Dear Friends,

2023 is the year that was. But was it a year to remember, or your favorite year? Was it the Best Year Ever, maybe a Year in the Life of a Fool? Or was it more the Days of Wine and Roses or a time we’d rather forget? However, those 525,600 minutes of those 365 days or those 31,536,000 seconds of the 52 weeks of 2023 passed by I hope you can find many reasons for gratitude and thankfulness.

Dear Friends,

Love, joy, and peace are words often associated with the infant in the manger in Bethlehem. But truth be told - the best way to describe him: subversive. His birth undercuts all worldly power and assumptions. Even at the moment of birth, there was “no room in the Inn,” and as C.S. Lewis often quipped, “God had to sneak clandestinely behind enemy lines.” This world would not receive this newborn King and has found ways to reject him ever since. The swaddled child was an immediate threat to the political order and an object of panic to the religious community. Herod wanted him dead; the Temple officials wouldn’t tolerate this version of a Messiah. From this point onward, Jesus turned the worldly powers on their heads, he subverted the old religions, and those who dared to follow him were hunted down as revolutionaries, disloyal citizens who threatened the status quo.

Dear Friends,

Bonfire of the Vanities: Vatican City Edition, 2023.

Well, it seems that Papa Francesco summoned his inner Trump and told Bishop Strickland of Tyler, Texas: “You’re Fired”. No reasons were given. No following the Code of Canon Law’s Process for the removal of a Bishop, no due process. Maybe the bishops should join the AFL-CIO. So much for “dialogue and transparency”. I mean why let the Faithful of Tyler know why their bishop was summarily fired?

Dear Friends,

“Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.” (Romans 12:15)

When it comes to the Middle East, it is hard for us to wrap our heads around the fact that religion and politics are intertwined. In our sometimes naivete or sometimes hubris, we think we can bring about a political solution without dealing with the religious dimension of the dynamic that is present in the Holy Land. In that regard, the religious and political authorities (Bethlehem is part of the West Bank that is under control of the Palestinian Authority) have cancelled the public celebration of Christmas, including the decorations and the processions that accompany the Feast (though the religious celebration will still go on).

Dear Friends,

Like it or not, we are all infected with the “Myth of Progress”. Simply put, the future will always be better than the past and the present is far superior to anything that came before. Admittedly, there is no small amount of hubris in thinking that and a large dose of condescension that makes us condemn yesterday with today’s information. But still the myth persists.