My paternal grandparents owned a home in Rosedale, Queens. Although I was there only a handful of times, I remember their Tudor house in striking detail. I can still feel the fibers of the large, oval braided rug set beneath the wooden dining table against my tender skin as I recall being finally found under the ample tablecloth, where I had been sharing out a box of colorful assorted cookies in the shape of tiny mailmen with Benji the First.
The Author (Benji I and Bark Bars not shown)
Despite the heavy familial strife that was ever palpable during those few brief visits, I really liked my grandparents’ place – palatial by my Brooklyn and Middle Village standards, and situated in a vibrant, lovely, mostly Carribean area. This married couple of pan-European origin – progressive for sure, and for this I am grateful – were proud to belong to a community that was only 5 per cent Caucasian.
Two of the best memories of my troubled childhood involved their neighbors. I must have been about three when the gentle, courtly older Black man in the adjacent yard invited me to come over and pick raspberries in the July sunshine. It was as if I had been transported to heaven. The joy of those luscious berries surpassed even that of the spoils meted out with the mutt.
Then there was the time, again in the brilliant summer sunshine, that a band of the neighborhood locals were solicitous to include a preschooler as they transformed a mattress discarded outside one of the homes for bulk trash pick-up into a makeshift trampoline, and jumped and jumped and jumped. Indeed, I saw a sharp distinction between us, but it pertained exclusively to age; they were elementary school children – so, to my mind, virtually adults – and they, certainly, knew what they were doing. It was, as a matter of fact, probably the one and only time in my childhood I experienced warm and genuine peer inclusion. In our uninhibited frenzy of laughing and bouncing, it never occurred to me to be self-conscious of my differences; we were all just kids. In contrast, the Brooklyn in which I was growing up was witnessing a war of all against all.
Now, as an adult, I love so many things: music, food, flowers, words, learning, liturgy and ritual, sciences and the arts, approaches to transcendence, colors, clothes, dance, festivity, people above all (I’m over the bit about Benji and the mail carriers). I am a Christian humanist, a life junkie, an extrovert of extroverts. I am also a good mimic with a good ear (as is Paul); this has given us a ready facility with languages. (If we’ve met you in person, rest assured that at least one of us has mastered an impression.) The summation of all these surpassing goods is, in a word, culture – the way in which each particular group lives into the one, common experience of being human.
Through my life, I have had the experience of inclusion in one culture after another, far too numerous to list. All I can say is that they rival one another in beauty. On a pilgrimage to the Shrine of St. Anne de Beaupré in Quebec, I happened to attend a First Nations Mass, with indigenous peoples from all over Canada arrayed in spectacular tribal dress. On that same pilgrimage, a Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia befriended us, introducing us to their community – including their group leader, an elderly man who spoke only Mi’kmaw. It was there that the idea of Sacred Beauty was born: a charism founded in a thematic vision of the Eucharist as nucleus about which all of the manifold human cultural beauty of the Earth should coalesce, be taken up and be transposed to praise.
Now, a brief interlude for a “Which Pope Said This?” challenge: “Exclusion of what is different is contrary to human nature.” Ding, ding, ding! Yes, exactly! Josef Cardinal Ratzinger. Of course you knew that! Have a Bark Bar… er, a cookie, the kind intended for humans specifically. A Ratzinger quote from this author – why, what are the odds?
Ratzinger wrote (as did St. John Paul II) of the suprarational wisdom of cultures, of “… traditions from the beginnings, which have the character of revelation, … the result, not simply of human questioning and reflection, but of aboriginal contact with the ground of all things; …communications from the Divinity.” The truth of this, taking its inspiration from the much respected neo-Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper (footnoted by Ratzinger in this passage from Feast of Faith), is embodied in every human person, and finds a singular apotheosis in the breathtaking elegance of the Aztec features of La Guadalupana. (The original Guadalupe account, the Nican Mopohua, attributes these words to the Blessed Mother: “I am truly the compassionate mother, to you and to all the people who live together in this land, and to all the people of other ancestries who love me, who cry out to me, who seek me, who trust in me.”)
For Ratzinger, that historical and religious progress is not only possible but willed divinely is a settled matter (quite in contradistinction to von Balthasar, but this exceeds our scope). Progress, however, remains as an orientation, as a choice among others, within man’s freedom. Should he fail to mortify the gravitational draw of his primitive xenophobic undertow, he will, alas, stay narrowly locked beneath too low of an existential (and even religious) ceiling. “The historical character of culture signifies its capacity for progress, and that implies its capacity to be open, to accept its being transformed by an encounter… A process of this kind can in fact lead to a breaking open of the silent alienation of man from the truth and from himself” that, due to sin, mars each culture. Intercultural encounter stands as “the healing Pasch for a culture, which through an apparent death comes to new life and becomes then for the first time truly itself.”
While Ratzinger has ideas that privilege Greek philosophy and Western music, even there his position is astutely nuanced; his attribution holds insofar as he sees a providential role in the actual course of concrete historical development. It is, however, worth noting that he agrees with Pieper’s assessment that Thomism as a system is inherently ordered to self-transcendence, which has not yet properly encountered or assimilated the wisdom of the Far East. He writes with regard to “the Asiatic religious world view and the Christian faith”:
I have no doubt that both sides have a great deal to learn from each other. The issue may be which of the two can rescue more of the other’s authentic content.
Now back to our previously scheduled autobiographical musings. When I taught rudimentary Spanish to the largely minority K through 8 classes at St. Lawrence this past spring, I adorned the classroom with banners and flowers and star-shaped mylar balloons – ¡flores y pancartas y globos en forma de estrella! – to celebrate the election of the first American pope. (Did I bring in a true to size full-scale image of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe? You bet I did.) This was our culture, their culture, being brought onto the world stage to bear uniquely and formatively on the Church of our times: Leo XIV the American (dual citizen of North and South); Leo, with his mixed racial roots; Leo, the Augustinian who chose as his motto, In Illo uno unum, in the One, we are one. The sanctity of great African Americans like Pierre Toussant, the sublimity of the spirituals, the joy of the works of William Grant Still – all of which has been cultivated through persecution and repression – this is a heritage which would now carry forward, in the person of Leo.
And now for the Afterword[1]: I am writing all of this now because I am grieved. I am grieved at the death of Charlie Kirk, and of countless other victims of gun violence in this country. I am grieved to think of his mourning widow and fatherless children, and of all those who mourn parents, spouses, and children slain the world over. But specifically as a Catholic, I am grieved that a Prince of the Church, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, saw fit to call Charlie Kirk “a modern-day St. Paul” without an accompanying teaching moment to repudiate the cultural chauvinism, fomenting of division, and especially the egregious racial provocations which, sadly, constitute much of his legacy.
I am not aggrieved at Charlie Kirk himself. I am not claiming to know the personal dispositions motivating his public actions. He is dead and judged – with all the mercy, I pray, that I would hope for myself. If Cardinal Dolan had wished to compare Charlie Kirk to a pre-conversion St. Paul, filled with factional zeal against perceived enemies of divine sovereignty, he could have made his intentions explicit; as it is, this horrible crime deprived Charlie Kirk of the years which might have led him to foreswear such misplaced zeal.
The mythologizing immortalization which has attached itself to this tragically murdered young man as a figurehead is indeed a very dangerous thing. As an “old man,” the real St. Paul expressed the equality of dignity of all persons with characteristic pastoral genius in his Letter to Philemon. Let us hope that those who carry on the Pauline spirit all bear such universal love in their own hearts.
[1] I am not particularly engaged with political details. For the sake of precision, Paul contributed significantly to the Afterword
Image: Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated
V. J. Tarantino is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport. She has studied ancient and Medieval metaphysics and has devoted her adult life to the service of liturgy (study of liturgical texts and norms, the cultivation of sacred elocution, musical performance and composition, the beautification of sacred space, and the organization and direction of public Eucharistic Adoration) and to immersion in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and of recent Popes. Her writing can be found at https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/
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