With the Iowa caucuses a week away, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, who leads in all the polls, is Donald Trump.
The consensus candidate of the Democratic Party elite, Hillary Clinton, has been thrown onto the defensive by a Socialist from Vermont who seems to want to burn down Wall Street.
Not so long ago, Clinton was pulling down $225,000 a speech from Goldman Sachs. Today, she sounds like William Jennings Bryan.
Taken together, the candidacies of Trump, Sanders, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz represent a rejection of the establishment. And, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, other Republican campaigns are now channeling Trump’s.
When Lawrence “Yogi” Berra died last September at the age of ninety, he was remembered with true affection, not only for the kindness that wreathed his life, but also for his charming ways with the English language. He may have seemed like Sheridan’s Mrs. Malaprop or Shakespeare’s Dogberry when he confused words, as when he said that Texas has a lot of electrical votes, but his unique genre consisted in stating truths with guileless syntax. Others tried to invent Yogi-isms, goading him to say: “I didn’t say half the things I said.” His meaning was clear, grammar notwithstanding, as when he said that in autumn it gets late earlier.
When he said, “It’s déjà vu all over again,” some may have snickered, but that is the way with snobs. He was broaching a concept that the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher and theologian, Kierkegaard, explored in his considerations of “repetition” and “recollection.” Basically, Yogi Berra and Søren Kierkegaard simply acknowledged, as all of us do one way or another, the role of the imagination in relation to time.
Perceptions of things past and to come are limited by our mortal intelligence, and memory can be as defective as prediction. In Christ, human and divine, there are no such limitations, so he has a perfect knowledge of past and future. Cynics have thought that his predictions came true only because later editors made them seem so. It should be no surprise, however, that Jesus as the Beginning and the End, should be able to know the Father’s will and foresee its consequences.
The accounts of Matthew, Mark and Luke stress the chronology of Christ’s earthly life, while John declares its meaning. It is like the difference between a photograph and a portrait, each conveying personality, but in different ways. Most likely, Jesus cleansed the Temple at the end of his earthly life, but John mentions it at the beginning of his narrative as a foretaste of what Christ would do, just as when I was a boy, I opened the Cracker Jack box from the bottom to get the little prize first. Our Lord hints at the future by showing the Magi his divinity, and exposing the Trinity at his baptism, and letting heaven break through in his Transfiguration.
His miracles are “signs” by which the Lord prepares his Church for what is to come. He recollects seven of them, as a kind of repetition of the seven acts of the world’s creation, of which he has a perfect memory. It is not that John was confused about the order of events. He was inspired to know that the events were ordered. The Incarnation of the Eternal Word is déjà vu all over again. “And now I have told you before it comes to pass: that when it shall come to pass, you may believe” (John 14:29).
Father Walter Joseph Ciszek, S.J. (1904-1984) was a heroic
Polish-American Jesuit priest who volunteered to clandestinely enter the
Soviet Union to serve the spiritual needs of the Russian people. From
1939 and 1963, Father Ciszek suffered in the now thankfully gone Soviet
Union. During fifteen of these years, the Communists tortured Father
Ciszek in solitary confinement and brutal forced labor camps in harsh
Siberia. He also suffered indescribable hardships for an additional five
years in Moscow's infamous Lubyanka prison. After Father was released
in a Soviet spy exchange and returned to the United States in October
1963, he wrote two books, including the memoir With God in Russia.
Born
Nov. 4, 1904, in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania to Polish immigrant parents
Martin and Mary (Mika) Ciszek. A former gang member, he shocked his
family by deciding to become a priest. Ciszek entered the Jesuit
novitiate in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1928.
The following year,
he volunteered to serve as a missionary to Russia, which had become the
Soviet Union after the bloody Bolshevik Revolution 12 years before. The
civil and religious rights of the Russian people were brutally
suppressed and Christians were openly persecuted. Few Christians had
access to the assistance of a priest. Pope Pius XI made a special appeal
to priests from around the world to go to Russia as missionaries and
Father Ciszek generously responded.
In 1934, Father was sent to
Rome to study theology and Russian language, history and liturgy at the
Pontifical Russian College (or 'Russicum'). In 1937, he was ordained in
Rome a priest for eternity according to the Byzantine Rite, taking the
religious name of Vladimir.
In 1941, Father was arrested under
false accusations of espionage for the Vatican and sent to the Lubyanka
prison in Moscow, operated by the criminal NKVD (Communist internal
security gang). There he spent a total of five years, most of which in
solitary confinement. In 1942, he was forced to sign a confession under
severe torture, was convicted of espionage, and subsequently sentenced
to 15 years hard labor in the GULAG.
Father was to remain in
Lubyanka for four more years. In 1946, he was sent by train to
Krasnoyarsk then 20 days by boat to Norilsk in Siberia. There, he was to
shovel coal onto freighter vessels, and later transferred to work in
coal mines. A year later, he was sent to work in construction at an ore
processing plant. From 1953 to 1955, he worked in mines. His memoirs
provide a vivid description of the revolts that spread through the GULAG
in the aftermath of tyrant Joseph Stalin's death.
Throughout his
lengthy imprisonment, Fr. Ciszek continued to pray, to celebrate Divine
Liturgy, hear confessions, conduct retreats and perform parish
ministry. Until he was allowed to write to America in 1955, he was
presumed dead by both his family and the Jesuit order.
By April
22, 1955, his hard labor sentence was complete, and he was released with
restrictions in the city of Norilsk. At this time, he was finally able
to write to his sisters in the United States.
On December 8, 1984, Fr. Ciszek died, and was buried at the Jesuit Cemetery in Wernersville, Pennsylvania.
Ciszek
Hall at Fordham University in New York City is named after Fr. Ciszek.
It currently houses Jesuit scholastics in the first stage of formal
study for the priesthood. There is also a Ciszek Hall at the University
of Scranton. The Father Walter Ciszek Prayer League, based in
Shenandoah, was formed in 1985 to promote the cause of his Sainthood. In
1989, his cause for canonization was formally opened and is currently
under review by the Vatican.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
