Recently I heard an interview with Clare Morell about her book, The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones. The essential problem with “screens,” she said, is that they stimulate excitement (dopamine) without joy (oxytocin). The body releases the “feel-good” neurotransmitter dopamine when one sees exciting images or hears thrilling sounds. The body releases the “bonding” neurotransmitter oxytocin when one makes eye contact or touches another person. Screens cannot provide oxytocin.
 
What’s a “neurotransmitter?” It’s a hormone, meaning it’s a chemical or a drug, like adrenaline or endorphins, that the body releases in needful situations. Oxytocin helps bond people and is released, for example, when a mother nurses her child or two spouses come together. Without God’s gift of oxytocin, there would be a lot more divorces—it gives parents sufficient feelings of bonding to stay together when the going gets rough. Without oxytocin, it would be much harder to take joy in any close human relationship, because our annoyance would outweigh our delight in that other person. Smartphones can provide dopamine hits (excited pleasure) but not oxytocin (long lasting joy) because the latter requires eye-to-eye contact and/or physical touch.
 
If used indiscriminately, screens are not only addicting but rather joyless. If you are staring at a phone instead of making eye contact with people, you will not get enough oxytocin to keep existential loneliness at bay. Young people, especially, tend to use machines incorrectly if not given adequate training. No one puts a 15-year-old behind a steering wheel without training them, and no one should put a phone in a 15-year-old's hand without training. The studies show that we are not giving our children adequate training or age-specific support. Young people are getting sadder and more isolated the more we leave them alone with their phones. It’s worth noting that “smart” countries, like France, Sweden, Italy, and the Netherlands, have banned smartphones from schools.
 
When I was fourteen, Mom banished TV from our home. Before that we were allowed to watch four primetime TV shows a week, plus Saturday morning cartoons. Little House and the Prairie was one of those four shows, but TV was becoming too prurient for Mom and Dad. He especially deplored televised violence, so Mom did away with the cathode ray tube altogether. Dad had long been advocating for that, turning off the TV every time he heard gunshots from the box.
 
In disobedience to Mom’s new rule, I hid a little TV under my bed. I continued watching Little House on the Prairie on Wednesday nights, but at low volume and from a little mirror placed opposite the bed. If Mom unexpectedly came into the room, I would yank a string tied to the wall switch. Besides being a mortal sin (Commandment Number Four), this innovation made everything appear backwards: the mirror reversed the TV image. So instead of Mr. Ingalls riding from left to right through the prairie, his horse went from right to left. I thought I was pretty smart, and I dreamed of someday inventing a radio with a little tv screen in it, so I could take my favorite shows with me wherever I went.
 
My dream has come true. I carry a little radio with me that has a screen with unlimited TV shows, movies, and music at the tap of a finger. Since the 1970s, however, New York and Los Angeles have amped up the prurience. It’s up to Dads and Moms to do what mine did forty-five years ago: écrasez l'infâme. It can be done, and it is being done. That’s the good news in Clare Morell’s The Tech Exit book. Maybe I can coin the word texit to describe how families are doing the needful. They getting rid of the screens and bravely enduring the 30-day withdrawal period. Some young people even suffer the delirium tremens, or at least pretend to, as they withdraw, but on the other side they are stronger, smarter, and more loving than before their addiction. Like France and the Netherlands, I’ve banished cell phones from my school. When parents see the results, they get serious about keeping their children safe from screens at home. “I can talk with my daughter again!” they tell me with joy. “She can do her homework in half the time now! She is so much happier, and the whole family is more peaceful!”
 
The French government and Fr. Illo have banned “smart” phones from our schools. But that’s only 40 hours a week, when school is in session. What about the other 128 hours of your child’s life? Or your life, for that matter? “Only you, dear parents, can prevent forest fires.” So do the needful, and get rid of the problem.

Rural Ireland, where I am situated, is the most natural spot on earth. The wild grasses and the birds, the winds and the smoke curling from stone chimneys, the people and the deep black soil, live in a kind of effortless harmony rarely found in other parts of the planet.
 
The other day I got lost on some narrow winding lanes. The road finally ended in a modest farmyard bustling with chickens, and I turned off the motor. A fresh-faced matron came out of the barn, followed by her scruffy ten-year-old son. “Hall-o!” she cried out. “R’ ye lost?” I explained how a friend had texted me an “Eircode” (Ireland’s “satnav” location system) and it had deposited me in front of their barnyard.
 
“Do the Crowley’s live around here?” I asked hopefully. She squinted, never having heard of any Crowley’s in those parts. “We are O’Shea’s,” she said with a bit of spirit. She led me to a little farmhouse across the road, in which her parents were just beginning their supper. On entering their home I cracked my head on the door lintel, which was not much more than five feet tall, and all exclaimed their heartfelt concern about my poor pate. “Ye moost sit down for a coop a’ teh” exclaimed the mother. Her husband, looking wistfully at the cold meats on his plate, nodded in solemn agreement.
 
“Well, you see,” I said, “I’m going to be rather late as it is for my dinner appointment, and….” Mrs. O’Shea was not to be deterred. “Ooo, boot ye must sit down for a coop a’ teh. Surely ye have a bit of time for that!” I apologized exceedingly but said I would have to find out where I was so I could get to where I needed to be. I showed them the Eircode, which was certainly their farm, and nobody knew what to do. So I called my friend. “O sugar,” he repeated several times (in place of another word that begins with “s”), “I hit the ‘3’ with my thumb instead of the ‘2.’ I’m so sorry!” My Eircode was one digit off, but my location was half an hour off. I would be an hour late for dinner, but that didn’t seem important to Mrs. O’Shea, who again warmly invited me to a cup a tea. “I’ll have to come back,” I promised, waving goodbye.
 
Yesterday I got lost again, this time on my bike. I was looking for the ruins of O’Crowley Castle, which is about 20 minutes east of the O’Shea farm. Perhaps there have not been Crowleys or O’Crowleys near the O'Shea's for many centuries, but there was still the remains of an O'Crowley castle in the area. But I couldn’t see it from any of the roads or cowtracks I had traversed over the last 40 minutes. So I stopped into a farmyard and asked a nice young lady. She was washing her car with the barnyard hose. She pointed to the farm lane I should take to find the castle, and I said I had been down it three times without seeing a castle. “Oh, you poor dear,” she said. “Would you want a cup of tea?” She called her father over, a wiry man in muck boots who smiled when he heard of my misadventures. “Just through the barnyard at the end of the lane, and then down to the left” he explained. He had been working at something in the field, but he too invited me in for a cup of tea.
 
When I say the people are natural here, I mean that the most natural thing in the world is for people to talk to each other. We have been given the capacity to converse, and it would be unnatural to not engage other people. But in most of the world rarely do we stop our “business” to talk to others more than briefly. Here in rural Ireland, it’s almost always a good time to share a cup of tea with someone, even when you are washing your car or taking the cows out or preparing supper. Inviting another human being to share your supper is the most natural thing in the world! 

Today we celebrate the last feast of the Paschal Cycle, the final reverberating chords of the liturgical season we began with Septuagesima on February 4. We began the Lenten discipline five months ago to prepare for Easter Sunday, then through paschaltide to Ascension Thursday, Pentecost Sunday, Trinity Sunday and finally to Corpus Christi last week. Two feasts cap all these mysteries, and they are really quite simple: the Sacred Heart of Jesus (yesterday) and the Immaculate Heart of Mary (today). The entire 150-day Lent-Easter-Pentecost season leads us to the simple conviction that … God loves us with heartfelt affection.
 
I’m in Ireland on sabbatical, with lots of time to pray and think, a stack of books to read, and two books to write. Why Ireland? Because a friend of mine had an empty farmhouse which he has generously put at my disposal. It’s always been my dream to spend a few months in a cottage outside a small European village. Some dreams actually come true…. my “cottage” is actually a modern farmhouse with large picture windows looking out on breezy fields, mooing cows, singing birds, daily sun and showers, and lots of Irish green. There’s plenty of room to roam on this island, and I’ve got my quick red bike for daily rides on narrow winding roads above which tower lush green hedgerows. Driving in rural Ireland can be a bit nerve-wracking, particularly when a monster tractor, huge milk truck or racing red sport car appears around a bend (one of my Irish parishioners in San Francisco absolutely forbade me to ride my bike “on those terrible roads”). I’m being careful.
 
The charming byways and cute farmhouses are not the best part of Ireland, however. The best thing about the Irish, still, are their great hearts. Even when they argue vehemently about some point of politics or religion, they keep a twinkle in their eye. The Irish communicate a subtle irony, a tiny grin just beneath the stoutest red beard and a chuckle beneath even the strongest conversation. The irony implicit in every Irish heart is that we are all only flesh and blood, but flesh and blood made in the image of God. The Irish—especially the rural Irish—assume that every man is my brother, and every woman is my mother or my daughter or my sister, and in any case we must somehow be related.
 
Rural Ireland is still quite Catholic. I’ve made friends with our village priest (population: 766) and am taking some of the parish Masses. Fifty people a day come to holy Mass in our little village, and churches are kept open all day for the steady stream of those who want to make a visit, light a candle, and say a prayer. More than in her religious devotions, however, Ireland demonstrates her faith in her charming and warmhearted humor. The Irish say about a pub that either it’s “crack” or it isn’t, meaning: you want to be in that pub or you don’t. “Crack” in San Francisco is a kind of white powder, but “crack” in Ireland is “heart,” a shared electricity, a social dynamism in which where people talk and laugh and banter easily. A pub is “crack” when the people can be friendly because they know they are all children of one God.
 
Ireland is still crack much of the time, and I would say it came from the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. St. Patrick delivered Jesus and Mary to the wild Gaels in the fourth century, and they haven’t forgotten it. Yesterday I offered the Mass of the Sacred Heart in the village church, noticing that the stained glass window just above me portrayed Jesus offering his Sacred Heart to the world. Almost every church in Ireland has the Sacred Heart somewhere, with the Immaculate Heart not far behind. After Mass we prayed the rosary to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. And after the rosary, before getting back to the day’s work, everyone caught up with each other for the day. They are genuinely interested in each other!
 
Technology and government efficiency has replaced much of our heartfelt encounters with real people. Remember when you could actually talk with a human being at the gas station or on a phone call with your bank? There are some parts of the world that have not become so heartless, and I am most grateful to live among them for a few months.

Yesterday I drove to Cork City with friends for the only Corpus Christi Mass in the County, since in almost every church the feast has been moved to Sunday. The Feast of the Sacred Heart (next Friday) follows Corpus Christi by nine days, which in Catholic lingo is called a “novena.” Corpus Christi, if celebrated on Thursday, thus begins the novena to the Sacred Heart, teaching us how the Body of Christ is (literally) from the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Forensic analyses of the Eucharistic miracles (beginning with Lanciano around 750AD) indicate myocardial [heart] tissue of the left ventricle, AB blood type, with living white corpuscles (which explains the preservation of the tissue). In other words, the Corpus Christi that we receive at Holy Mass is living heart tissue from the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Most dioceses have moved Corpus Christi from Thursday to Sunday, which is unfortunate, because it misses the link between the Eucharist and the Sacred Heart. The Body of Christ is not from any old part of Christ’s body but precisely from His Heart, torn open by the soldier’s lance and pouring forth blood and water to the earth.
 
When one changes an ancient liturgical practice, much knowledge and piety can be lost, so one must make changes only when necessary and with the greatest care. If we lament that most Catholics don’t believe in the real presence of the Eucharist, we might consider restoring the full value of the Corpus Christi Feast. Returning it to Thursday would require Catholics to make the (small) sacrifice of attending Mass on a weekday in addition to Sunday, better defining the sacrifices required for a “worthy” reception of the Holy Eucharist. Returning Corpus Christi to Thursday would also connect it to Holy Thursday, when we processed with the Blessed Sacrament inside the Church. On Corpus Christi we process outside the church because it follows Pentecost: the Spirit’s gift of fortitude and piety impel the Church to bring God into the streets. Like the disciples on that first Pentecost day, we cannot keep the good news of God’s saving love to ourselves but must proclaim what we have seen and heard.
 
In Rome Corpus Christi is still celebrated on Thursday. During my studies in Rome, I would look forward all year to the Corpus Christi procession. In the evening, after Rome’s students had finished our classes and Rome’s laborers had finished their work, the Pope would carry the Blessed Sacrament through the streets in the grandaddy of all Eucharistic processions. Anyone could join the procession and even get kind of close to the Pope. My little brother and I joined the procession in 2010 and Pope Benedict’s car (it was raining that day) drove within a few feet of us. The Pontiff looked directly at the two of us with a fatherly smile, and I knew I was loved.
 
But even better than getting close to the Pope is getting close to Jesus. In Rome’s Corpus Christi procession, everyone can get close to Christ Himself as the Incarnate Word and Lover of Mankind makes his way from St. John Lateran to St. Mary Major on the Via Merulana (about half a mile). God goes out into our streets on Corpus Christi, and it’s a perfect way to end a long workday one Thursday a year.

It is said that Pope Paul VI, who authorized the radical re-formation of the Catholic liturgy in the 1970s, came into his sacristy the day after Pentecost. He found green vestments laid out for him rather than red for the Pentecost Octave, and he was consternated. He asked his liturgical assistant, Annibale Bugnini, what had happened to the Pentecost Octave. Msgr. Bugnini explained that it had been abolished. “Who did that?” the Pope asked with growing agitation. “You did, your holiness,” Bugnini replied. And it is said that Pope Paul VI wept.
 
I doubt the conversation between Paul VI and Bugnini happened just like that, but I don’t doubt that the Pope wept when he realized the Octave of the Holy Ghost had been done away with. Like the Octaves of Christmas and Easter, we used to celebrate Pentecost for eight straight days, each one a First Class Feast. In my parish, thanks be to God, we are still permitted to do that. I entered the sacristy this morning to find red vestments, and I asked my liturgical assistant which martyr we were celebrating. He explained that it was the Octave of the Holy Spirit. And I rejoiced.
 
The older I get, the more I appreciate the Holy Ghost. After all, I am getting a bit more ghostlike myself. God gives us (who live long enough) the gift of old age. Our bodies grow weaker so that our spirits may grow stronger, preparing for a splendid liftoff into eternity. We older folks can see so much farther than we used to; we have become strong enough to weather storms with deep serenity. My dear father, at whose grave I prayed yesterday, said at a family reunion when he was 94: “At my age, it’s getting harder to deny reality.” He had been a soft atheist since reading Marxism at Columbia in the 1950s, but seeing his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, he could only wonder at life’s beauty and tranquil order.
 
As my physical powers fade, I appreciate the Holy Spirit more. My body is ceding the tyrannical demands it once made so that I can think more clearly and see more deeply. My flesh is making more room for my spirit, and for the Holy Spirit of God. I too am becoming ghostlike as my hair thins (it’s been pure white for ten years already), my eyes dim, my limbs lose some of their bulk, and my memory fades. I’m looking up a lot more than looking down these days.
 
Don’t get me wrong: I’ll keep riding my bike until I fall off of it. We have to keep moving as long as we can, but there will be a day when I will stop moving, and then my spiritual transformation will be complete. The Holy Ghost will take over, I hope, and I will shoot into heaven. For this grace, gracious God, we beseech thee!

I have been trying to detransition, but I can't return to the way I was. Three surgeries that promised to enhance my body have irrevocably damaged my physical integrity. Ten months ago I decided to undergo a procedure that the medical establishment claimed was safe, would reduce my anxiety, and would improve my physical health. It wasn’t transgender surgery, but I made the same mistake that people with gender dysphoria often make: dissatisfaction with my body and overconfidence in medical technology. I felt entitled to perfect eyesight, and so I had cataract surgery even though I had no cataracts. To be sure, cataract surgery and “trans” surgery are essentially different: one replaces a diseased organ with a functional technology, and one replaces a healthy organ with a non-functional technology. I am grateful to my surgeons for improving my eyesight in one aspect, but I lament the damage done to my eyes in other ways. My eye surgeries, however, opened my eyes to the fundamental errors we currently make regarding medical technology and the human person.
 
When my father’s eyesight began to diminish, he refused to wear glasses. My mother simply began using readers, even though they were not perfect. At 62, I decided to purchase progressive lenses, but while in the doctor’s office I saw ads for a surgery that promised clear vision without glasses. So with the money my Dad left me after his death, I paid a surgeon to cut off my natural, God-given lenses and implant artificial lenses.
 
For most people, I’ve been told, cataract surgery involves few or no complications. The human eye, however, is wondrously complex, and as one physician told me, “no technology will ever be as good as your God-given lens.” My doctor did not inform me about all the possible complications, nor how it could affect my life as a unique individual. For example, he did not explain how the surgery would almost certainly make a blue-eyed person more light-sensitive, nor did he ask if I spend a lot of time outdoors, which has now become quite painful for me. This disregard for the individual indicates how contemporary medicine tends to regard the human person not as a unique body-soul composite but as a physical machine needing simple part replacements.
 
The first surgery fixed my vision in one way but damaged it in five other ways. Seeking to repair these things, I got four other opinions from four other doctors, all of whom told me different things. In one of America’s premier medical facilities here in San Francisco, one physician gave his certain diagnosis, and ten minutes later a more senior physician gave me precisely the opposite diagnosis. I realized that doctors know some things about the marvelously complex human eye, but that they do not know much. In describing my complications, I was often met by a puzzled look and only that “I would hope it improves with time.” After my second surgery, with eight different complications, I still clung desperately to the hope that the medical establishment did know how to fix me, so I scheduled a third surgery. This procedure fixed one problem but created two more, damaging both my retina and my optic nerve.

Am I complaining? What I want to say is that modern medicine often promises what it cannot deliver. And if that is true of eye surgery, how tragically true it is of so-called transgender surgery. A person is hurting from some kind of sexual trauma and imbalance. The insurance and medical establishments rush in to promise that they can fix the problem, and we believe them. We spend tremendous amounts of money on risky surgeries under the illusion that technicians can “remake” us. But, actually, we should consider alterations to our bodily integrity only as a last resort. We should strive, rather, to be grateful for the bodies God has given us, and try to see meaning and purpose in our physical and mental limitations. We are, after all, not gods.
 
I grew up watching The Six Million Dollar Man TV show, where medical technicians “rebuild” an airman’s broken body. Most people under 40 don’t know who Colonel Steve Austin is, but they have been raised on the Six Million Dollar Myth: that with enough money, doctors can repair and rebuild anything. Which points to another problem: healthcare’s fantastic costs. The huge sums of money changing hands in all these surgeries would distort anybody’s professional opinion. If I pay a doctor $50,000 for a forty-minute surgery, he is less likely to discourage me from engaging his services than if I pay him $10,000.
 
One of my doctors, whom I now fully trust, is white-haired like me. I would guess he doesn’t need more money at this point in his life, and he tells the full truth about what surgeons can and cannot do. He told me not to get the third surgery, even though he is probably San Francisco’s best surgeon for that procedure. Nevertheless, I went to one of California’s most respected medical centers, got the 40-minute surgery, and received a bill for $60,000. It’s mostly covered by insurance (meaning I pay the entire amount over many years through insurance premiums). I’m sure the doctors don’t keep all that money, but they must keep a good bit of it, and with that kind of compensation, they might be less inclined to discourage patients from surgery.
 
My three eye surgeries cost me a load of cash, a year of anxiety and suffering, and (at this point) impaired vision. But consider how much more invasive are “transgender” surgeries, the complications to mind and body, and the lifelong hormone follow-up therapies. There is a lot more money to made in transgender “medicine” than in just about any other surgeries (some estimate around $2 million over one's lifetime). We mistakenly think we can control, manipulate, and reconstruct our own humanity, and we pay gobs of money to perpetuate this fantasy. As the voice-over technicians said on the Six Million Dollar Man show 50 years ago, “We can rebuild him. We have the technology….”
 
If we should approach the human eye with fear and trembling, how much more should we approach human sexuality? How much more delicate, wondrous, and mysterious is God’s gift of human love and the transmission of human life? Doctors, intellectuals, and politicians can tell us that sex is just recreation, and that the human person is just a meat machine, but there is far more evidence to the contrary. Our souls and our bodies are wondrous and unique gifts, much more a mystery to be discovered than a commodity to be manipulated.
 
I hope my body will recover its equilibrium some day. My most trusted doctor tells me that, with time and patience, I will recover to a large degree, both physically and psychologically. But even if I never regain full use of my eyes, I see more clearly that life is not a little lump of clay to be manipulated. Life is gift and mystery. Far better to respect this gift, and to thank God for this mystery in good times and in bad, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health. With that humility before the miracle of human life, and that trust in the Creator, it seems to me, we best practice the medical arts.

Today is the feast of St. Philip Neri, who reluctantly accepted priestly ordination and reluctantly submitted his prayer groups to canonical establishment, now known as the  Congregation of the Oratory. With invincible joy and simplicity, he largely converted the corrupt Church in Rome of his day (the Medici Popes et al.) back to heartfelt faith in God. I tried to start an Oratory here in San Francisco ten years ago but it was not to be. St. Philip, Apostle of Joy, pray for us!

I grew up 90 minutes from the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, and Mom would often take us there to wander about the vast interior. Lining the perimeter of this massive church are dozens of side altars, each portraying an apparition of Our Lady from a different country. When I became pastor of a large fixer upper in San Francisco eleven years ago, I had a problem on my hands. Not only the physical church was deteriorating, but the community itself was fading away. How could I restore both what was once a splendid church and a vibrant parish community? I figured I’d better keep it simple, so I would simply give the people Jesus and Mary: Eucharistic adoration and the rosary. The church seated 1000 people, but only 85 were coming to Mass, so I made one of the side rooms into a Eucharistic chapel, and I replaced 200 seats with 16 side altars to the apparitions of Our Lady.

The Mother of all apparitions, especially on the American continent, is her visit to the center point of both North and South America in 1531. She called herself “Guadalupe.” In drawing up plans for her altar, I came across two curious facts.
First, one best “reads” the complex and beautiful image on Juan Diego’s tilma from a distance. Details of the image are sharpest when viewed from twenty feet back; colors seem pale close-up but become fully vibrant at a distance; and the image itself appears reduced when one is near, but becomes larger than life at a distance.
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Second, an analysis from the University of Florida in 1979 discovered that the eyes of the image reflect light rays, as in a living human eye. The image itself is dynamic, as if it were alive, or at least the moving representation of a living person. In much the same way, analysis of the blood in various Eucharistic Miracles, such as that in Lanciano in the year 740, reveals living white blood cells, which cannot survive the death of the organism. The images and relics of Jesus and Mary themselves are dynamic. In 2006 a priest brought the relic of St. John Vianny—his heart enclosed in a glass case, to my parish in Modesto. Vianney died in 1859, but the day we brought the relic of his heart to a dying person in my parish, it began to sweat in the hot summer weather. How could a 150-year-old human heart still sweat unless that heart is still alive?
 
With these thoughts I begin my book on Our Lady’s apparitions, which I will complete during my 90-day sabbatical beginning June 15. The book will consider all the approved apparitions of Our Lady “from a distance,” looking at the common themes and events surrounding these apparitions from the year 50 (Our Lady of the Pillar in Spain) to 1983 (Our Lady of Kibeho in Rwanda). One doesn’t know if a book is worth writing until one writes it, so today I begin!

A blessed and happy Mother’s Day to everyone, but especially to those women chosen by God to carry children from heaven to earth and back to heaven again. All life on earth is from God, but a child outshines them all, radiating the image and likeness of God in purest beauty. God himself chose to become a human child, and to have a human mother. If we wonder why we love our mothers so, consider how God loves his own mother best of all. Next month we will honor our fathers, but this month we honor Mary and her fellow mothers.
 
I was giving a talk to our confirmation students on Thursday when two of their Moms bounded down the stairs of our retreat house. “White smoke!” they cried. Shortly thereafter, the grave and slightly trembling voice of the Cardinal Protodeacon sounded over St. Peter’s Square, Nuntio vobis gaudium magnum: Habemus papam! Where were you when the white smoke appeared? At first, I didn’t allow myself to get excited like those two mothers. In my many years I’ve seen popes come and go, and the Church continues to decline. But these women stirred my hope. Where there is life, there is hope, and God has endowed women with the unique capacity to bear both life and hope. In the darkest times of my life it was my mother who bore me up, lifting my spirits with hope for the future. I think of my first semester in a large eastern university, terribly homesick and confused, and the Saturday morning phone calls with Mom that sustained me.
 
So the mothers announced at the retreat house, with hopeful enthusiasm, that we have a new Papa. After lunch we all drove down to a state park for a hike. At the entrance station a hippieish man with a long pony tail took my credit card and noticed my Roman collar. “We have a new pope,” he observed. “I like him. He’s a radical, like the guy before him, and I’m a radical.” I nodded politely. My new hippie friend is most likely not a Catholic, I thought, but at least he’s hopeful that this new pope will bring some good into the world.
 
Since Thursday I’ve been reading articles and listening to podcasts from mostly traditional Catholic perspectives about Pope Leo. Like my hippie friend at the state park, my traditional Catholic friends are excited and hopeful. On perhaps the most reliably traditional Catholic newscast of them all—Raymond Arroyo’s World Over program—the most often repeated word was hope. Will Pope Leo relax restrictions on the Latin Mass? “I’m hopeful.” Will the new Pope solve the Vatican’s financial mess? “There’s good reason to hope so.” Will he get a handle on Vatican-Chinese diplomacy? “We can certainly hope he will.” Can Pope Leo build bridges between liberal and conservative Catholics? “There’s every hope that he can do that.” And even this one: “we hope that Pope Leo, as an American, can communicate with Donald Trump more effectively!”
 
Everyone is hopeful: aging hippies and young traditionalists, practicing and non-practicing Catholics, believers and atheists. Hope springs eternal for the human race, and “we are not dead yet” (my favorite line from the Ukrainian national anthem). We can thank our mothers for giving us that life, and that hope. Let us keep hoping, even after honeymoons are over.

,​First, the Pope is dead. Where were you when he died? My sexton informed me of it on Monday morning as I entered the sacristy for Mass. Later that day, I was at the uber-secularist University of California, San Francisco, to see an eye doctor. The scheduler kindly made my next appointment and then, noticing my Roman collar, said “my condolences.” I didn’t know what she meant at first, but then realized she was offering thoughtful sympathy for the death of the Pope. From there I popped by Costco and the checkout man, noticing my Roman collar, said with some energy “and what are we going to do now?” I was pleasantly surprised, as one who wears a Roman collar 18 hours a day, that the Roman Pope is still a thing for modern man. It seems that we do want, after all, a papa, even if most of the time we ignore him. When he dies, some of us get rather nervous. Most of our troubles, one sociologist observed, are “daddy wounds.”
 
From Pope Francis’ death to his funeral, I was offering Masses for his soul. Now that he is safely in the ground, I’ve switched to offering Masses for the Conclave, because…
 
Second, the Church must elect another Pope. In anticipation of this event, some clever screenwriters came up with a movie called “Conclave,” which I have not and will not see. A friend did see it and told me the music and cinematography are exquisite, and at the end, it is revealed that the new pope is … wait for it! … non-binary. “Of course!” I laughed. “It has to be like that today!” We live and breathe politics and the ideologies du jour that fuel our politics.
 
The recent papacy had some strengths and some weaknesses, as do all papacies. Pope Francis’ cardinal weakness, it seems to me, was to politicize the Office of Peter. How much of that was his fault is open to debate, but his policy pronouncements and PR statements forced people into one of two political camps: either pro-Francis or anti-Francis. This was a great tragedy for the Church, for the Pope is to be father of us all, the visible source of unity to all his spiritual children. The Pope is the vicar of Christ, not merely a political influencer. The Pope bears the Christian Gospel, the perennial truths that lead to eternal life, not merely human proposals for improving our brief moment in history.
 
I’ve been a bit disappointed, and quite bored, with both “liberal” and “conservative” speculations on the upcoming Conclave. Most of us are thinking about the papacy now as merely an exercise in politics. The word “Conclave,” con-clavus in Latin, means “locked together. After all 133 cardinals are comfortably seated in the Sistine Chapel, a Vatican functionary locks the door behind them, pocketing the clavus, the key, and there they remain, liberal and conservative, with the Holy Spirit. Their one task is to reach an agreement on the next Pope. Most of us seem to have forgotten that the Holy Spirit is also in the room.
 
Recently a group of editors from one of my favorite journals speculated on who will be the next Pope. Many gave their best guess, some tongue in cheek, but only one editor kept his Catholic head on straight. He said simply “I think the next pope should be whomever the cardinals elect.” I think that’s the best approach, along with lots of prayers for the Church at this time. As for me, I am offering the Mass pro eligendo summo pontifice every chance I get until the next vicar of Christ is announced.

​I live in one of America’s most secular cities, and we pride ourselves on our French restaurants. Our secularism comes largely from France, along with our escargots à l’ail gratinés. Did you hear the one about Descartes in a French restaurant? “Monsieur Descartes,” the waiter asked, “would you like the escargots à l’ail gratinés?” The father of the Enlightenment replied “I think not.” And he disappeared…. Certainly the French are clever people, and in some fundamental ways their laïcité (google it) has given us the secular city.
 
But something strange is happening in France this Easter. A record number of French citizens are seeking baptism—over 10,000 this year, compared with 5,500 last year. What to account for a 45% increase in those seeking the holy and Catholic religion in France, the birthplace of secularism? Another strange statistic: the annual three-day pilgrimage from Notre Dame in Paris to Notre Dame in Chartres has been steadily growing (from 16,000 two years ago to 18,000 last year). This year the number of registrations overwhelmed the computer systems, which had to shut down until after Easter! And not only in France: almost every diocese in this country has recorded steadily increasing numbers seeking baptism. Baltimore has reported a 28% increase, and Los Angeles a 38% increase. I just read that Malasia, of all places, had 2000 people enter the Church yesterday.
 
I have not a few French parishioners here in San Francisco, but my first one was an atheist. He was raised in Paris with no faith and came to San Francisco to work as an animator at Lukasfilms. He had a good job, a beautiful Swedish wife, a lovely apartment in a chic neighborhood, but he came knocking on the parish door. “Why do you want to be baptized?” I asked him. David replied: “because life without God doesn’t work. I grew up in Paris with steadily increasing social chaos, and my personal life has no fundamental meaning. I want to see if Christ can give me a fuller life.” David was baptized in 2016 and has since returned to France with his beautiful Swedish wife and beautiful three children, for which he thanks God unceasingly.
 
Yesterday I ran to Costco to pick up some fixins for the Easter Vigil reception. Twelve were baptized in my parish last night, and I needed some grapes and cheese to go with my French wines. I put my card up to the reader at the entrance and a nice Filipina smiled at me. “Thank you, Father,” she said. It made me feel all warm inside. Inside the vast Costco, I next approached a massive security guard. He was sitting, but I think he was about six foot five, and he looked straight at every person entering the store through his wrap-around black sunglasses. He was a black man, rippling with muscles, and looking as scary as the Terminator. I shyly waved at him, and he said, without cracking any kind of smile, “Happy Easter, Father.” I hurried on, rejoicing to have received the best Easter gift of all, the shared joy of a man who is not allowed to smile and not allowed to be religious. The six foot five security guard is there to scare people from shoplifting, but he knows, too, that life without God is dark and boorish. He knows, in his great heart, that Jesus rose from the dead!