Too many notes

Antonio Salieri was a pretty good composer; popular, too.  He had a prominent and comfortable job in the Vienna court of Emperor Joseph II of Austria–Hungary, which city was a major center, even the center, of musical culture in its time.  It was, as a musician might say, a good gig.

Before the theater major came to the university radio station (WLUR 91.5 FM) where I was the director of classical music programming, I had already found Salieri because he was an unknown contemporary of Mozart, and I was always looking for more obscure composers whose work I could program.   How had his “good gig” settled into near-oblivion, a curiosity, a footnote?

That theater student, a senior, was preparing the thesis presentation he was to perform for the departmental jury: a selection of monologues, one of which would be a soliloquy by Salieri from Peter Schaffer’s hit play, Amadeus.  He came looking for a recording of the third movement of Mozart’s Serenade for Winds, K. 361, the “Gran Partita” to use for the soundtrack.  You can hear what he said about it in this clip: Click here for Salieri

That was before the hit film version of Amadeus by Milos Forman featuring Tom Hulce as Mozart and F. Murray Abraham as Salieri.  That was before I was familiar with the premise of Schaffer’s play, that Salieri’s life-long gratitude to God for his musical gifts turned to anger and vengeance when he realized that he had just genius enough to recognize the true genius, Mozart, even as his own music remained popular with the undiscerning masses.   On that shocking but simple awakening turns the play, the movie, and one possible understanding of an important chapter in musical and human history.  The suggested subsequent effort to murder Mozart is secondary and even unimportant.

Schaffer’s penetrating insight is not unique to the particular person and situation of Salieri; if it were, I doubt the play would have had such success.   There is something recognizable to everybody, I think, about Salieri’s bitterness about being just gifted enough to recognize the greater gifts of another.

It is hardly uncommon to be able to recognize what somebody else does wrong.  The popular phrase, “Everybody’s a critic!” does not spring up out of a vacuum.  People who have never been president even of a neighborhood committee can be very confident – and sometimes very correct – in observing the mistakes and failures of the President of the United States.  That is hardly a gift, great or otherwise.  Perhaps it is a gift to figure out how to make a living doing it – but I digress.

It is more rare, and more difficult, to be able to discern and describe what somebody else does well; not only very well, but exceptionally well.  To be able to do that, one must know quite a bit about the work in question, and what its essential elements are, as well as its nuances.  In other words, to be able to identify the elements and efforts that make someone exceptional, one has to have been pretty good himself.  Perhaps this is why among all the professional sports commentators on every broadcast network, there is an effort to have at least one who has played the game at the highest level.

To see someone else doing what you yourself love to do, even live to do, and see him doing it at a level you yourself have tried and failed to achieve, can be a crushing blow.  To have that experience as all around you are congratulating you on your excellence, while failing to notice the excellence of the other, would create an ironic dissonance that would be unsustainable for most of us.

Yet, most of us could understand Salieri’s dilemma in Schaffer’s depiction of it.  Why is that?   Perhaps, it is the shuddering realization that not only are we not as good as other people think we are, or even not as good as we wanted people to think we are, but we are not nearly as good as even we thought we were.  Our gifts and abilities have raised us only to the level of being able to see where we should be, but are not.  How can these abilities, then, be construed to be gifts at all?

As we close this month in which we contemplate our own end and the judgment that will come, it is healthy to recognize God has called us not to dominance, but to holiness.  Comparing ourselves to others, or even to some formal measure or abstract standard, brings dissatisfaction and even misery.   We should cultivate sufficient virtue in ourselves, and sufficient holiness, to be able to recognize and respect it in others, without raging when we fall short of their example.   

It is no divine punishment to know what we have done badly.  Our weaknesses, our mistakes, our shortcomings are transformed by the grace of God into our encounters with mercy.  His mercy reveals to us the perfection of love, simultaneously making it possible for us to participate in that same perfection.  Christ’s excellence does not dominate us, but rather delivers us. 

God has given me eyes to see and a heart to understand; abilities and gifts, failures and faults.  The time of judgment is near; the time of repentance is now.  I must become a saint; my Jesus expects it!  It’s better than a good gig. 

Monsignor Smith 

But not a singer

It’s a bit out of line, but having reflected on Monsignor Stricker, the indomitable and inimitable Founding Pastor of our parish, I want to jump to my immediate predecessor, Father William Thompson, the Fifth Pastor of Saint Bernadette.  When what was supposed to be a column about all five of my predecessor Pastors filled up very quickly with the muchness that was Stricker, I assumed I would write next about Bishop David Foley (or “Monsignor Foley” as many around these parts still remembered him) since he was, after all, the Second.  But I have already written about him on several occasions, and for reasons I do not entirely understand, Father Thompson has been very much on my mind the past few weeks, when both liturgically and privately my prayer has been directed toward the faithful departed.

Father Thompson was also my first pastor, since I was assigned here just after my ordination to the Priesthood.  He had been here only one year at that time, and he had spent part of that year in a continuing education program for priests that was given in Rome, at the North American College where I was finishing seminary, so we had already met.  His previous assignment had been Saint Mary, Bryantown, to which he had been assigned when he returned to the Archdiocese from his decade as a chaplain in the Navy. 

Large and loud like Monsignor Stricker, and his speech peppered with nautical terms after two turns in the Navy, one of his nicknames among the clergy was “Battleship Bill.”  With ten years enlisted service and ten years as an officer (chaplain) he was a classic “mustang.”  He had enlisted while still a teenager, having been invited to leave several of our distinguished Catholic high schools.  After ten years’ service, he went back to school, continuing straight through seminary to be ordained in 1971, then after a time returning as a chaplain.   He always figured that Cardinal Hickey treated him so well because after his retirement from the Navy, he came back to the Archdiocese to serve, whereas many chaplains, with their comfortable pensions, find more leisurely pursuits after separation.  

Father Thompson did not check all the boxes for the textbook exemplary priest.  However, among my seminary friends and classmates who compared notes frequently in those early years, I was unanimously recognized to have the Best First Pastor.   Not least among the reasons, but hardly the only one, was his generosity to me.  That includes gifts; I still routinely use the lovely embroidered pall he gave me a few months after I arrived, and he fed me very, very well.  More memorably, he treated me with respect, offered me friendship, and allowed me to thrive as a priest who was discovering just what an awesome thing that is.  As you might expect, this parish was itself an excellent teacher for a priest, by the expectations and requirements of her people.  He was not jealous of people’s affection, but rather was happy when I found welcome here.   He was also generous to my priest friends, treating them as worthy of his time, attention, respect, and affection.   Altogether, that put him head and shoulders above what many of my peers received.  

It was a magnificent first assignment, almost making necessary a predictably difficult second one.  As it turned out, when his time as Pastor here ended, mine began.  We remained friends, getting together for dinner, though not nearly enough.   He diminished rather steadily and died in 2015.

The names on the list vary as I mentally mention souls I remember at Mass, or when one of my other prayers concludes with “and may the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.”  Most often, I lead with “Jack and Kay and Carl and Martha,” my grandparents.  Cardinal Baum and Cardinal Hickey both get frequent mention.  Other family, various friends, recent losses, people from the news pop up in their turn.  And yes, of course I remember Bishop Foley often and by name, as he also became a friend and generous mentor to me.  For some reason this November, most likely gratitude, but also because I hope someday someone will do it for me, Father Thompson has often jumped to the front of the list.  May the souls of all the faithful departed, especially Bill Thompson, through the mercy of God rest in peace.

Monsignor Smith

More than a name

What is the “MSR?”

Yes, that is a question I get occasionally, usually from new parishioners who are looking for the announced Community Sunday donuts and treats.   The Monsignor Stricker Room is our multi-purpose meeting room in the undercroft (that is, basement) of the church.  It is named for the founding pastor of our parish, Msgr. William F. “Pete” Stricker, whose visage presides over the proceedings in that room, or the mayhem, from a creditable oil portrait on the south wall.  

That portrait may be all you know of Monsignor Stricker; he retired after twenty-seven years as pastor almost fifty years ago, in 1975, and died in 1976.  You might expect that to be all I know of him, too, since I was in fifth grade in Alabama when he retired.  But no, I know rather a lot more.  When I first arrived here, the memories of Msgr. Stricker were still vivid and common, and I heard them all.  

The generation of parishioners who had benefitted from his shepherd’s care were always ready with an anecdote or observation about him. He wore white socks because of a dye allergy, and didn’t drive, so he would walk up to Woodmoor Center and invariably “find” (mooch?) a ride home.  He sang with the choir if he was not celebrating the Mass, and his love of good music laid the foundation for what we enjoy now.   Speaking of foundations, he oversaw the construction of the rectory and the church.

Every homily he ever preached is retained in perfect typescript in a heavy steel file cabinet in the rectory basement. Selected homilies were gathered into a little paperback, (Verbum Sapienti, that is “a word to the wise”) where I have delighted to read them.  He also published a book, still available in the second-hand market, called Keeping Christmas, An Edwardian-Age Memoir, about his youth in the German section of Baltimore.   

Cardinal Baum, for whom I worked for almost five years, remembered that early in his time as Archbishop of Washington, he had to ask Msgr. Stricker for his retirement.  Girded as he was for resistance from the famous curmudgeon, he was shocked when Monsignor gently agreed.  When Monsignor’s friends turned out for his funeral just a year later, Cardinal Baum inquired from where his nickname “Pete” had come.  They explained that in seminary in Rome in the 1920’s, young Stricker had been the captain or head of their camerata, the subgroup in which seminarians pursued all recreational activities.  He was our leader, our “Peter,” explained his classmate, who by then was Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago.  

His presence was so strong that not only parishioners remember him.  Neighbors and shop owners at the corner, kids who were friends of kids in the school, all knew and admired (in a vaguely intimidated way) the indomitable pastor of Saint Bernadette.  He was a large man with a powerful voice and a well-tuned intellect; he did not keep people guessing what he thought about things.   I have met non-Catholics who lived in the area and moved away fifty years ago who remembered him, and his name.

Why am I sharing this with you now?  It is November, and we remember and pray for our beloved dead.  This past Sunday, one of our Masses was offered for the repose of the souls of the deceased Pastors of Saint Bernadette; it is the least we can do.  For my letter this week, I thought I would share some stories about my venerable predecessors to put some flesh on their dusty old names and pictures.  But as you can tell, Monsignor Stricker used all the space I had.  Imagine that.

And that is what, and WHO, the Monsignor Stricker Room is. 

Monsignor Smith

It seemed like a good idea at the time

The Last Judgment, fresco in the Old Cathedral of Salamanca, image by Richard Stracke 

Here we are in the month of judgment.  That sounds like no fun at all, but really, isn’t it better to spend some time every year thinking about judgment than to spend all eternity wishing we had?  Because all this month, in the Gospel readings at Mass, we will be hearing Jesus draw our attention to judgment, and remind us that it is real, and our time to be judged will come.  

Does he want to scare us?  Not so much, I do not think, as he does want to remind us of our power and freedom.  We are able now to choose the good and avoid what is evil; that is an awesome power and a glorious freedom.  Should we not decide how best to use it?

There is a theory out there, not new but neither has it passed out of currency, that the key to making a good judgment is to choose whatever accomplishes the greatest good for the greatest number of people.  This theory is called utilitarianism, and it sounds awfully good up front, but has been flagged by the Church as very, very dangerous and false.   The shepherding rod-and-staff warns us who know Jesus to avoid falling into this trap precisely because it can make doing evil seem to be doing good. 

Now it is rare for a moral theory to display its inherent weakness in such a way that even the casual observer can see it.   But lucky us!  The sinister side of this siren’s song is revealed for all to see even now.

The fraud trial of Sam Bankman-Fried is an object lesson in the defectiveness of this attractive theory, and it is clear to all because the scale on which he applied it in his own undertakings is so huge that it is impossible to deny the devastating consequences.   

Now, the trial is still ongoing, and I make no claim to know whether the young man committed the crimes of which he is accused.  That is not necessary to judge.  However, simply on the basis of the motives and methods to which he himself has testified and even broadcast to the world, he has acknowledged himself to be a utilitarianist on the grandest of scales.

In the category of financial instrument known as “crypto” he attracted huge amounts of money from investors.  The explicit and promised return for that investment was profit, though there was the acknowledged risk of some loss, as with any investment.  At the same time, he freely announced that his goal in garnering profit to himself was to give it away; to use his resources for good.  

As a recent article in Forbes magazine explained, Effective altruism–known as EA—helped to facilitate Bankman-Fried’s rapid rise as someone with a vision beyond simply making money.  Unlike other crypto moguls who praised decentralization and libertarian ideals, Bankman-Fried professed a plain old desire to do good with his lucre. His crypto (companies) were, in Bankman-Fried’s telling, nothing more than a way to make as much money as possible so that he could give it all away… Practically overnight, he made himself into effective altruism’s most famous proponent and one of its biggest financial contributors, …. “In the end, my goal is to do as much good as I can for the world,” Bankman-Fried explained to Forbes earlier this year. “I’m part of the effective altruism community.” 

The accusations against him are that the money he used was not his own to spend; that the resources were not even his, to use as he saw fit.  There are many experts trying now to determine to what extent this is the case.  Because it was his announced intention so to do, did the investors consent to his use of their funds for this purpose?  Did he break any laws in reporting, management of resources, designation of funds, and so on?

But before that question is even asked, there is clearly a problem.  He gathered resources from other people in order to garner growth for them, and instead deployed that wealth toward some other purpose.  There are many, many unhappy people who will not receive their desired return, nor, conceivably, even the return of their original investment.

Mr. Bankman-Fried’s situation is even more complicated because much, maybe even most, of his “effective altruism” was in the form of political contributions.  This is complicated because, first, it may be seen as a way to obtain influence with the politicians to whom he contributed, and status among the governing classes if his favored causes and candidates were to win; and second, because it reveals an underlying presumption to know which politicians and policies will accomplish “good.”  Without checking which politicians or parties or proposals he supported, you and I both, as seasoned observers of the world, can raise a hand of caution about trusting any politician to seek, much less to accomplish, anything good.  

One of the keys to understanding how he got himself into this position is to know something about his parents, both professors at Stanford Law School.  Academically, they share an interest in using tax law as an instrument of social fairness, and they describe themselves as “utilitarian-minded.”  (from a recent New Yorker article).  They raised the kids, Sam and his brothers, according to their moral vision – a utilitarian moral vision. 

So this very bright, talented, charismatic, and motivated young man suddenly finds himself on trial for enormous crimes committed while he assured himself and everybody who was watching him that he was doing good.

Without knowing how that civil judgment will fall for him, it is not hard to look at the wreckage of his life and the fiscal situations of many, many people to realize that what he was doing was not good.  Even if his goals were virtuous, his methods were harmful.  There were also serious flaws in his evaluation of which goals would be virtuous, and he clearly failed to ascertain which methods and instruments were virtuous.  

Parents, teach your children well.  God has given us knowledge of the truth, the treasury of the Church’s moral reasoning and instruction, and the ability to discern good from evil.  No human enterprise or calculation can improve upon nor escape the reality of divine truth.   Ill-intentioned or even ill-considered actions on your part or mine will not play out on a scale as vast and as public as this unfortunate young man’s have; yet even if they remain hidden, the devastation wrought by our self-delusion will cry out to God for vengeance.  Far better to consider such things now, in the month we have set aside for such reflection, than to regret them later, possibly forever.

Monsignor Smith