Angelus News | April 9, 2021 Vol 6 No 7

Heather King is an award-winning
author, speaker, and workshop leader.
all three of them ordered lamb chops, I
interjected, ‘You can’t have lamb chops
— it’s Good Friday.’ Without missing a
beat, Msgr. Albacete said, ‘Oh, Mike,
[he was the only person who ever
called me Mike], we had an ancestor
who died fighting in the Crusades and
have a dispensation in perpetuity.’ ”
But Msgr. Albacete was anything but
superficial. In “God at the Ritz: Attraction
to Infinity” (Crossroad, $13.48),
a collection of essays about religion,
politics, and sex, he posited: “The
inhabitants of the world of suffering
are the ones who truly transform the
world. They are the true revolutionaries
on behalf of human dignity. … It
is necessary to suffer so that the truth
not be crystallized in doctrine, but be
born from the flesh.”
He appeared on Charlie Rose and
Frontline, wrote for The New York
Times, and publicly debated acerbic
atheist Christopher Hitchens. In his
later years, he helped establish a New
York-based educational arm of the lay
Catholic organization Communion
and Liberation.
He died at 73 of complications of
Parkinson’s disease.
“The Relevance of the Stars: Christ,
Culture, Destiny” (Slant, $19), a
posthumous essay collection edited
by Lisa Lickona and Gregory Wolfe,
emerges from Msgr. Albacete’s spiritual
transformation in the early 1990s. It
was then that he met an Italian priest
from Milan: Father Luigi Giussani
(1922-2005).
“What Giussani proposed,” the editors
observe, “was a return to the central
experience of Christianity, God’s own
method, summed up in the encounters
that people have with Christ in the
Gospels — John and Andrew, Zacchaeus,
Mary Magdalene, the woman
at the well. Jesus did not convince
these men and women by discourse,
but rather won them over through
the power of his person, his gaze, his
gestures, his presence.”
Msgr. Albacete’s intellect ranged
wide, and if he sometimes posed
questions, meandered around to other
questions, and never quite got back
to the first, so be it: Reading him I
found myself, again and again, nearly
shouting “Yes!”
The first chapter, “The Lovers and
the Stars,” considers the faith versus
reason question.
“This is the proposal,” he avers. “It’s
where faith (the stars) enters in and
broadens, purifies. Here it is proposed
that what we call faith above all is the
healing of our humanity. What we suffer
from, whatever its origin, we must
overcome this wound, this disaster, this
separation of reason from affectivity.”
From “Overcoming Dualism”: “In
practical terms this means that everything
human that is interesting can
lead me to Christ.”
From “The Church of the Infinitely
Fractured”: “[W]hat saves us are the
facts of the life of Christ and of his
death and resurrection, not the ethical
consequences drawn from them from
the right wing or the left wing.”
In “Searching for Truth Together,”
he observes that, for the early monks,
“The logos is not at all merely an
intellectual concept, but a reality that
catches our attention, that is addressed
to us. It is what Giussani would call
an encounter. It is a call; it is therefore
a vocation. Human life itself was
experienced as a response to a word addressed
in human words; life became
a response to this encounter with the
Word.”
Msgr. Albacete anticipated and
addressed “critical theory,” the godless,
rigidly enforced ideology that holds
increasing sway in the fields of politics,
media, education, and even art.
The chapter “Learning to Say ‘I’ ”
considers the tension between identity
(modern) and individuality (ancient).
“The human heart is made, structured,
or given as a yearning for a mystery
that man is unable to reach. … This
is my proposal: the modern problem
of individuality versus an identity
defined by belonging is the result of
modernity’s fear of the possibility of the
Incarnation.”
From “The Mystery and the Holocaust”:
“The contemporary disdain
for the capacity of human reason
abandons the religious sense to the
irrational, thus paving the way for the
worship of those idols of racial, ethnic,
or national identity which led to the
Holocaust and the other barbarous
planned and systematic horrors so
characteristic of our time.”
“Religion is welcomed only when it
is reduced to harmless sentimentality
or a socially convenient disposition to
self-control. What makes us afraid is
the claim of the presence in the world
of the infinite mystery for which the
heart desires.”
But treat yourself to the book and
read these profoundly human, intelligent,
and thought-provoking essays
for yourself. As the editors point out,
Msgr. Albacete is an “astronomer of
the spirit.”
April 9, 2021 • ANGELUS • 31