Chevalier de la charité

We might not think about buying a Christmas tree and decorating it as a ceremony. But the actions we ritually perform to carry out this annual tradition suggest otherwise: a journey to select a tree we then bring home to adorn with objects imbued with deep meaning, surrounded by people important to us. Unwritten yet « sacred » rules guide the process.

Twenty-five to 30 million live Christmas trees are purchased in the United States each year. Add to that countless artificial trees set up in homes, stores and churches. That prevalence surely makes it one of the most widespread — if mostly unrecognized — American ceremonies.

And this ceremony is still developing and unfinished.

While the ceremony of the Christmas tree draws on centuries of sacred tree traditions from multiple faith perspectives, the Christmas tree attained its incredible cultural power in the U.S. in the last century, expanding outside religious settings and into secular spaces that one might think are the furthest from sacred ceremonies.

The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree tradition started in 1931. The Capitol Christmas Tree tradition began in 1964. Charlie Brown brought the Christmas tree to the center of American popular culture in « A Charlie Brown Christmas » in 1965. In turn, Vince Guaraldi’s soundtrack fills public spaces to this day, bringing the Christmas tree to every corner of our communities.

Now the Indigenous traditions of North America are adding the latest stage in the Christmas tree tradition, calling us to complete the ceremony by honoring the sacrifice of the tree. By doing so, the Christmas tree will help us enter into deeper relationship with the land and see the land’s love for us.

The Christmas tree was an important part of the spirituality of Nicholas Black Elk, the Lakota holy man made famous by the book Black Elk Speaks. In a letter the now Servant of God wrote in January 1908, he detailed the Christmas celebrations of a number of Pine Ridge communities, where the people « had Christmas tree. » On Dec. 23, he went with one community to cut their tree.

« I went to the hill in the trees, » Black Elk remembered, « and they did a great honoring of me. »

The importance of the Christmas tree for Black Elk flowed from Catholic tradition and the Sun Dance, a ceremony around a cottonwood tree traditionally practiced by Plains Tribes and now by tribes across North America. During this four-day fast and dance of purification, the cottonwood tree gathers in and renews the people.

Lakota educator Dave Archambault Sr. wrote in 2016 that there is « a fundamental likeness and comparison behind the meaning of a Christmas Tree and a Sundance Tree. » For Archambault, « both are traditions that embody and symbolize a good way to be with one another. »

The main difference between the Sun Dance and Christmas tree traditions is land. Typically, we do not harvest a Christmas tree with a ceremony that honors its sacrifice and connects us to the land.

Neva Standing Bear explained in Lakota Texts: Narratives of Lakota Life and Culture in the Twentieth Century how her community addressed that difference by honoring the Christmas tree in the same way they honored the Sun Dance tree.

Key to this approach is asking permission and making an offering. For Christmas, Standing Bear said the people went out on the land and chose the tree together, they « laid tobacco around it and they prayed. » Like with the Sun Dance tree, a young girl and boy made the first cuts, then the people carried the tree together to the church without letting it touch the ground.

From a Lakota perspective, the tree is not just a symbol onto which we project meaning but a being that prays with us. At the church, people decorated the Christmas tree with traditional prayer ties, each offering specific petitions.

« Some people say thanks, and some people want peace, » Standing Bear recounted. « Or some people are sick, so they want to get better, or they suffer something, so they also put something on the tree for that reason, » she continued.

When the Christmas season was over, the tree was not thrown away, but respectfully helped on its journey back to the earth. In this case, it was burned in the fire for the Inipi, or sweat lodge, for the purification of the people.

There is a circularity to the Christmas tree tradition in the Lakota context, the bridging of the old and new, of the land and the people. In it, we see the multifaceted work of Indigenous ceremony that Robin Wall Kimmerer describes in her runaway bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass.

Ceremony unites people in a common vision and forges spiritual connection to land and relatives on which people depend. « Ceremonies transcend the boundaries of the individual and resonate beyond the human realm. These acts of reverence are powerfully pragmatic. These are ceremonies that magnify life, » says Kimmerer.

Like for Black Elk and Standing Bear, the Christmas tree bridges the old and new for us today, only in reverse.

Contemporary, American, non-Indigenous society has a few meaningful civic ceremonies, like graduation, Kimmerer argues, but the « ceremonies that endure are not about land; they’re about family and culture, values that are transportable from the old country. Ceremonies for the land no doubt existed there, but in a sense they did not survive emigration in any substantial way. »

Except for the Christmas tree. The Christmas tree tradition came from « the old country » and not only survived, but expanded in importance here in Turtle Island, an Indigenous name for North America. The Christmas tree ceremonially stands in the middle of our families, communities and our nation, and like the Sun Dance, renews us — magnifying life.

We only need to add our ceremonial gratitude to fully participate in the circular call and response between the people and land, what Kimmerer calls a « relationship of loving respect and mutual caregiving. » Something that has already happened at one of America’s most important Christmas tree ceremonies.

When the Utes of southwest Colorado provided the nation with the 2012 Capitol Christmas Tree, they chose the « tallest and most beautiful looking tree in the forest, » Bradley W. Hight, vice-chairman of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Council explained. They honored it before cutting with a ceremony from the Sundance Way and sent it on its journey to the U.S. Capitol to help bind the people of Turtle Island together.

« We hope this tree will bring unity, » Gary Hayes, the tribal council chairman said.

Many of us already carry out a Christmas tree ceremony in our homes, whether we have thought about it in that way or not. If we follow the example of our elder sisters and brothers on this land, we can imagine new practices informed by but not taken from them: make an offering, ask permission and honor the gift of the Christmas tree’s life and the work the Christmas tree does.

« There is wisdom in regenerating [ceremonies from the old country] here, as a means to form bonds with this land, » said Kimmerer. We can grow the roots of the Christmas tree tradition in a meaningful way by not only recognizing our part in the ceremony, but also the role of the tree and all to which it points during this season of renewal.

An unprecedented crisis of confidence is shaking a historic center of Catholicism in Germany — the Archdiocese of Cologne. Catholic believers have protested their deeply divisive archbishop and are leaving in droves over allegations that he may have covered up clergy sexual abuse reports.

While Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki’s personal fate is in the hands of Pope Francis, the drama has reverberations nationwide, given that the Cologne archdiocese has more Catholics than any other in Germany — about 1.8 million. Its double-domed cathedral is an iconic tourist attraction and one of the oldest, most important pilgrimage sites of Northern Europe.

And the crisis in Cologne, in which many thousands of Catholics in the region have left the church, is in some ways a microcosm of the issues playing out in the German Catholic Church as a whole as it undergoes a profound and controversial reform process precisely to respond to complaints by rank-and-file Catholics about the hierarchy’s responsibility for the clergy abuse crisis.

Some archdiocese employees have refused to attend meetings with the archbishop. Congregants of a Duesseldorf parish in the archdiocese raised red cards in protest when he visited last year, objecting to him administering the sacrament of confirmation to their children.

Dozens of altar boys and girls from the archdiocese turned their backs in protest to Woelki when he celebrated Mass with them during a trip to Rome in October. The choirs in the archdiocese recently reported a loss of 30% of their members, which they say is partially related to the coronavirus pandemic but also a clear repudiation of Woelki.

In the latest escalation, Cologne prosecutors last month opened an investigation against the powerful conservative cardinal in two cases on suspicion of making false affidavits. In each case, the question is whether Woelki, 66, had been informed earlier than he stated about allegations of abuse against certain clergymen. The cardinal rejects all accusations against him.

Even influential German politicians who normally steer clear of church politics have spoken out.

The minister for youth and family in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where Cologne is located, said she viewed the situation with bewilderment.

“Especially those in positions of responsibility must not look the other way and they must certainly not deny or cover up,” Josefine Paul said last month in a speech in the state parliament.

The church is expected to be a preeminent model of morality, and it has « set the highest moral standards for all kinds of people in society — does all this no longer apply to a bishop? » Tim Kurzbach, chairman of the diocesan council of Catholics in the archdiocese, told The Associated Press.

Kurzbach, mayor of the town of Solingen in the archdiocese, said he knows of several long-time parishioners who are leaving the church because they can no longer bear “the moral decay” in Cologne.

The crisis of confidence began in 2020, when Woelki, citing legal concerns, kept under wraps a report he commissioned on how local church officials reacted when priests were accused of sexual abuse. That infuriated many Cologne Catholics. A second report, published in March 2021, found 75 cases in which high-ranking officials neglected their duties.

The report absolved Woelki of any neglect of his legal duty with respect to abuse victims. He subsequently said he made mistakes in past cases involving sexual abuse allegations but insisted he had no intention of resigning.

Two papal envoys were dispatched to Cologne a few months later to investigate possible mistakes by senior officials in handling cases. Their report led Francis to give Woelki a “ spiritual timeout ” of several months for making major communication errors.

In March, after his return from the timeout, the cardinal submitted his offer to resign but so far Francis has not acted on it.

“I don’t think it got through to Rome how much the people here are suffering,” Kurzbach said. “Without a decision on the Cologne cardinal question, we will not get out of the crisis. The question must finally be resolved.”

The issue was raised when Germany’s bishops visited with the pope last month. The head of the German Bishops Conference, Limburg Bishop Georg Baetzing, told reporters that “it was made very clear that the situation in the archdiocese is increasingly unbearable, even for the archbishop.” The wait for a papal decision also is burdensome for German Catholics, he said.

In the interim, they are exiting the church in record numbers. Some 44,772 Catholics in the Cologne archdiocese left in 2021, up from 17,281 in 2020, according to church figures.

Nationally, the number of Catholics leaving the church has also risen dramatically. Some 359,338 left in 2021, up from 221,390 in 2020. It is still the largest faith group in the country. About 21.6 million Catholics live in Germany, which has an overall population of 84 million.

“It’s clear that this is a difficult situation,” Cologne archdiocese spokesman, Juergen Kleikamp, told the AP last week. “But that’s just the way it is. In the Catholic Church, the pope has to decide and no one else.”

Meanwhile, Woelki is “doing his work to the best of his knowledge and also with great commitment,” Kleikamp said, adding that while some Catholics “are angry and quarrel with their church, there are others who applaud and rejoice when the bishop comes.”

Many Catholics, however, doubt the crisis can be easily fixed any time soon — even if the cardinal resigns.

Lay leader Regina Oediger-Spinrath, 61, called it “an absolute crisis of trust and credibility.” She is a spokeswoman for the professional association of pastoral assistants in the archdiocese, and thinks the crisis goes beyond the Cologne situation. Oediger-Spinrath said fundamental changes are needed, including more equality for women and LGBTQ people.

“Leadership needs to be rethought,” she said. “The way it is in the Catholic Church, that is absolutely hierarchical, some also say authoritarian from the top down — I believe, that many people no longer want to go along with that.”

Those demands are in line with the reform process, known as the “ Synodal Path, » the German church launched with the country’s influential lay group, the Central Committee of German Catholics, to respond to the clergy sexual abuse scandals after a 2018 report found at least 3,677 people were abused by clergy between 1946 and 2014.

Preliminary assemblies have already approved calls to allow same-sex couple blessings, married priests and the ordination of women deacons. The movement, however, also sparked fierce opposition from the Vatican and conservative clergy in Germany and elsewhere.

While Oediger-Spinrath says she is ready to fight for changes, others have lost patience.

“I will leave the church,” says Peter Barzel, 65, a member of the St. Margareta parish in Duesseldorf. He helped organize last year’s red card protest during Woelki’s visit.

Barzel, an active parishioner for decades, also tried to bring more attention to recent sexual abuse allegations lodged against two former St. Margareta pastors that have roiled the parish. Eventually, he gave up.

“I will certainly miss something when I leave the church, because the Christian faith is something you share with other people,” he said. “But I can no longer support this system.”

One of the Vatican’s leading Jesuit advisers on preventing clergy sexual abuse called Dec. 7 for church authorities to shed more light on the case of a famous Jesuit artist who wasn’t sanctioned by the Holy See after he was accused of spiritually abusing women during confession.

Jesuit Fr. Hans Zollner said the recent statement by the Jesuit order about Fr. Marko Ivan Rupnik « raised questions that, as far as I see, can only be answered by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. »

The Jesuits said in a statement made public this week that the Dicastery, which handles abuse cases, had closed its file on Rupnik, one of the most famous Catholic artists alive today, because the statute of limitations had expired.

The order said precautionary measures imposed on the priest by his Jesuit superior remained in effect, forbidding him from hearing confession or giving spiritual direction.

Usually the Dicastery waives the statute of limitations for prosecuting abuse and confession-related church crimes since victims often take longer than the 20-year limit to process their trauma and report the abuse. There was no explanation why that didn’t occur this time, or whether Pope Francis, a fellow Jesuit who met with Rupnik in January, had any role in the decision not to sanction him.

Mosaics by Rupnik decorate the Lourdes basilica, a chapel in the Apostolic Palace and churches around the globe, and his artwork is regularly used by the Vatican, including as recently as this year when he designed the logo for the World Meeting of Families.

Rupnik was for years the head of a Rome-based center for study about the impact of culture on the Christian faith, the Aletti Center, with which the Dicastery’s former No. 2 official was long affiliated.

The Jesuit statement didn’t reveal the nature of the allegations against Rupnik other than to say they didn’t involve minors and concerned the way he « exercised his ministry. » Italian news reports have said they concerned spiritual and sexual abuse of adult women during confession.

Confession-related crimes, which are also handled by the Dicastery, are among the most serious in canon law and carry with them automatic excommunication.

Zollner said it was his « firm belief that transparency in the Church, including the Society of Jesus, is essential in order to combat the scourge of abuse in all its forms. » Zollner heads the Pontifical Gregorian University’s anthropology institute for studies on human dignity and care and is also a founding member of Francis’ child protection advisory board.

There was no immediate response to calls and emails seeking further comment from the Jesuits and the Vatican on Dec. 7.

Another Jesuit made clear his unease with the way the case was handled, calling it the « Rupnik tsunami, » and demanded a full, transparent accounting.

Jesuit Fr. Gianfranco Matarazzo, former head of a Jesuit institute in Palermo, Sicily, wrote a series of tweets saying the case, as presented to date, amounted to a « paradigmatic case of justice denied. » He called for the opening of archives and explanations.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas Dec. 5 announced a redesignation of Temporary Protected Status for Haiti and an extension of TPS for Haitian migrants already residing in the United States for an additional 18 months, from Feb. 4 through Aug. 3, 2024.

He said this « much-needed humanitarian relief » for Haitians was compelled by current conditions in Haiti such as « socioeconomic challenges, political instability, and gang violence and crime — aggravated by environmental disaster. »

Mayorkas’ decision came « after consultation with interagency partners and careful consideration of the extraordinary and temporary conditions in Haiti, » said a news release from the Department of Homeland Security.

It said the Caribbean nation has endured a prolonged political crisis, as well as « grave insecurity and gang crime that worsened a dire economic situation; a lack of access to food, water, fuel and health care during a resurgence of cholera; and the recent catastrophic earthquakes. »

Executive director Gustavo Torres of CASA, an immigrant advocacy organization in Hyattsville, Maryland, said the Biden administration’s decision « restores security to our Haitian brothers and sisters that their lives here in the United States will not be uprooted nor that they will be separated from their families. »

« As we celebrate this win, we will continue to shed light on the millions of migrants still waiting on TPS designation for their countries, » Torres said. « The fight for immigrant justice continues as the fate of DACA holders and DACA-eligible youth hangs in the balance. »

He added, « We will not rest until the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and other protections are provided for the millions of immigrants that have built lives in this country. »

DACA was authorized by the Obama administration in 2012. It protects young adults brought into the country illegally as minors — giving them a reprieve from deportation and allowing them to get the documents they need to work and drive.

But in October of this year, a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans affirmed a lower court’s ruling last year that said the Obama administration did not have the legal authority to create DACA in the first place.

The appeals court did not say the program had to completely shut down or stop processing renewal applications, but it left in place last year’s order from Judge Andrew Hanen of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. He ruled DACA could continue only for current recipients with no new participants.

The Washington Post was the first to report Dec. 5 that two members of the U.S. Senate are working on a bipartisan framework for immigration reform that would allow a pathway to citizenship for the DACA recipients, known as Dreamers.

According to the Post, the framework proposed by Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C., also provides for:

— $25 billion to $40 billion in increased funding for Border Patrol and border security, « including a commitment to hiring more agents and increasing their pay. »

— An extension of Title 42 until a formal plan is in place to stop an expected surge of migrants at the border. The public health rule has allowed U.S. authorities for health reasons to expel more than 1 million migrants who illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Under the proposed framework, the law would remain in effect for at least a year, while processing centers are set up.

— An overhaul of the asylum system « to prevent abuse of the law. »