Merry Christmas

     In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to his own town to register.

    So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

    And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger."

    Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests."

    When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about."

    So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

Merry Christmas!

No Peace in the Holy Land

This is the second in our "Christmas Triduum."

As I write this Christians in many parts of the world are streaming to churches for Midnight Mass and other vigil observances of the birth  of the Prince of Peace. But in Biblical lands there is anything but peace.

The fact is that in predominantly Muslim countries Christians are under attack as never before. As Steve Huntley noted recently in the Chicago Sun-Times:

Post-Mubarak Egypt has seen a virtual pogrom against Christians. In one bloody episode Egyptian security forces joined a violent, club-wielding mob, murdering 60 Christians in Cairo and wounding another 300. Copts are one of the earliest Christian churches, predating the prophet Muhammad. But the unchecked violence towards them may cause the dispersion of hundreds of thousands of them. Copts as a group are also among most educated and prosperous Egyptians. This may explain the animosity towards them on the part of a poorer, more illiterate majority. But chasing them out of their home may create an economic and resource drain that can only worsen an already bad economy for everyone.

As bad as it is in Egypt it's worse in Palestine. The West Bank and Gaza, controlled by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, respectively, have led the Mid East in the Diaspora of Christians. Thirty-five years ago Bethlehem , the birthplace of Jesus, was 100 percent Christian. Today Christians make up only a third of the population. Living in the Palestinian territories, Christians are governed by Islamic Sharia law.

And let's not even talk about Iraq. Iraq, where the ancient Tigris and Euphrates run. As recently as ten years ago was home to a Chaldean Christian church with nearly a million and a half members. Today, as the U.S. abdicates its responsibility to help build a stable, pluralistic society, the Chaldean church is down to 500,000 members and shrinking.

For t several summers past I can remember Arab Catholics from Bethlehem making the tour of the U.S. and visiting various churches. Their goal was to sell artifacts made of native olive wood to raise money for the support the of sacred Holy Land sites. This year they didn't come at all. Not a good sign.

Palestinians in Bethlehem assiduously ensure that the tiny town where Christ was born remains a tourist destination. But that is because the annual December pilgrimage there is the largest economic draw in town. The number of Christians left to keep and care for this site out of a sense of faith-based responsibility continues to dwindle. What happens when they all leave?

Just thought you might like to know. 

Keeping Christ in Christmas

What follows is the first of three postings on the Christmas season of 2012. Call it a Nativity Triduum of sorts.

Those who celebrate Christmas seem to be divided into to camps: the secular and the sacred. Those who seem to revel in its pagan, Bacchanalian roots and those that view Christmas as a deeply spiritual event. Most Christians are on the fault line of that battle--erecting creches along with colored lights, attending church services, if only once a year, and also getting in line at Target at 12:00 in the morning on Black Friday. Midnight madness vs, Midnight Mass.

 David Gibson of the Religion News Service writes today about how churches try to offer a bit of the secular in order to get the faithful to notice the sacred. Traditional Midnight Mass is going the way of the C7 incandescent Christmas bulb as pastors try to boost attendance by getting parishioners home by midnight in order to finish assembling and wrapping presents and getting a couple of hours of sleep before the kids are up at dawn. At the other end, clergy are making Christmas church services more kid friendly in order to help the little ones turn their attention from Santa to Jesus for at least a day. Gibson quotes a Catholic priest joking about "Jingle Bell Masses." 

St. Augustine was among
the first theologians to
write about balancing the secular
and the sacred at Christmas

A lot of people blame the secularization of Christmas on our modern consumer culture. But the battle between secular and sacred goes back a lot further than that. In his column today Gibson writes about Saint Augustine, the great fifth century Doctor of the Church. Augustine, a convert to Christianity, knew well the pagan rites and festivals, as well as the Feast of the Nativity. For this reason, he cautioned his flock not to downplay the celebratory aspects of Jesus' birth. Christians were to be faithful to the true meaning of Christmas and not to give into pagan celebrations. But they were to combine the celebratory with the sacred.

"So," he wrote, "brothers and sisters, let us keep this day as a festival - not, like the unbelievers, because of the sun up there in the sky, but because of the One who made that sun."

Fifteen centuries later it is a lesson we the faithful should keep in mind. Merry Christmas.

Just thought you might like to know

The 351st Bomb Group-A War Story

"The 351st Bomb Group" is the story of the death of my uncle, Edward H. Bucceri. It was originally posted on December 23, 2009, the anniversary of his death during World War II. It has been posted every year since on this date. It is presented again here.

This post is dedicated to my late uncle, Sgt. Edward H. Bucceri, a member of the 351st Bomb Group killed in action off the coast of England in World War II. Today is the anniversary of his death during a combat mission over the North Sea 66 years ago.


Uncle Ed died long before I was born. We know little about the incident that took his life other than it was his eighth combat mission. What information we have is preserved in The Chronicle of the 351st Bomb Group, by Peter Harris and Ken Harbour, and the official War Department report. Both are the basis of this post.

Sgt. Bucceri's plane, serial number 42-39778 , and known as "Lucky Ball," was part of the 511th Squadron on a 34-plane bombing run that took off on December 22, 1943 from its base in Polebrook, England on a night-time mission to bomb a steel mill in Osnabruck, Germany. In command of Lucky Ball was the pilot, Lt. Lewis Maginn of Rochester, New York. It was to be the plane's fifth and final mission.

According to Lt. Maginn's recollection of the event, Lucky Ball was anything but lucky that night. It had just been overhauled prior to the mission, with two engines ripped out and replaced by rebuilt ones. Lt. Maginn recalls being uneasy with the fact that the plane was pressed into service without the rebuilt engines having logged some more running time following the overhaul.

In addition to having to make the run with untested engines, two of the regular crew could not go on the mission and were replaced in the ball turret and tail gun positions.

Early into the mission, the pilot realized something was wrong. Bomb Groups assigned to the position behind them were rapidly gaining on Lucky Ball. Lt. Maginn put the hammer down to "near full power" and still found himself falling behind his formation.

And then the oil pressure in the number four engine began to drop.

The pilot killed the four engine and, being close to the target, tried to make the run with three motors. Then the oil pressure on number three began dropping.

With two engines out on one side, and an impossible task to keep up, Lt. Maginn made the decision to break formation and turn back to base. The crew jettisoned its bomb load, ammo and equipment in hopes of lightening the load on the two remaining engines.

The crew then mistook an American plane for an enemy fighter and dived into a cloud bank. But the maneuver cost the crew "precious altitude," according to Lt. Maginn. Then the oil pressure in number two began to drop. The crew began to take flak from German fighters, worsening their altitude situation. The pilot was forced to shut down number two, leaving Lucky Ball one engine.

The crew dumped all remaining equipment, guns and ammunition and began a desperate run to the English coast. Sgt. Palmer, the radio man, sent out the SOS. But there was no luck for Lucky Ball that night as it struggled westward into a gale headwind.

With the English coastline in plain view, the crew came to the realization they would never reach it. They prepared to ditch their craft into the chop of the North Sea. Cruising low above the waves, the pilot cut the last engine to try and glide to a straight landing. The bomber hit the water at 85 miles per hour, breaking in half.

Lt. Maginn describes the intense cold of the North Sea in late December as "instantly numbing." The crash landing had jammed the cables on the life rafts, forcing the crew to "take to the water, their flotation devices their only hope for survival. Huddled together in the freezing water they watched Lucky Ball sink below the waves. The first big wave to break over them scattered them about the sea, each man to his own.

Sgt. Palmer assured Maginn that the rescue squadrons had a fix on their position, but it would be 45 more agonizing minutes before the first boat appeared. During that 45 minutes as the men drifted apart, Lt. Maginn later said, "the wind and bitter cold water took its toll rapidly." Five of the ten-man crew were rescued. Perishing that night were the navigator, Lt. James McMorrow of Akron, Ohio, Sgts. Albert Meyer of Roswell, New Mexico, Docile Nadeau of Fort Keat Mills, Maine, and Clarence Rowlinson of Des Moines, Iowa. Sgt. Meyer was the only one whose body was recovered.

Sgts. Nadeau and Rowlinson were the replacement ball turret and tail gunners fatefully assigned to the flight that night.

The fifth crew member killed was my uncle, Edward H. Bucceri of Jersey City, New Jersey.

No memorial marks the spot where these men went to their final rest. There was no military funeral at a national cemetery, no 21-gun salute, no honor guard. No one made a movie about the Lucky Ball's last run, and no Grammy-winning folk singer penned a mournful song . The crew that perished that night were just five of the more than 400,000 Americans killed in action in that war. Today I remember one of them.

Rest in Peace, Uncle Ed. Merry Christmas. And thank you.

Just thought you might like to know.

Pearl Harbor Remembered

Today, December 7, 2011, marks the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor that ushered America's entry into World War II.

Seventy years is a long time. I can remember when "Pearl Harbor Day," as it was called (officially it is referred to as National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day) was as much a part of American history that it was marked on every calendar, like Lincoln's Birthday or Armistice Day. Today--not so much.

I asked my teenage son today if he knew what today, December 7, was. He had to think about it for a second but came back with Pearl Harbor Day. I proposed to him that if he asked 20 people the same question 18 wouldn't know. His take was that I could ask 100 and most of them would be clueless. I'm sure most of those 100 could cite me chapter and verse about global warming but little about one of the key events that shaped America into a world power and defined its character. I'm not surprised. It seems as if most American teachers, judging by what they teach, think American history started in the 1960s.

But 70 years is a long time. The saddest news of the day is that the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association gathered today at the memorial in Honolulu for the last time. As of December 31, 2011 the Association will disband, a victim of the passage of time. With the Survivors Association gone, who will be left to testify about Pearl Harbor?

Pearl Harbor remains important in American history for many reasons. The Japanese surprise attack occurred despite the fact that the Americans had broken the Japanese code, were eavesdropping on Japanese communications and knew both the day and the approximate time when an attack would take place.

Twenty years before, it was the Americans who demonstrated just how vulnerable naval vessels could be to the growing threat of air power. In a 1921 demonstration the legendary Billy Mitchell sank three surplus ships. Present at the demonstration was a Japanese naval officer attached to Japan's diplomatic mission in the U.S.

The lesson of Pearl Harbor shaped America's military thinking for the next 60 years. However, over the last decade, we've grown weary of two wars, fighting a shadowy enemy, and being economically crushed by a global recession. As a nation we've disengaged from some of our global responsibilities. But today we face threats at least as formidable as we faced in 1941, as Warren Kozak points out in today's Wall Street Journal. A nuclear-armed Iran. A belligerent Russia. An increasingly belligerent China that holds the power of the purse over our economy. An ever-present threat of Islamic terrorism.

Perhaps we need to study the lessons of Pearl Harbor a little more. We need to gather the intelligence on places like Iran, sift through it, analyze it, and above all, not ignore the facts that stare back at us.

If we can do that, then the Pearl Harbor Survivors and those 2,400 brave souls who went to their death 70 years ago this day can rest easier knowing that we've carried their lesson forward to the present.

Can we do that? The guy who heads up the the Southeast chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association is quoted today about how we've failed our kids by not teaching them about Pearl Harbor.

Harry Kerr was invited to talk to a school about December 7, 1941. "I was being introduced by a male teacher," said Mr. Kerr.  "[the teacher] told the class, 'Mr. Kerr will be talking about Pearl Harbor.’ And one of these little girls said, ‘Pearl Harbor? Who is she?’"

Just thought you might like to know.

Old Fashioned Christmas

I live in a small community that's getting bigger by the day. But at least we have one event that lets us remember our small town roots. It's the annual West Chester Old Fashioned Christmas parade, held for the last 32 years on the first Friday in December. I remember going to the parade for the first time 20 or so years ago. Then it consisted of a marching band, some antique cars, tractors and fire engines, a few Girl Scout and Brownie troops marching, some local pols on parade and, of course, Santa Claus. It took all of 30 minutes for the parade to wind its way around town.

Last night's parade lasted over an hour and a half. It featured 19 marching bands, a Salute to the Troops, a Bolivian dance troupe up from Virginia, and back from last year, the Lone Ranger atop Silver. The parade has benefited greatly from the addition of professional management and from corporate sponsorship. The name sponsor for last night's event was MARS Drinks.

As the parade has grown, so has the attendance with thousands of people clogging the narrow streets to catch a glimpse of the various floats.

The historic Courthouse in West
Chester, Pa. decorated for Christmas

I'm happy to live in a place where events like an Old Fashioned Christmas parade can take place. In addition to the parade there is Christmas caroling in the streets, a tree-lighting ceremony on the lawn of the old Courthouse, next to the creche and the menorah placed there to commemorate the holiday. We've had our First Amendment battles over all this, but for now at least common sense and good will have prevailed.

The growth of the parade has been stunning over the last few years. But there is something about the smaller, locally managed events of 20 years ago I miss. Maybe it's something about the unpolished, unrehearsed marching of little kids, or the many local merchants who kept their doors open after the parade to serve cookies and hot drinks to spectators looking for a little warmth. Either way there is something about a parade and something about Christmas that reminds us of the way things used to be, and they way we'd like them to be now if we could only turn back the clock.

Just thought you might like to know.

The National Debt