Author: wtucker

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Masters of Deceit

As Laura Thornton of the McCain Institute commented in the Post recently, “.  . . the Russian Orthodox churches–which they say take orders from the Kremlin, spread Russian disinformation and provide cover for Russian spies–are allowed to operate in [Ukraine].”   The alliance of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet government is one of the great modern betrayals of Christianity.

Vladimir Putin has manipulated Orthodox Christians in Russia to believe he is a crusader for Christian causes like the purity of gender and the immorality of abortion, which makes his war of aggression in Ukraine a moral one. His participation in the culture wars is no more than a ruse for gathering international support for Russia’s imperialism. As Anne Applebaum wrote in Autocracy Inc. It is

Putin’s way of building alliances between his domestic audiences and his supporters in Europe and North America,  where he has a following on the authoritative far right, having convinced some naive conservatives that Russian is a “white Christian state.” (p. 76)

Christians in the United States are truly deceived if they think that Putin has adopted the Orthodox faith other than to manipulate other religions to support his aggression in Europe. The former KGB agent is an expert in disinformation. As Jesus once said, “False messiahs and false prophets will appear and produce signs and omens, to lead astray, if possible, the elect” (Mark 13:22). Too many of us have become toxically suspicious of our own political leaders, yet completely gullible to tyrants, such as Putin and Viktor Orban, who follows the same playbook.

We need to listen to journalists with first-hand knowledge of conditions in these autocracies–such as Thornton and Anne Applebaum, who is a Pulitzer Prize winner.  These writers have no political stake in attracting a following. If they warn us of the true conditions in Russia and Hungary we should listen. Applebaum writes,

In reality, Russia has a  very low church attendance, legal abortion, and a multi-ethnic population containing millions of Muslim citizens. The autonomous region of Chechnya, which is part of the Russian Federation, is governed by elements of sharia law and has arrested and killed gay men in the name of Islamic purity. The Russian state harrasses and represses many forms of religion outside the state-sanctioned Russian Orthodox Church, including evangelical Protestants. (p. 76)

It is sad to hear the churches become the megaphone of propaganda, as the Russian Orthodox church has become. In the United States Franklin Graham (evangelist son of Billy Graham), Tony Perkins (Family Research Council), and Pat Buchanan (religious politician/ journalist) have come out in support of the Russian moral agenda.  Unfortunately this support bleeds over to a rejection of America’s support of Ukraine.  Putin’s strange brew of religion and politics has infected America’s culture wars. Ukraine has become a casualty of that war.

In my teenage years Russia was regarded as a godless nation associated with Marxism. Later Ronald Reagan echoed the sentiment that the Soviet Union was not only a political, but a religious and moral threat to America. It is possible we exaggerated the religious intentions of the Communist dictators, trying to demonize them, but we were able to separate the propaganda from the reality of Soviet aggression.

Too many Christians are now duped by the propaganda of Vladimir Putin and his allies in the Russian Orthodox Church. We see them as allies in our own political causes and fail to see their persecution of religions in their own country. We have turned a blind eye to their aggression in Ukraine thinking Russia is a force of religious purity. We need to see the unholy alliance of the Orthodox church and Putin for what it is: a political campaign against all dissent, including religious dissent. That kind of oppression should repel us, regardless of our political or religious convictions.

 

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How We Loved Italy

On the morning after we returned from Rome, Victoria and I awoke at 11 a.m.—Roman time. That would be 4:00 a.m St. Louis time. To our dismay, the temperature  in St. Louis hardly differed from the mid-90’s in Rome after the 15-hour flight (including three-hour layover). It rose to 93 degrees in St.Louis at midday. I started mowing the waving savannah about 7 a.m. to beat the heat of the day.

To give a decent travelogue I’d have to study what we saw among the ruins of twenty-seven centuries, but I can immediately remember how we enjoyed our pilgrim fellow-travelers and their journey. We enjoyed exhibitions of celebrated original art and sculpture, the earthly and spiritual tracks of an unsophisticated saint, the evidence and ruins of a great empire, and the love and dedication of guides/ teachers who led us through it all.

I cannot say enough about our guides, who could also teach and lead.  I will cite two, but they all were skilled and passionate about their subject. In a previous blog I already mentioned Antoinella, “who shepherded us through the masses to find the painting in each room that represented the time period or artistic development she wanted to explain. She pointed to small, but significant details that educated even a philistine like me to the changes in form and character of each painting. She made a chaotic museum mob into an entertaining classroom.”  As a teacher she was passionate, strategic, selective and considerate. She saved us from insanity at the Uffizzi, an amazing collection attended by ten thousand people a day.

Alex gave us every development of St. Francis in lore and example. Alex loved the holy man, yet gave us a perspective of a saint who had struggled with doubt and uncertainty. Each church we explored he related to the previous one, sewing together a biography that had no continuous source. Alex himself was warm and tender, hard-working and patient. As I said earlier, he “never looked down on the weak, who took the bus” instead of hiking up the hill from San Damiano church. He had a hard act to follow, conveying St. Francis in word and deed, .

 

 

Pictured below, some of our pilgrims gathered at a table around the corner from our hotel in Rome, where the highly recommended St. Benoit beer was served. All pictured below were from Southminster Presbyterian Church of Birmingham Alabama. Although they were the prevailing majority, they welcomed the four “outliers” from Missouri and Minnesota into their group.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the rooftop cafe at the Uffizzi in Florence I was victim of the best irony of the pilgrimage when I ordered “imported beer” from the menu. At left the imported beverage I drank.

 

Assisi on the Plaza was a delightful mix of electric guitar, tourist shops, and the prominent temple of Minerva, now a Roman Catholic church. Two of the other “outliers,” from Minnesota, are pictured here: David and Cindy; Bill in the middle.  Along with Augusta (from Birmingham) at far right,  we are enjoying beer and wine on the plaza in Assisi before dinner.

 

In Florence on a hill above the Po River, we dined outside before seeking out the sunset. (It was obscured by clouds).

 

 

 

 

 

On a rooftop bar the final night of Rome. Apparently a run on orange spritzers.

At the end in the center, our tour director, Eric Doss, who engineered our escape from Rome around an anticipated transportation strike.

The Pieta–poignant and tender– good reason to visit St. Peter’s Basilica

My apologies to any in our group who were not captured in our random photography. We love you all. I cannot explain how Laura managed to appear in three out of four group shots, but we are investigating . . .

My favorite traveling companion.

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Rome, You Are Too Much!

Tuesday and Wednesday have been a blur of churches, temples, and fora, not to mention the giant Colosseum. Finally bought a copy of Rome: Past and Present, hoping to make some sense of it in the aftermath. It is an amazing city where,everytime you put  a shovel to soil, you bring up something two – four thousand years old, and, as you pass through neighborhoods, not a hundreds years old, you see brick and mortar from the time of Caesar. The archeologists must be a little jaded with discoveries.

We are walking distance from the Panthenon, the Roman Forums, and the Trevi Fountain, and the Colosseum is within foot-ache distance. The heat and  the crowds are suffocating here in mid-June. Even with advance tickets you stand in line up to a half hour to get in to the big attractions like the Panthenon and the Colosseum. Standing in the vast ruins of the Roman fora is different, because the area is huge.

The challenge on the plain of Roman fora, basilicas, and temples is to reconstruct these layers of history ravaged by war and layers of later buildings. You can see the fragmentary remains in the photos below. Nothing is intact. Rome: Past and Present is a somewhat helpful in the reconstruction with its translucent overlays, showing what the building looked like centuries ago. Still, I am overwhelmed by the names, the centuries, the politics, the differences between a basilica, a temple and a forum. They are not what I thought they were.

The food has lived up to all expectations. I have had spaghetti, ravioli, rigatoni, pizza till my belly cried for mercy. It was all perfect. The Italians are smart about moderate portions, but you add in the beer (high marks for St. Benoit) and the bread and hefty salads and you are talking calories. I don’t even have the burden of gelato with my sugar intolerance. I still manage to eat beyond all sense, and, when I pass the countless restaurants walking home from a feast, I wish I had more room for the food I can see being consumed in plain sight on the patios.

Thursday, we are visiting the catacombs, final scheduled stop before a full day of travel  Friday. There is a lot to digest: caloric, historic, architectural, cultural. Probably more blogs in the aftermath of Rome, if I can absorb any more than this.

The dark outline of the wolf on a pedestal, symbol of Romulus and Remus

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To Be Understood

 

O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love.

What I have wanted most of my life is to be understood, but not for who I am, but for who I wanted to be.  I lacked things: athletic skills, animal attraction, social grace, material wealth. These things mattered to me. I had some things: intelligence, writing skill, and religious dedication. I always had religious dedication, even when I wasn’t the smartest or the best writer. So I often took credit for that. People might say to me: I wish I had your religious faith! What would St. Francis have said to that?

One story Alex told gives a clue. The one that impressed me most.

During a fast one novice monk cries out that he is dying of hunger.  Long into the night he is crying and suffering out loud. St. Francis did not see that novice as a rookie, an inferior, or one who did not make the team. He said, “Come with me and we will find something to eat.” He broke his fast so he could share the condition of the weakest in the group. St. Francis did not try to be the strongest, but identified with the weakest. He would not try “to be understood as to understand.”

I think that tells me what St. Francis would do when someone would say, “I wish I had your religious faith.”

On our pilgrimage I met many who  sought to understand. They listened to Victoria and me and showed that they attended and cared. We did not feel weaker or less capable for sharing. I felt self-conscious about not hearing or forgetting or losing my way, all of which are part of who I am now. I did not feel less accepted or less respected among the pilgrims. I heard all about how much they enjoyed my writing.

That makes me happy, but I have been struggling with a memoir for more than a year, and I know that I am not a great writer. I look at one draft and wonder how I could have said stuff that was so obvious or repeated stuff that was easy to understand.  So I am grateful for the pilgrims who liked my writing. Thank you, pilgrims.

Thanks to Alex, who was patient and never looked down on the weak, who took the bus, and who gave me a love for Francis.

Thanks to Eric, patient, and willing to repeat directions five or six times to make sure all the sheep got into the fold at the right time.

Thanks to St. Francis, who never looked for credit for all the kindness he gave. He set the example for an order of followers and for pilgrims who need never seek credit for doing the right thing. An example for me who never wants to claim credit for my religious dedication.

Thanks to the pilgrims who were willing to understand more than to be understood.

St. Francis washing the leper

Alex, Best Guide to St. Francis

 

 

 

Last view of Assisi

St. Peter’s Dome Wednesday

 

 

 

Laocoon – A Messenger Aborted

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Quick Takes on Assisi

The Lion of Assisi looking prayerful or maybe just asleep.

 

Assisi to the west at sunset. The tower of the Basilica of St. Clare in profile. (at right). Only a two high profile buildings in Assisi,

the other one the fortress at the top of the hill crowning the town. (below)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two views of St. Francis- one in contemplation of the valley below–Another traveling, I imagine making his journey to the church at San Damiano. He felt he had been called to repair the church, and he did so—before he realized God had a much larger church in mind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A side view of Ereme Delle Carceri – Hermitage of the Prisons.  These were constructed as a remote retreat for contemplation of the sisters and brothers of Assisi. It is carved right into a hill and includes caves for private prayer. The hill rises just a few miles up from the town of Assisi.

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve written of the Vermeer chalk art beneath our balcony. Here you can see the  talent of the artist. He worked on the man at the left while we were there. I didn’t think to ask if the man represented Vermeer himself (the caption under him said “Vermeer”), but he looks a bit forlorn, like he would never get the attention of the elusive Girl in the Pearl Earring.

 

Missing here is the impassioned crucifix I described earlier. I need to try to get a shot of the sculpture before we leave.

 

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Praised Be You on a Sunday Morning in Assisi

For the serene thoroughfare by my balcony

The trembling potted petunias hanging in the alcove

The arriving pigeon in the casement and

His rhythmic tremolo

Below him, a brilliant gift:

Street art of sky-blue-head-banded

Girl in the Pearl Earring

Gazing away from the curly-locked young

Man With Wistful, Dark-tan Face,

Cameo of the Uncoupled

Captured in the Dutch Golden Age

Captioned “Vermeer”

Captioned with the artist’s “Gratzie.”

Thank you, Open-handed chalkster!

Praised be to You in the medley of your temples, O Lord

Chiara, Serifica Bellezza, Damiano, Portiuncula, Basilica of St. Clare

Low and soaring arches, wide and narrow naves, humble and spread spaces,

Praised be you, Eternal God

For vulnerable, preserved dwelling places.

 

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Visio Divina

you can begin to bring this spirit of visio divina with you even as you are out walking.… As you receive your images, pay attention to moments that seem to shimmer and make space within your heart to be with whatever feelings or memories these stir, trusting that God is at work in the process. Over time, you might discover that there is an invitation being offered to you in this time of slowing down and deepening your way of seeing in the world…. from Richard Rohr’s Meditations for 6/12/2025 https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?pli=1#search/MS+Word/FMfcgzQbffgpzMrZBxjWWnHGwRgpQdWT

I am trying to see the ancient world without modern eyes that tend to catalog and make historical notes, instead of only taking in what I see. Richard Rohr refers to this as “visio divina,”  a kind of meditation on things we see that receives, that leads to a “time of slowing down and deepening your way of seeing the world.”

So alien to the traveler, who takes in Florence for its history, architecture and art! We walk down the main drag of Assisi and it could be Florence with its gifts shops and deeply ethnic restaurants with the finest Italian foods. Then, at the end of the street, we see the ancient Minerva church, once a Roman temple, now a converted Catholic sanctuary where Francis and Clare were baptized. The square has a strange combination of electric guitar, outdoor tables with happy revelers, and the solemn Roman-pillared Minerva church.

Our guide, Costanza, brought us down into the side streets where the early ministries of Francis and Clare were born. The churches are shadowy and solemn–one with Mary central to the altar with golden sculptures of St. Peter and St. Paul to the side, as we mused, the famous trio of Peter, Paul and Mary. Another church displays the flat Byzantine art of Jesus on the cross at the center. I am really handicapped by the lack of downloaded photos here. The flat images do not speak to me by visio divina or any other way of observation.

The most striking image for me, perhaps visio divina, was the three-dimension sculpture of Jesus on the cross at the entrance to the San Damiano sanctuary–not sure if I have the location right. The foot of the cross is just above eye level, the body contorted and yet graceful in its balance between the head  tilted toward the right and the hips slightly left. The spotlight shines on the front, leaving the background in shadows. The pain of crucifixion is dominant, but the nobility of it seems underneath, perhaps a meaning only I see. The image tells me that suffering can have meaning, not justification, but a message that God’s love bears all things.

Jesus said, “Why have you forsaken me? but I realized I am not forsaken, because I know the outcome that Jesus, himself, did not feel at that moment on the cross.

I saw a lot of images of Jesus on the cross on Friday, some morbid, some more placid. I realize that every image speaks at some time to some people. I had a singular moment the modern exhibit of a circular display of smooth, carved white stones, each encased in a glass mantle. They were barely recognizable to me as many tiny  white images of Mary.

What spoke to me was behind a wall of the exhibit, a human-sized light-wood cross in the shape of a “Tau,” the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet.  The Tau looks like a rounded “T.” It represents an empty cross because the last word of the cross is the overcoming of darkness and hate. It is illuminated as an invitation to absorb and even embrace. I did embrace and felt a weird compromise with the suffering and the grace of the cross. I would normally avoid that kind of sentimentality, but Assisi is a place for first times and  of “visio divina.”

 

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Florence and the DiMedici’s

I wanted to download some portraits and paintings from medieval Florence, but the server is not co-operating today. So, some brief commentary.

We learned plenty about the two DiMedici families that ruled Florence in the late Medieval and early Renaissance periods: the Dynasty founded by Cosimo I (early 1500’s) and the Bankers, founded by Lorenzo the Magnificent (late 1400’s), both famous for sponsoring the merchants and guilds that made Florence wealthy in the sixteenth century, and for sponsoring the illustrious painters DaVinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli  and many others.

Without photos, the churches are not a good subject for this blog. They are gorgeous in their own right, but not comparable  in size to some of the awesome gothic churches in France and Germany.

I loved the narrow streets, the public squares that were anything but square, the multi-story stone dwellings, the twisting, disorderly alleys, the al dente pasta at every corner,  the Arno River with its gentle arching bridges, the tower fortresses and tower homes, everything that brings you back to another era. At night the whole scene is transporting.

Of course, the paintings at the Uffizzi, none of which I would have enjoyed as much without our exuberant guide Antoinella. The museum crowd was football game proportions, a little less rowdy.  Antoinella shepherded us through the masses to find the painting in each room that represented the time period or artistic development she wanted to explain. She pointed to small, but significant details that educated even a philistine like me to the changes in form and character of each painting. She made a chaotic scene into a entertaining classroom. Gratzi, Antoinella.

Editorial: I was surprised by the positive spin on the DiMedici’s, who were famous for their ruthless, sometimes brutal administration of Florence and the region. You can just read from their contemporary Machiavelli (The Prince) to find out their playbook. They were the models for his image of governing, which was the guide to keeping power at any expense. They kept order and increased revenue, but Mussolini made the trains run on time and Hitler brought Germany out of the Depression. By our standards the DiMedici’s were pretty rough customers.

Still, they brought us some of the greatest painters and sculptors of all time, so we are apt to forgive them.  O.K. we forgive, but not forget.

 

 

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Florence

Arrived in Florence at what would have been breakfast in St. Louis hour on Monday, but has now become our lunch hour. The transatlantic trip is eight hours through the night added to several hours layover and a quicker jump from Paris to Florence. So we were having lunch at the Trattoria Dalloste about the time we might have been having a Groundhog Day breakfast back in St.Louis.

So it’s Tuesday, and Monday did not entirely disappear in a flare of jet-lag. The lunch was expensive, but I demanded pasta for my first meal in Italy, so I had something that looked like cylindrical noodles with meatballs, but was so much better! Victoria had a thick, savory sew.

I can only describe the afternoon as map-wandering as we tried to work our way toward the Duomo, but only managed to wend our way to the Arno River, which is picturesque, but southeast of our hopes and dreams.  The narrow streets are teaming with motorcycles, buses and cars of every nationality. Traffic tends to open up in the large piazzas, but many of the streets are no wider than alleys. Foot-traffic on the sidewalks is pretty purposeful–not many window-shoppers in the midday.

We retraced our steps, returning to the hotel to find our room ready for our first jet-lag collapse.

We met the “Instruments of Peace,” not a musical group, but our pilgrimage tour group, in the lobby at 5:45. Quick orientation, then on to St. James Episcopal, an English-speaking stately church about a half mile away. Met a newly-married Chinese couple on the steps on the way in. Apparently documents and weddings are St. James’ lucrative income in a Catholic city. Below you can barely see the happy couple receding through the front entrance of the church.

We had a brief worship and reflection service with Holy Communion in the adjoining chapel, which was about the right size for our sixteen-pilgrim group. We are mostly in the Second Half of Life,  several retired, mostly Presbyterian, but an ecumenical bunch. Our name comes from St. Francis and St. Clare of Assisi, whose home we will visit on Wednesday- Saturday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Palm Sunday is depicted in the rosette over the entranceway to the church. The inscription at the bottom says, “Hosanna to the Son of David!”

Below is a tribute plaque to Henry William Tucker. honored as “Plebendary of St. Paul’s Cathdral.” I thought I knew most of the titles Episcopals throw around, but not this one.

A prebendary is a member of the Catholic or Anglican clergy, a form of canon with a role in the administration of a cathedral or collegiate church. When attending services, prebendaries sit in particular seats, usually at the back of the choir stalls, known as prebendal stalls.

Hmm. . . no wonder this doesn’t ring a bell. Primary role is to sit.  

Oh, those Anglicans!

I am assuming Henry is no ancestor of mine. Sitting! The very idea!

Today we’ll hit some of those great art museums. No sitting for us!

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The Source is a Process

Lies, lies, lies.

The media lies, the politicians lie, the President lies, the judges lie, the public investigators lie, the doctors lie, the teachers lie, the clergy lies . . . Every possible source of truth has been discredited, so we cannot possibly know what is true.

And yet  . . . opinions, suspicions, accusations are as strong as ever. We are quite sure about Biden’s incompetency, Musk’s corruption, Zelenskyy’s dishonesty, Johnson’s spinelessness . . . but how do we know any of this? Where are our reliable sources? Who have we decided to believe, after all?

Donald Trump deserves some credit for awakening the rest of us, those not yet cynical, to the “fake news” in our midst.  At the risk of becoming fake news myself  I’ll note that Donald Trump only accuses news sources of fake news if they criticize him or someone he admires. As a result we almost never hear that Fox News or NewsMax generates fake news, not because they are more careful than other media, but because they comment on him favorably. The father of “fake news” himself could be guilty of generating fakeness, as shocking as that could be.

Since every source is unreliable, we can no longer admit to having sources. We start sentences with my grandmother’s favorite source . . . “They say . . .” (Who is that “they”?  No one knows.)  Or that indisputable source: “Everyone knows that . . .”  Another favorite, “Someone said that . . .”  You can’t quibble with sources like these, because . . . you don’t know who they are!!

So that leaves us no one and nothing as a reliable source of truth. So every opinion, no matter how  friendly to your side, has no reliable evidence, according to popular consensus.  All evidence is suspect, because all sources are suspect. It is no wonder we keep hearing the word “chaos”  to describe the current state of information.

How do we cope? Well, you certainly can’t rely on me! But I’ll give my 1.5 cents anyway.

  1. We have to rely on something. We have the sacred sources that we rarely challenge: pastors, internet prophets, reliable editorial voices, the brother-in-law with good networks, the one comrade who criticizes both ends of the political spectrum. We rely on these people, but, truthfully, we can’t prove they are not “fake news.”
  2. What we call “fair play.”  Sometimes we can step back and say, “If I was that person, here’s what I would want.” These are the rare moments when we detach ourselves from the carping of politicians and try to say what is fair, because we do know how fairness works in this country.
  3. Is there a standard of truth anywhere to be found? I will argue it must be found in the courts, especially the courts of appeal where ongoing issues must be settled by a few judges. It is possible that the judges are also corrupt, but they are not so malleable as elected representatives. They often follow their conscience and their idea of justice. When the impartiality of these judges is challenged it cuts at the possibility of finding justice in any instance. To me it feels sacrilegious.
  4.  The Truth is not easily captured. Here’s how it works for me:  I hear the report on PBS Nightly News. It pings off my spouse, Victoria, who raises some of her own questions. It rattles around my head for a few minutes, banging off my morning reading of the liberal rag, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I shoot some ideas back to Victoria, and she gives them due consideration.  I subscribe to, and often read, The Dispatch or anything Jonah Goldberg writes, because he is my conservative voice of reason. Likewise anything reprinted in the Post-Dispatch from The Wall Street Journal, so I get so get a little conservative injection now and then.
  5. On the odd day I sit down and try to write what I am thinking, as I am doing now . . .

And it comes out here.

A week later I may put it on Substack, if I still like it, but often I don’t like it.

I’m not pretending to be the model of reason, but my point is that the Truth is a process, not a revelation, not a single post on Facebook.

So Mr. Trump may have a point when he calls certain media “fake news,  because the Truth is not easily captured. We owe it to ourselves to take our time to give it a good chase. Even the authoritative pronouncements of President Trump require a good run around the park.

The Source is a Process, not a guru, the kind I mentioned in #1. That guru is only the starting point. The rest is our responsibility.