Bring on Some New York Values!

I was standing on Fifth Avenue the Friday morning after the New York primary with my left arm out in taxi-hailing position when an NYPD officer in a passing patrol car put his hand out for a high-five. We were outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where for 25 minutes Cardinal Timothy Dolan had heard New Yorkers’ confessions after the 7 a.m. Mass. Now that the primary is over and done with (and the candidate I voted for didn’t come out on top), can we talk about New York values?

First of all: I get it. The “New York values” slam was issued with good reason. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton don’t exactly represent everyday American lives, and that’s also true of many other New Yorkers. But it’s not as an elitist that I issue a wee bit of a protest. Yes, National Review, the magazine I’ve worked at for the better part of two decades, is and has always been headquartered in the shadow of the Empire State Building. And, yes, the storied dinners at the late William F. Buckley Jr.’s Park Avenue apartment happened here. But these aren’t the reasons for my protest either.

Not long after this whole anti–“New York val ues” campaign began during a primary debate back in January, I spent a weekend at the annual New York Encounter, a cultural conference where one kept nearly tripping over the babies and toddlers of young married parents — old-fashioned moms and dads. They were listening to music and lectures, praying at Mass, and hearing about the plight of persecuted Christians in the Middle East and refugees from what we once called the “Arab Spring.” Young men and women who want to get married and raise virtuous children are a lot of my experience of New York — and it’s never a surprise to hear about the engagements and eventually to see the baby pictures. The New York values I see involve crowded daily Masses, long lines for confession, and homeless people you’re on a first-name basis with. Calvin, outside the deli on 34th and Lexington, likes bologna, and the guys behind the counter know how he likes it when someone offers to buy him something. And there’s Louis, who hangs out outside St. Agnes church near Grand Central, and always says, “God bless you” and “Safe travels.”

I can’t get Calvin and Louis off my mind, or the man who began a question at a recent lecture on assisted suicide at St. Catherine of Siena’s priory with “I’m not suicidal, but . . .” These men keep us honest. They remind us that behind every political debate and policy discussion there are real people with beating hearts. And they remind us that we should never be too busy to see the human being in front of us.

That lecture was by Dr. Michael J. Brescia, co-founder of Calvary Hospital, a hospice that cares exclusively for the terminally ill. He and Dr. James E. Cimino invented the Brescia–Cimino fistula in 1966; it is a game-changer in dialysis treatment, which they didn’t patent so that no one who needed it would experience delay. When he tells that part of the story, Brescia tells the rest of the story, too: He was going to patent it until his Italian father made him think about the face of every person who could die because of any delay in treatment. No money that could be made could be worth risking any person’s life.

Calvary is a haven for the terminally ill, allowing death with true dignity, not a political manipulation of what every man and woman deserves, whatever his or her circumstances.

My experience of New York primary week was bracketed, as it happens, by the archbishop of New York hearing confessions. On the Saturday afternoon and evening before the primary, Cardinal Dolan was visiting the shrine of Our Lady Help of Christians in Stony Point, about 40 miles north of New York City, for one in a series of events for the Year of Mercy. Pope Francis designated this year as such because “the name of God is mercy,” as his recent book put it, and not everyone has met Him.

Cardinal Dolan arrived to the welcome of Sisters Antoniana and Mary Karen, both from the Sisters of Life. He showed them the pectoral cross Iraqi bishops had given him while he made his first visit there as chairman of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, to see the faces of some of the persecuted and displaced, and to let them know they are not forgotten. The sisters couldn’t stay long, having to get back to the work they do living a culture of life, helping women and men embrace life and heal from the wounds abortion has made in their lives. But the sisters’ presence brings hope. When Christians are who they say they are, we can see that love is the mission, as the pope put it in announcing his visit to the U.S. this fall.

At St. Patrick’s Cathedral, if you walk toward the bronze door nearest to the Armani Exchange across the street, you’ll see the “Door of mercy” sign outside. It’s an invitation to Reconciliation — sacramental confession — that is, an invitation to experience the peace that can come from knowing you’re created in the image and likeness of God, as is the man next to you, as is the family who fled its home on account of ISIS very far away.

New York values welcome you at the center door of St. Pat’s, too. Carved into this door are images of women like the immigrants Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini and Elizabeth Ann Seton, who, in the 19th century, built schools and hospitals for immigrant communities no one else would serve. You will also find there the 17th-century Algonquin/Mohawk convert Kateri Tekakwitha. If you keep your eyes out, New York values could actually change your life for the better.

When St. Pope John Paul II visited New York in 1979, he said at the cathedral:

This too is included in the symbolism of Saint Patrick’s; this is the mission of the Church in New York — the expression of her vital and distinctive service to humanity: to direct hearts to God, to keep alive hope in the world. And so we repeat with Saint Paul: “This explains why we work and struggle as we do; our hopes are fixed on the living God” (1 Timothy 4:10).

It’s not only not all bad here in New York, it can be quite radiant.