Whenever there’s a civic holiday coming up, the recessional hymn at our church is always “America the Beautiful.” We in the choir usually sing all four verses, and we always get a round of applause at the end — for us, for the country, maybe both.

I’ve never liked the song. It’s no “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which I find far more melodic and moving. But lately my antipathy toward “America the Beautiful” has taken on deeper meaning.

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Those who think President Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk will make up, or staged their feud for effect, do not understand how narcissism works.

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Well, that didn’t last long but perhaps longer than we thought it would.

Actually, Elon Musk was only slated to have a six-month tenure at DOGE, although given the importance of groceries — remember them? — Musk’s sell-by date was always ready to be stamped.

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Now that Pope Leo XIV has hit the ground running — and done some fence-mending, albeit stiffly, with Vice President JD Vance and the Trump Administration — the Memorial Day weekend is a good moment to look at the overcomplicated idea that created the Trump-Vatican rift in the first place.

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So who had Robert Francis Prevost on their bingo card?

No one, right? The election of the cardinal to succeed Pope Francis as Leo XIV came so far out of left field as to be outside the park of the Chicago-born Leo’s beloved White Sox. And yet, it didn’t take long to see that the choice of Leo – calm, centered, bespectacled, math-studying, multilingual, trumpet- and tennis-playing ,Republican primary-voting, Francis-mentored Leo – was the perfect one to countermand the rising American nationalism under President Donald J. Trump. 

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“Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,” — Shakespeare, “Henry IV, Part 2”

“Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light” and “Marie Antoinette” — airing back to back on PBS’ WNET-Channel 13 on Sunday nights — give us two kings in crisis as seen through the eyes of two insiders who will soon be axed.

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