July 20th in the Round
The Catholic Thing, 26 July 2025
While traveling across Canada by rail, some reflections on July 20th, a day of significant anniversaries: in Canada, the U.S., and Rome.
Last Sunday, to mark the anniversary of the moon landing in 1969, Pope Leo XIV had a video call with Buzz Aldrin, who was delighted and moved to speak with the Holy Father and receive his blessing.
Robert Prevost was 13 that summer of ‘69 and, like millions of other teenage boys, certainly gazed up at the sky in wonder. That fall, he would leave Chicago for a high school seminary in Michigan.
I hope that Pope Leo likes anniversaries. I do. They liberate us from what is happening right now, and remind us of happier things, of the various intrusions of Providence into history. Or perhaps better to say, remind us to be more attentive to the Providence that does not intrude so much as sustain and support and surround us.
Readers will appreciate that I am particularly keen on anniversaries that fall on July 20th, the date of my priestly ordination. I was ordained in 2002, just a few days before St. John Paul the Great arrived in Canada for World Youth Day; this year was my 23rd anniversary.
By happenstance, I spent the anniversary on a four-day train journey across Canada. In the age of cheap air travel, no one takes the train across Canada except to take the train across Canada. Via Rail’s The Canadian goes from Vancouver to Toronto twice a week; I have wanted to go for some time, an experience of the vastness of Canada and its history.
It was, as it happens, on July 20th, 1871, that British Columbia joined the fledgling Dominion of Canada. A transcontinental railway was a condition of joining, even though it seemed utterly impossible at the time. In 1867, the year of Canadian Confederation, the United States had purchased Alaska, and not a few Canadians thought that Americans might desire more northern territory. So, a railway was built in a mere ten years from first sod turning to the last spike.
Pierre Berton, Canada’s preeminent popular historian, wrote in 1970 – a year after the lunar landing – that while in the 1850s there was fanciful rhetoric about one day hearing “a steam whistle in the passes of the Rockies. . .a century later, public figures were prophesying with equal recklessness and incidental accuracy that their children would live to see a man land on the moon.”
“The comparison is a reasonable one,” noted Berton. “For most colonial Canadians at mid-[19th]-century the prospect of a line of steel stretching off two thousand miles into the Pacific mists was similarly unreal.”
But they built it – a railway and a country.
Sunday morning, I offered Mass aboard the train while passing through Saskatchewan, where the bright fields of canola look as if God had taken a yellow highlighter and dragged it across the endless prairie. Jesus spoke of the “fields white for harvest” (John 4:35), but the golden canola is prettier. My Jewish friends joke sometimes that Canada would have made a better Promised Land than Canaan. Prettier, to be sure.
Canada has been an unimaginably blessed country in which my parents made a life, and the altar of the rails seemed somehow suitable to give thanks for this abundantly bountiful part of Creation. Psalm 16 is the psalm of the priestly tribe, but it can be applied to those fortunate souls who make Canada their home: The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage. (Psalm 16:6)
Continue reading at The Catholic Thing.