Number 521
August/September 2018
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A review of Catholic affairs
The visit of Pope Francis to Ireland The Great Unmentionable JENNIFER KEHOE
Film: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom BISHOP BARRON
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Number 521 · August/September 2018
Editorial by Fr Gavan Jennings
The Gospel of the Family: Joy for the World by Pope Francis
Pope Francis is coming! by Pat Hanratty
In Passing: Voices in the wilderness by Michael Kirke
The Great Unmentionable by Jennifer Kehoe
The son I never dreamed of by Patricia Schroeder
BOOKS: Don Quixote: the world’s first novel – and one of the best by Vicente Pérez de León and Ana Puchau de Lecea
FILMS: What “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” Gets right and wrong by Bishop Robert Barron
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Rev. Gavan Jennings Michael Kirke, Pat Hanratty, Brenda McGann Liam Ó hAlmhain Dick Kearns Eblana Solutions
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Editorial
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or four days in August Dublin will become the focal point for the Church’s proclamation of what has become known as the “Gospel of the Family”. I can think of no more beautiful presentation of the content of this proclamation than the prayer of Pope Benedict XVI in the 2006 Way of the Cross in Rome: Lord Jesus, the family is one of God’s dreams entrusted to humanity; the family is a spark from Heaven shared with all mankind: the family is the cradle where we were born and are constantly reborn in love. For four days Dublin will celebrate this “divine dream” in the 9th World Meeting of Families, centred on the theme chosen by Pope Francis: “The Gospel of the Family: Joy for the World.” The first WMOF took place in Rome in 1994 during a UN “International Year of the Family” and since then it has taken place every three years in different cities. It generally consists of an international Pastoral Congress and a concluding Festival of Families in the presence of the Pope and a final Solemn Eucharistic Celebration. The event is under the auspices of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life. The programme of events has all been finalised, including the speakers for the three day Pastoral Congress in the Royal Dublin Society (RDS), the star-studded line-up for the Festival of Families event Dublin’s Croke Park Stadium on Saturday (including among other Nathan Carter, The Riverdance Troupe, Dana Masters, Daniel O’Donnell, The Begley Family, and The Priests), and the programme for the Pope’s Final Mass in the Phoenix Park the next day. The Papal itinerary during his two day visit to Ireland has also been finalised, including a meeting with President Michael D. Higgins, a visit to the Day Centre of the Capuchin Fathers in Dublin, and a visit to Knock Shrine in the West of Ireland on Sunday morning.
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Tickets for the various WMOF events were made available online and were quickly snapped up: the 40,000 tickets for the Knock shrine event were gone in a few hours, and the half million tickets for Sunday’s Papal Mass being booked in a few days. All 37,000 tickets for the Pastoral Congress have also been taken. It is quite fitting that there is already an atmosphere of joyful enthusiasm for an event – a festival – designed to celebrate the family. This joy bears out the words of Pope Francis in a letter addressed to Cardinal Farrell, as prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life for the Ninth World Meeting of Families: One might ask: does the Gospel continue to be a joy for the world? And also: does the family continue to be good news for today’s world? I am sure the answer is yes! And this “yes” is firmly based on God’s plan. The love of God is His “yes” to all creation and at the heart of this latter is man. It is God’s “yes” to the union between man and woman, in openness and service to life in all its phases; it is God’s “yes” and His commitment to a humanity that is often wounded, mistreated and dominated by a lack of love. The family, therefore, is the “yes” of God as Love. The truth of this affirmation: that the Gospel continues to be joy to the world, and the family continues to be good news are particular important for us Irish Catholics at the moment, deeply disturbed as we are by the increasingly paganised tenor of Irish life, not least by the recent landslide decision of the population to legalise abortion. Despite these gathering storm clouds we have not lost our hope, realising as we do that we have the Gospel and the Christian family, and with them we still have every reason not just for hope, but even for festivity. The theologian Josef Pieper once pointed out that there can be no festivity “except on the basis of faith that all is well with the world and life as a whole” (Josef Pieper, In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity); the WMOF is an affirmation that, despite everything, “all is well with the world and life as a whole”.
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A great part of our cause for celebration is to have the Vicar of Christ on Irish soil once again for only the second time in history. The context for his visit is – as our media never tires of pointing out – glaringly different from that of Saint John Paul II in September 1979. And yet when one revisits the texts of his addresses and homilies one sees that the Pope was in no way starry-eyed about the condition or the future of Catholicism in Ireland. With the clear vision of a veritable prophet he pointed out to the Ireland of almost forty years ago what has become a sad reality since, not least in the area of human sexuality: The most sacred principles, which were the sure guides for the behaviour of individuals and society, are being hollowed out by false pretences concerning freedom, the sacredness of life, the indissolubility of marriage, the true sense of human sexuality, the right attitude towards the material goods that progress has to offer. Many people now are tempted to self-indulgence and consumerism, and human identity is often defined by what one owns (Homily, Mass in the Phoenix Park, Dublin). In his stirring homily at the Mass for the young of Ireland, celebrated in Galway, Saint John Paul II spoke of them as “the Ireland of the future”, the “technicians or teachers, nurses or secretaries, farmers or tradesmen, doctors or engineers, priests or religious” of the Ireland to come. To rapturous applause he told those young people that “Tomorrow, Ireland will depend on you”. At the same time he warned them unambiguously that the challenge facing them would come largely in the domain of sexual morality: The lure of pleasure, to be had whenever and wherever it can be found, will be strong and it may be presented to you as part of progress towards greater autonomy and freedom from rules. The desire to be free from external restraints may manifest itself very strongly in the sexual domain, since this is an area that is so closely tied to a human personality. The moral standards that the
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Church and society have held up to you for so long a time, will be presented as obsolete and a hindrance to the full development of your own personality. Mass media, entertainment, and literature will present a model for living where all too often it is every man for himself, and where the unrestrained affirmation of self leaves no room for concern for others. Sadly his words were as prophetic as they were unheeded, and the desire to be “free from external restraints” – even those of human nature itself – have wreaked havoc with Irish young people ever since. Sadly it looks as if his foreboding that Satan might “seduce Irish men and women away from Christ” and thus inflict a great blow “on the Body of Christ in the world” (Address in Limerick) has been borne out. In his letter convoking the Dublin WMOF Pope Francis has expressed his wish that the Dublin event would offer in its pastoral preparation, “concrete signs” that “Christian families are a place of mercy and witnesses of mercy”. His own 2016 post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on love in the family Amoris Laetitia is naturally the background document for reflection on the family in the Pastoral Congress of WMOF 2018. Amoris Laetitia, for all its concern to “accompany with attention and care the weakest of her children, who show signs of a wounded and troubled love” (Amoris Laetitia, 291), clearly rejects the notion of a marriage between persons of the same sex: In discussing the dignity and mission of the family, the Synod Fathers observed that, “as for proposals to place unions between homosexual persons on the same level as marriage, there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family” (Amoris Laetitia, 251). Despite this, the organisers of the WMOF have come in for criticism for intolerance towards those who are LGBT. An instance of
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this is an Irish Times article in which a gay marriage advocate describes the very positive reaction his own homosexual “marriage” received from a group of nuns: Over a lot of tea and buns, all they wanted to hear about was the ceremony, the dinner and dancing and to see as many photos as possible. It was Pope Francis’s exhortation Amoris Laetitia in action. However, my wedding photographs have no place at the Dublin World Meeting of Families (WMoF2018). In the last three months, the organisers of the WMoF2018 have shown a staggering zerotolerance policy towards the LGBTI+ community. The organisers have removed inclusive language on the family by Pope Francis and LGBTI+ pictures from their pamphlets, and deleted references to gay families by a bishop in the catechesis. Despite these actions, the event organisers claim that the LGBTI+ community is welcome – provided of course we’re not seen or heard.(Irish Times, March 27, 2018). What he is referring to here are two instances where same-sex unions were in fact, contrary to the teaching of Amoris Laetitia, presented in WMOF promotional material as “analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family”: firstly in the WMOF explanatory booklet “Six-Session Parish Conversation” which was reprinted to replace six photos which seemed to show same-sex couples, and secondly the editing by the WMOF of a promotional video by the Irish-American bishop, David O’Connell of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, to remove a section in which he speaks of gay couples as an instance of a new and acceptable, family configuration. The insinuations of homophobia being directed at the organisers of the WMOF from various quarters are remarkable in the light of the
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clear, sometimes and – as those corrections suggest – even excessive, attempts to strike a welcoming note towards LGBT persons. Certainly the organisers and churchmen have to navigate skillfully to preserve fidelity to the Church’s unpalatable teaching that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered” while accepting homosexuals “with respect, compassion, and sensitivity” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2357). And yet as Pope Francis himself has pointed out that there can be no genuine love where truth is omitted: We can and we must judge situations of sin – such as violence, corruption and exploitation – but we may not judge individuals, since only God can see into the depths of their hearts…. It is our task to admonish those who err and to denounce the evil and injustice of certain ways of acting for the sake of setting victims free and raising up those who have fallen…. Harsh and moralistic words and actions risk further alienating those whom we wish to lead to conversion and freedom, reinforcing their sense of rejection and defensiveness” (Message for World Communications Day, 2016). Besides, the call to conversion is directed to all Catholics. Interestingly, even though often the 1979 Papal Visit to Ireland is presented as if it were a moment of Catholic triumphalism it was in fact preceded by a call to national conversion, as Saint John Paul II was happy to point out in his homily in the Phoenix Park: It was with great joy that I received the news that the Irish Bishops had asked all the faithful to go to Confession as part of a great spiritual preparation for my visit to Ireland. You could not have given me a greater joy or a greater gift. And if today there is someone who is still hesitating, for one reason or another, please remember this: the person who knows how to acknowledge the truth of guilt, and asks Christ for forgiveness, enhances his own human dignity and manifests spiritual greatness. Perhaps the people of Ireland should make similar spiritual preparation for the visit of Pope Francis? Certainly the WMOF, and in
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particular the days of the Pope’s presence here, will be a time of great grace for all the people of Ireland, and a time to renew our commitment to the “spark from heaven” which is the family. On Pope Francis’ itinerary is Knock Shrine, also visited in 1979 by Saint John Paul II. He called Knock the “goal of my journey to Ireland”. In his homily there the saint remarked that “Every generation, with its own mentality and characteristics, is like a new continent to be won for Christ”, and of course this applies to the generation of young Irish of 2018 as much as it did in 1979. Who knows whether they might not be moved by the presence of Peter’s successor among them. Perhaps “This generation is once more a generation of decision” (John Paul II, Limerick).
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The Gospel of the Family: Joy for the World by Pope Francis
The following is the full text of the letter the Holy Father has sent to the prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life, His Eminence Cardinal Kevin Farrell, in preparation for the Ninth World Meeting of Families, to take place from 21 to 26 August in Dublin on the theme: “The Gospel of the Family: joy for the world”.
To the Venerable Brother Cardinal Kevin Farrell Prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life
confirm that it will be held from 21 to 26 August 2018, on the theme “The Gospel of the Family: joy for the world”. Indeed, it is my wish for families to have a way of deepening their reflection and their sharing of the content of the post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia.
At the end of the Eighth World Meeting of Families, held in Philadelphia in September 2015, I announced that the subsequent meeting with Catholic families of the world would take place in Dublin. I now wish to initiate preparations, and am pleased to
One might ask: does the Gospel continue to be a joy for the
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world? And also: does the family continue to be good news for today’s world? I am sure the answer is yes! And this “yes” is firmly based on God’s plan. The love of God is His “yes” to all creation and at the heart of this latter is man. It is God’s “yes” to the union between man and woman, in openness and service to life in all its phases; it is God’s “yes” and His commitment to a humanity that is often wounded, mistreated and dominated by a lack of love. The family, therefore, is the “yes” of God as Love. Only starting from love can the family manifest, spread and regenerate God’s love in the world. Without love, we cannot live as children of God, as couples, parents and brothers. I wish to underline how important it is for families to ask themselves often if they live based on love, for love and in love. In practice, this means giving oneself, forgiving, not losing patience, anticipating the other, respecting. How much better family life would be if every day we lived according to
the words, “please”, “thank you” and “I’m sorry”. Every day we have the experience of fragility and weakness, and therefore we all, families and pastors, are in need of renewed humility that forms the desire to form ourselves, to educate and be educated, to help and be helped, to accompany, discern and integrate all men of good will. I dream of an outbound Church, not a self-referential one, a Church that does not pass by far from man’s wounds, a merciful Church that proclaims the heart of the revelation of God as Love, which is Mercy. It is this very mercy that makes us new in love; and we know how much Christian families are a place of mercy and witnesses of mercy, and even more so after the extraordinary Jubilee. The Dublin meeting will be able to offer concrete signs of this. I therefore invite all the Church to keep these indications in mind in the pastoral preparation for the next World Meeting. You, dear Brother, along with your collaborators, have the task of translating in a special way
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the teaching of Amoris Laetitia, with which the Church wishes families always to be in step, in that inner pilgrimage that is the manifestation of authentic life.
bless your service, and all the families involved in the preparation of the great World Meeting in Dublin.
My thoughts go in a special way to the archdiocese of Dublin and to all the dear Irish nation for the generous welcome and commitment involved in hosting such an important event. May the Lord recompense you as of now, granting you abundant heavenly favours. May the Holy Family of Nazareth guide, accompany and
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From the Vatican, 
 25 March 2017
Pope Francis is Coming! by Pat Hanratty
T
he joyful news that Pope Francis will actually be coming to Ireland in August for the World Meeting of Families came last March. I thought then what joyful news that this most wonderful man would be lighting up our lives and making 2018 a wonderful year to remember! At the time it seemed almost like having a touch of Spring to cheer us up after what seems like an endless supply of cold and snow to which we Irish are unaccustomed! That of course was before this amazing Summer began! And cheer us up he will! Since he first greeted the world as he knelt before the cameras in St Peter’s in Rome after the
conclave that elected him in 2013, his has been a most cheerful pontificate. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, one might say. His election was a surprise – I don’t remember hearing or reading anyone mention his name in the media beforehand. And everywhere he has visited, he has lifted the hearts of the people. A visit of Pope Francis is definitely something to be excited about! There has been and will be negativity in the media about the visit – some of it related to abuse and its cover up which is understandable – some of it born out of a hatred for the Church and all it stands for. But the visit will be a massive media
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event, and Pope Francis, like it or not will be the star attraction. Whether our newspapers adopt a positive or a negative approach (I expect a bit of both), one thing is certain: the visit will fill countless column inches and will increase the sales of many newspapers, to the delight of their editors and marketing people. Come to think of it, I still have some of the newspapers I kept from the time of St John Paul’s visit in 1979 – fading to yellow as the song goes, and unlooked at for a long time! Much will be said about the differences between this visit and St John Paul’s in 1979. There won’t be 1.25 million people in the Phoenix Park – Health and Safety concerns have meant a limit being set, but it is gratifying to see that all available tickets have been snapped up. One thing is certain – unlike 1979 when those attending the events were overwhelmingly umpteenth generation Irish and white caucasian in complexion, we will see a very different mixture of people this year. We will also see many visitors from other countries, some of whom
are coming for the World Meeting of Families, while others will come just to see and hear Pope Francis. A theme I have noticed in broadcast and print media has been one of asking people “what do you want to say to Pope Francis?” Personally I’m far more interested in what he has to say to us. He is unlikely to get involved in current issues. Like his predecessor, he will no doubt refer to the way our forefathers kept the faith alive despite systematic and sustained persecution over the centuries. He may warn us of the real danger of this generation snuffing out the light of faith that has burned ever since St. Patrick came to these shores nearly 1,600 years ago, but even if he does I’m sure his message will be full of optimism for the future. As always he will preach in a way that will encourage those listening to take to heart the saving message of Jesus Christ which is always relevant and never changes, and of course he will have plenty of encouraging words to say to
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those gathered for the World Meeting of Families. Come Pope Francis, come! We are dearly looking forward to having you with us, even for such a short time! Let us pray that the visit will be a grace filled experience for all, for the health and safety of the Pope and all involved, and yes, for a few surprises along the way.
ABOUT THE
 AUTHOR
Pat Hanratty taught Science/Chemistry in Tallaght Community School from its inception in 1972 until he retired in 2010. He was the school's first Transition Year Co-ordinator and for four years he had the role of Home School Community Liaison Officer.
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In Passing: Voices in the wilderness by Michael Kirke
W
ho in this secular age can hear these voices crying in the wilderness? Who can deny, in good faith, that they tell us truths on which the future well-being of our race depends, indeed the very preservation of our civilization? First, these words, written just over twenty years ago and rooted in Christian anthropology: It must never be forgotten that the disordered use of sex tends progressively to destroy the person’s capacity to love by making pleasure, instead of sincere self-giving, the end of sexuality and by reducing
other persons to objects of one’s own gratification. In this way the meaning of true love between a man and a woman (love always open to life) is weakened as well as the family itself. Moreover, this subsequently leads to disdain for the human life which could be conceived, which, in some situations, is then regarded as an evil that threatens personal pleasure (The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality, The Pontifical Council for the Family). To this we could add the words:“The trivialization of sexuality is among the principal factors which have
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led to contempt for new life. Only a true love is able to protect life� (John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 97).
spiritual things with spiritual. But the sensual man perceiveth not these things that are of the Spirit of God. For it is foolishness to him: and he cannot understand, because it is spiritually examined (1 Cor. 2:12-14).
Who would have thought that in the space of those twenty odd years, this understanding of our nature and the foundations of our society would have been denied and forgotten so emphatically by a majority of the people of Ireland? What has happened to cause this change, essentially a change in our perception of what it is to be human in the fullest sense, a radical change in the way we understand ourselves and our nature? Can it be the answer lies in these other words, also now heard only in the wilderness?
Those were the words of St Paul addressing the first followers of the Christian Way in the City of Corinth. They also, it appears, had lost their grasp of what that Way said about the human condition in this world and what the choices it presented to them obliged them to do. A centuries’ old note of explanation by Richard Challoner (1691-1781), a scholar at the university of Douai, on that text clarifies what he meant:
Now, we have received not the spirit of this world, but the Spirit that is of God: that we may know the things that are given us from God. Which things also we speak: not in the learned words of human wisdom, but in the doctrine of the Spirit, comparing
The sensual man is either he who is taken up with sensual pleasures, with carnal and worldly affections; or he who measureth divine mysteries by natural reason, sense, and human wisdom only. Now such a man has little or no notion of the things of God.
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Whereas the spiritual man is he who, in the mysteries of religion, takes not human sense for his guide: but submits his judgment to the decisions of the church, which he is commanded to hear and obey. For Christ hath promised to remain to the end of the world with his church, and to direct her in all things by the Spirit of truth. Choice is good but choices have consequences and it is the consequences of our choices that are ultimately more important than whether or not we have the freedom to choose. The consequences of ignoring that the disordered use of sex tends progressively to destroy the person’s capacity to love will be far more devastating for both individual lives and for our society that would be any restrictions our laws might put on our right to choose freely life-styles which institutionalize the abuse of our nature. But if our society, in its laws, customs and practices, does
ignore the principles of good and evil all is not lost. The individual need not lose sight of those principles and this is precisely why adherence to the single greatest body of knowledge articulating moral truth to which history bears witness stands with us to protect us from the evils our folly might otherwise bring down upon ourselves. That body of knowledge is contained in the Magisterium of the Christ’s Church – its Sacred Scriptures and Traditions. So those in Ireland today, indeed all of those throughout the world, who find themselves perplexed and bewildered by the insanities spewing out of modernity, post-modernity and cultural Marxism, do have a solution. Listen to the voices which are echoing in the wilderness created by those cultural aberrations and in thought word and deed try to live by them. The message of love at their heart – demanding and utterly counter-cultural as it is in this day and age – has the
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key to the future of our civilization just as it did in the day of the prophets of the Old Testament, in the New Testament when it was newly new, and in countless epochs since then when cultural forces were captivated by those who measure divine mysteries by natural reason, sense, and human wisdom only.
ABOUT THE
 AUTHOR
Michael Kirke is a freelance writer, a regular contributor to Position Papers, and a widely read blogger at Garvan Hill (www.garvan.wordpress.com). His views can be responded to at mjgkirke@gmail.com.
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The Great Unmentionable by Jennifer Kehoe
“We have tested and tasted too much, lover – Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.” (“Advent”, Patrick Kavanagh, 1904-1967)
W
ith the fall of Ireland to the cult of abortion I think it’s pretty much glaringly obvious that we are in a mess, not just Ireland, we, all of us, we’re in a mess. There’s so much to say about it, analysis and dissection about where it all went wrong, was the campaign lacking, did we do enough, maybe the posters could have been better, maybe the leaflets could have been done differently, could we have talked to more people, started sooner and so on and so on. Nothing of that counts now, we are where we are and the
world is a mess. People are unhappy in spite of wealth, in spite of better health, more freedoms. We have everything and nothing and we’re left there like children surrounded by too many toys yet having a tantrum. As the children’s song goes “I want this, I want that, and then I want some more … I like this, I like that, I like the whole store, the more I see the more I want, the more I want I see, I want the thing I saw yesterday on TV.” We wanted it all, we wanted
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other people for ourselves and for our pleasure and entertainment and for our satiation, and that is precisely what we got. We grabbed, and took and still not satisfied we kept and keep grabbing and consuming to the point that to kill another because they’re too young, or too old, to add to our personal quest for comfort and convenience and pleasure means nothing. We cheer and weep for joy at the thought of it, as if the very killing itself is a satiation of desire for pleasure or of some perverse thirst. Humans have always derived pleasure from death. Look at the Roman arenas, look at the public executions all over Europe where ordinary folk vied and shoved for front row seats, look at the bestselling true crime books and rags, the more grisly the higher the sales. We love death and it seems we love its author. In the trail of our march toward “freedom” and “autonomy” what have we left but carnage? We’ve embraced a culture which glorifies death, which promotes it, where other humans, even those we profess to “Love” are disposable and
dispensable, where a healthy body is seen as a disease and its healthy consequence seen as a disaster or an encumbrance. Abortion isn’t the cause of the problem, at one time it was an unthinkable evil for the vast majority of people. Yes it took place but it was never thought of as the great Goddess it’s now hailed as. It was looked upon with rightful horror, because the concept of a mother killing her child, whatever her despair, for despair it must be, was so opposite to the maternal human nature which was the norm. Most women were maternal and children were treasured. Most marriages were intact, most children had their parents and knew that siblings and cousins and little neighbours were just normal parts of normal life. And now we have abortion. Cheered and sacramentally adored as the mark of women’s advancement. We have wails and tears of elation because now we don’t find any shame in the idea that a child is ripped from the womb, the safe harbour to which she is entitled. The womb
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is where the unborn child belongs, not the incinerator, not the trash can, not the pearlised coffin we had crafted for her before we had her killed because she was imperfect, or a twin or because we love you but not now, maybe another time ... maybe later, yes, maybe later when the time is just so. Abortion didn’t cause itself. Something else caused it. We caused it. We caused abortion the minute and day we decided to grab and take and consume the other and simultaneously decided to not give, to not sacrifice, to not love. In every war the innocent always suffer most. In every war children, being the most innocent suffer more than everybody else, they’re dependent on bigger people to keep them safe. In war big people tend to not keep children safe. And the war here is that between men and women. Abortion is simply the carnage. Contraception is the bomb. There, I’ve said it! Fifty years ago the world was warned. Fifty years ago the holy
and gentle Pope who warned us paid a heavy cost. Fifty years ago, in the year of free love and protest and the rapid acceptance of the ideology that sex was not about marriage or love and even less had it anything to do with new life and our responsibility to that new life, our quiet shepherd stood alone against a baying and dissenting world and wrote in black and white what the consequence would be if we chose that severing of the intimacy between man, woman, sex and fertility. In the beautifully tender and short encyclical Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI reiterated God’s plan for the transmission of human life and for the intimate relationship between love, marriage and babies. By 1968, so sure that the Church was going to change the teaching, many, if not most Catholics and Catholic priests and seminaries had already adopted a laissez faire attitude to the practice of contraception and it was neither corrected nor discouraged since it was going to imminently change anyway. Indeed, until the 1931 Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Church it had been the teaching
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Po pe
Pa
ul V
I
of every Christian denomination that artificial contraception was intrinsically wrong and damaging to the bond of marriage. Indeed as so eloquently described by Mahatma Gandhi, a truly good man, that damage extends to the widening society starting from the natural male/female relationship and infecting every other aspect of culture from there out. Then came the encyclical and all hell broke loose (quite possibly literally)! Barely was the ink dry on the page than the dissent began. Like petulant teenagers, priest after priest, theologian after theologian added their disobedient non serviam to the list of those who thought they knew better than Christ’s Vicar. Instead of being Christ’s shepherds lovingly leading his sheep and little ones into the safe fold, they became guardians of what Pope St John Paul II
would later call the “culture of death”. Seminaries rather than teaching seminarians the content of Humanae Vitae instead provided lectures on how the Pope was wrong and outdated, how he was old and celibate and wears a dress so what would he know? He knew all right and he wrote down precisely what would happen. In a profound and tragically prophetic manner that saint who suffered told the world the disaster which awaited. But so enamored were we with the idea of more sex, more fun, less encumbrance, less of those pesky babies which so cramped our style that we shouted him down and closed off our ears. So for fifty years Christ’s little lambs have not only not been taught about Christ’s loving plan for man and woman, or about how children are the greatest gift, even when they mean inconvenience or even suffering, they have been actively DENIED such teaching. The wolves have been devouring
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the lambs ever since. And that’s where we are today. Everything Pope Paul predicted has come to pass. Infidelity and moral decline? Who among us can look around us and claim that we live in a sexually faithful and noble culture? None of us. Lost respect for women? Check. So lacking that we don’t even respect ourselves any more. A woman in her natural state is seen as something flawed. Femininity is some sort of betrayal to the “sisterhood”, everything which for centuries was considered beautiful about women, in particular her life giving nurturing faculty is disdained as at best simply a path to personal fulfilment but more usually an impediment, a disease to be medicated away. Contraception and her conjoined twin abortion are the only two elements of medicine which take something healthy and break them, which make them unable to function. There's nothing new under the
sun, for thousands of years women have been made to mutilate or suppress their healthy female bodies so as to make them available for sex whenever a man (or indeed, she) so chose without the natural result which is sometimes new life. Demeaning methods from intimately inserting camel dung or other concoctions to usurp fertility, to ingesting or wearing all sorts of poison or disgusting talismans or animal entrails, always the woman, always to enable consequence free sex. But hey, the pill changed all those dangerous demeaning practices. Or did it? Instead of poisons and animal excrement women ingest a pretty little pill in pretty packaging, pink you know ... because feminine. A pretty pill of artificial hormones which affect every cell of their bodies and psyche. Hormones which affect every detail of ourselves from how often we blink, to mood, to the type of man we find attractive. Sure, people always went to lengths to avoid pregnancy but by and large womanhood, marriage and babies were things which were respected. Children were
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considered a blessing and a joy. Even a disabled child was believed to have been kissed by an angel whereas now the diagnosis of disability all too often hails the kiss of death. Oh how things have changed! Some years ago I had a friend, actually more an acquaintance, who confided in me that she was expecting her seventh child and, regardless of her delight and that of her husband, was afraid to tell anybody else, apart from me, because of the remarks she would surely get. Eighteen years later I currently have a friend nervous to announce the news of her third pregnancy because she is fully aware of the disdain which will follow. THREE, hardly Guinness record breaking, yet scandalous and shocking ... “Handmaid’s Tale” and all that. Because having children is demeaning and unmodern and there’s something a little bit dirty or common about it. That’s how little we regard that integral part of womanhood, our fertility is shameful and nasty and just fix it!!
Women are not broken or faulty, they are beautiful, and healthy and to give life and feed that life is not an illness to be medicated or surgically “fixed” like we’d fix an oul’ cat. Female fertility is not something to be so hated or mocked. We have taken a beautiful meadow and doused it in paraquat lest anything should flower in it. The mother a disease to be medicated, the child in the womb, a mere weed to be plucked out and tossed. Abuse of governmental power? Need we look any further than western aid programmes which impose population control, forced abortion and forced sterilisation across the developing world. Barely can an aid agency receive funds unless they commit to birth control programmes or the pushing of abortion. Need we look further than European governments which cap children’s allowance at two children? Need we look further than individualisation of tax systems which essentially
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fine one income families? Everything working against the natural family and motherhood as things of great value. The illusion of unlimited dominion over our bodies? Well that can of worms is well and truly overflowing. The chemical and surgical mutilation of even children’s bodies in the name of gender identity is so scandalous and yet cheered and hailed as the Golden Calf. We believe we are masters of life and death. When we want to die, or want our elderly or sick to die, that’s our choice. The unwanted child? A clump of cells to be discarded, but not before we make maximum profit from the body parts of that clump. By and large we don’t want children but when we do want one the human cost to others, including that child, is not even an afterthought. I want, I get. Simple. Indeed we are in a mess. The human race is in a mess and we are suffering even through the cheers and tears of “joy”. The scenes of adulation in Dublin
last May struck me more like the spectacle of an overwhelmed indulged child in a toy shop - she wants everything she sees but cares for none of it. She wants the packaging because it’s shiny and attractive and looks like it will fulfil the desire for happiness. The next man ... or woman, the next party, the next career, the next whatever is the latest next thing. What that child needs is not shiny marketed tat, she needs her one safe comforting doll which gives security and grounding and calm which is there no matter how rough life gets, but she is not being offered her doll, because to do so would mean acknowledging that men and the imaginary ‘patriarchy’ are not the pariahs they’ve been sold as but rather that men are the complementary other half of the human race which just might possibly complete her. It might mean acknowledging that men and women are for each other and thrive best as a team rather than as enemies. Such an acknowledgment is so contrary to the false ideology she’s been sold that it is nigh impossible for her to even hear or see it.
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Instead of empowered strong women all I see is a herd of broken girls, longing for the thing they don’t even know how to look for. What deeper desire than to be loved and known unconditionally? What deeper desire than to be told “I accept you, all of you, forever, you, your body and yes, your life giving ability, I love YOU because you are the only YOU”? Where are they hearing it? Nowhere, because likely their parents haven’t heard it either. You cannot give what you do not have so how can these girls give sacrificial unconditional love to a helpless unborn child when it is likely they have never known it themselves? Instead of Love we have “hot” instead of “I give myself to you”, we have “I take of you, I love you except ... babies”. And men too, how broken is manhood when it too is seen as a disease, when masculinity is seen as a danger to the world? Where computer games and teenage pursuits are still the priorities of the thirtysomething teen-man. Oh indeed we are broken and lost and wailing!
You know when you look at a mess so bad that even beginning to fix it is unimaginably difficult. You pick up one thing, look at it and, not knowing where it should go because there isn’t anywhere to put it, you just put it back down again walk away despondent because it looks like it will always be like this. It’s easier to drift along in chaos than to set to, than to pick up one piece and tend to it then the next and the next. The answer is there and has been there all along except it is the great unmentionable. When you look at each problem and start to unravel it further and further you find that the threads are all leading to the same root. The relationship between mankind and sexuality is severely damaged. For the sake of consequence-free sex, for the desire for the pleasure but not the cost which looks like suffering and work and inconvenience but is actually deep deep joy and fulfilling love, the man-woman relationship has changed from a union of equals to a battle of power. Just
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as the Pope-saint predicted. He knew his words would have a personal cost, he knew he would suffer. In fact, nobody realised until after his death just how much he suffered. It would have been easier to go with the world, he would have been praised and adulated as progressive and compassionate and ‘with it’ and we would have hurtled forward in delight at our newfound freedom and free love and childless dissipation. Had he done that, fifty years later we would have no prodigal son’s father to return to. We would have no father waiting and watching to lovingly RUN to meet us when we realise that eating pig fodder from a trough is not happiness. We would have no father to embrace us and hug us and reclothe us in the dignity fitting the son of such a loving father, the sin forgotten and forgiven. “Father, I have sinned against Heaven and against you,” such simple humble words which resulted in a banquet. The banquet is waiting, all we have to do is turn up. We have grabbed and spent our inheritance but however low we
fall, that loving father is waiting to run to us. He won’t impose himself but he has been there all the time. Waiting patiently for his pitiful broken children to turn to him. The feast is there, Humanae Vitae is the answer to our problems. Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II, left us food and medicine. His works Love and Responsibility and later, the greatest treatise on the human person and sexuality ever to be written, Man and Woman He Created Them, now better known as Theology of The Body, are potent and healing
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medicine, if only we turn to the doctor and admit we’re sick...nay, we’re dying...please save us! I am convinced that we will never even start to rid the world of the great evil of abortion, that we will never even start to heal the wounds carried by the now adult children of divorce, that we will never even start to repair the crime and poverty and hopelessness of so many communities until we start to restore the male/female relationship to its original state. Jesus himself told us “but in the beginning it was not so”. Before our hardness of heart took over God’s plan for man and woman was self-giving love. Our
hardness of heart has led to self love taking, quite the opposite thing. Contraception has done us no favours. Women haven’t benefitted. Men haven’t benefitted and as sure as hell, children haven’t benefitted, especially the little ones killed in their millions. Unless we address the great unmentionable, the great false god of contraception, we cannot begin to heal. Maybe the fiftieth anniversary will be that year when we start. I hope so!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jennifer Kehoe is a young mother of six, living in Kildare, Ireland. She runs a blog “Raindrops on my Head,” at http://jenniferkehoe.blogspot.ie.
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The son I never dreamed of by Patricia Schroeder
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rancis is the son I never dreamed of, and I say this with a bit of shame. I have seven children. Fran arrived with his twin brother. It never crossed my mind that I could have a child with Down syndrome. I dreamed of the birth of two sons, strong, athletic, good students.... I dreamed about their future professions, their becoming mature and responsible adults. A few days after the twins were born, I began to be worried about Fran; his almond-shaped eyes hid a secret we needed to decipher. That very day we asked for a genetic test. After a short time we had the diagnosis confirmed. At first we felt a great
uncertainty, a lot of anguish and fear. What could we do? How could we educate him? How could we help him become part of this world of ours that seems so unaccepting for someone different? The confirmation of the diagnosis transformed our negative feelings into a great certainty. Fran will need the help of each of us: Dad, Mom, brothers and sisters‌. Almost without realizing it, we began drawing up a family action plan that, without exaggerating things, revolved around his special needs. He taught us that a family, this small community, should organize itself and prioritize in
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accord with the one who is most in need. For a while it was the twins: Nico and Fran. The two were always together at first, when eating, bathing, and sleeping. If at times Fran needed me more, the rest of the family would be diligent in looking after Nico. Now Fran and Nico are ten years old. And after so many shared efforts, we look with pride at what has been achieved in our family. We have no doubt that God will never stop holding us in his hands, and that the family is always protected by our Lady’s embrace. As Saint Josemaria said, each day God is close to us “like a loving Father. He loves each one of us more than all the mothers in the world can love their children – helping us, inspiring us, blessing ... and forgiving.” With almost ten years of work as a family team, I thought it was also a good time to pause and reflect on what Fran has brought us. So I asked his brothers and sisters: “What’s the best thing about Fran?" Their responses are very positive:
– If you feel down, he always tries to cheer you up. – His daily joy, his kindness, his transparency and sincerity (he never hides anything), his warmth, always being concerned about everyone, always being in a good mood and sharing it with the rest, his huge heart. He spreads love around him. – Fran is always attentive to how you feel; if you are down, he encourages you with a hug without your asking. – In Fran I see his good humor (most of the time), his way of entertaining others and his big heart. – He’s so transparent, direct and authentic. – The best of my brother: he is always willing to do whatever you need. He is the first to greet you when you arrive home with a hug and a kiss. When you’re sad he asks what’s the matter and gives you a hug; he’s our “teddy bear” we can hug when we need it.
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– (From Nico, the twin): He is the sun and I am the moon, that’s how twins are. So it’s easy to see that all our effort with Fran has brought our family a great reward. And the answer to a second question: “what’s the worst about Fran” was also quite revealing. He is very insistent, and doesn’t stop until he gets what he wants; it is difficult to “negotiate” with him; he always wants something right away and needs to be the center of attention. Whenever we notice that Fran has made an advance in some point there are so many of us who take pride. First, the five older brothers and sisters who have rolled up their sleeves
countless times to provide extra help at home. And also the grandparents, uncles, cousins, friends and godparents who always want the best for Fran. And the many educational and sports institutions that have opened their doors to us. I hope this message reaches parents who may now be feeling the same fear we felt in those first days of uncertainty. I also hope it will help bring about greater inclusion in sports, at school, in games and at work. This is not easily achieved, and there has to be some give and take, just as happened in our home. But the reward is enormous, much more than we could ever have dreamed of.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patricia Schroeder, a journalist and mother of seven, lives in Uruguay. This article first appeared on www.opusdei.org.
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BOOKS
Don Quixote: the world’s first novel – and one of the best by Vicente Pérez de León and Ana Puchau de Lecea
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omewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember… This line, arguably the most famous in the history of Spanish literature, is the opening of The Ingenious Nobleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, the first modern novel. Published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, this is the story of Alonso Quijano, a 16th-century Spanish hidalgo, a noble, who is so passionate about reading that he leaves home in search of his own chivalrous adventures. He becomes a knight-errant himself: Don Quixote de la Mancha. By imitating his
admired literary heroes, he finds new meaning in his life: aiding damsels in distress, battling giants and righting wrongs… mostly in his own head. But Don Quixote is much more. It is a book about books, reading, writing, idealism vs. materialism, life … and death. Don Quixote is mad. “His brain’s dried up” due to his reading, and he is unable to separate reality from fiction, a trait that was appreciated at the time as funny. However, Cervantes was also using Don Quixote’s insanity to probe the eternal debate between free will and fate. The misguided hero is actually a man fighting against his own
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limitations to become who he dreams to be. Open-minded, well-travelled, and very well-educated, Cervantes was, like Don Quixote himself, an avid reader. He also served the Spanish crown in adventures that he would later include in the novel. After defeating the Ottoman Empire in the battle of Lepanto (and losing the use of his left hand, becoming “the one-handed of Lepanto”), Cervantes was captured and held for ransom in Algiers. This autobiographical episode and his escape attempts are depicted in “The Captive’s Tale” (in Don Quixote Part I), where the character recalls “a Spanish soldier named something de Saavedra”, referring to Cervantes’s second last name. Years later, back in Spain, he completed Don Quixote in prison, due to irregularities in his accounts while he worked for the government.
Tilting at windmills In Part I, Quijano with his new name, Don Quixote, gathers other indispensable accessories to any knight-errant: his armour; a horse, Rocinante; and a lady, an unwitting peasant girl he calls Dulcinea of Toboso, in whose name he will perform great deeds of chivalry. While Don Quixote recovers from a disastrous first campaign as a knight, his close friends, the priest and the barber, decide to examine the books in his library. Their comments about his chivalric books combine literary criticism with a parody of the Inquisition’s practices of burning texts associated with the devil. Although a few volumes are saved (Cervantes’s own La Galatea among them), most books are burned for their responsibility in Don Quixote’s madness. In Don Quixote’s second expedition, the peasant Sancho Panza joins him as his faithful squire, with the hopes of becoming the governor of his own island one day. The duo
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diverges in every aspect. Don Quixote is tall and thin, Sancho is short and fat (panza means “pot belly”). Sancho is an illiterate commoner and responds to Don Quixote’s elaborate speeches with popular proverbs. The mismatched couple has remained as a key literary archetype since then.
its characters into his own Part II, adding yet another chapter to the history of modern narrative.
In perhaps the most famous scene from the novel, Don Quixote sees three windmills as fearful giants that he must combat, which is where the phrase “tilting at windmills” comes from. At the end of Part I, Don Quixote and Sancho are tricked into returning to their village. Sancho has become “quixotized”, now increasingly obsessed with becoming rich by ruling his own island. Don Quixote was an enormous success, being translated from Spanish into the main European languages and even reaching North America. In 1614 an unknown author, Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, published an apocryphal second part. Cervantes incorporated this spurious Don Quixote and
Whereas Part I was a reaction to chivalric romances, Part II is a reaction to Part I. The book is set only one month after Don Quixote and Sancho’s return from their first literary quest, after they are notified that a book retelling their story has been published (Part I). The rest of Part II operates as a game of mirrors, recalling and rewriting episodes. New characters, such as aristocrats who have also read Part I, use their knowledge to play tricks on Don Quixote and Sancho for their own amusement. Deceived by the rest of the characters, Sancho and a badly wounded Don Quixote finally return again to their village. After being in bed for several days, Don Quixote’s final hour arrives. He decides to abandon his existence as Don Quixote for good, giving up his literary identity and physically dying. He leaves Sancho – his best and most faithful reader – in tears,
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and avoids further additions by any future imitators by dying. The original unreliable narrator The narrator of Part I’s prologue claims to write a sincere and uncomplicated story. Nothing is further from reality. Distancing himself from textual authority, the narrator declares that he merely compiled a manuscript translated by some Arab historian – an untrustworthy source at the time. The reader has to decide what’s real and what’s not. Don Quixote is also a book made of preexisting books. Don Quixote is obsessed with chivalric romances, and includes episodes parodying other narrative subgenres such as pastoral romances, picaresque novels and Italian novellas (of which Cervantes himself wrote a few). Don Quixote’s transformation from nobleman to knight-errant is particularly profound given the events in Europe at the time
the novel was published. Spain had been reconquered by Christian royals after centuries of Islamic presence. Social status, ethnicity and religion were seen as determining a person’s future, but Don Quixote defied this. “I know who I am,” he answered roundly to whoever tried to convince him of his “true” and original identity. Don Quixote through the ages Many writers have been inspired by Don Quixote: from Goethe, Stendhal, Melville, Flaubert and Dickens, to Borges, Faulkner and Nabokov. In fact, for many critics, the whole history of the novel could justifiably be considered “a variation of the theme of Don Quixote”. Since its early success, there have also been many valuable English translations of the novel. John Rutherford and more recently Edith Grossman have been praised for their versions. Apart from literature, Don Quixote has inspired
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many creative works. Based on the episode of the wedding of Camacho in Part II, Marius Petipa choreographed a ballet in 1896. Also created for the stage, Man of La Mancha, the 1960s’ Broadway musical, is one of the most popular reimaginings. In 1992, the State Spanish TV launched a highly successful adaptation of Part I. Terry Gilliam’s muchawaited The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is only the most recent addition to a long list of films inspired by Don Quixote.
book by other celebrated authors. In our own times, full of windmills and giants, Don Quixote’s still-valuable message is that the way we filter reality through any ideology affects our perception of the world.
More than 400 years after its publication and great success, Don Quixote is widely considered the world’s best
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Ana Puchau de Lecea is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Associate, and Vicente Pérez de León is an Honorary Fellow, at the University of Melbourne. This article was originally published on The Conversation.
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FILMS
What “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” Gets right and wrong by Bishop Robert Barron
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**SPOILER ALERT**
he original Jurassic Park film from twenty-five years ago rather inventively explored a theme that has been prominent in Western culture from the time of the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment – namely, the dangers of an aggressive and arrogant rationalism. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, poets and philosophers such as JeanJacques Rousseau, Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Herder, William Blake, and John Keats warned that the lust to understand and control nature would result in disaster for both the human soul and for the physical world. Goethe, for instance, railed against the
Newtonian scientific practice, which involved the intrusive questioning of nature rather than the patient and respectful contemplation of it. And Blake memorably complained of the “Satanic mills,” which is to say, the forges and factories that had begun to blight the English countryside with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. But the most famous and influential meditation on this theme was undoubtedly Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. It is hardly accidental, of course, that the author in question was the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the greatest of the Romantic
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poets. As readers of Shelley’s book or viewers of the Boris Karlov movie can testify, Dr. Frankenstein’s successful attempt to create life artificially rather spectacularly backfired, producing misery on all sides. Shelley’s point was that seizing godlike authority over nature, though it perhaps satisfies our pride and our desire to dominate the world, in point of fact unleashes powers that we cannot, even in principle, control. John Hammond, the character played so genially by Richard Attenborough in the original Jurassic Park, was an updated and far friendlier version of Dr. Frankenstein. Blithely turning back the momentum of evolution and placing ferocious life forms in a combination zoo/amusement park, he perfectly embodied the typically modern, rationalistic attitude that sees everything as an object of manipulation. That he was backed up by greedy financiers and lawyers only made him more dangerous. Jeff
Goldblum’s character, the quirky chaos theory specialist, gave voice, wisely, to the standard Romantic critique: “John, the kind of control you’re attempting here is, ah, it’s not possible.” That the chaos theorist had it right was bloodily proven in the original movie and in pretty much every iteration of Jurassic Park since. Well, in the most recent installment of the series, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, still other Dr. Frankensteins and John Hammonds emerge. This time they are an elderly tycoon, his youthful business colleague, a ruthless wrangler, and a whole coterie of unscrupulous armsdealers willing to pay exorbitant prices so as to acquire and weaponize the dinosaurs. And once more, the tale is told through rampaging beasts and piles of corpses: “The kind of control you’re attempting here is, ah, it’s not possible.” Please don’t get me wrong: this is a good message. Mary Shelley was right and so are the makers of the Jurassic
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Park movies. And if you want Catholic confirmation of this theme, take a good long look at Pope Francis’ letter Laudato si, which excoriates our arrogant attempts to master and manipulate nature. What is bothersome in the latest film is the emergence of a new and much more problematic motif – namely, the moral equivalence of human beings and other animals. The heroes of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom want to rescue the dinosaurs from Isla Nublar, which is threatened by a catastrophic volcanic eruption – and, as Jerry Seinfeld would say, there is nothing wrong with that. However, when the dinosaurs end up on the mainland in cages and are menaced by the release of toxic chemicals (watch the movie for the plot details), one of the heroes elects to open their prisons and let them go free, which is to say, to wander out into the forests of Northern California. The final scene of the film depicts a
velociraptor looking down from a ridge over a denselypopulated area, evidently free to hunt at will. As she presses the button, freeing the dinosaurs, the young hero says, “We can’t let them die. I had to. They’re alive like me.” The pretty clear implication is that the dinosaurs have the same dignity as human beings and deserve to live as much as we do. They must be released, even if it means thousands of people will die. Well...no. Nature should always be respected, and the arrogant attempt to manipulate nature indeed results in disaster. However, since there exists a qualitative difference between human beings and other living creatures, one must always, in a case of conflict, opt for the former over the latter. The Bible is quite insistent on the goodness of nature and how the non-human world is ingredient in God’s great plan of salvation, but it is equally insistent that human beings are made specially in the image and likeness of God and
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hence have a unique dignity and inviolability. No matter how magnificent an animal might be, it is not a subject of infinite value, as is a human person, and when that distinction is blurred, another version of Frankenstein’s monster is unleashed.
ABOUT THE
 AUTHOR
This article first appeared at: www.wordonfire.org. Bishop Robert Barron is an author, speaker, theologian, and founder of Word on Fire, a global media ministry. This article has been reprinted with the kind permission of the editors.
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Nazareth Family Institute Pre-marriage preparation. Marriage enrichment, restoration & healing. Dates of marriage preparation weekends: 7/8 September 2018 2/3 November 2018 Venue: Avila retreat centre, Donnybrook, Dublin. Extended course: A seven week course by arrangement with the course directors Course director, Peter Perrem 01-2896647 For more information see: www.nazarethfamilyinstitute.net
Rebuild Communication in your Marriage
RETROUVAILLE IRELAND World Meeting of Families 2018 Visit us and discuss marriage Hall 1: Stand 159 Wednesday 22nd – Saturday 25th August 2018 Morning Panel ‘When Plates fly: Pope Francis on the Reality of Love in Family Life’ Evening Panel ‘Coping with Crises and Hurt in Marriage’ PANEL DISCUSSIONS Thursday 23rd August 2018
Contact Retrouvaille in Confidence: Tony & Anne: (01) 495 3536; Mike & Anne: (01) 450 0922; Pat & Susan: 086 413 5440; Email: info@retrouvaille.ie Web: www.retrouvaille.ie CHY 12909