Number 534 December 2019 €3 · £2.50 · $4
A review of Catholic affairs
Preparing for the Lord’s Coming Juan Jose Silvestre (Editor)
Late Late reflections Tim O’Sullivan
Books: Dominion
James Bradshaw
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Number 534 · December 2019
Editorial by Fr Gavan Jennings
In Passing: The sacred and the profane by Michael Kirke
Preparing for the Lord’s Coming by Juan Jose Silvestre (Editor)
All You Who Are Weary by Jennifer Kehoe
Late Late reflections by Tim O’Sullivan
150 Years of Faith by Pat Hanratty
Books: Dominion by Tom Holland review by James Bradshaw
Films: Motherless Brooklyn review by John Mulderig
Editor: Assistant editors: Subscription manager: Secretary: Design:
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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
T
he November editorial encouraging union with the Pope in the light of controversial goings-on in the Vatican generated a certain amount of reaction, both positive and negative. I would like to return to the theme once more to give a theological justification for the things I wrote there, to outline the solid theological under-pinnings for our union with the Pope. It is important to remind ourselves that our relationship with the Vicar of Christ on earth is before all else a theological, not emotional one: it makes no real difference if we are thrilled by a Pope (in the way the Catholic world was so enamoured of the undeniable holiness, charisma, courage and charm of St John Paul II) or whether he is not “our cup of tea” humanly speaking. First of all we, as Catholics, owe the Pope reverence for purely spiritual reasons: he is the Vicar of Christ (the validity of his election can only be doubted at the expense of becoming schismatic), and it is principally in and through him that the Church participates in the very infallibility of God himself. Without this gift of infallibility there is no way the Church could avoid quickly falling into serious deviations and confusion regarding the true faith. Putting it simply, the Pope – whoever he may be – is the rock preventing us from falling into error in faith and morals. It might be useful to recall that the Magisterium of the Church is the teaching dimension of the Church and its task is “to preserve God’s people from deviations and defections and to guarantee them the objective possibility of professing the true faith without error” (CCC890) and that this infallible character resides principally in the Pope. The Magisterium, or teaching dimension, of the Church presents its teaching at three levels: firstly those truths, such as the articles of the creed, the Christological dogmas, the Marian dogmas, and Christ’s institution of the sacraments, which are divinely revealed and must be believed as such. If we were to obstinately deny the truth of such teachings we would fall into heresy.
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At a level below this there are those truths which, while they are not directly revealed by God, follow necessarily from directly revealed truths. Examples of doctrines of this second category are the legitimacy of the election of a Pope, the celebration of an ecumenical council, the canonizations of saints and the reservation of the priesthood to men. These like the previous level of truth, must be believed on faith, and obstinately not to do so would undermine our communion with the Church. Incidentally, neither of the above levels of truths require extraordinary or “ex cathedra” pronouncements. The Pope (and the bishops in union with him) can teach in a way which is meant to be definitive, though not given in the form of a dogmatic definition. A very clear example of such an “ordinary” and yet definitive or universal teaching is Pope John Paul II’s clarification in the 1994 Apostolic Letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis that the priesthood is reserved to men: “… in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful”. At a level below this again are to be found in the “merely” ordinary – not “ordinary and universal”– Church teachings on faith and morals. These do not require, unlike the previous two levels, an assent of faith (“I believe…”) but rather a “religious submission of will and intellect” – also termed “religious assent”. That the Pope is teaching in this way (and not just expressing personal opinions) is clear “either by the type of document, or by the frequent proposal of the same teaching, or by his manner of speaking” (Lumen Gentium 25). While such teaching is not the last word on the matter in question, and is still subject to theological clarification or even correction, it should not be presumed incorrect, and should be seen as a reliable guide on a matter still under investigation. The correct attitude to such teaching is not a merely external acquiescence or obedience, as if such teaching concerned merely disciplinary matters governing behaviour rather than doctrinal truth itself. The attitude here is one of a readiness to accept such teaching,
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especially since also at this lower level of teaching the Magisterium of the Church is receiving the assistance of the Holy Spirit. At least as of yet, these are not recognised as unchangeable truths of faith but they are reliable approximations to truths of faith, even though they might someday require some correction or re-formulation. It is this kind of non-definitive teaching which makes it possible for the Church to pick its way through a world which is constantly presenting new problems and challenges, and also insights, where there is nothing explicit in revealed faith to guide us. It is not clear from the primary truths of revelation how we should react to new political movements, to developments in medical practice, to environmental sensitivities etc. The ordinary Magisterium of the Pope and bishops leads the Church safely, albeit tentatively, through such uncharted waters. Nevertheless a theologian may find that he has reason for disagreeing with the teaching itself, the manner in which it is framed etc., and yet this does not mean that he withdraws reverence for the teaching. In such a situation that theologian must find a way to discretely communicate his misgivings on the subject to its framers. He or she does not use the methods of applying pressure through public opinion, as Cardinal Ratzinger clarifies in the relevant document, Donum Veritatis: “for it is not by seeking to exert the pressure of public opinion that one contributes to the clarification of doctrinal issues and renders service to the truth”. This latter clarification is very important and relevant now: it is not for theologians to form pressure groups to convey disaffection with the ordinary Magisterium of the Pope through the mass media (and we could now add social media). Cardinal Ratzinger goes on in the same document to point out “the serious harm done to the community of the Church by attitudes of general opposition to Church teaching which even come to expression in organized groups”. If you would like to study this matter more deeply I recommend the reading of Donum Veritatis, the 1990 Instruction from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the ecclesial vocation of the theologian. Finally I would like to wish all our readers a very happy and holy Christmas!
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In Passing: The sacred and the profane by Michael Kirke
“H
istory is written by the winners” is a trite adage which was probably first circulated by some losers. Ever since, it has been used to cast a shadow of doubt over every account of struggles between human beings of which history purports to tell us.
Pseudo historians and journalists – on the pretext that their work is the first draft of history – constantly try to pass off as a true account of the past, narratives which are nothing more than the whitewashing of the victors and the blacklisting of the vanquished.
Searching through our past is a sacred pursuit. It is the pursuit of truth and, regardless of whether or not the goal is attained, if ever the pursuer veers from that course, seeking to serve ulterior motives, the sacred is profaned.
In the ebb and flow of that cold conflict which we call the culture wars – particularly in the theatre of war where religion and secularism are the protagonists – the secularists seem currently to be the in the ascendant. Their ascendancy is partly the fruit of their committing this very kind of sacrilege – the representation, or misrepresentation, of facts in
There is, sadly, a surfeit of this kind of profanity for us to contend with in our time.
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a wilfully selective way, serving an ulterior purpose.
my ‘crimes’, and sooner than expected. The University Observer at UCD tried to have me barred from taking part in a debate there and a guy from the paper accosted me afterwards. There was the protest against me the other night in Enniscorthy by People before Profit members.” (Facebook post)
Christian belief and the Catholic Church in particular are being vilified with every opportunity which presents itself to blacken the name of those who adhere to them. The shelves of our bookstores, the pages – hard or soft – of our news media, our broadcast services, all carry ample evidence of this. The callous indifference of the liberal West to the violent persecution of Christians and the burning of their churches in many parts of the world is just another dimension of their hidden – or not so hidden – agenda.
Even Dublin City Council, in its recent three-week-long Festival of History did not escape the reach of the secular culture warriors. A great deal of its programme was good, some of it very good, but a little too many of its presentations were no more than an opportunity for the ground troops of progressivism to gloat on their victories at the expense of the vanquished.
The consequences of this hostility are felt by ordinary Christians on our streets, in their workplaces and on college campuses every day. How about this, from David Quinn, director of Ireland’s Iona Institute, a secular Ireland’s bête noir in that country?
Black legends passing themselves off as the history of Christianity are nothing new. Each era seems to seek to generate its own to contribute to this destructive campaign. Here and now history is being used to pass judgement on and blacken the reputation of a generation of Irish people and of the Catholic
“It’s getting nastier out there. In the last couple of weeks, I have had a Sinn Fein supporter say on Twitter that I will be paying for
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Church, past and present. At the Festival Professor Frank McDonagh, in answer to a question related to his colloquy on his new book on Nazi Germany, wisely reminded us, History is an investigation of the past, not a judgement on it. Too many writers about the past undertake their work as counsels for the prosecution or the defence. They should be neither.
injustices in pursuit of the ulterior goal of destroying a targeted institution and its adherents. Caelainn Hogan is a journalist who has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times and The Guardian, among others, chronicling for the whole world the injustices she claims the entire Irish State and the entire Catholic Church has inflicted on the people of this island. She has now written her first book, entitled Republic of Shame: Stories from Ireland’s institutions for ‘Fallen Women’. She contributed to the last weekend of this festival in an event where she was “in conversation with Tuam survivors”. This was billed in the published programme as follows:
The destructive campaign against religion and religious institutions is being pursued ostensibly by some under the cover if investigating sad injustices perpetrated in the past by individuals and some institutions. In the way this is being done they are only piling injustice upon injustice. This doubling of injustice is being perpetrated firstly by presenting fractions of truth as the whole truth; secondly by judging the deficiencies of another time in dealing with social problems by the mores, standards and circumstances of our own time; and thirdly – in the case of some at least – by weaponising the victims of past
Until recently, the Catholic Church, in concert with the Irish state, operated a network of institutions for the concealment, punishment and exploitation of ‘fallen women’. In the Magdalene laundries, girls and women were incarcerated and
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condemned to servitude. And in the mother-and-baby homes, women who had become pregnant out of wedlock were hidden from view, and in most cases their babies were adopted — sometimes illegally. Mortality rates in these institutions were high, and the discovery of a mass infant grave at the mother-and-baby home in Tuam made news all over the world. The Irish state has commissioned investigations, but for countless people, a search for answers continues.
wounds inflicted on them. We need to hear it because we all need to reform what needs reform in ourselves and in our institutions. But when our response to this moves us to general judgements on whole populations and everyone serving in institutions, this does not serve any concept of truthfulness, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, which honest historical narrative seeks.
That may be good sensational journalism – if you like that sort of thing. But it has nothing to do with history. It was sad to see this rubbing shoulders with the contributions of people like Tom Holland and Margaret Macmillan and Jung Chang – all of whose presentations were filled with the nuance which the complexity of the past demands.
To identify the faltering but earnest efforts of the entire Irish state to serve its people in those decades with the tragic mistakes made in some of those efforts, is to portray it as a monster. To identify the Catholic Church in a similar manner is equally gross. This is the institution which for millennia has nurtured our civilisation from the rough justice of pagan times, through era after era when new forms of barbarism threatened to swamp it.
There is no doubt but that we need to hear the sad accounts of people who have suffered injustice. We need to hear it because we need to help heal the
In our own time the Catholic Church is the only global institution standing firm against the new barbarism which manifests itself in the daily
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slaughter of thousands of unborn children. The writing of tendentious historical narratives seems to be just one more weapon in an arsenal assembled for the destruction of all semblances of Christian values in our civilisation.
much maligned Inquisition was in fact and effort to ameliorate the kind of summary treatment of dissent which had been standard practice prior to that; nearer our own time came the French Revolution, whose reign of terror held sway until eventually a fragile Christian order brought the Enlightenment back to its sense of humanity; the sad history of the twentieth century’s bloodsoaked efforts to supplant Christianity bled itself right into our own time
History gives us many examples of justice warriors who have felt it necessary to destroy their flawed but workable institutions to establish what they saw as justice. Most of them, in doing so, have left trails of pain and suffering in their wakes, until Christian inspired restorations brought the world back to some semblance of justice, even if only of the faltering kind which our race is capable of achieving.
The Catholic Church has battled on through all these storms and for anyone who wants to question its perennial commitment to justice and truth and the ultimate welfare of mankind, let them start by taking up that seminal document, the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It is by this compendium of all the teaching of its Founder, as found in the scriptures, its traditions and its explicit pronouncements down through the two thousand years of its history, that it should be judged. The faltering efforts of its adherents can of course often
Constantine reformed a Roman regime which brutally tried but failed to destroy the Christian religion; throughout the Middle Ages the Catholic Church resisted repeated incursions of barbaric forces, eventually converting them and with them laying the foundations for what we today call Western Civilisation; honest historians now recognise that even the
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be found wanting, sometimes gravely wanting – and indeed be occasion for scandal. They should not however, be a pretext for condemning that which the Catholic Church works constantly for, and which it insistently asks and encourages us to aspire to and strive for.
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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Preparing for the Lord’s Coming by Juan Jose Silvestre (Editor)
“A
dvent invites us to stop and be silent, to take in the presence of God.”
vigilant, to stay awake to receive Christ who is passing by, Christ who is coming.
“Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God, the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ with righteous deeds at his coming, so that, gathered at his right hand, they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom.” These words from the Collect for the first Sunday of Advent throw a powerful light on the particular character of this period at the beginning of the liturgical year. Echoing the attitude of the prudent virgins in the Gospel parable, who sensibly took enough oil with them to await the Bridegroom’s arrival, the Church calls upon her children to be
A time of presence
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The desire to go out to meet him, to prepare for the Lord’s coming, makes us consider the Greek term parousia, which Latin renders as adventus, from which comes our word “Advent.” In fact adventus can be translated as presence, arrival, and coming. This word was not invented by the early Christians, in antiquity, it was normally used to designate the first official visit of someone important – the king, the emperor or one of his officials – coming to take possession of a province. It could also be used for
the coming of the gods, emerging from obscurity to show themselves in strength, or to be celebrated by their worshippers. Christians adopted the term to express their relationship with Christ: Jesus is the King who has entered this poor “province,” our world, to visit all men and women. He is a King whose invitation to share in the feast of his Advent is extended to all who believe in him, all who are sure of his presence among us. In using the word adventus, Christians were simply stating that God is here: our Lord has not withdrawn from the world, he has not left us alone. Although we cannot see him or touch him, as we can with sense perceptible things, he really is here, and comes to visit us in many ways: in the reading of Sacred Scripture, in the sacraments, especially Holy Communion, in the liturgical year, in the lives of the saints, in the many happenings, however commonplace, of our daily lives, in the beauty of creation…. God loves us, he knows our name, everything about us interests him and he is always present beside
us. The certainty of his presence that the Advent liturgy suggests to us discreetly but constantly throughout these weeks, brings before our eyes a new image of the world. “This certainty which the faith gives enables us to look at everything in a new light. And everything, while remaining exactly the same becomes different, because it is an expression of God’s love.” (Christ is Passing By, no. 144). Grateful remembrance Advent invites us to stop and be silent, to take in the presence of God. These are days when we can think again about Saint Josemaría’s words: “we’ve got to be convinced that God is always near us. We live as though he were far away, in the heavens high above, and we forget that he is also continually by our side. He is there 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” (The Way, no. 267). If we steep ourselves in this reality, if we think about it often during Advent, we shall feel
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encouraged to talk confidently to him in our prayer and during the day, we will put before him the sufferings that make us sad, the impatience and questions that arise in our hearts. This is the right time to strengthen our conviction that he is always listening to us. “To you I lift up my soul, O my God. In you I have trusted, let me not be put to shame” (Entrance Antiphon, First Sunday of Advent; cf. Ps 25:1-2). We shall also understand that the unexpected turns a day can take are very personal touches from God, signs of his attentive watchfulness over each of us. Our attention is often drawn to problems and difficulties, and sometimes we scarcely have any energy left to perceive the many good, beautiful things that come from God. Advent is the time to consider more frequently how he has protected, guided and helped us throughout our life, to praise him for all he has done and continues doing for us. By being watchful and attentive for loving details from our heavenly Father, our heart will pour out acts of
thanksgiving. The grateful memory of the good things God has done for us helps us also in dark times of difficulties, problems, sickness, and suffering. “The joy of evangelising,” wrote the Pope, “always arises from grateful remembrance: it is a grace which we constantly need to implore” (Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, 24 November 2013, no. 13). Advent is a time that invites us to keep, so to speak, an internal diary of the love God has for us. “I imagine,” said Saint Josemaría, “that you, like me, will thank our Lord. I know too that, without falling into false humility, this thankfulness will leave you even more convinced that you have merited nothing of this on your own” (Christ is Passing By, no. 1). God is coming Dominus veniet! God is coming! This short exclamation opens the time of Advent, and is heard in a special way during these four weeks, and throughout the entire liturgical year. God is coming! It is not merely that God came in
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the past, nor a simple announcement that God will come in the future. It is something actually happening, it is happening now, and it will go on happening as time passes. At every moment, “God is coming”, in each moment of history, our Lord says: my Father is working still, and I am working (9 Jn 5:17). Advent invites us to become aware of this truth and act accordingly. It is full time now for you to wake from sleep. Watch at all times. What I say to you I say to all: watch (10 Rom 13:11; Lk 21:36; Mk 13:37).
two main comings of Christ: his Incarnation, and his glorious coming at the end of history (Cf. Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechesis 15:1 (2nd reading of the Office of Readings for the First Sunday of Advent)).
These calls from Sacred Scripture in the readings for the first Sunday of Advent remind us of the constant comings, the adventus, of our Lord. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, but today. God is not just in heaven, uninterested in us and our history. He really is the God who is coming. Meditating attentively on the texts of the Advent liturgy helps us to prepare so that we do not let his presence pass unnoticed. For the Fathers of the Church, God’s “coming” – continual, and part of his very being – is concentrated in the
Advent unfolds between these two points. The first days underline the expectation of our Lord’s last coming at the end of time. And as Christmas draws near, the memory of the Bethlehem event, which brought the fullness of time, becomes more vivid. “For these two reasons Advent is markedly a time of pious and joyful expectation” (Universal Calendar, Universal norms for the liturgical year, no. 39). The first preface of Advent combines this double theme: “He assumed at his first coming the lowliness of human flesh, and so fulfilled the design you formed long ago, and opened for us the way to eternal salvation, that, when he comes again in glory and majesty and all is at last made manifest, we who watch for that day may inherit the great promise in which now we dare to hope.”
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Days of waiting and hope The fundamental note of Advent, then, is one of waiting, but it is a waiting that our Lord comes to turn into hope. Experience shows us that we go through life waiting and hoping. When we are children we want to grow up, as young men and women we wait in hope for a great love to fulfil us, when we are adults we hope for professional fulfilment, a level of success to shape the rest of our lives, when we grow old our hope is for some well-earned rest. Nevertheless when these desires are fulfilled, and also when they fail, we realise that the thing hoped for was not everything. We need a hope which goes beyond what we can imagine, which will surprise us. And so, although we have great or small hopes which keep us going from day to day, without the greatest hope of all, born of the Love the Holy Spirit has placed in our hearts, everything else is insufficient. The time of Advent encourages us to ask ourselves: What are we hoping for? What does our hope consist of? Or to go deeper: what meaning does my present life have, my today and now? “If time
is not filled by a present endowed with meaning,” said Benedict XVI, “expectation risks becoming unbearable, if one expects something but at a given moment there is nothing, in other words if the present remains empty, every instant that passes appears extremely long and waiting becomes too heavy a burden because the future remains completely uncertain. On the other hand, when time is endowed with meaning and at every instant we perceive something specific and worthwhile, it is then that the joy of expectation makes the present more precious” (Benedict XVI, Homily, Vespers of the First Sunday of Advent, 28 November 2009). A crib for our God Our present moment has meaning because the Messiah, expected for centuries, is being born in Bethlehem. Together with Mary and Joseph and with the help of our Guardian Angels we wait for him with renewed excitement. On coming among us Christ offers us the gift of his love and his salvation. For Christians, hope is filled with certainty: our
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Lord is present all though our life, in our work, in our daily cares, he accompanies us all the time, and one day he will dry our tears. One day, not so far away, everything will find fulfilment in God’s kingdom, a kingdom of justice and peace. “The season of Advent … restores this horizon of hope, a hope which does not disappoint, for it is founded on God’s Word. A hope which does not disappoint, simply because the Lord never disappoints!” (Pope Francis, Angelus, 1 December 2013). Advent is a time of presence and of waiting for what is eternal, and a time of joy, an intimate joy that nothing can take away. I will see you again, Jesus promised his
disciples, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you (Jn 16:22). The joy of the time of waiting is a deeply Christian attitude that we can see in our blessed Lady: from the moment of the Annunciation “the Virgin Mother longed with love beyond all telling” for the coming of her Son, Christ Jesus. Mary teaches us to wait with a peaceful heart for the coming of our Lord, while we also prepare interiorly for that meeting, joyfully trying “to build a crib for our God in our hearts” (Saint Josemaría, Notes from a meditation, 25 December 1973).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
This reflection is reprinted from the eBook: The Time of God’s Presence edited by Juan Jose Silvestre and which is available for free download on the website opusdei.org.
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All You Who Are Weary by Jennifer Kehoe
B
efore a trip to Rome some years ago I posted that I was going and that I would be carrying the intentions of my Facebook friends to the tombs of Pope St John Paul, St Josemaria, St Monica. I didn’t expect to know people’s actual requests but by that night, instead of packing for my early flight I was sitting at the computer crying at the heartbreak my friends were asking me to place at the feet of these great saints. Heavy burdens under which the most saintly would buckle. If there’s one thing we all agree on it’s that life is no bed of roses. We’ve always known this. However, I have of late noticed a growing despondency even
where it shouldn’t be – among Catholics. I can understand this. Things are bad ... they’re very bad. Life is heavy. The world is heavy. People are carrying heavy crosses and there seems to be no place of respite because those places too seem to be disappearing in front of our very eyes. We’ve become afraid to share our burdens with the world because the world’s answer to burden always seems to be death. Kill the child, kill the elderly, the sick, the lonely, kill the marriage, kill sports, privacy, innocence and ideas we don’t like ... kill whatever it is that causes us discomfort, that challenges us or prickles our conscience. Hey ... Kill God, why not?
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The world seems bad, it’s as though the human race and Western civilisation is in a state of self deconstruction. Only Pollyanna cannot cry the words of Shakespeare “Oh woe is me, to see what I have seen, to see what I see.”
made and it was good. The world is good, God said so.
I get it, many of us are indeed sad. We are burdened with the heavy world. Perhaps we should be despondent and fearful and sad. But should we really? Let’s delve a bit. Saints indeed buckle. Jesus buckled under the cross, under the heavy heavy weight of our sins ... three times. I often consider he fell to show us that getting up again and again, and yes, again, is the path he walked and the one we can indeed walk with him. Someone once asked Saint John Paul II whether he got sad about the state of the world, about all the troubles and sufferings and all the people who do not love God? He replied God does not need a sad Pope, God needs a joyful Pope. When we think of John Paul, we think of his joy, his smile, how he embraced the world, kissed it even. The world is not bad. It is GOOD. God saw what he had
After the disgraceful abortion referendum in Ireland last year, I think all of us, not just in Ireland, but across the world, felt so broken and buckled that to get up again seemed an unattainable task. I remember the afternoon of the result I opened my fridge and to my horror discovered that we needed milk!! I felt almost frozen in fright. Had my husband been home I would have sent him out into the big bad world like early man out to hunt the mammoth, to bring home the milk I needed for survival coffee. I honestly did not want to go out into the world which to my perception was bad, filled with bad people who had done this terrible thing. Later I was talking to my husband about this. I surmised that this very mindset was a huge temptation when we perceive the world to be bad and people to be bad. The temptation is to withdraw into our Catholic cave. Set up our Catholic camps and circle our Catholic wagons
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lest we be tainted by big bad world. I see precisely this happening in a creeping way. Catholics are withdrawing from mainstream society and intentionally circulating in ever more restricted carefully chosen circles in the name of Catholicism. We are withdrawing our children from schools (often rightly so), we are abandoning our parishes in droves in favour of those we feel to be more “Catholic” (absolutely fine since we are free to attend wherever we wish, however the church by and large is territorial, we belong to the parish in which we live. Our parish priest is responsible for us as father even of his Church building is bland and even if he is bland). We are cutting loose family and friends who do not have our world view. I am noticing a perceptible Catholic drift away from the world as it is and into an idealised version of the past. Most worryingly, I am noticing, especially among young Catholics, an increasing preoccupation with demons, exorcists and demonic activity sometimes to the point that their
faith seems ever more fearful, concerned with avoiding demons rather than pursuing and embracing Jesus Christ who loves us and who died for us. This is not right. In fact it is very wrong. Focusing on Satan and his demons gives them a dignity they do not deserve. Satan is NOT the equal opposite of God. He is a creature, created by God and who subsequently in his inflated pride rejected God and chose himself. God did not create hell or send Satan and his pathetic Wormwoods there; they freely and knowingly chose it. If a man sins, it’s not because he is possessed by a demon; we are well able to sin off our own bat. Satan can suggest, stir up, remind. He cannot make a single person commit a single sin. Our sins are well and truly our own. Our sins are what nailed Christ to a cross. We don’t need Satan, we’re only too delighted to sin. Bless me Father for I have sinned, and I’m not really all that sorry ... it was only venial after all ... and so satisfying to say that thing ... or do that thing ... or not do that thing….
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The saints remind us that plenary indulgences are not all that easy to gain, precisely because detachment form sin is a difficult lifetime task, sin is sticky.
said, you know who is real, be alert.
I was in a beautiful church last All Saints Day with my nine year old daughter. She spotted a statue depicting Our Lady and under her foot the writhing serpent. What a curious sight for a little girl, she asked me about it so I told her about the sin of Eve and how God promised he would send us a New Eve, one who would crush the head of the serpent. More importantly, I told my daughter to look at the demeanour of Mary. How powerful: Mary is paying zero attention to Satan, he doesn’t deserve her attention. In Mel Gibson’s Passion of The Christ opening scene we equally see Jesus not giving Satan the dignity of his gaze, just as later he didn’t dignify the impure depraved Herod with the sound of his Divine voice. SO ... don’t dignify demons with too many of our thoughts. That’s the example of Jesus and Mary and probably what we should do too. That
Where is all this leading to? This is what I’m trying to say ... we are losing our JOY. This is not right. Joyless fearful Christians are questionably not Christian at all. Sure times are bad, have there ever been times which weren’t bad? The fourth century contemporaries of St Augustine thought that their times were bad: “Bad times, hard times, this is what people keep saying; but let us live well and times shall be good. We are the times, such as we are, such are the times.” St Teresa of Avila called her times “A bad night in a bad inn”, not too flattering to her times. Whoever penned the Salve Regina in the twelfth century saw fit to call the world “This Valley of Tears”. The world has always been a mix of bad and good, sufferings and joys, sin and virtue. It will always be that way. If I had a penny for every time I’ve seen somebody comment “Come Lord Jesus” on reports of the newest political and ecclesiastic equivalent to celebrity gossip,
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well I don’t know how much I’d have, a good bit. I’m guilty, I’ve thought it myself. Come Lord Jesus, come and save us from this messed up world, come and smite them all down!! How gleefully I’d watch “them’ get their comeuppance, the villains well and truly vanquished. Let’s have a close look at “Come Lord Jesus”. Just why do we want Lord Jesus to come? Truth be told, I’m guessing we want Jesus to come because what lies ahead looks a bit too much like hard work. Come and relieve me of this uncomfortable task, put me into Heaven already!! Come Lord Jesus because I’m too lazy for my times. Why didn’t you put me into a time of ease, like the heyday of Christendom, the times when government, Kings, writers, architects, composers and craftsmen were glorifying your name? I’d have been great in those times, I’d have been “stunning and brave”, going along with the river of Christians, being Christian. Why, oh why, oh why did you put me in these rotten times Lord? But Augustine tells us we are the times.
My mother used to repeatedly remind me and my siblings that God places us in precisely the time he wants us in. For you and me that means now. Withdrawing from the world as it is today is rejecting God’s wisdom in placing me here and now. What an honour it is to be chosen to live in difficult challenging times, what an honour to witness to Christ when the world is not singing Glory to God in The Highest but rather cursing him, denying him or, even more likely, plain shabby old apathy toward him. It would be so easy and comfortable to withdraw into our cosy Catholic citadels and let the wolves devour the world. One problem with this though, that would not be Catholicism. Pope John Paul spoke about this in Crossing The Threshold of Hope. Some Eastern religions have the aim of going deeper and deeper into ourselves and there finding the divine, the small “d” divine which is our own self awareness to the exclusion of the world. This is not compatible with Catholicism. Each of us has a
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task given to us by nature of our Baptism, it’s not inward, it’s OUTWARD. The nature of God is out and out and out, an ever flowing torrent of outward, creative, life-giving love. An outward flowing of Joy. Therein lies the secret ... JOY. Not the “kind we might call physiological good spirits – the happiness of a healthy animal ... happiness that comes from the abandonment of everything and the abandonment of yourself to the loving arms of Our Father God” (St Josemaría Escrivá, The Way 659). Each of us is called to make holy our times. We aren’t called to preserve the purity of our personal air, we’re called to purify the air of those around us. How can we win hearts if our own heart is miserable? How can we place Christ as the pinnacle of the world if we think the world is bad? How can we point to heaven if our own view of heaven is obscured by the shadows of demons? We cannot. We don’t need to carry the sins of the world, of ideologies which cause so much division. We don’t need to take upon our
shoulders the sin of Eve, or the neglectful Adam who just stood there. Jesus has already carried those sins. The weight of the world is too heavy for us, the entire world and it’s sinful history is not our cross. Our cross is today, it’s the weather, the neighbour, the school run, the aching back and the traffic jam. Pick up those crosses with a smile and we will surely change the world. Until we realise that God is joy, that we have a happy God who wants us to be happy, not just in heaven, but on earth too, we will be bogged down in the mire of the world, our feet weighted like lead, unable to soar, unable to raise our hearts to God, unable to taste the sweetness of his love. We have a God who delights in making us happy, who lavishes us with beauty in every form. Creation is beautiful. It doesn’t just look beautiful, it smells, sounds, tastes and feels beautiful. God wants us to be happy today he wants us to be joyful. Only Joy will win hearts. Only joy will remedy the joylessness of the world. A miserable Christian is a paradox.
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A fearful, suspicious Christian is a paradox. Authentic Christianity shouts it from the mountaintops. Open WIDE the doors to Christ, not barricade them in case the world gets in. As Christmas approaches we are guaranteed to see the annual scrooge articles, condemning the world, the trappings, the food, the glitter of Christmas, even Santa Claus gets it in the neck . To these party poopers I say this: Merry, Merry, Merry Christmas!! Catholics should have the best banquets. I attended a Christmas meditation some years ago in which the priest related the story of being on an outing with a number of men when one produced some fine Cuban cigars. Each cigar was worth a hefty sum of money. What struck the priest wasn’t the cigars but the box in which they came. It was of the finest wood, smoothed and polished to perfection. A fitting presentation to a fine cigar. I passed the Tiffany & Co store in Harrods a few years ago, how I looked so longingly at the beautiful sparkling display. A
woman emerged from the shop elegantly dangling the recognisable turquoise bag from her hand. If ever I get a gift from Tiffany I will dangle the bag elegantly from my hand for the next year, even if it is only to carry my car keys and my receipts from Lidl! I’ll want everyone to know I got something from Tiffany, that someone loved me enough to give me such a gift. You see, we put precious gifts in precious packaging. The more precious the gift the more effort we put into the packaging. What greater gift has ever been given than the gift of God the Son. God made man and given to an undeserving bunch of sinful miserable complainers such as us for no other reason than that he loves us and that he told us he would. What packaging we should prepare!! The best for Jesus. The Catholics should surely have the best parties, the Bridegroom has come, we are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song! There is no compatibility with Alleluia and Bah, Humbug! We are the ones who know who and why and who wins in the end. We know whose head gets
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nonchalantly crushed under the pure heel of Mary, we don’t cower at his ugly name. We’re not afraid or ashamed and we’re not going to reject or retreat from this world and this time we have been put into. How can we not look into the eyes of Christ, who loves us and our hearts not soar like a bird?
So there you have it ... be joyful, keep praying, be hopeful. And be a saint, a happy saint.
St Peter tells us: “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer” (Rom 12:12). The times are what they are and all we can do is be holy, be saints, be the joy that attracts the world. and “always be prepared to give an answer to anyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jennifer Kehoe is a mother of six, living in Kildare, Ireland. She runs a blog “Raindrops on my Head,” at http://jenniferkehoe.blogspot.ie.
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Late Late reflections by Tim O’Sullivan
T
he recent sad passing of Gay Byrne has led to much reflection on his life and work. An Irish Times supplement on the broadcaster summarised his legacy in this way: he and his programmes were saying the unsayable, were always ahead of public opinion, liberated social issues, opened up Ireland, formed the national consciousness, pushed the boundaries of a deeply conservative country, undermined the very conservative approach that had characterised Irish life well into the 1960s, played a hugely influential role in the transformation of attitudes in the latter part of the twentieth century, offered a willingness to
talk about controversial subjects, shone an unforgiving light on the pieties of the day and constituted a wedge which opened a narrow, insular Ireland to the wider world. Viewing the Late Late Show on RTÉ, one outside observer noted, was like watching a nation talking to itself, while another commentator, in a burst of enthusiasm, compared the Late Late and Daniel O’Connell’s monster meetings in the nineteenth century! No fewer than five contributors to the Irish Times supplement highlighted the much hyped 1960s “Bishop and Nightie” episode, in which a bishop’s protests about a particular item
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brought down ridicule on his head , and which is now clearly seen as a symbol of the decline of episcopal influence in Ireland. Acknowledgement of Gay Byrne’s huge contribution to Irish broadcasting was very appropriate and widely shared. He was an enormously gifted and hard-working broadcaster as well as being a person of faith who was devoted to family and friends. Media experts will be analysing his contribution for years to come and his place in the history books seems secure. The influence of the Late Late Show should not be exaggerated – as Mary Kenny put it in the Irish Catholic, Ireland would have modernised anyway. Nevertheless, the Late Late had a huge audience in its heyday and a significant influence on social attitudes in Ireland while Byrne’s morning radio programme also had a major impact. Many hidden stories in the past needed to be told and might not have been publicised without the courage and perseverance of broadcasters like him.
Nevertheless, the media narrative set out above doesn’t leave much space for other reflections or questions. For example, have we moved, as often seems to be implied, to a “land of milk and honey” in areas such as marriage and sexuality? Distressing court cases and daily news stories would suggest that that is emphatically not the case. Or: was the Catholic society whose values the Late Late was challenging a totally dark and insular backwater? This presentation does not do justice to the many good things in Irish society fifty years ago, which coexisted undoubtedly with welldocumented darker realities, including economic failure and mass emigration as well as the grave abuse issues. Those good things included a sense of community and caring in many places, the loyalty of Irish Catholics to their faith, the social contribution of the religious orders, the humour and warmth of many social interactions, a remarkable missionary outreach and a great sense of place and attachment to one’s local area.
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Brian Fallon’s An Age of Innocence (Gill and Macmillan, 1998) documents the lively cultural life in Ireland in the decades prior to 1960 in a whole range of areas, from theatre to the visual arts to poetry and music. Conventional wisdom about social change in Ireland since the 1960s also sometimes seems to imply that the decline in faith in Christ which has occurred is a good thing, or at least not much of a problem, but, for believers, it must surely be a cause for the deepest regret. Another question which occurs is about the capability of the media then and now to handle profound questions relating, for example, to marriage, sexuality or the right to life of the unborn. Writing in an American rather than Irish context, the US historian, Professor James Hitchcock, highlighted “the general unsuitability” of the mass media for a serious discussion of sensitive and delicate issues of any kind (What is Secular Humanism? Servant Books, 1982, with the chapter on the mass media also available on
the website, catholiceducation.org). He wrote: By their very nature, the media deal with such questions briefly, simplistically, and in a style which borders on the sensational. Their aim is not primarily to explore problems responsibly but to attract the largest possible audience. Since the various media are in competition with each other, there is strong pressure on each to do something just a bit more “daring” than its competitors. Hitchcock also questioned media claims to “neutrality” on such issues:
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No matter how seemingly “neutral” the treatment, when certain ideas are given time and space in the media, they acquire a respectability that increases with frequency. Then comes the point where previously taboo subjects become familiar and acceptable. There is deep
hypocrisy in the media's pious claims that they merely reflect reality and do not shape it. In fact the power of celebrity is used deliberately and selectively in order to effect changes in values. These criticisms are quite cogent but should not be used to justify disengagement with the media. It seems clear at this remove that the Church in Ireland and its leadership in the early 1960s was not well-prepared for the challenge of TV or indeed for the wider social changes of that period, even if such preparation was not an easy task and new forms of media had a major impact around the world and not just here. In recent years,
positive developments in Ireland on the media landscape years have included the excellent work of bodies like the Iona Institute, which makes excellent contributions to public debates, the biennial Cleraun Media Conference which promotes discussion of contemporary debates in the media, Catholic Comment which trains and provides contributors to media discussions or the Family and Media Association which seeks to inform the public about the media and to hold the media, and particularly the public broadcaster, to account, on behalf of media users.
ABOUT THE
 AUTHOR Tim O’Sullivan has degrees in history and social policy and taught healthcare policy at third level. He is a regular contributor to Position Papers.
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150 Years of Faith by Pat Hanratty
O
n 24th October last I had the privilege of attending a beautiful celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Church of Mary Immaculate in Collon, Co. Louth, the church where I was baptised, confirmed, made my first Holy Communion and was an altar server for some years, all those decades ago. Collon is, I’m sure among many towns and villages celebrating such anniversaries – it has never ceased to amaze me how in the period after the Famine of the 1840s, only decades after Catholic Emancipation and after two hundred plus years of draconian Penal Laws designed to completely repress if not exterminate the Catholic
population, a still impoverished people not only clung steadfastly to the faith, but by the 1870s had erected hundreds if not thousands of wonderful church buildings throughout the length and breath of the island. But back to Collon on 24th October: The Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All-Ireland, Dr Eamon Martin was the chief celebrant. It was quite clear from the beautiful music and singing, from the choice of the gifts being brought to the altar and from the general orderliness of the celebration that a huge amount of planning
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had gone into the occasion. But planning can only take you so far …. From the moment that more than a dozen priests including current and former clergy of the parish and the superior of nearby Mellifont Abbey processed ahead of the Archbishop through the nave of the church there was a real sense of something special being celebrated. Archbishop Martin led from the front and at every opportunity made us feel how wonderful it was to be celebrating one hundred and fifty years and he took us back to imagine what joy must have been in the hearts of our forebears on the day that Cardinal Cullen, who by 1869 had moved from the Archdiocese of Armagh to that of Dublin, came back to
perform the consecration of the church. Those of us who were alive in the village around the middle of the last century and knew the poverty of the time can only imagine what it was like one hundred years earlier, and can imagine the joy that the successful completion of the building of the church brought to all. I was enthralled by Archbishop Martin’s homily, and I chanced to ask him if I could have a copy of it, he smiled and told me that he had “ad libbed” a lot of it. It was very much from the heart, and echoing words of Pope Francis he spoke of his dream of a missionary impulse that will renew interest in the Church again. He particularly addressed the many young people present, including the excellent choir from the local Collon, Co. Louth
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primary school, urging them to consider following in the footsteps of the many in former generations who had followed the call of Christ to work in His vineyard.
To the next one hundred and fifty years!
Throughout the Mass and the reception in the local GAA Hall there was a real sense of community. One was inspired to give thanks to God for all His gifts in the past one hundred and fifty years, and to our forebears who kept the faith alive during often very troubled times. A beautiful commemoration booklet was produced for the occasion by Michael Reid and Seamus Roe – it is guaranteed to become a collector's item!
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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BOOKS
Dominion by Tom Holland
Originally published: Sept 5, 2019 Author: Tom Holland Pages: 525
review by James Bradshaw
D
ominion, the latest book by the popular historian Tom Holland (the author of Rubicon, Persian Fire and In the Shadow of the Sword), was published in September. Given the success of Holland’s previous books, many history buffs will be including Dominion on their Christmas wish list. Holland made his name exploring broad historical periods like the fall of Roman Republic or the rise of Islam, but Dominion focuses on a subject which many historians steer clear of: the role of Christianity in shaping Western civilisation, and shaping it for the better.
Considering the various upheavals (both political and social) currently underway in the West, it is a worthy topic, especially given that Holland is himself an atheist. Though raised in the Church of England, the author’s Christian faith waned from childhood onwards and he found himself being drawn towards classical history, including the Greek gods. Like many intellectuals, he initially accepted the thesis of Edward Gibbon that the triumph of Christianity during the Roman Empire’s dying days had ushered in a more superstitious and credulous era. Gibbon’s views were not shared by most Europeans when he was writing
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in the late eighteenth century, but few within Europe’s cultural elite would criticise them now. All religion is deemed to be backward, and the fact that Christianity has played a formative role in shaping the culture of every European nation is seldom reflected upon. As a non-believer, Holland’s interest in writing about this topic is not motivated by a desire to bring people into the Church. Over the course of several decades, he became an authority on ancient Greek and ancient Roman history. Fascinated though he was with them, there were parts of this pre-Christian culture which the historian could not embrace, in particular, the extraordinary brutality which was considered normal in such societies, and which their religions condoned. “The more years, I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, the more alien I increasingly found it,” Holland writes. “The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly
murderous form of eugenics and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls, and enslaved a million more. “It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value.” The examples of the abuse of the weak and powerless are widelyknown among anyone familiar with Greco-Roman history: public execution of slaves, gladiatorial combat for the amusement of spectators, the widespread abandonment of baby girls in refuse dumps, and so on. Not all of this was stamped out by Christianity immediately (the continuation of slavery being an obvious and sad example), but over time, the moral principles of Christianity became so deeply embedded within European societies that the greatest abuses of ancient
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Rome and Greece became unthinkable.
the historical evolution of the Western mind inevitably brings us to Jesus.
Without the conversion of Europe, this could not have happened. As Holland explains, there was nothing in GrecoRoman polytheism which would give pause to a Roman nobleman considering raping his slave girl, or to a general about to order his legionaries to annihilate a defeated tribe. Ancient Athens is still renowned for the high-quality of its political philosophy, but though the gods would intervene in all manner of earthy affairs, they were not likely to intervene in defence of those at the bottom of the societal hierarchy. These immortals, Holland adds, “were held to be simultaneously whimsical and purposeful, amoral and sternly moral, arbitrary and wholly just.” As Holland explains at length, the Jewish people played a vital role in fostering the understanding of a different, monotheistic, God whose actions could – for the most part – be understood. Holland’s tracing of
Curiously, the actual life of Christ is not dwelt upon here, but as the author states early on, this is not a history of Christianity, nor a biography of its central figure. The crucifixion does however play a central role in the cultural shift Holland is describing, and he points this out again and again. Death on the cross was a punishment only thought suitable for slaves. In Greece and Rome and other pagan societies throughout the world, the gods were enormously powerful, and in these societies, strength and power were lauded, even when they went hand-in-hand with cruelty. The idea of God becoming a man and willingly suffering this kind of torture and death ran completely contrary to the ideas of paganism. It presented a clear challenge to the divisions that had previously separated the powerless from the powerful. Furthermore, the mission of St. Paul and the other
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followers of Jesus was clearly universal. Where before, one people would have many gods, this God was to be made known to all people: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” That Christian message would soon be spread across the Roman Empire to the point where Christianity would quickly replace paganism as the dominant religion, with the result that many of the worst practices of old went from being common, to being frowned upon, and then to becoming unthinkable. The story of Western civilisation did not end then, of course, and Holland’s book traces its evolution up to the present day, taking in all manner of figures, groups and movements: Origen, St Martin of Tours, St Augustine, Muhammad, Charlemagne, the Albigensian Crusade, the persecution of the Hussites, Martin Luther, Voltaire, the Enlightenment, Charles Darwin and much, much more besides.
Holland’s analysis of how the nihilistic German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche influenced modern thought is especially interesting. Modern-day atheists often stress that they still belief in concepts such as “human rights” or “human dignity,” which are frequently presented as having evolved out of nothing. “We are all twenty-first century people,” Holland quotes Richard Dawkins as saying, “and we subscribe to a pretty widespread consensus of what is right and wrong.” In his rejection of the Christianity which he was reared in, Nietzsche made clear that he and others like him could not engage in such wishful thinking: “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.” Not that he wanted to keep hold of it. Nietzsche admired the pagan philosophy of exalting strength and crushing weakness, and wished to recreate a world like
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that which existed “in the days before mankind grew ashamed of its cruelty.” The waning belief in Christianity – already obvious in many advanced European societies during Nietzsche’s lifetime – had done much to reduce that shame, but more was to follow. When he died in 1900, Nietzsche probably could not have anticipated just how soon Germany would revert to a pagan moral ethos, one which would be made far worse due to the progress which had been made in military and scientific technology during the previous two millennia. There is much to admire in this book, not least the fact that an irreligious historian has taken such time to examine Christianity’s positive role in creating a kinder, gentler and more loving world than could otherwise have existed. Holland is a terrific writer, and one who is enormously authoritative in his analysis of history. But in meandering through such an enormous
period of history encompassing so many important subjects, he has ended up trying to do too much. At 525 pages, Dominion feels very long indeed, and some of the links that Holland sees between Christianity and other tendencies in modern Western societies seem tenuous at best. This does not reflect on the author: any one volume effort to describe the Christian roots of Western civilisation would probably be doomed to failure also. Earlier this year, the conservative Christian writer Samuel Gregg tried to accomplish something somewhat similar in Reason, Faith and the Struggle for Western Civilization. This book was only half as long as Dominion, but still suffered from some of the same flaws. Conversely, there are other important issues that Holland could have addressed and did not. Holland is right to highlight how unwanted and physically imperfect children were either
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put to death or abandoned in pagan societies like preChristian Rome. In its insistence on the dignity of every innocent life, the newly ascendant Christianity firmly stamped these practices out. But it did more than condemn infanticide or abandonment. The sociologist Rodney Stark achieved some renown in the 1990s when he wrote The Rise of Christianity, which looked at how a small sect had multiplied so rapidly to become the majority religion of the Roman Empire within three centuries. However grisly and unsafe the technique was, Stark wrote that abortion was commonplace in pre-Christian Rome. The steadfast refusal of the Catholic Church to accept the killing of children – born or unborn, wanted or not – played an important role in causing the number of Christians to grow rapidly. Somewhat ironically given the dogmatic attitude of modern feminists, this also made the new religion more attractive to
Roman women. Thus, the number of converts grew. In addition to condemning the slaughter of the young, Christianity also placed a much greater importance on caring for the sick and the aged. Contrast this with the present-day state of what is still, in some respects, Christendom. Abortion has been readily available in most Western societies for several generations now. Abortion on the grounds of disability is rampant. People with conditions like Down’s Syndrome are being systematically erased. The morals of Sparta are no longer so foreign. Several countries have legalised euthanasia as well, and horrific stories about patients being involuntarily dispatched are now being reported in the Netherlands and elsewhere. In Europe, a human being’s survival is, once again, dependent on the will of those who are stronger and more powerful. Tom Holland recoils from the worst abuses of the pagan
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societies he has studied but has nothing to say about how closely we are beginning to mirror them. Alas, a liberal atheist was never likely to challenge this regression into savagery. All that being said, this is an important book. Hopefully, it will be the start of a critical reevaluation of how the most humane and advanced civilisation in the world came into existence. It could not have been published at a more important time, when Europeans need to re-familiarise ourselves with what the author rightly calls the greatest story ever told.
ABOUT THE
 AUTHOR
James Bradshaw works in an international consulting firm, based in Dublin, and is a regular contributor to Position Papers.
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FILMS
Release date: Dec 6, 2019 (Ireland) Director: Edward Norton Production company: MWM Studios
Motherless Brooklyn review by John Mulderig
E
dward Norton wrote, directed and stars in Motherless Brooklyn (Warner Bros.), an adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel. The result is a top-notch crime drama whose sound basic values are only tarnished by the gritty vocabulary of its script. Norton plays Lionel Essrog, a private detective in 1950s New York whose Tourette’s syndrome is offset by a phenomenal memory for detail. After his friend, mentor and senior partner, Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), is murdered while investigating shady real estate deals, Lionel pursues the case in the hope of bringing Frank’s killers to justice.
The hunt that follows finds him crossing paths with Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin), a powerful civil servant obviously modelled on Robert Moses (1888-1981) as well as with Laura Rose (Gugu MbathaRaw), a community activist opposed to Randolph’s latest project. Other colorful figures he encounters include gifted but down-on-his-luck architect Paul (sharp, energetic Willem Dafoe) and an unnamed trumpet player (Michael Kenneth Williams) reminiscent of music great Miles Davis. As the movie’s plot twists and turns over a long running time, viewers will appreciate its evocation of film noir
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atmospherics, its powerful jazz score and the innocence of the romance that ensues once Lionel and Laura fall for each other. Pro-life moviegoers will also welcome the sympathy Norton wins for its afflicted but goodhearted protagonist.
hardscrabble, tough-guy-in-afedora mood Norton seeks to conjure. But he lays it on pretty thickly.
Lionel not only has to contend with his “condition,” as he calls it, an illness that – if the impression given by the screenplay is to be believed – was much less easily recognized and understood sixty years ago, but with the legacy of being an orphan. His recollections of life in his Catholic orphanage, where Frank first became his defender, incorporate the familiar caricature of the ruler-wielding nun.
The film contains stylized violence with occasional gore, semi-medicinal drug use, frequent profanities, a few milder oaths and pervasive rough and crude language. The Catholic News Service classification is A-III – adults. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is R – restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.
Overall, however, Motherless Brooklyn has a good heart and a sound moral compass.
Along with the mild bashing of women religious, many in the audience may be put off by the heavy-handed exchanges about the nature of power that spring from the presence of Randolph in the mix. While this sort of clunky writing is confined to a couple of scenes, vulgarity, by contrast, pervades the dialogue. Presumably, this is in aid of the
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Mulderig is a reviewer for Catholic News Service. © 2019 Catholic News Service. Reprinted with permission from CNS. www.catholicnews.com
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