Position Papers – February 2019

Number 526 February 2019 €3 · £2.50 · $4

A review of Catholic affairs

A Call of Love: The Vocation to Marriage FR DONNCHA Ó hAODHA

The Benedict Option comes to Ireland JAMES BRADSHAW

Films: Towards a sexual counter-revolution CAROLYN MOYNIHAN

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Number 526 · February 2019

Editorial

by Fr Gavan Jennings

In Passing: Psalm II

by Michael Kirke

The Benedict Option comes to Ireland

by James Bradshaw

Stephen Hawking: Great scientist, lousy theologian

by Bishop Robert Barron

A Call of Love: The Vocation to Marriage

by Fr Donncha Ó hAodha

Books: A fairer look at the Sisters of Mercy

by Tim O’Sullivan

Films: Towards a sexual counter-revolution

by Carolyn Moynihan

Films: The Upside

by Kurt Jensen

Editor: Assistant editors: Subscription manager: Secretary: Design:

2 5 11 19 23 29 34 38

Rev. Gavan Jennings Michael Kirke, Pat Hanratty, Brenda McGann Liam Ó hAlmhain Dick Kearns Eblana Solutions

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Editorial

O

ver the past few months there has been a vegan onslaught, here in Ireland at least: large billboards have gone up in prominent places around the country admonishing us that our milk drinking is tantamount to depriving some poor calf of his daily dram, while other billboards enjoin us to “see someone, not something” the next time we gaze into the face of a sheep. As if that wasn’t enough, a recent and much reported piece in the Lancet suggests meat taxes may be needed to bring down our consumption of red meat by 90%, in order to save the planet from the methane emissions of cows. Beans, we are told, would make an ideal alternative.

Perhaps some years ago such gibberish could have laughed off as harmless nonsense which nobody could take seriously, but now that we have seen how whole swathes of society been taken in by gender ideology it is hard to be so sanguine. Concerted media campaigns have revealed an almost limitless capacity to alter public opinion, especially in societies with no fixed metaphysical reference points. We have seen how many in our post-Christian society have been relatively easily inducted into the ideology that holds the difference between male and female to be a social construct, and we also are seeing how this patently false belief is increasingly being translated into social policy.

This does not augur well for the traditional, common-sense notion that man is no mere animal, and that the animals are essentially at his disposal. Such a conception of man was present in the Classical preChristian world which was never in doubt about man’s superiority to animals. Christianity, with its revelation that God had created man – alone among creatures – in His own image and likeness, gave such a distinction the firmest of foundations. The Christian conception of man’s relationship to the animals is summed as follows in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: God entrusted animals to the stewardship of those whom he created in his own image. Hence it is legitimate to use animals for food and clothing. They may be domesticated to help man in his work and

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leisure. Medical and scientific experimentation on animals is a morally acceptable practice if it remains within reasonable limits and contributes to caring for or saving human lives. (CCC 2417) The vegan campaign seeks to upend this perennial distinction between man and the animals, in much the same way as the malefemale contradistinction has been upended. The very notion of personhood (to be “someone” rather than “something”) has been bequeathed to us by the theologians of the first centuries of Christianity. The apparently touching elevation of sheep to the level of personhood is in reality the destruction of personhood; it is to strip man of his unique spiritual status among creatures.

The destruction of the very concept of personhood is clearly the mark of a worldview which has lost the guidance of what Christianity has revealed about the dignity of man. Similarly the anxiety of the fragility of creation which suggests that our red meat intake should be reduced to virtually nothing brings to my mind the anxiety of the pagans which Christ speaks of in St Matthew’s Gospel: “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things” (Mt.6:31-32). The cosmos devoid of any sense of a special divine providence caring for man and providing for his needs becomes a scary place indeed.

There is an unmistakeable aura of anxious sadness in the postChristian view of man and the world he inhabits: man is no longer a unique creature (except in his portrayal at times as uniquely evil), resources are invariably dangerously scarce, and there is no sense of man’s connection with a transcendent realm or a life beyond death.

There is a sad puritanism about this vegan world and it is very much in need of an injection of Christian joy and optimism. Joseph Ratzinger has observed that “Nothing can make man laugh unless

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there is an answer to the question of death. And conversely, if there is an answer to death, it will make genuine joy possible – and joy is the basis for every feast” (The Feast of Faith, 130). With Christianity and the Resurrection, he observes, man is enabled to genuinely rejoice. It leads to a fundamental optimism about the world, and man’s place in the world. And significantly food is always at the centre of all celebration: festivity by definition requires feasting. So forget about the beans, pour yourself a large glass of milk (or beer or wine), and tuck into a good steak!

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In Passing: Psalm II

by Michael Kirke

“W

e have effectively disenfranchised 33% of the population from Irish politics,” Dr David Thunder said in a radio interview with Wendy Grace on Spirit FM before Christmas. Dr Thunder is a political scientist and a UCD and University of Notre Dame graduate. He now teaches in the University of Navarre in Spain.

It is a stark prospect for such a sizable proportion of the Irish population.

man, or woman, all of the above represent values which are alien to the Christian principles by which they try to live their lives.

“None of the above” is, of course, no choice at all. Call this forced abstinence.

The last disenfranchisement of the Catholic Irish took place with the Act of Settlement in 1701 and in subsequent penal acts depriving both them – and Protestant Dissenters – of all sorts of civil rights. That wrong took well over a hundred years to put right. Indeed, in Northern Ireland the British Government only got around to restoring full civil rights at the end of the last century – about three hundred years later.

Dr Thunder is referring to the political reality in Ireland whereby when citizens go out to vote they are faced with a ballot paper to which their only response can be “none of the above” because, practically to a

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This new marginalisation, at whose root again is the issue of conscience and faith, is more subtle and therefore harder to combat. Will they be living in this condition for another hundred years? This loss of rights and the privilege of citizenship for faith is nothing new. One of the earliest instances in recorded history brings us back all the way to ancient Egypt.

which was signed by Ireland’s President before Christmas and came into effect on the first day of January has sinister implications for anyone with a Christian conscience.

Undoubtedly there was a special poignancy in our Irish Christmas in 2018. In some way it linked aptly with this no less poignant famous picture of Joseph helping Mary and her unborn child along the road to Bethlehem, just over two thousand years ago.

“By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to share illtreatment with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He considered abuse suffered for the Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he looked to the reward. By faith he left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king; for he endured as seeing him who is invisible.” So we are told in the Letter to the Hebrews.

It is Mary and Joseph on the Way to Bethlehem, from the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes, now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

That will be the same path which many doctors, nurses and health workers in Ireland will now also take. The abortion legislation

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In it, the Guardian newspaper (believe it or not), tells us that we see Mary and Joseph on their way to Bethlehem through a rocky landscape. She has climbed down from the donkey, perhaps afraid of riding down such a perilous, ankle-breaking slope. Joseph, grizzled and weary, is helping her along with all his loving kindness, his actions (rather than her physical appearance) suggesting just how pregnant she is. He is doing everything he can, as husband and prospective new father, to protect his little family from hardship and danger.

to do so is in some way harder to comprehend. But comprehend it we must.

The antiphon to the second Psalm, a substantial portion of which constitutes part of the lyrics of Handel’s Messiah, proclaims: “His kingdom is a kingdom of all ages, and all kings shall serve and obey him.”

This lines challenge us, challenge our faith in the word of God. When we look around at our crazy world and our apostate nation, we might have the temerity to question these words as so much self-delusion and say, “Really? Serve and obey?

Will they really? You must be joking.”

In Ireland the unborn have now lost the protection of the State.

The fatal decision was made by a majority of the Irish people last May. That they did so, many still find very hard to come to terms with. Being told by the victors, “You lost. Get over it,” certainly doesn’t help – no more than it helped the defeated at Aughrim and the Boyne in the 1690s.

Credibly enough, the psalmist asks rhetorically, “Quare fremuérunt gentes, et pópuli meditáti sunt inánia?”: Why this tumult among nations, among peoples this useless murmuring?” Indeed the more direct translation, “thinking up inanities” might be better.

Legislatures, at one remove from the will of the people, pass laws like this – but that a people should directly ask its legislature

Tumult certainly; useless also; even self-negating – all that selfaggrandising posturing which

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we call identity politics, signifying nothing; hang-ups over “diversity” to the point where the world is becoming a new Tower of Babel.

weeks ago. But then comes an even harder bit for the beleaguered remnants of Israel to take on board.

“He who sits in the heavens”, we are told, ” laughs; the Lord is laughing them to scorn. Then shall he speak to them in his anger, and trouble them in his rage. It is I who have set up my king on Zion, my holy mountain.”

And the political classes, left, right and center? They also fit into this picture, personified by the royalty of a former age: “They arise, the kings of the earth, princes plot against the Lord and his Anointed. They shout, ‘Come, let us break their fetters, come let us cast off their yoke.’”

But where is he, we ask, as the division bell rings in the Irish parliament and “the kings of the earth”, the “princes”, troop to the lobby to pass death sentence on thousands of unborn children? The estimate is that close to 10,000 Irish babies will perish next year under the legislation recently rushed through the two Houses of Parliament – with only a few brave voices offering resistance.

There is certainly a great deal of that around. How else are we to interpret the abuse piled on those who dare to defend the rights of medical professionals whose consciences are being trampled on by their own elected representatives? For our “rulers” conscience is now a fetter, a yoke to be cast off.

We look around and see a crumbling civilisation. I walk through the campus of a famous university; I pick up a student newspaper – free because it is printed with money from taxpayers, in the name of

“Carol Nolan TD (a member of the Irish Parliament) has received a lot vitriol abuse from fellow TDs for opposing the abortion bill,” we were reminded courtesy of Facebook a few

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education. What do I find in it?

Very little that is not advocating licentious hedonism. Irony of ironies, this university was dedicated to the Most Blessed Trinity over four hundred years ago. If I were an advocate of “safe spaces” for young people I would certainly not be recommending this university campus, my alma mater, as one of them.

begotten you this day. Ask and I shall bequeath you the nations, put the ends of the earth in your possession.’”

And the reckoning? “‘With a rod of iron you shall break them, shatter them like a potter’s jar.’ Now, O kings, understand; take warning, rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with awe and trembling, pay him with your homage. Lest he be angry and you perish; for suddenly his anger will blaze.”

But then, in the midst of all these temptations to doubt the sacred texts, we remember the crumbling of Christ’s cohort of followers. Just four are left at the foot of the Cross, while faithful Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus face up to the powers-that-be and prepare to take him down from the gibbet to lay him in the tomb prepared by one of them. That makes six out of all those who, less than a week before, were hailing him as the Son of David.

Can all that really be balderdash? No. These words have been sung and believed in for more, much more probably, than three thousand years. They have also been scoffed at by kings, princes and peoples who delude themselves with “useless murmuring”. These words have been at the heart of the Christian transformation of the world foretold in the Old Testament and announced in the New. Strip away all that has come to us from these words and we will be left with a nasty and brutal world dominated by superstition and fatalistic myth, ruled by

Then we hear the psalmist say with utmost confidence: “I will announce the decree of the Lord: the Lord said to me, ‘You are my Son. It is I who have

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fools who think they can mould human nature into whatever shape they dream up or desire.

The final line of the psalm proclaims, “Blessed are they who put their trust in the Lord.” So, with those words, all doubt melts away – if trust in the Lord is the condition for Blessedness what more is there to say? If we were to value anything in the world over this then we make ourselves nothing more than useless murmurers and lackeys of the “kings of the earth”.

struggled towards Bethlehem with the unborn child who is the saviour of mankind; and as real as it was three thousand years ago – in spite of the world's Herods, dictators, pseudodemocrats and all the other varieties of rulers it offers us.

That trust, that Blessedness, will still be as real three thousand years from now, as real as it is today, as real as it was in the souls of Mary and Joseph as they

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 Benedict Option comes to Ireland

by James Bradshaw

O

n January 21, the American writer Rod Dreher spoke at Dublin’s Newman Church about his recent book, The Benedict Option.

Like its author, this book is rapidly growing in popularity and influence, with the New York Times columnist David Brooks describing it as the “most important religious book of the decade.”

A native of Louisiana, Dreher has worked for a host of leading publications in the United States. Though The Benedict Option is mostly inspired by recent developments in his own country, it also focuses on communities in Europe who are making special efforts to grow in faith together at a time when the light of Christianity is fading throughout the West.

Since the book came out, it has been published in nine languages, and has proved especially popular with European Catholics (in spite of the fact that its author is an Eastern Orthodox Christian).

In it, Dreher describes the need for committed Christians of various denominations to form communities which will allow them to lead Christian lives in the midst of a culture in which their beliefs are increasingly coming under attack.

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What is the Benedict Option?

And what is it that has attracted such attention?

always possible for every family or in every country.

“My idea is that the Benedict Option is not a rigid rule – it’s not like the Rule of Saint Benedict,” Dreher explained, while sitting in his hotel in Dublin. “[But] I lay out some principles there that I hope Christians, wherever they are, can take in and work out among themselves faithful to their local conditions, to build something resilient for themselves.” The best example which he says he has encountered is the Tipi Loschi, a Catholic community on the east coast of Italy.

In one sense, there is no Benedict Option. Dreher does not provide a specific set of guidelines which should be implemented by each Christian community seeking to live this lifestyle out.

Saint Benedict of Nursia, the founder of Western monasticism, provides the inspiration for Dreher today, just as he attracted the attention of sixth century Christians appalled by the degradations and desolation of a postimperial Rome.

Yet each country and culture has its own distinctive features and challenges which Christians have to navigate. As a result, no one model can be applied everywhere.

Homeschooling, for instance, forms part of the Benedict Option-approach for Dreher’s own family and for many likeminded parents in the US. But he recognises that this is not

The group was formed when some young men and women – all of them committed Catholics – began to come together regularly for social fellowship and religious formation. As couples wed and children were born, the community grew, and it now encompasses a school named after GK Chesterton: a school which follows a classical curriculum.

It is important to note that there is no geographic segregation

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here. Members of this community live in their own homes in the surrounding area, and work normal jobs. They haven’t left the secular world.

They are not monks or nuns and they do not aspire to be.

They do however make a special effort to engage in the sorts of activities which better educate themselves in their own faith and which foster a community spirit to help them to withstand the pressures to conform with a consumerist culture which differs so sharply from Christianity.

Dreher sharply disputes the notion that he is advocating that Christians should retreat from society or become insular in their outlook.

But in the midst of civilisational decline, he believes that it is imperative that Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox believers take it upon themselves to create communities which can survive and outlast the coming flood.

Look at the evidence around us, he argues in the book.

Europe has become almost completely secularised. In examining the data collected by the Notre Dame sociologist Professor Christian Smith, Dreher believes that America is not far behind.

Though the US is still relatively speaking a bastion of religious belief, all the indicators are that Americans are rapidly following the example of Europeans in abandoning Christianity.

Believers there are increasingly finding themselves more marginalised in public life, and the growth of the religiously unaffiliated – the nones – in the last few years has been remarkable.

Somewhere between a fifth and a third of Americans now fall into this category, and the number is higher among younger Americans. Liberal Protestant denominations have collapsed. Though the Catholic share of the population has held steady, it is only done so because

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of large-scale Hispanic immigration in recent decades: had they not come, the decline of American Catholicism would appear stark indeed.

“No honest person can look at the statistics that we have today for religious belief; the falling away of religious belief; the rank ignorance of so many people, especially the young, of what the Church actually teaches. It’s a catastrophe,” Dreher said.

Yet America still appears to be a Christian nation, at least compared to the continent of Europe and its empty churches.

The fact that American Christianity still appears outwardly vibrant has made Christians there less receptive to his somewhat gloomy outlook.

In Europe too, the author has noted a certain paradox. Older Christians are often more sceptical about his arguments, but younger European Christians – and especially younger Catholics – are embracing it.

“I believe that older Catholics, my age and older, we still want to believe that there’s room for us in the system, that if we just tweak something about the way we approach the Faith, then the world will love us, this postChristian world, the establishment will love us,” he said.

“These young Catholics in Europe; they don’t have that illusion at all, and they still want to be Catholic. If you want to be a good middle-class conformist, you can’t be authentically Catholic. They’d rather be Catholic first. They still want to have a successful career and all that, but they want to be Catholic first.”

What should these young Catholics do in a cultural environment which frowns upon them, and a political environment in which conservative Christians in Ireland and elsewhere feel more out of place than ever before?

Seeking an answer to this question, Dreher points to the example set by the late Václav

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Benda, the Catholic dissident in Communist Czechoslovakia.

Living in Prague in the 1970s, Benda knew that the Marxist regime was for the time being unalterable, but he did not despair or withdraw into isolation from those like him. He believed that Christians had to live some sort of public life and this involved setting up a “parallel polis” where Christians would come together and resist authoritarianism in the only ways they could.

“He talked about inventing something called the parallel polis, the parallel city, in which people who were shut out from official channels nevertheless informally got together, not necessarily to be political, but just to re-learn the art of community,” Dreher explained.

“He believed that just coming together to share a meal was in fact a political act because it countered the atomisation that the Communist authorities depended on for control.”

Nor was Benda’s approach limited to private acts of

resistance with his friends. The Benda’s family home was situated close to the headquarters of the secret police, and victims of interrogation often went there immediately after being released, confident that they would receive a warm welcome.

Benda (who was for imprisoned for four years for this resistance) and his wife devoted particular attention to the education of their children: reading to them for several hours every evening and discussing the topics which they had been exposed to in the state-run schools which worked so hard (and so successfully) to stamp out Christian belief.

The legacy of Communist rule in this region has been a lasting one: the Czech Republic is now one of the most atheistic countries in the world.

Remarkably though, when Dreher visited Benda’s widow and extended family in Prague recently, he found that all five of the Benda children and all of the grandchildren remain practicing Catholics. A faith which was

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strong enough to survive the ravages of Communism is also proving itself strong enough to survive the materialistic culture created by Western capitalism.

The pleasure which Dreher took in relaying this story of Catholic fortitude might strike some as being noteworthy, for he himself left the Catholic Church more than a decade ago. Yet his concern for – and love of – the Church remains obvious.

From a Methodist background originally, Rod converted to Catholicism in the early 1990s, and embraced his religion in its entirety, becoming a traditionalist and socially conservative Catholic.

journalist, he needed to seek the truth. As a Catholic, he wanted to help expose the sins of those who had disgraced their ministry. As a young father, he felt a great responsibility to protect children.

But nothing prepared him for what was to come, and like many an Irish Catholic, seeing what priests had done and what bishops had enabled, would eventually shatter his faith in the Church entirely.

A particular moment stands out.

In around 2002, several priests had come to Dreher to inform him that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had sexually abused seminarians.

In 2001, he embarked upon a lengthy journalistic assignment which continues to this day, and which has cost him dearly. He began to report on the scandal of clerical child sexual abuse.

Though a priest friend warned him that he would uncover unspeakable horror should he go down this road, Dreher felt a responsibility to do so. As a

When it appeared likely that Dreher would report on the allegations, strong pressure was exerted on the editor to kill the story. More importantly, the same pressure appeared to have been applied elsewhere and to the same ends: nobody would go on the record and expose the predator cardinal, who continued in office for another sixteen years.

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Seeing what was being done to protect the guilty at the expense of the innocent was traumatic for Dreher.

“Knowing that man was guilty and yet seeing him on national TV week in, week out, talking about how ‘Oh the scandal is so terrible, we’re going to get to the bottom of it, we’re going to clean the Church up,’ knowing he was a lying hypocrite, that was like acid on me as a faithful Catholic,” Dreher explained.

“Over the next few years, just watching what the bishops said in public and knowing what they were doing in private and had done in private…”

Eventually, he could take no more, and had to seek refuge elsewhere.

“Losing my Catholic faith was the most painful thing in my life, without question. And I buried my sister. I buried my father.

And neither of those cases were as painful as losing my faith, because I didn’t think it was possible, and it was so much a part of my identity.

“In his mercy, God preserved my faith in Jesus Christ, and I became an Eastern Orthodox Christian, not because I thought the Orthodox Church was free of sin – I don’t believe that any church is free of sin – but because as a Catholic, I knew that the Orthodox Church had real sacraments.”

His experience with the Catholic hierarchy has clearly left scars, but Dreher is not bitter. Though he is not optimistic that the sexual abuse crisis will be ended soon, his optimism about the long-term future of Catholicism has increased thanks to his experiences of encountering young Catholics – especially in Europe – who are not merely reading The Benedict Option but living it as well.

A special highlight since the book’s publication occurred in Rome not long ago, when Archbishop Georg Gänswein – the personal secretary of the Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI – gave a talk which Dreher attended.

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The confidante and aide of one of Dreher’s great heroes praised The Benedict Option as “prophetic” and encouraged Catholics to read it: unsurprising given the importance which the Pope Emeritus always placed on Christians acting as “creative minorities” within secular cultures, of which Ireland is just one.

Though his prognosis of the current situation in the West is a stark one, his outlook remains optimistic, and Dreher intends to continue to explore these issues in the coming years.

clear in his belief that the solutions prescribed within The Benedict Option provide hope for the Church, and for the universal Christian church as well.

“I’ve regained my love for the Catholic Church … not feeling responsible for the bishops anymore … [and] that’s why these Benedictine monks are at the centre of my book. And I want to use the rest of the time God gives me to build bridges between Catholics and Orthodox, and among Protestants too, because we’re really in this together.”

It is likely that many more Catholics will come to know his work as he does so, and he is

ABOUT THE AUTHOR James Bradshaw works in an international consulting firm, based in Dublin.

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Stephen Hawking: Great scientist, lousy theologian

by Bishop Robert Barron

S

tephen Hawking was a great theoretical physicist and cosmologist, perhaps the most important since Einstein. It is only right that his remains have been interred alongside those of Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. He was, furthermore, a person of tremendous courage and perseverance, accomplishing groundbreaking work despite a decades-long struggle with the debilitating effects of Lou Gehrig’s disease.

And by all accounts, he was a man of good humor with a rare gift for friendship. It is practically impossible not to admire him. But boy was he annoying when he talked about religion!

In the last year of his life, Hawking was putting the finishing touches on a book that is something of a follow-up to his mega-bestselling A Brief History of Time. Called Brief Answers to the Big Questions, it is a series of short essays on subjects including time travel, the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the physics that obtains within a black hole, and the colonization of space. But chapter one is entitled simply “Is There a God?” To the surprise of no one who has been paying attention to Hawking’s musings on the subject the last several years, his answer is no. Now, to anyone involved in the apologetics or evangelization game, this is, of

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course, depressing, since many people, especially the young, will say, “Well, there you have it: the smartest man in the world says that God does not exist.” The problem is that one can be exceptionally intelligent in one arena of thought and actually quite naïve in another. This, I’m afraid, is the case with Stephen Hawking, who, though uniquely well-versed in his chosen field, makes a number of blunders when he wanders into the domains of philosophy and religion.

Things get off to a very bad start in the opening line of the chapter: “Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.”

Though certain primitive forms of religion might be construed as attempts to answer what we would consider properly scientific questions, religion, in the developed sense of the term, is not asking and answering scientific questions poorly; rather, it is asking and answering qualitatively different kinds of questions. Hawking’s glib one-liner beautifully expresses the scientistic attitude,

by which I mean the arrogant tendency to reduce all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge. Following their method of empirical observation, hypothesis formation, and experimentation, the sciences can indeed tell us a great deal about a certain dimension of reality. But they cannot, for example, tell us a thing about what makes a work of art beautiful, what makes a free act good or evil, what constitutes a just political arrangement, what are the features of a being qua being – and indeed, why there is a universe of finite existence at all.

These are all philosophical and/ or religious matters, and when a pure scientist, employing the method proper to the sciences, enters into them, he does so awkwardly, ham-handedly.

Let me demonstrate this by drawing attention to Hawking’s treatment of the last issue I mentioned – namely, why there should be a universe at all.

Hawking opines that theoretical physics can confidently answer this question in such a way that the existence of God is rendered

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superfluous. Just as, at the quantum level, elementary particles pop into and out of existence regularly without a cause, so the singularity that produced the Big Bang simply came to be out of nothing, without a cause and without an explanation. The result, Hawking concludes, is that “the universe is the ultimate free lunch.” The first mistake – and armies of Hawking’s followers make it – is to equivocate on the meaning of the word “nothing.”

In the strict philosophical (or indeed religious) sense, “nothing” designates absolute nonbeing; but what Hawking and his disciples mean by the term is in fact a fecund field of energy from which realities come and to which they return.

The moment one speaks of “coming from” or “returning to,” one is not speaking of nothing! I actually laughed out loud at this part of Hawking’s analysis, which fairly gives away the game: “I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science.” Well, whatever you want to say about the laws of science, they’re not nothing!

Indeed, when the quantum theorists talk about particles popping into being spontaneously, they regularly invoke quantum constants and dynamics according to which such emergences occur. Again, say what you want about these law-like arrangements, they are not absolute nonbeing. And therefore, we are compelled to ask the question why should contingent states of affairs – matter, energy, the Big Bang, the laws of science themselves – exist at all? The classical response of religious philosophy is that no contingency can be explained satisfactorily by appealing endlessly to other contingencies. Therefore, some finally noncontingent reality, which grounds and actualizes the finite universe, must exist.

And this uncaused cause, this reality whose very nature is to be, is what serious religious people call “God.” None of Hawking’s speculations – least of all his musings about the putative “nothing” from which the universe arises – tells against this conviction.

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May I say by way of conclusion that I actually rather liked Stephen Hawking’s last book.

When he stayed within the confines of his areas of expertise, he was readable, funny, informative, and creative. But could I encourage readers please to take him with a substantial grain of salt when he speaks of the things of God?

ABOUT THE
 AUTHOR 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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A Call of Love: The Vocation to Marriage

by Fr Donncha Ó hAodha

The following reflection on marriage as vocation is offered to mark St Valentine’s Day. Why get married?

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love” (Jn 15:9). These words of our Lord from the Last Supper can help us consider three reasons why spouses embrace the sacrament of matrimony.

Firstly, they get married because God loves them.

Secondly, they get married because they love each other.

Thirdly, they get married so as to love God. For Christian couples, marriage is a call from love, in love and to love.

1. Because God loves them In the first place couples get married because God loves them. “Abide in my love”: These words of Christ imply that we are already in his love. Before marriage the man and woman are already very greatly loved by God, as indeed we all are. We know we are loved by God by the very fact of our existence.

“Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is

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willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary”.1 God does not just love us into existence. He sustains us throughout life and beyond. “I have loved you with an everlasting love”, he tells us through Jeremiah. “Therefore I have continued by faithfulness to you” (Jer 31:3). In their vocation to marriage, the Lord continues his faithful love for the spouses. He has called them into existence, each with their unique personal characteristics.

In marriage he calls them to become one, one with each other, and one with, in and through Him. “I have called you by your name, you are mine” (Is 43:1).

In calling a given couple to marriage, God once more shows his deep personal love for them,

1

and indicates their path to happiness, here and hereafter.

As Pope Francis teaches, our “Christian identity, as the baptismal embrace which the Father gave us when we were little ones, makes us desire, as prodigal children – and favourite children in Mary – yet another embrace, that of the merciful Father who awaits us in glory”.2 2. Because they love each other Secondly, men and women get married because they love each other. We have already said that the couple are called to marriage. Marriage is a real vocation, a call from God.3 On one level, we all have the same vocation, namely the calling to become saints, as the Holy Father has recently reminded

Benedict XVI, Mass for the Inauguration of the Pontificate, 24 April, 2005.

2

Francis, Apostolic Exhortation on the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World, Evangelii Gaudium, 24 November, 2013, 144.

3

Cf. St Josemaría Escrivá, “Marriage: a Christian Vocation”, Christ is Passing By, chapter 3.

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us.4 Life is a bit like a motorway, where we are all headed in the same direction (we hope!) towards eternal life.

That one motorway has different lanes however, as there are different personal callings within the one great call to holiness.

As a philosopher St John Paul II reflected deeply on human love.

In his great teaching on the Christian family, he states that “love is the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being”.5 But what is love? St John Paul often repeated that love is the sincere gift of self without reserve.6 Yes, we are all called, every single one of us, to make of our lives a sincere gift of ourselves.

In marriage the spouses are called to give themselves freely, sincerely and entirely to one

another, and to the children God may gift them with. In apostolic celibacy too, the person is called to freely and fully give him or herself to God and to others, and hence live out the same fundamental human vocation to love.

If the gift of self is at the heart of marriage it will show itself in the spouses’ willingness to welcome and bring up the children God may entrust to them. This openness to life on the parents’ part is the first training in self-giving for their children. Creating a culture of vocations is dependent on marriages rooted in the sincere gift of self. Children are better prepared for their own vocations, be it to marriage, apostolic celibacy, priesthood or consecrated life, if their first and primordial “school”,

4

Francis, Apostolic Exhortation on the Call to Holiness in Today’s World, Gaudete et Exsultate, 19 March 2018.

5

St John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation on the role of the Christian Family in the Modern World, Familiaris Consortio, 22 November 1981, 11.

6

Cf. Vatican Council II, Pastoral Constitution, Gaudium et Spes, 7 December 1965, 24.

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namely the family, is based on the logic of unselfish love.

“Human life is a gift received in order then to be given as a gift”.7 This is the great challenge and drama of every human life and the true path to holiness.

Self-surrender is the way of Jesus Christ, who loved us and gave himself up for us (cf. Gal 2:20). This is why it is most fitting that the Sacrament of Matrimony be celebrated within the sacrifice of the Mass, where the self-giving love of Jesus “to the end” (cf. Jn 13:1) is made really and truly present.

Paraphrasing St Josemaría Escrivá, a great pioneer in proclaiming that marriage is truly a vocation, we might say that the husband’s path to heaven bears the name of his wife, and the wife’s path to heaven bears that of her

husband. Christ calls all married couples to “remain in [his] love” by remaining faithful in their love for one another, “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health”.

In fact, “marriage based on exclusive and definitive love becomes the icon of the relationship between God and his people and vice versa. God’s way of loving becomes the measure of human love”.8 3. So as to love God Thirdly, couples get married so as to love God. In matrimony, God will makes the woman and man one in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit (cf. Eph 5:31).

This is the Sacrament of Marriage, and occurs when each party expresses his and her free consent. The spouses

7

St John Paul II, Encyclical on the value and inviolability of Human Life, Evangelium Vitae, 25 March, 1995, 92.

8

Benedict XVI, Encyclical on Christian Love, Deus Caritas Est, 25 December 2005, 11. Here Benedict XVI explains that monogamous marriage corresponds to the image of a monotheistic God.

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themselves are the ministers of this sacrament.9 What happens in the celebration of Christian marriage is no mere formality.

Nor is it just a public declaration. There is real divine action whereby the two become one and it is God who does this through their free consent.

In joining spouses to each other, Christ tells them: “Abide in my love”. The Lord commits himself to accompanying them on their journey through life, each and every day, and towards eternal happiness.

Every human life and every marriage has ups and downs, easy times and hard times.

However the grace of God, that spiritual strength that only God can give, will never be lacking.

We get our strength, all of us, from prayer, from having some time each day to listen to and speak intimately with the Lord.

We are healed of our sins and fortified for the challenges of life in a powerful way by the 9

Sacrament of Confession. Above all, Christian marriage and family life find their mainstay in the Blessed Eucharist, which makes present the ever-faithful love of Christ for his Church.

Mother of Fair Love It is very significant that the first miracle of Christ was worked at a wedding feast, and that this first miracle was prompted by Mary. In Scripture wine signifies joy and love. At the bidding of Our Lady joy and love are poured in abundance on the newlyweds of Cana. So too, Mary desires to bestow God’s gifts on all her married children.

The plentiful and rich wine of Cana also prefigures the superabundant outpouring of Christ’s blood through his lifegiving Passion. It is through the Sacraments, Matrimony included, that the springs of divine life flow from the heart of the crucified and risen Christ into the families of today.

Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church 1623.

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We do well to invoke Mary our Mother, asking her to look tenderly on each and every one of us. We ask her to help us to always cherish marriage as a proof of God’s love and as a path to holiness. We pray that she may be close to all married couples as they live out their vocation through their family life. May her intercession help and support them so that they may be happy and faithful. May married couples love each other more each day, and may they rejoice ultimately in heaven, in the fullness of eternal love, the marriage feast of the Lamb (Rev 19:6-9), to which we are all called.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rev. Donncha Ó hAodha is a priest of the Opus Dei Prelature, author of several CTS booklets and a regular contributor to Position Papers.

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BOOKS

Jacinta Prunty, The Monasteries, Magdalen Asylums and Reformatory Schools of Our Lady of Charity in Ireland. 1853-1973.

The Columba Press, Dublin, 2017

A fairer look at the Sisters of Mercy

by Tim O’Sullivan

O

enormous contribution that the sisters made.

I sometimes think of that plaque, and that self-sacrificing service, when I read criticisms of the historical legacy of Irish religious sisters that too often lack fairness or acknowledgement of the

The strongest criticism has been reserved for the orders that ran the “Magdalen asylums” – or Magdalen laundries, as they came to be known – but without any serious attempt being made to explain the reasons for the original establishment of such bodies. It is important to acknowledge the public disquiet about these institutions from our past as well as the suffering of many women who resided there; and, indeed, the historical abuses in residential childcare institutions that were extensively documented in the Ryan Report.

n a visit once to the beautiful church of St Teresa in Dublin’s Clarendon Street, my eyes were drawn to a plaque there that honours the first thirteen Sisters of Mercy who died in the mid nineteenth century and are buried in the crypt. Many died young in the service of the poor of Dublin during very tough times when cholera was among the many challenges the sisters faced.

29

In his Chairperson’s introduction to the 2013 report on the Magdalen laundries, Senator Martin McAleese stated that many of the women who met with his Committee experienced the Laundries as “lonely and frightening places” (Par. 3) or found themselves quite alone in what was, by today’s standards, a harsh and physically demanding work environment. He added that “the psychological impact on these girls was undoubtedly traumatic and lasting” (Par. 10).

In his nuanced report, McAleese also pointed out, however, that the majority of women who entered these institutions spent less than one year there and that the atmosphere in the Laundries “softened” in the period after Vatican Two (Par. 18).

A gap in public discussion relates to how the sisters themselves saw their aims and their work. This fair-minded history of one of the orders involved – The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity or OLC – thus meets a real need. Its author, Dr Jacinta Prunty, is head of the

Department of History at Maynooth University.

The decades-long or even centuries-long apostolate of a religious order cannot be reduced to a few soundbites.

Painstaking historical research is needed for proper understanding of an order’s contribution over time. Prunty’s important book draws on extensive documentary research and covers the period from 1853, when the OLC congregation arrived in Ireland, to 1973, or the post Vatican Two era.

While the McAleese report rightly warned against any labelling of Magdalen Laundry former residents as exprostitutes, the context for the foundation of the OLC congregation in France nevertheless was the huge challenge of prostitution, which led to many initiatives to reach out to women caught up in, or at risk of being drawn into, prostitution.

In nineteenth century Dublin, prostitution was rife in the “Monto” district of the city – an

30

area including what is now Sean McDermott Street, where the OLC sisters arrived in the 1880s.

The area was in close proximity to a railway station, the port and a British army barracks.

Grinding poverty and homelessness were major contributory causes of prostitution. While terms like “Magdalen asylums” have a negative resonance today, the original term used by the sisters in France, where the OLC community started, was “refuge,” a term with positive connotations, implying safety, respite and care for vulnerable women. “Asylum”, the term more commonly used in Britain and Ireland, also originally implied safety and shelter.

As well as being a respected historian, Jacinta Prunty is also a Holy Faith sister and thus possesses a deeper understanding of the religious inspiration of the sisters than many current commentators.

It is useful to recall, as Prunty does in this book, that the original vision of the OLC community, founded by St John

Eudes in France in the seventeenth century, was that the sisters and women residents should share, as far as possible, a monastic rule of life.

Prostitutes were often social outcasts so that original vision responded to a real need and saw the OLC monastery as “a refuge for repentant women under the care of a religious order created expressly for the purpose, the whole enterprise to be driven by a spirituality that centred on the compassionate heart of Jesus” (p. 59).

Like the McAleese committee, which she assisted, Prunty makes the point that the large majority of women stayed shortterm in the OLC services, but she also notes that there was a steady increment of a small number of more long-term residents. Women did not live in the laundries but in separate residences and the laundries were necessary to pay for a service that received little State or private funding.

Dr Prunty’s book is a valuable contribution to knowledge about the OLC services but also

31

highlights information deficiencies relating to those services. For example, in the High Park institution in Drumcondra, nothing is known of the background story of 89% of the women admitted between 1922 and 1971 (p.42) – partly because the sisters had a “no questions asked” policy about the background of women who sought shelter with them.

By the mid-twentieth century, the penitential, institutional vision of the OLC congregation had become very out-dated. The lack of wages had not seemed problematic previously for women who were being provided with bed and board but was seen as totally unacceptable by the 1960s. There was a great need to develop new approaches and to prepare women better, notably through good vocational training, for life afterwards.

Those accustomed to presentations of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid as the pantomime villain of Ireland’s Catholic past may be surprised to read here that, in this area, he was a determined moderniser,

who pushed the sisters strongly to adapt their services, for example, through hostel provision, better governance arrangements and improved education for the sisters themselves in social work, psychology and childcare. The sisters had an admirable tradition of decentralised governance, but this tradition did not facilitate the introduction of reform across the congregation.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there were nevertheless positive reform initiatives, such as the development of hostels and of greater links with the local community. Indeed, an OLC reformatory school for girls, St Anne’s in Kilmacud, was the subject of a not uncritical but generally positive report in 1966 by a well-known feminist journalist, Mary Maher, at a time when her paper, the Irish Times, was publishing strong critiques of institutional childcare in Ireland in which the religious orders were deeply involved.

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In my own research on the religious orders in healthcare, I was much impressed by their pioneering contributions in areas as diverse as – to give just a few examples – the hospice movement, acute hospital investment, spinal injuries treatment and rehabilitation, early intervention in intellectual disability services, and the reach-out today to refugees, drug addicts and prostitutes. In the health and social services generally, the religious orders arguably gave somewhat limited priority to documenting their own endeavours, still less to blowing their own trumpets.

Their focus was on living their vocation and on service delivery.

Today, the need for published reflection on service provision, and for historical research like that of Dr Prunty, is widely recognised, even if responding to those in need will always take priority over theorising about the services provided.

and at a general readership. It deserves a large audience. Books like this may not have an immediate impact during a period when anti-Catholic emotions are very powerful in Ireland. One hopes, however, that they will have a stronger influence over time when the tides of history change and the need for a fair re-balancing of the historical record is better appreciated.

This book is aimed at the OLC sisters and at the Good Shepherd sisters with whom they re-united in 2014, at those with a policy interest in this area

Dr 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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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FILMS

Towards a sexual counter-revolution

by Carolyn Moynihan

Narrator, Alana Newman

P

roducing a film that argues for the moral and practical superiority of natural family planning over modern contraceptive technology when practically “everyone” takes the latter approach for granted must be either an act of madness or an act of faith. “Sexual Revolution: 50 Years Since Humanae Vitae”, is both.

But it is more: the documentary, inspired by the prophetic encyclical of Pope St Paul VI, is also a testament to reason and to truth; philosophical reason, scientific truth.

The film tilts towards a Catholic audience (funding issues alone made this necessary) and it’s

Catholics who are in most need of hearing its message. As popular writer Peter Kreeft says at the beginning, there is no Catholic teaching more “despised, hated and disobeyed” – by Catholics themselves – than that contained in Humanae Vitae.

Yet the number of true believers is not small and their intellectual leaders are impressive.

Witnesses assembled by the film’s director Daniel diSilva include some of the biggest Catholic names in American scholarship: Robert P. George, Janet Smith, Helen Alvare, Brad Wilcox, Mary Eberstadt….

Theological writers and apologists such as Dr Kreeft and

34

Chris West appear in a line-up that includes Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia and Archbishop Anthony Fisher O.P. of Sydney.

of the reproductive anarchy unleashed by the Pill: Anonymous Us. For all the weight of authority in its cast, however, the project is up against a massive wall of prejudice.

Not least in this gallery are the scientists dead or alive, who gave a large part of their lives to setting natural family planning on a sophisticated, scientific footing: Australian neuroscientist John Billings and his paediatrician wife Evelyn; New Zealand chemist, James Brown; Swedish physicist and gynaecologist Eric Oderblad….

Mother Teresa, whose nuns introduced NFP to India, makes an appearance.

And the narrator is a young woman who knows one of the downstream effects of the Pill from personal experience: Alana Newman, long-haired, strumming a guitar and singing of love, evokes the era of Woodstock and “free love” even as she speaks about the wound of not knowing her father, not even who he is. The child of an anonymous donor, she created an organisation for such victims

The vast majority of people cannot see anything wrong with the Pill and other modern forms of contraception. Though some have practical problems with it, moral and philosophical objections don’t wash with the general run of humanity. How could you question the value of something that has shaped society as we know it, liberating women from constant childbearing, allowing them to use their brains and earn their own money, slowing population growth and thus protecting the planet we live on?

As the various experts in the film demonstrate, however, these grand claims wilfully ignore the damage that contraception, with its promise of “free” and “no consequences” sex, has done to individuals and society: the explosion of single motherhood

35

and fatherless children; the decline of marriage, delayed parenthood, disease, infertility and the boost it has given to embryo experimentation, anonymous donor dads and poor women exploited as surrogate mothers; and, of course, countless millions of abortions of “unwanted pregnancies” – to name only the most obvious harms.

daily for years on end rather than taking control of their own bodies, though the latter was always supposed to be the goal of “women’s liberation”.

The decades-long effort to make out that NFP is unscientific and very unreliable – even to persistence in referring to it as the “rhythm method”, which was based solely on charting the menstrual cycle – hides the truth of the painstaking research that has gone into identifying changes in cervical mucus as the key indicator of ovulation and the monthly fertility window.

Women themselves have been kept in ignorance about the physical risks of hormonal contraception: its contribution to breast and cervical cancer, blood clots and strokes, and harm to the reproductive organs themselves, such as premature ageing of the cervix – a cause of infertility.

Indeed, there is a general unwillingness to teach women to understand their reproductive system and thus give them the choice to work with its natural symptoms and rhythms to achieve, with spouses or partners, their own family goals.

Public and private interests alike would prefer to see healthy women medicating themselves

(The focus in this film is squarely on Billings Ovulation Method of NFP, which relies on mucus symptoms only. Some NFP organisations insist on the necessity of charting temperature as well.)

The history of this research is probably the most important aspect of the film for younger adults, most of whom will have no idea that there were two paths to choose between back in the 1960s. No idea of the eugenic inspiration for mass

36

contraception (ask Black America), of its unethical testing, and the way it prepared the ground for population control programmes in China, India and elsewhere, involving massive abuse of human rights.

maintaining our marriages?

Demonstrably not.”

At the close of the film he looks forward to a natural family planning counter-revolution that will sustain what John Paul II called “a civilisation of life” and love, and sees forces in Western culture at the moment that “point exactly in that direction.”

And no idea, either, of how to read their own bodies and respond with appreciation and respect. This is particularly hard for a generation who have learned that the body is something you can change to suit your own idea of sex and sexuality. But the seeds of this idea were already present sixty years ago when the Pill told us that the body is just something to use, not something with its own laws, which we disregard at the risk of disease and unhappiness.

I think he is right. After all, everyone wants to be healthy and happy – two things that are eluding many of us today.

For more information about this film: sexualrevolutionmovie.com

Commercially, it was a “very clever idea to get every woman on earth to take a pill [nearly] every day of her fertile life,” says Archbishop Fisher in the film.

“Now we know how this technology messes up the body and relationships.” And again, “Are we any happier? Better at

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet. This article first appeared on www.mercatornet.com and is reprinted with the kind permission of the Editor.

FILMS

The Upside

by Kurt Jensen

T

ake the “white savior” formula of 2009’s The Blind Side, in which a Caucasian of considerable means changes the life of an impoverished AfricanAmerican, mix in a little of Driving Miss Daisy from 1989, and you have The Upside (STX).

Director Neil Burger and screenwriter Jon Hartmere have remade a popular 2011 French film Les Intouchables, itself taken from Philippe Pozzo di Borgo’s 2001 book, Le Second Souffle (The Second Wind), based on the real relationship between a disabled man and his caregiver.

Like its predecessor, it takes hard swerves between comedy

and drama, and also relies on the substantial, unflagging charisma of the two leads. Kevin Hart is Dell, a recent parolee for various crimes who desperately needs employment to avoid returning to prison, and Bryan Cranston is Phillip, an uberwealthy investment guru in a Park Avenue penthouse who is a quadriplegic as the result of a hang-gliding mishap and also a lonely widower.

Dell, of course, has no qualifications as a caregiver, and thinks he’s interviewing to be a janitor. Phillip, who hates being controlled, somehow finds Dell’s insouciance and flat-out ignorance refreshing. So off we go on an adventure of

38

“connection,” with Phillip’s suspicious and genuinely caring executive, Yvonne (Nicole Kidman), hovering in the background.

and late-night fast-food binges, which are mostly an excuse to drive one of Philip’s luxury cars.

Dell’s other motivation for newfound responsibility involves taking care of his estranged exwife, Latrice (Aja Naomi King), and their son, Anthony (Jahi Di’Allo Winston), who are living in crumbling public housing.

And his old thieving habits, we see, are difficult to break at first.

There’s considerable learning ahead. Dell picks up quickly on Phillip’s love of opera and makes the connection to the singing of Aretha Franklin. In turn, he introduces Philip to marijuana

How many laughs can be extracted from Dell’s realization of what’s involved in changing a catheter? Let’s just say there’s an entire stand-up routine involved.

Dell also later tries to help Phillip reconnect with romance.

The larger point the filmmakers are trying to convey is that these two actors are having a very good time, Cranston with his dry observations and Hart performing his specialty of manic squeaky-voiced fear. So why can't we all just enjoy the

39

ride? Well, because first of all, old stereotypes of race and class still have the power to hurt, and hurt deeply. Second, there’s a warped outlook here in which money solves all anxiety – and, in large quantities, even becomes morality itself.

Service classification is A-III – adults. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is PG-13 – parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

Such relationships often have the ability to inspire. But this one has strong echoes of the old plantation days in which the highest compliment given to a servant was, “We treated him like he was family!”

The film contains benignly viewed marijuana use, sexual humor and references and fleeting rough and crude language. The Catholic News

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kurt Jensen is a guest reviewer for Catholic News Service.

Copyright (c) 2019, Catholic News Service.

Reprinted with permission from CNS

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LEARN TO COMMUNICATE IN YOUR MARRIAGE Next Programmes: 8-10 February 2019 & 4-6 October 2019

CATHOLIC CHAPEL EXPANSION PROJECT Lenana School, Nairobi, Kenya Lenana School is a public school at the outskirts of Nairobi. We are expanding our school oratory to accommodate the 350 students who come to Sunday Mass. We still need to build a gallery to cater for 120 more students. This will cost €30,000.

The chapel before Phase 1 of our project

If you can help, please contact Rev. Francis Rimbau francisrimbau@gmail.com Euro Bank account: 0241081432003 SBM BANK KENYA LTD Standard Chartered Bank Frankfurt.

Germany SWIFT CODE: SCBLDEFX IBAN: DE31500700100954257200 The chapel after completion of Phase 1