Position Papers – February 2020

February 2020 January 2020 Issue 536 €3·Issue £2.50·534 $4

€3 · £2.50 · $4

Beginning the New Year with a Smile The collapse REV. DONNCHA Ó HAODHA of Catholic Ireland A part of

JAMES BRADSHAW Ireland’s heritage PAT HANRATTY A sooner F I L Mrather RE V I E W : The Two thanPopes later JAMES BRADSHAW conversion BISHOP CULLINAN FILM REVIEW:

1917

BISHOP BARRON

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CONTENT

A REVIEW OF CATHOLIC AFFAIRS

Editorial 2

by Fr Gavan Jennings

In Passing: Reflections on our time? 8

by Michael Kirke

The collapse of Catholic Ireland 13

by James Bradshaw

A sooner rather than later conversion 19

by Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan

“Thank Him For Everything, Because 23 Everything Is Good”

by Rev. Carlos Ayxelà

St Valentine’s Day: It’s all about the Gift 30

by Rev. Donncha Ó hAodha

Ash Wednesday and the journey of Lent 34

by Pope Benedict XVI

Books: The Victim Cult 35

by Barbara Kay

Films: 1917 and remembering who we are 38 Editor:

Assistant editors:

Rev. Gavan Jennings

by Bishop Robert Barron

Michael Kirke, Pat Hanratty, Brenda McGann

Subscription manager: Liam Ó hAlmhain Secretary:

Design:

Dick Kearns

Dimo Publishers (Naas, Co. Kildare)

The editor, Position Papers, P.O. Box 4948, Rathmines, Dublin 6 Email: editor@positionpapers.ie Website: www.positionpapers.ie Tel: + 353 86065 2313 For new or renewed subscriptions contact: liamoha@gmail.com

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Editorial

n this editorial I would like to offer some personal reflections on the planned, and cancelled, visit of Jason Evert to Ireland last month.

For those not familiar with the controversy generated by the planned visit, Jason Evert is a well-known American public speaker on the virtue of chastity and is also the founder of the Chastity Project. He was due to speak in Dublin: in two secondary schools, a university (guest of the Catholic Newman Society) and in a Catholic parish.

Speaking appearances were also booked in Waterford. These were to take place in mid January and the theme of his talks was to be on the virtue of chastity. The theme of his tour was billed as: “It Starts With the Heart�, and topics likely to be covered included friendships, dating as a Catholic, being truly free to love, the meaning of sex, Christian marriage, and more. No explicit mention was made of homosexual attractions. The talks were promoted on Catholic websites.

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Several days before he was due to arrive serious objections to these speaking engagements appeared in several media outlets, and eventually in the national media, finding an echo also in media abroad.

The core of the objections centred on the fact that Evert, his book Pure Manhood, wrote that “the homosexual act is disordered”. Several groups had grave reservations about the planned talks, and expressed the fear that the presence of Evert at these speaking venues could be significantly detrimental to the mental wellbeing of younger people in attendance, especially those who experience homosexual attractions or who were unsure of their sexuality, and especially so if Evert were making claims that were not objectively true.

I have to admit that I found these claims unsettling: was it the case that Jason Evert was grossly insensitive in his treatment of homosexuality as these claims suggested? It brought to my mind Steven L Anderson, the Arizona based Baptist pastor who was refused entry to Ireland in May last year due to the virulence of his preaching against homosexuals. I looked him up at the time and what I saw of his material was enough to convince me that Ireland could certainly do without his presence here. Was Jason Evert more of the same. I doubted it, and my doubts were confirmed by a quick search for “Jason Evert homosexuality” on YouTube. The first item up was a short video entitled “Homosexuality, Gay Marriage, and Holiness”. I was very pleasantly surprised by what I heard him saying in the video: there was nothing even remotely insensitive in his treatment of the matter; on the contrary, the way he dealt with homosexual attraction was striking for its tact and sensitivity. In fact the video begins with a rotund rejection of the likes of Steven L. Anderson, those as Evert said, who parade around with “God hates gays” placards: “What God hates are your placards”, he says. Maybe his longer video: “Homosexuality, Gay Marriage, and Holiness” would turn up something less sensitive? But no – just more of the same tact and sensitivity. On then to his Chastity Project website (www.chastity.com) and to the section dealing with homosexuality. What I was looking for in particular was the use of the word “disorder” in connection with homosexuality. All I managed to turn up was this: “Theologians explain that we all have weakened wills, darkened intellects, and disordered desires – all of us. Same-sex attraction is only one manifestation of the universal human condition.”

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If indeed Evert had spoken of homosexuality in a hateful, demeaning and abusive manner in his videos or on the Chastity Project website, I think that there would have be grounds for the censorship of his talks, but this is patently not the case. And of course it takes only a few minutes to verify that his videos and website treats homosexuality with the utmost delicacy. But what about his claim, in his book Pure Manhood, that “the homosexual act is disordered”? I bought the Kindle version of the book and looked up what he says on the matter.

The term appears once, in a section entitled: “What if you have homosexual attractions?” The first thing he says in the section is quite reassuring: “Few people, including myself, can grasp the challenges that individuals with same-sex attractions face on a daily basis.” A little later in that section he writes: “Much like contraceptive sex between heterosexuals, the homosexual act is a dis-order of God’s purpose for sex: babies and bonding.”

Clearly Evert is using the term “disorder” in the same way as it is used in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. There acts are described as “intrinsically disordered” (CCC2357) and the homosexual inclination itself is called “objectively disordered” (CCC2358). (The word used in the original Latin is “inordinatus”.) Note that the Catechism only ever applies the term “disordered” to acts and inclinations, never to persons themselves. It is a technical rather than pejorative term, and is used to mean an act or desire whose connection to God as its final goal is either completely or partially absent. The term appears thirty-eight times in the Catechism, two of which are in connection with homosexual acts and desires. So clearly homosexuality has not been singled out in the Catechism for special treatment as a unique “disorder”; in the same chapter lust is called a “disordered desire” (CCC2351); it is asserted “that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action” (CCC2352); and that divorce “introduces disorder into the family and into society”. There is clearly no intention to insult or demean those who experience homosexual attractions, or engage in homosexual acts. It is simply being stated, very much in keeping with the Church’s millennial teaching on matters sexual, that any voluntary act which seeks sexual pleasures without the intrinsic connection of sex to procreation is not ordered correctly, ie, it is “disordered”.

And yet even then the Chastity Project website appears to restricts its 4

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quotes from the Catechism to more benign statement that: “Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.”

Nevertheless, despite the manifestly sensitive and balanced way in which Evert presents the Catholic view of sexuality, a storm had been generated in what was a knee-jerk reaction. Even though Evert clearly opposes the likes of Steven L Anderson, the calls for his talks to be banned were successful in that several of Evert’s Dublin and Waterford venues felt obliged to withdraw their invitations. Clearly each institution had to make a prudent decision in the light of the intensely negative publicity which had been generated in the media – they had not generated the furore, but had to respond to it in a manner they felt was appropriate. What was deeply unsettling was not their response to the pressure, but the manner in which the intense pressure had been generated in the media and on social media. As it so happened Jason Evert took ill (genuinely, not tactically, as it turned out) and none of the planned events were able to take place.

More and more it became clear to me that what had happened was grossly unjust, to Jason Evert in the first place, and then to all those who wished to hear him speak. Perhaps those who called for his talks to be banned had simply taken on good faith what was reported to them regarding the content of Evert’s material. And yet it really only takes a few minutes to see that Evert is evidently no Anderson. If this simple measure been taken an injustice would have been averted.

Catholic venues and audiences: three Catholic secondary schools, a Catholic university club and a Catholic parish ended up being in effect censored. This violation of a most fundamental human right should not leave Catholics (or indeed any citizens) unperturbed. It is also disturbing that one of the institutions concerned was University College Dublin. While it is unclear precisely how Evert’s planned appearance came to be cancelled there, it is especially to be feared that an institution such as a university should be subject to covert censorship. If anything a university has to be a locus for greater freedom of investigation and expression than in the wider society.

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Jason Evert himself later commented on this: “The idea that [university staff] have to shelter a 21-year-old from opinions other than his own kind of sounds like [they] don’t have much confidence in their critical thinking abilities.”

The Irish Constitution guarantees that: “Freedom of conscience and the free profession and practice of religion are, subject to public order and morality, guaranteed to every citizen” (Article 44, 2, 1). It would be risible to suggest that public order or morality were even remotely threatened by the presence of a benign speaker who would simply defend the view – in private venues moreover – that unchaste acts are not good for relationships?

What are Catholics to do about the covert (and not so covert) interference with their constitutionally guaranteed freedom to believe, practice and profess their faith? I think in the first place to treasure this freedom, and be zealous in its defence. In the words of the American lawyer Louis Brandeis: Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties: and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary…. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; … that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty and that this should be a fundamental principle of American government (Whitney v. California, 1927).

His line that the “greatest menace to freedom is an inert people” seems unfortunately applicable in the case of the planned Jason Evert visit.

It is remarkable to see how a small number of people, making perhaps sincerely held but also readily falsifiable claims, were so successful in preventing a speaker from appearing at Catholic venues. I suspect that many who have no sympathy for Catholic teaching on human sexuality would nevertheless be disturbed to see a fundamental right such as free-speech being so easily violated.

This is of particular importance now given the current review by the 6

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Irish Department of Justice and Equality of our existing hate speech legislation – a review which given the example of the treatment by the media of the planned Jason Evert events does not bode well for Catholics in this State. As David Thunder put it in an opinion piece in the Irish Times: What one person views as legitimate criticism of group behaviour, another will perceive as an intervention “intended or likely to stir up hatred” against the group in question (to use the language of the 1989 Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act).

For example, if someone publicly satirises the beliefs of Catholics as naive or childish, is that person engaging in legitimate social critique or stirring up hatred against Catholics? When someone queries the legitimacy of sex-change operations for children, is that person defending children’s rights or inciting hatred against transgender persons? Shouldn’t these sorts of thorny question be thrashed out politically rather than settled in a court of law? (IT, Dec.12, 2019) It is contrary to the dignity of any group of citizens to look on with inertia while their fundamental civic rights are violated in practice, or undermined in law. It might be timely to remember the sobering warning in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that societies “without the light the Gospel sheds on God and man … easily become totalitarian” (CCC2257). Catholics should not allow themselves to be cowed. At the same time, even when experiencing disturbing injustices – as happened last month – we should never lose our conviction that justice always finally conquers, even in the short term. Certainly it gave me great pleasure to learn that traffic to Jason Evert’s website had increased website by 150 per cent following the controversy. There’s a lesson there.

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In Passing: Reflections on our time?

by Michael Kirke

T

here is no doubt but that something very strange has happened to Western society. When, last summer, I found myself reading these words from Thierry Frémaux, the chairman of Cannes Film Festival an alarm bells rang. He told a press conference, “Today it is very difficult to reward or honour or recompense anyone because the political police then falls on you.” The Oscars again this year will not have a formal presenter.

Presentation has become too dangerous.

Add to that the life-shattering punishment meted out to Israel Folau on the other side of the world for a thought expressed on social media. Then, in another hemisphere, medical personnel, by a judgment of a Canadian court of appeals, are to have their professional careers destroyed if they will not cooperate in the killing of

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their patients. Those examples don’t even cover the tip of the iceberg of injustice being meted out in so-called civilised society today in the name of something they call equality. Agreeing to disagree with someone is no longer an option.

People who disagree with you now feel compelled to punish you.

Libertarian Brendan O’Neill, introducing a Spiked.dot.com post on the subject, at the time last year when the axe fell on poor Israel Folau’s neck, wrote of the case, So we’re back to persecuting people for their religious beliefs.

That’s the take-home message of the scandalous sacking of Israel Folau. He’s been dumped by Rugby Australia for sharing a meme on social media that said ‘hell awaits’ gay people (and also drunks, thieves, adulterers and atheists). But Folau is a devout Christian and this is a Christian belief. It is part of Christianity

A REVIEW OF CATHOLIC AFFAIRS

to believe in hell and to believe that certain sexual and social ‘deviants’ will go there. Folau has been punished for his religious convictions. And the people cheering his sacking are supporting this chilling, premodern form of punishment.

This case speaks to the new intolerance, where anyone who thinks differently to the mainstream risks being cast out.

Israel Folau – rugby player and thought criminal.

But how can they be resisted?

Forget the political class. It is too prone to corruption of one kind or another, in thrall to or captive by the ayatollahs of ever more lunatic political correctness. Will writers and artists come to our rescue as those Russians did in the last century? The evil of National Socialism – in both its Teutonic and Latin manifestation – self-destructed in the space of little more than ten years. Admittedly there was the help of a significant military push. But the evils flowing from hard Marxist This was the kind of totalitarian ideology took a good deal longer to world which we thought we had vanquish (if vanquished they are). largely left behind us with fall of the They were essentially undermined Berlin Wall and the end of Soviet by a combination of religious faith Communism. Clearly, we were and the creative imagination of a wrong. Soft cultural Marxism has handful of great writers. brought us to a place which is worse than the stark Soviet variety ever The great Russian writers and was – worse because it insidiously artists of the nineteenth and masquerades under the cloak of a twentieth centuries were never benign progressivism, and the whole shy about talking about the Devil. world seems to be swallowing it.

Solzhenitsyn took on the soviets and identified their greatest folly It seems as if the battles for and vice as the denial of the spiritual humanity fought by the Russian in man. He later warned us in the and Eastern European dissidents West that we were descending into like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav our own hell by putting man at the Havel and others have to be fought centre of all things and denying the all over again if we are to have any existence of God. He had no doubt hope of restoring our freedom, who the driving force behind this our common sense and common was. decency.

One of Russia and the world’s greatest film auters, 9

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Sergei Eisenstein, in Ivan the Terrible, personified the eponymous subject as Satan. No one said it out loud, but everyone suspected who the real personification of Satan was - Stalin. The film was heavily censored to hide as much of this as they could from the great man himself.

evokes Satan presiding over some demonic orgy.

t was much more explicit and, in some ways, more devastating in making the Devil and his acolytes the central protagonists in his extraordinarily funny but utterly serious and complex satirical fable, The Master and Margarita.

As noted in Russian Literature This was completed in 1940 but not and its Demons (ed. Pamela published until 1965 – and only Davidson, Berghahn Books, New then in a heavily censored version.

York / Oxford), Stalin’s terror of the 1930s, evokes the book of Writers and artists like Bulgakov, Revelation, in which Satan takes and composers like Shostakovich on the form of a “great red dragon” and Prokofiev suffered rejection (Rev.12:3). In Eisenstein’s film, but persevered within the repressive the play in the cathedral in which system. Bulgakov, even with his Shadrach, Medrach, and Abednego White Russian background and are symbolically cast into the fiery hostility to atheism, kicked against it furnace draws a parallel between the and still survived. He was constantly cruelty of Ivan (or Stalin) and the evil refused permission to go abroad and Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar. spent time being interrogated in the In the banquet scene, with its wild infamous Lubyanka. dance of the oprichniki (Ivan’s secret The Master and Margarita, his police) and its vivid use of black masterpiece, is a slap in the face and red, the representation of Ivan of the intolerant atheism which Mikhail Bulgakov

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poisoned Soviet Russia. By 1922 the Orthodox Church was under direct attack and priests were rounded up.

Four were condemned to be shot (Bulgakov’s own father was a priest and theologian). Throughout the 1920s the debunking of Christianity was a constant objective. Ruthless punishment was inflicted on the authors whose books questioned this and they found themselves abroad owing to deportation, emigration, or defection. Their books had to be removed from public libraries and shredded.

and Woland, there is no question but that the Soviet censors read the novel in this way. In one passage, the shape changing cat, Begemot, speaks of the grandeur of Satan’s ball, but, after being contradicted

by Woland, immediately hastens to agree obsequiously with his master: “Of course, messire. If you think it wasn’t very grand, I immediately find myself agreeing with you.” That was much too close to the bone.

And what does that remind us of?

The grovelling apologies of many of those who find themselves Bulgakov’s portrait of the Devil, reprimanded and punished by our Woland, is daringly suggestive of thought police, which we now read Stalin. Both were mysterious, aloof, almost on a daily basis. and rarely seen. Like Woland, Stalin also destroyed what sought to expose So where are they, the writers, him. Both demanded subservience creative artists, who will expose this from their followers. Woland and evil among us? They have yet to his acolytes, however, also attack the stick their heads above the parapets agents of the system. We are inclined – and God help them when they to cheer them on. Throughout the do. The great Russians who exposed novel they mock and play games, Satan suffered for what they did, sometimes hilariously funny, with some physically as well as mentally. the apparatchiks who run the system Perhaps something written almost and who pretend not to believe in 2000 years ago is a starting point?

Woland’s existence – despite all the And when they came to the crowd, evidence he gives them. In their a man came up to him and folly they try to explain the tricks kneeling before him said, “Lord, he plays on them as some form of have mercy on my son, for he is an hypnotism or scientific sleight of epileptic and he suffers terribly; for hand. often he falls into the fire, and often into the water. And I brought him Whether or not Bulgakov intended to your disciples, and they could not to draw a parallel between Stalin 11

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heal him.” And Jesus answered, “O faithless and perverse generation, how long am I to be with you?

How long am I to bear with you?

Bring him here to me.” And Jesus rebuked him, and the demon came out of him, and the boy was cured instantly. Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, “Why could we not cast it out?” He said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you. But this kind never comes out except by prayer and fasting.” (Mathew 17.

14-20).

of bringing peace to the world, they bring confusion, injustice and misery. By denying and denigrating the principle of religion and the need for “prayer and fasting”, they deprive themselves of the possibility of moving the mountains they dream of moving, and in doing so they simply put the possibility of achieving the impossible beyond their reach.

The new progressivist ideologies of our time are rooted in a belief that men and women should be good and just. But they build on sand their dreams of how this might be. They do so because they deny and therefore refuse to acknowledge the existence of the source of all goodness, truth and justice and therefore suffer the fate of all attempted utopias. Instead ...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 collapse of Catholic Ireland

by James Bradshaw

S

hortly before Christmas, The Economist, the world’s leading news magazine, published an article titled “The liberalisation of Ireland,” with the subheading “How Ireland stopped being one of the most devout, socially conservative places in Europe.”

This has been a familiar discussion both at home and abroad, particularly after the landslide vote to legalise abortion in 2018.

The Economist’s piece provides a brief overview of recent social milestones, followed by a description of physical and sexual abuse by clergy or within Churchrun institutions. Although some conservative voices are quoted, the article presents a narrative which is endemic in modern Ireland: the theocracy of yesteryear has been destroyed, and Ireland has been born anew.

the leading activists is quoted as saying. At a time when growing nationalism and populism is threatening the worldview of cosmopolitan Economist readers, Ireland has suddenly developed into a poster child for liberal values. The country’s politicians are very eager to assert this newfound identity at home and on the international stage.

But this article does not provide a thorough enough explanation of how “The liberalisation of Ireland” occurred, or what it means for Ireland’s present or future.

The world turned upside down

There is one thing which the article notes that cannot be disputed. Over the last few decades, the position of the Catholic Church in Ireland has changed beyond recognition.

Admittedly, almost 80 percent of the population still identify “In an angrier world Ireland has as Catholic, and with about one a lot to teach people,” one of in three Irish people saying they 13

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attend weekly church services, we remain one of the most churchgoing nations in Europe. Yet the residual influence of Catholicism in Irish life does not mask the collapse which has occurred, and which will likely accelerate.

and stripping legal protection from the unborn, liberal campaigners are now focusing on efforts to force Catholic schools and schoolteachers to violate their ethos in areas such as sex education, or better yet, attempts to nationalise and secularise Catholic schools. The Church attendance has fallen predominant feeling of the average dramatically in recent decades. believing Catholic in Ireland is Church congregations are larger often one of wearied acceptance. in Ireland, but they are also greyer than elsewhere, and there is a The battle is over, and it is lost. more pronounced generational divide. As older people die off, Catholicism by convention, not Mass attendance rates in Ireland conviction (already as low as 2 percent in How did this happen so some Dublin parishes) will soon quickly? The Economist puts resemble those in even more secular forward several explanations, none countries. of which is entirely convincing.

Vocations to the priesthood The writer begins with a contrast plummeted decades ago and are between an octogenarian practising not recovering. A sign of the Catholic Agnes, and her 27-yearproblem can be seen in recent old Síona Cahill. Síona works figures showing that four times for the Irish Family Planning more men were studying for the Association, an abortion provider Catholic priesthood in England and advocate. and Wales than in Ireland. The real significance of this trend will It looks like a straight-up contrast be seen in the coming years, when between the old Ireland and the huge numbers of Irish parishes will new Ireland. likely be without a parish priest.

But it quickly becomes clear that Apart from falling numbers, the contrast between the two is the influence of the Church in not so great at all. Though a daily public life is probably going Mass-goer whose life “still resolves to diminish. Fresh from their around the Church,” Agnes voted victories in redefining marriage to legalise abortion, and even joined

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her granddaughter in canvassing to the abortion referendum, just for the removal of the right to life as they stay silent on all other from Ireland’s Constitution. contentious Church teachings.

The results of this were seen in the No questions are posed to the old fact that 66 percent of Irish voters woman about how she reconciles said “Yes” to abortion-on-demand. belief in Jesus Christ with support Such a figure could not have been for ending the lives of unborn achieved had several hundred children. That is to say if she does thousand practicing Catholics not believe at all. For many older Irish supported the move.

Catholics, regular Mass attendance has little to do with religious faith Agnes was not alone, by any and more to do with routine, a stretch. routine which a few generations ago attracted virtually the entire Those of her generation were born Irish population to church each into an Ireland where nominal Catholicism was for historical Sunday morning. reasons part of our national identity.

For a decent-sized minority, Mass There was no real challenge to the has long been as much a social Church on a political level after outing as it is anything else, where the English abandoned sixteenth people (especially those living in and seventeenth century efforts to the countryside) come together to enforce Protestantism on their first discuss the local goings on before and most troublesome colony. the service begins, and as soon as it ends. The sense of being part of After independence, politicians of a shared community of faith is not the fledgling Irish state sought as felt as strongly during Mass in an close a relationship as possible with Irish church as it is in England for the hierarchy, with the result that example, where Catholicism is less clericalism took hold. A Catholic common but in a much healthier state emerged, one where – as James Joyce once said – Christ and Caesar state. were hand in glove. Naturally, During and after the referendum complacency set in. The question campaign, many Catholics of “Why do we believe?” was not bore witness to this in their often asked and required no great local parishes. Faced with many consideration. unbelieving parishioners, many priests stayed quiet in the run-up Without a case against being Catholic, few ever had to consider 15

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the case for the Faith.

began. At a time when most Irish families had friends and relatives Compare this with the experience in non-Catholic countries, the of other European Catholics. In country remained observant, as did France, for example, believers Irish immigrant communities in have had to contend with an anti- Britain, America and further afield. clerical state on and off since the Revolution, and a much stronger The author rightly suggests that the Catholic identity exists there, sexual abuse crisis is a reason why albeit among a small minority. In the drift away from Catholicism contrast, Ireland remained almost here accelerated. This is certainly uniformly Catholic for much, correct, but the timeline shows much longer. But the collapse, that this was not the primary cause. when it came, was all the more The most damning and damaging dramatic. official investigations into abuse in Irish dioceses or Church-run Why did this happen so quickly? institutions were published in the The possible explanations for why last fifteen years. This is long after this “social revolution” which The the shift away from Catholicism Economist puts forward are to had commenced. some extent unconvincing.

A new kind of conformity “Exposure to the outside world” Again and again, it is suggested and increased foreign travel form by The Economist that the dramatic one suggestion, and this has some changes in Ireland are a result of truth to it, given the similar social normal Irish people beginning trends which have occurred here to speak out about the past and and elsewhere in the West. present. The impression given is But Ireland was controlled by of an Ireland where a stultifying a foreign – and expressly anti- silence has been replaced by a Catholic – country for centuries diversity of opinion, with the result and remained stubbornly Catholic. that the country has now chosen secularism en masse. But as the More importantly, the country’s Catholic journalist Breda O’Brien experience of mass emigration dates notes in the article, a strong back to the Great Famine in the “conformist streak” is present in mid 1800s, more than a century the Irish character. before the process of secularisation Modern Ireland is a place where 16

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there is remarkably little debate about public or social policy, and the body politic tends to move in unison, rather than diverging on left-right lines as occurs elsewhere.

This, more than anything else, allows for rapid social change.

The two main political parties in Ireland, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, are of a centrist disposition, with Sinn Féin and the remaining smaller parties being left-leaning.

Up until the last general election in 2016, Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin were all ostensibly prolife, but by the end of 2018 all three parties had come to support the Government’s abortion legislation, with all three party leaders doing an about face in renouncing the pro-life views they had so recently espoused.

Similarly, there is no significant ideological divide in the country’s media, with all of the major newspapers adhering to a liberal viewpoint on social matters.

Ireland’s State broadcaster RTÉ occupies a disproportionate role in the media landscape and is well-known for its liberal bias, particularly when it comes to how it deals with Catholicism and how it depicts the past.

secularised country, embarrassed by its past and desperately seeking a new identity, would latch on to a role as an exemplar of liberal values.

What can be done?

For beleaguered Irish Catholics struggling to comprehend this new Ireland, there is little hope of the situation changing in the short term.

That does not mean that all hope is lost, though.

A first step in challenging the prevailing consensus is to tackle the deliberate misrepresentation of the past, which is so frequently the starting point for a campaign to usher in damaging changes in the present. The Church needs to focus more on reminding ordinary Catholics of the enormously positive role it has played in the 1,600 years since the coming of St Patrick: the story of Irish scholars and martyrs, the history of our missionaries, the good work done in our schools and hospitals, and so on. Because as long as Catholic Ireland is being maliciously depicted as one long abuse scandal, there is little prospect of lapsed Catholics being drawn once more to the Faith.

In these circumstances, and absent any substantive public debate, it is easy to see why a recently Another

crucial

step

now

is 17

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recognising that there is no point in fighting worthless battles for the broader culture. Religious orders are gradually withdrawing from hospitals in which the lives of unborn patients are being taken daily. This withdrawal should be finalised without delay.

of unborn children should say nothing about “our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ.”

Liberal and anti-Catholic voices have long demanded a secular state in Ireland. They should be given it. And modern Ireland should be made to own its many failures without any opportunity to blame Similarly, a unilateral withdrawal Christianity. from the majority of Catholic schools, and the consolidation of a Here too, there is hope. Christians distinctive Catholic identity within throughout the Western world are the remaining schools, would facing the same challenges in a be better than seeing Catholic post-Christian environment, but in education die as a result of a other countries believers have had thousand cuts. longer to adjust to the new reality.

Catholic Ireland is in this respect – Secularists often bemoan the as its critics like to say – behind the presence of religious oaths for times. political or judicial offices, and references to God in the Irish But with the right leadership, we Constitution. Rather than fighting might just wake up. a futile campaign to preserve the remnants of the ChurchState model which has damaged the former party so badly, the Church should get out ahead of its opponents and formally request that these references be removed.

A Constitution which now makes specific reference to the killing ...the Author James Bradshaw works for an international consulting firm based in Dublin, and has a background in journalism and public policy. Outside of work, he writes for a number of publications, on topics including politics, history, culture, film and literature.

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A sooner rather than later conversion

by Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan

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n December 22nd 2019 the former Anglican Bishop and chaplain to Queen Elizabeth Gavin Ashenden, was received into the Roman Catholic Church by the Bishop of Shrewsbury, Dr Mark Davies.

Bishop Mark had invited Bishop Gavin some months before saying something along the lines: “I know that you will come over at some stage, why not make it sooner rather than later. We need you”. That invitation was something of a final push which resulted in his decision to join the apostolic Church of Rome.

Gavin Ashenden is no theological lightweight. For twenty five years he worked in Sussex University, as a chaplain and academic, lecturing in literature and the Psychology of Religion. He held several high ecclesiastical positions including being the Queen’s chaplain from 2008 to 2017, but had been ill at ease with the direction in which the Church of England was heading for

about thirty years. As an Anglican he had believed for some time that he had the advantage of working out his faith in a broad Church, which gave him plenty of room for exploring and that under the Anglican umbrella there was sufficient space to embrace differing views and theological understandings. That was more or less the case for him until Anglicanism began a steady capitulation to the increasingly intense and non-negotiable demands of a secular culture. Rev. Ashenden experienced a growing unease as he saw that behind the “progressive” value system there emerged a determination to promote the twin and related evils of thought-crime and the effective ending of freedom of speech.

As he writes on his website, “In each generation Christianity has to either convert its surrounding culture or be converted by it. The history of the West is the history of this struggle.”

And he watched as Anglicanism suffered what he calls a collapse 19

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of inner integrity, capitulated and unwanted visitation of metaphysical “swallowed wholesale secular society’s evil which only the rosary seemed to descent into a post-Christian overcome. culture.”

The second was the discovery of the The motive for his stance was his phenomena of Eucharistic miracles. love of truth and freedom. His was The fact that they were unknown a pilgrimage not about comfort, among those who celebrated the but about truth and integrity and in Anglican version of the Eucharist many ways his conversion mirrors carries as he says obvious implications. that of John Henry Newman, now It was of the greatest relief to him to canonised. find an ecclesial community where the Mass is truly the Mass and where Rev. Ashenden pin-pointed three he could celebrate an unembarrassed things in particular which drew him relationship with Our Lady and the home into Catholicism. saints.

The first was an examination of the The third reason was the encounter between the children and Magisterium. Faced with the Our Lady at Garabandal in 1963 increasingly lethal assault on the (which has not been authenticated by faith in our day and time, he found the Holy See). Curious and sceptical, there was no theological means to he was watching the film footage draw orthodox Anglicans together with a child psychologist friend who in ecclesial unity. He could find a noted that “whatever was going on different Anglicanism for each day with the children it was essentially of the week and came to realise that real, as ecstasy among children could only the Catholic Church, with the never be faked.” From there he found weight of the Magisterium, had the whole history of Our Lady’s the ecclesial integrity, theological apparitions beginning with Gregory maturity and spiritual potency to Thaumaturges in the third century defend the faith, renew society and through to Zeitoun in Cairo in save souls in the fullness of faith.

1968 and indeed to the present day, deeply compelling. Circumstances Like Newman the reading of the brought him to a friendship with Fathers shaped his thought as he saw Abbé René Laurentin, the Catholic more and more clearly the tenets of Church’s foremost expert on Marian the true Church as revealed through apparitions, and his theological Scripture and Tradition. Objective perspective blossomed into a deep truth then is a given in the Judeo dependence on the rosary. Curiously, Christian set of values. this was accompanied by an 20

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It became increasingly clear to him that in modern culture there was a concerted effort to undo the entire Judeo-Christian system from the ground up by redefining the meaning of personhood, of marriage, the of family, and classifying people on the basis of their sexual preference, raising individual rights over those of the unborn, and denigrating the sacredness of human life.

borrowed from Christianity. No longer is the person of faith urged to start from Revelation but rather to look to social revolution. What was and is being offered by today’s culture is a brave new world, where people are invited to retire to their comfort zones and the illusion of progress where we are tempted to believe that humanity can build whatever kind of world it wants without reference to God or natural law. The secular He saw too a real effort toward the culture promises a new utopia based redefinition of “love”. He explains: on equality and inclusion. While this This involved a replacement of the seems just in theory, the practice is values of self-sacrificial compassion otherwise. In reality equality is not with a culture of growing narcissism. extended to all and some categories It was associated with a narrowing of people are clearly excluded. concentration of view that restricted Faced with this increasing secularism itself to seeing humanity through and armed with a keen intellect the lens of categories of power, the and commitment to truth, Gavin redistribution of power and so- Ashenden followed Newman again called privilege. Faced with the in trying to find a kind of via media, complexities of a spectrum of cultural and formed with others a breakcomplexity, driven by a Marxist away group trying to preserve true pursuit of equality of outcome, Anglicanism and draw the different instead of offering a Christian groups of “traditional” Anglicans critique, Anglicanism swallowed it together. In early 2017, Ashenden wholesale, like so much of liberal resigned from his position as chaplain Protestantism. Instead of confronting after speaking out against a service this demolition of Christian culture at St Mary’s Cathedral, Glasgow, it sought to placate it. at which a Muslim law student When the Church of England should read a passage from the Koran that have been the conscience of the explicitly declared that Jesus is not nation, he says, it was simply rubber- the Son of God. In September 2017 stamping the new culture. Ashenden’s he was consecrated as a missionary issue with Anglicanism was that it bishop for the Christian Episcopal provided a Christian veneer for this Church. cultural subversion using language 21

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But this was, as it were, an experiment which did not last long and two years after his wife’s conversion, he left the Christian Episcopal Church in December 2019 and was received into full communion with the apostolic Church of Rome. Gavin Ashenden has thrown himself on Divine Providence and will now work as a lay catechist in Shrewsbury diocese until Rome decides on his case and his possible future in holy orders.

things happening in the world but must not be blind to the dead end and chaos into which we are being led. Many of the fundamentals of society are now gone from our laws and social norms – the traditional definition of marriage and the family, the sacredness of human life from conception to natural death, the transcendental view of the person, etc. The way back to sanity will be long and difficult. Those who are reshaping society will not stop until those who oppose them are silenced This brave man forces us in the for good. World history is against Roman Catholic Church to ask us, take the examples of Soviet some very basic questions about our Communism, Chinese Communism society. The issues facing the Church and the French Revolution. of England are facing all in the West.

What Gavin Ashenden faced we As Catholic Christians, however, we are now confronting ourselves in believe in the grace of God. “Where ordinary life, and truth be told, there sin abounded grace abounded all the are many in the Church who have more” (Rom. 5:20). We can be saved. similarly bought into the prevailing Humanity can change direction. culture. Like him we need to stand Each person has his or her gifts and firm in our faith and reject what is opportunities which, with the grace opposed to it, but he warns that if of God, can transform the culture in a person does not accept this new which we live starting with ourselves secular culture he or she is ostracised individually and then reaching out to and is not only unwelcome but others one by one. more and more is being side-lined or ruthlessly silenced.

We know that there are wonderful ...the Author

Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan is a priest of the diocese of Limerick. He studied for his doctorate in moral theology in the Alfonsianum in Rome 2001-2004 and was appointed chaplain to the Limerick Institute of Technology 2004-2011. He was appointed Parish Priest of Rathkeale , County Limerick in 2011.

He was ordained Bishop of Waterford & Lismore in 2015.

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“Thank Him For Everything, Because Everything Is Good”

by Rev. Carlos Ayxelà

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life lived wisely means grasping what is essential, appreciating what is worthwhile, being alert against evil, rising above what is irrelevant. If riches are desirable in life, what is richer than Wisdom, who produces all things? (Wis 8:5).

Wisdom has no price, and everyone wants to possess it. It is a knowledge that cannot be reduced to scholarship. Rather it is the ability to ‘”savour” what is good, to “taste” it. The Greek term sophia found in the Wisdom books was translated in Latin by sapientia, which is related to the English term “savour.” The original meaning of sapientia was a “good palate,” a good sense of smell. The wise man “savours” what is good. In an ancient prayer we ask God, da nobis recta sapere, “grant that we may savour what is right.”1

her, and is found by those who seek her. She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her. He who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty, for he will find her sitting at his gates (Wis 6:12-14).

Even so, to acquire this “connatural” knowledge we have to seek it, to desire it, to rise early in search of it. Doing so with patience, with the insistence of the Psalmist: Oh God, thou art my God, I seek thee, my flesh faints for thee as in a dry and weary land where no water is (Ps 63:1).

This search is the work of a lifetime, and hence wisdom grows as the years go by. As the Pope has often said, echoing the Book of Sirach (cf. Sir 8:9), wisdom belongs to the aged, who are “the store of the wisdom of our people.”2 It Sacred Scripture presents wisdom is true that age can sometimes as being readily attainable: Wisdom bring disadvantages such as the is radiant and unfading, and she is hardening of certain character easily discerned by those who love defects, a reluctance to accept one’s 1. Prayer Veni Sancte Spiritus, Collect for the Votive Mass of the Holy Spirit.

2. Pope Francis, Audience, 4 March 2015.

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own limitations, or difficulties in understanding young people. But despite all this, the elderly often possess the capacity to appreciate, to “savour” what is truly important.

And this, in the end, is what true wisdom is.

Saint Josemaría, when talking to a group of faithful of Opus Dei, once made reference to this type of knowledge that is gained over the years. “In thirty years’ time you’ll look back and you will be astonished. And you will feel impelled to spend the rest of your life giving thanks, giving thanks… ”3 As the years go by, we will be left, above all, with reasons to be grateful.

The sharp points of problems and difficulties that worried us greatly in the past become softened. We will see them with other eyes, maybe even with a bit of humour. We gain the perspective needed to see how God has been leading us, how He has made use of our efforts and even of our mistakes. Those who lived with Blessed Alvaro remember how he would often say with simplicity: “Thanks be to God.” The conviction that we only have reasons to be grateful contains an essential element of true wisdom. The wisdom that God increases in the souls of those who seek Him, and who can say, even before growing old, I understand more than the aged,

for I keep thy precepts (Ps 119:100).

Everything is good In 1937, amid the privations and worries in his hiding place in the Honduran Legation, Saint Josemaría wrote to faithful of Opus Dei who were scattered throughout Madrid: “Take heart! Try to ensure that everyone is cheerful: everything is for the good, everything is good.”4 Another letter written a month later to those in Valencia has the same advice: “Take heart. Strive to recover your joy, if very naturally you have become sad. Everything is for the good.”5 Everything is good, everything is for the good. These words are grounded in two verses from Sacred Scripture.

One is the crescendo of God’s joy in creating that comes to a climax with the final verse: all that He had made … was very good (Gen 1:31).

The other is Saint Paul’s maxim, in everything God works for good with those who love him (Rom 8:28), which Saint Josemaría condensed into the aspiration omnia in bonum! Years before, at Christmas 1931, those two threads from Scripture were woven together in a note that later became a point in The Way. Everything is good; everything is for the good. Both gratitude for what is good, and the

3. Notes from a family gathering, 21 January 1955, quoted in Noticias, August 1955, p. 53.

4. Letter, 17 May 1937, quoted in Critical-Historical edition of The Way, commentary on no. 268.

5. Letter, 15 June 1937, quoted in Critical-Historical edition of The Way, commentary on no. 268.

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hope that God will draw good out of what seems bad:

for the stars … Praise to you, my Lord, for Brothers Wind and Air, and fair and stormy, all weather’s Make it a habit to raise your heart moods … Praise to you, my Lord, to God, in acts of thanksgiving, for those who grant pardon for love many times a day. Because He of you.”7 gives you this and that... Because someone has despised you… “Because He gives you this and Because you don’t have what you that.” How many gifts God gives need, or because you do have us, and how easily we get used to it. And because He made his them! Health is a good example Mother, who is also your Mother, here. It has been defined as “life so beautiful. Because He created lived in the silence of the organs”: the sun and the moon and this we usually take it for granted until animal or that plant. Because our body starts to call attention He made that man eloquent and to itself. Maybe only then, when left you slow of speech…. Thank we no longer have it, do we truly Him for everything, because value what we once had. Gratitude everything is good.”6 here consists partly in “being alert”: listening carefully in order to The sequence of reasons to be perceive the silent, discreet way in grateful here follows no particular which God gives us so many things. order. Since everything is good, the first thing that comes to mind, God’s mercy accompanies us and the next, and the next… are all daily. To be able to perceive His reasons for gratitude. “Because He mercy it suffices to have a mind created the sun and the moon and that is alert. We are excessively this animal or that plant.” Wherever inclined to notice only the daily we happen to look, Saint Josemaría effort and fatigue…. If, however, seems to be telling us, we will only we open our hearts, we can be find reasons to be grateful. We constantly aware of how good see reflected here an overflowing God is to us, of how He thinks of admiration for God’s goodness: us precisely in little things, thus an astonishment that recalls Saint helping us to achieve important Francis’ “Canticle of the Creatures,” ones.8 where everything also becomes a reason for thanking God. “Praise to We would belittle this thankfulness you, my Lord, for Sister Moon and is we thought it simply meant 6. The Way, no. 268. The original note was dated 28 December 1931.

7. Saint Francis of Assisi, “The Canticle of the Creatures.”

8. Pope Benedict XVI, Homily, 15 April 2007.

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paying back a debt of gratitude. It is much more: precisely because it consists in “savouring” the good, thanking God means “enjoying with Him” the good things He gives us, for we always enjoy things more when accompanied by people we love. Even the most prosaic things can then be a cause for enjoyment: for not taking ourselves too seriously, for discovering the joy of living “amid the little things of life, as a response to the loving invitation of God our Father: my child, treat yourselves well according to your means … do not deprive yourself of the day’s enjoyment (Sir 14:11, 14).

What tender paternal love echoes in these words!”9 All things are for the good Remembering to be grateful for the good things God gives us is already a challenge. So what about less pleasant things? “Because someone has despised you”: because you have been treated coldly or with indifference, because you have been humiliated, because your efforts have not been appreciated… “Because you don’t have what you need or because you do have it.” What is surprising here is how calmly “having” and “not having” are placed on the same footing. Is it really possible to be grateful to God for the lack of health, or of work or

tranquillity? To thank God because we haven’t enough time (how often this makes us suffer!); because we haven’t enough courage, or strength, or ideas; or because this or that has turned out badly… Well, yes: even then, Saint Josemaría tells us, give thanks to God. This attitude reminds us of the difficulties that Saint Josemaría was coping with when he wrote those letters from the Honduran Legation, and the suffering which gave rise to a note that is the source of this point in The Way.10 The invitation to be grateful for difficulties, which is even more explicit some pages later, originates in a note from five days before.

Paradoxes of a little soul. When Jesus sends you what the world calls good luck, feel sorrow in your heart at the thought of His goodness and your wickedness.

When Jesus sends you what people consider bad luck, rejoice in your heart, for He always gives you what is best. This is the beautiful moment to love the Cross.11 Despite its closeness in time, this consideration is placed in a different chapter in The Way, one of two chapters about spiritual childhood. This gives us the key to

9. Pope Francis, Apost. Exhort. Evangelii Gaudium, 24 November 2013, no. 4.

10. Cf. Critical-Historical edition of The Way, commentary on nos. 267 and 268.

11. The Way, no. 873. The original note was dated 23 December 1931.

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understanding the spiritual climate In our interior life, it does all of his readiness to thank God “for of us good to be ... like those everything, because everything is tiny tots who seem to be made good.” Gratitude is a sign of the of rubber and who even enjoy wisdom that comes with age and falling down because they get up closeness to God; but it only comes again right away and are once when there is an attitude of “hopemore running around, and also filled abandonment”12 in God’s because they know their parents hands. Saint Josemaría discovered will always be there to console it through the path of spiritual them, whenever they need childhood. “Have you seen the them.14 gratitude of little children? Imitate them, saying to Jesus when things The gratitude that Saint Josemaría are favourable and when they aren’t, talks about isn’t a “magic cloak” to cover over the unpleasant things ‘How good you are! How good!’”13 in life; rather it means raising our Thanking God for difficulties eyes to look at God our Father is certainly not something that who is smiling at us. This leads to comes spontaneously. In practice, trust, to abandoning ourselves in it may even seem like putting on God, thus putting the setback in an act, or even being naïve, as the right perspective, even though if we were denying reality, and it continues hurting. To thank seeking consolation in a fairy- God when something hurts us tale. Nevertheless, being grateful means to accept it. “The best way in these situations doesn’t mean to show your gratitude to God and closing our eyes to reality, but seeing people is to accept everything with more deeply. We feel reluctant to be joy.”15 Certainly, our first reaction grateful because we are aware of isn’t a cry of joy; probably just the the loss, the setback, the damage opposite. Even so, even though our we have suffered. Our outlook is heart rebels, we need to strive to still too earthbound, as happens be grateful: “Lord, it’s impossible, with a child who thinks it’s the end it can’t be… but thank you.” We of the world because his toy has need to accept God’s will: “I wanted got broken, because he has fallen to have more time, more strength; over, or because he wants to go on I wanted that person to be nicer playing. At the time it’s a big drama, to me; I didn’t want to have this but soon everything is fine again: difficulty, this defect. But you know 12. The Father, Pastoral Letter, 14 February 2017, no. 8.

13. The Way, no. 894. The text comes from a note dated 23 December 1931.

14. Friends of God, no. 146.

15. Saint Teresa of Calcutta, No Greater Love, Novato (California) 2002, p. 33.

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best.” We will ask God to arrange things as seems best to us, but with the serene assurance that He knows what He is doing and draws good out of what we can only see as bad.

To be grateful even for what seems bad to us (as we are told in a text that was also written in December 1931) means “to believe as children believe, to love as children love, to abandon ourselves as children abandon themselves.”16 This abandonment can be expressed in many different ways in our interior life, but it always reflects the conviction that in God’s eyes we are very small, and so are our concerns.

And, in spite of this, that they are important to God, more than to anyone else in the world. This gives rise to the gratitude of knowing we are loved: thank you for being here at my side; thank you because this matters to you. Amid God’s apparent distance, we perceive His closeness. And we contemplate Him in the midst of ordinary life, because problems are part of ordinary life.

Faced with adversity we realize the deepest reason for thanking God for both good and bad things: thank you, because I meet Love everywhere. The true reason for acts of thanksgiving, the source of all gratitude, is that God loves me, and that everything in my life is an opportunity to love and to know that I am loved.

Suffering because of what we don’t have, because of people’s coldness, or because of what we lack, or from the consequences of our own mistakes… are all opportunities to remember, to wake up to God’s Love. We realize that, even though we find it hard to renounce something, to accept suffering or setbacks, what does it matter if we have God’s Love? Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? (Rom 8:35).

Hence it becomes possible for us to “thank Him for everything, because everything is good.” The Christian “madness” of being grateful for everything stems from divine filiation. Someone who realizes that they have a Father who loves them, truly needs nothing more. A good Father, above all, is to be thanked. This is the way Jesus loves His Father. Jesus is gratitude personified, since He has received everything from his Father. And to be a Christian is to enter into this love, into this gratitude: Father, I thank thee for thou hearest me always (cf. Jn 11:41).

Don’t forget to give thanks Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits (Ps 103:2). In the Scriptures God frequently invites

16. Holy Rosary, “To the Reader”. This passage was part of the original text that Saint Josemaría wrote all in one go during the Novena of the Immaculate Conception in 1931.

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us to remember, since He knows how often we are forgetful, like children who play with their toys and fail to think about their father.

God knows this, and understands it. But He draws us gently to Himself and whispers to us in a thousand ways: remember. To give thanks, then, is also a question of remembering. That is why the Holy Father often talks about “a grateful memory.”17

We also experience moments when life seems especially beautiful: a striking sunset, an unexpected act of kindness, a pleasant surprise…

And we discern, amid the apparent greyness of daily life, the brightness of God’s Love.

From ancient times, people have seen in the setting of the sun each evening an image of our life. Hence, if gratitude is part of the wisdom of someone who has lived a long life, The readiness to give thanks for what how good it is to end each day by annoys us, surprising though it may giving thanks. When we pause, in seem, in fact helps us to remember God’s presence, to consider how our to thank God for pleasant things. day has gone, God will be “thankful” Moreover, everyday life gives us when we thank Him for so many many opportunities to “remember”: gifts, etiam ignotis,18 including the stopping for a moment to say grace ones we aren’t aware of; and also before and after meals; dedicating when we ask for forgiveness, with a part of our thanksgiving after Mass child’s trust, for not thanking Him or of our personal prayer to giving enough. thanks for the ordinary things in our daily life, discovering what is “extraordinary” about them: for our work, for a roof over our heads, for people who love us; giving thanks for others’ joys; seeing God’s gifts in all the people who assist us…

17. Cf. e.g. Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, no. 13; Homily, 18 June 2017; Homily, 12 December 2017.

18. Saint Josemaría, In Dialogue with the Lord, London and New York, 2018, p. 135.

...the Author Rev. Carlos Ayxelà has a Bachelors in Humanities and Journalism (UIC Barcelona, 2002) and a Doctorate in Philosophy (Université de Montréal, Canada, 2011). He is currently working on a dissertation for the PhD program of Dogmatic Theology in the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.

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St Valentine’s Day: It’s all about the Gift

by Rev. Donncha Ó hAodha

A most beautiful mystery

The Blessed Trinity does not live in splendid isolation. Though he is totally perfect and self-sufficient, God freely goes out of himself through the divine mission of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (cf.

Catechism 690, 743). Indeed the whole history of salvation, which continues in our own time, the time of the Church, is the loving seeking-out of man by God.

“A mystery is not something we can know nothing about: it is only something the mind cannot wholly know… A mystery, in short, is an invitation to the mind. For it means that there is an exhaustible well of Truth from which the mind may drink and drink again in the certainty that the well will never run dry, that there will always be The unremitting longing of God water for the mind’s thirst”. for the love of human hearts is These words of the great apologist beautifully expressed in nuptial Frank Sheed apply also to the terms in the Old Testament “mystery” of human love, which prophecies of Hosea, Jeremiah, can be contemplated again and Ezekiel and Isaiah. The Song of again. Human love is in fact a Solomon sheds light on divine “mystery” and this is because it and human love in an unparalleled is inseparable from the supreme way: “Arise, my love, my fair one, “Mystery” who is God himself. and come away. O my dove in the How so? The human person is clefts of the rock, in the covert of made in the image and likeness of the cliff, let me see your face, let God (cf. Gen 1:27), and “God is me hear your voice” (2:13-14). love” (1 Jn 4:8). It is because God The Gift of gifts is love that, as St John Paul II puts it, “love is the fundamental and But what does this love, which is innate vocation of every human the calling of every single human being” (Familiaris Consortio 11). being, consist of? The answer can 30

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come only from contemplating God. The whole of Revelation shows that God not only helps us or gives us something; he gives his very self. As St Paul says: “He loved me and gave himself up for me” (Gal 2:20). God is pure gift, and we are made in his likeness.

“This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself ” (Gaudium et Spes 24).

God’s gift is evident firstly in the fact of creation. As Charles Journet put it in his classic work The Meaning of Grace: “The first act in which God’s love pours itself out is creation. God is the Infinite, the Absolute. He possesses being, intelligence, love, beauty to an infinite degree. We should not say that he has being, intelligence, love; rather, that he is Being itself, Intelligence itself, Love and Beauty themselves. He dwells in himself; he is lacking in absolutely nothing. Why, then, did he create the world?

Creator as “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars”.

God gives himself again in a new way in the Incarnation. “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given” (Is 9:6), to us is born a Saviour (cf. Lk 2:11), “for us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven… and became man”. No wonder Christmas is the season of gifts, since it is the time when God makes of himself the supreme and ultimate gift. In the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus, God shows us the sacrificial nature of all true love and the ultimate fruitfulness and joy of that self-giving: “In this is love”, St John tells us, “not that we loved God but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4:10).

God continues to gift himself to us here and now through the Church. “The grace of Christ is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of his own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our soul to heal it of sin and sanctify it” (Catechism 1999). The supreme gift of grace is of course contained in the Blessed Eucharist, the greatest sacrament, the very presence of Jesus in his Sacrifice, the “priceless gift” – inaestimabile donum, as the 1980 Instruction on the Worship of the Eucharistic Mystery approved by St John Paul II is entitled.

When man acts, it is always to procure for himself some benefit; but God could gain no benefit from creation. So then we are compelled to say that, if he created the world, it was through pure superabundance, pure desire to communicate his riches, pure disinterestedness, through love”. Every woman and man is called Dante rightly describes the to be the living image of this

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life-giving gift of self. The human person cannot be understood without reference to the supreme Gift who is God, and who gives each person the gift of life and the mission to make of his or her life a gift in turn. “Human life is a gift received in order then to be given as a gift” (Evangelium Vitae 92). The human person’s way to happiness is love, and love is the gift of oneself.

The gift of marriage

every day of their lives, “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health”, till death do them part. As Pope Francis explains: “What allows the spouses to remain united in marriage is a love of mutual giving supported

by Christ’s grace” (Angelus, 7th October 2018).

Marriage is a gift received from the supreme Gift who is God. Like all Christian vocations it is sustained by the gift of Christ’s life through his grace. Married people are a gift to one another and to the children they may be gifted with.

Christian marriages are a true gift to the human community since they are the basis and foundation for a stable and caring society.

The self-empting of Christ is at the heart of the marriage covenant. The spouses seek to give themselves fully to each other and to the children they may be graced with. This is of course the challenge of a lifetime, but a challenge that makes life truly The gift of celibacy worth living.

Apostolic celibacy too is a true The married couple are not alone form of love and a full expression faced with the vicissitudes of their of the human vocation to vocation. Their mutual self-gift is self-giving. Far from being a based on the firm foundation of denigration of marriage, the Christ’s total self-gift to his Spouse Church’s constant veneration for total self-giving through celibacy the Church, which is made present only points to the greatness of in every Eucharistic Celebration. matrimony. Each vocation sheds It makes sense therefore that where light on the beauty of the other, possible, the marriage of Catholics as different and complementary be celebrated within the Mass. expressions of the sacredness and Christ’s total self-giving on Calvary greatness of human love. and made present on the altar, is the model for and the source As St Josemaría pointed out: “Only of strength for married couples among those who understand at the moment of their free and and value in all its depth human public consent, which constitutes love can arise that other ineffable the Sacrament of Matrimony, and understanding of which Jesus 32

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spoke (cf. Mt 19:11). It is a pure gift of God which moves a person to dedicate body and soul to him, to offer him an undivided heart, without the mediation of earthly love” (Conversations 122).

A prayer

As we celebrate human love for St Valentine’s Day, let us pray for the gift of many vocations to happy fruitful marriages and to apostolic celibacy for the love of Jesus and “But what about me?” of his family of the Church. With the Holy Father, “let us invoke the All this talk of love as self- Virgin Mary, that she help married giving could leave us with the couples to always live and renew all too human question: “But their union, beginning with God’s what’s in this for me?” While original Gift”. (Pope Francis, understandable, the question is Angelus, 7th October 2018). superficial since it hasn’t discovered or recognised the paradox of true love, as famously expressed in the prayer of St Francis of Assisi: “It is in giving that we receive”.

All true love is challenging and at times involves real suffering, but as St Josemaría put it with great pastoral sense: “To be happy, what you need is not an easy life but a heart which is in love” (Furrow 795).

Our Lord himself has told us this by his life and his words: “Give, and it will be given to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back” (Lk 6:38). ...the Author Rev. Donncha Ó hAodha is the Regional Vicar of the Opus Dei Prelature in Ireland, author of several CTS booklets and a regular contributor to Position Papers.

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Ash Wednesday and the journey of Lent

by Pope Benedict XVI

Dear Brothers and Sisters, On this day, marked by the austere symbol of ashes, we enter the Season of Lent, beginning a spiritual journey that prepares us for celebrating worthily the Easter Mysteries. The blessed ashes imposed upon our forehead are a sign that reminds us of our condition as creatures, that invites us to repent, and to intensify our commitment to convert, to follow the Lord ever more closely.

Lent is a journey, it means accompanying Jesus who goes up to Jerusalem, the place of the fulfilment of his mystery of Passion, death and Resurrection; it reminds us that Christian life is a “way” to take, not so much consistent with a law to observe as with the very Person of Christ, to encounter, to welcome, to follow.

Indeed, Jesus says to us: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Lk 9:23). In other words he tells us that in order to attain, with him, the light and joy of the Resurrection, the victory of life, of love and of goodness, we too must take up our daily cross, as a beautiful passage from the Imitation of Christ urges us: “Take up your cross, therefore, and follow Jesus, and you shall enter eternal life. He himself opened the way before you in carrying his Cross (Jn 19:17), and upon it he died for you, that you too, might take up your cross and long to die upon it. If you die with him, you shall also live with him, and if you share his suffering, you shall also share his glory” (Book 2, chapter 12, n. 2).

In Holy Mass of the First Sunday of Lent we shall pray: “Father, through our observance of Lent, sign of the sacrament of our conversion, help us to understand the meaning of your Son’s death and Resurrection, and teach us to reflect it in our lives” (Opening Prayer).

This is an invocation that we address to God because we know that he alone can convert our hearts. And it is above all in the Liturgy, by participating in the holy mysteries, that we are led to make this journey with the Lord; it means learning at the school of Jesus, reviewing the events that brought salvation to us but not as a mere commemoration, a remembrance of past events. In the liturgical actions Christ makes himself present through the power of the Holy Spirit and these saving events become real.

There is a keyword that recurs frequently in the Liturgy to indicate this: the word “today”; and it should be understood in its original and practical, rather than metaphorical, sense. Today God reveals his law and we are granted to choose today between good and evil, between life and death (cf. Dt 30:19). Today “the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the Gospel” (Mk 1:15). Today Christ died on Calvary and rose from the dead; he ascended into Heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father; today the Holy Spirit is given to us; today is a favourable time.

From Pope Benedict XVI’s General Audience, 9 March 2011 34

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Books: The Victim Cult

by Barbara Kay

The Victim Cult: How the Culture of Blame Hurts Everyone and Wrecks Civilizations

by Mark Milke Thomas & Black, 2019

columnist and author Mark Milke, whose work has been published in think-tanks in Canada, the U.S. and Europe.

This excellent book was eight years e all know when we have been in the writing and it shows. But victimized as individuals, not because it is pedantic; on the and so do witnesses. The pain contrary, Milke wears his scholarship may or may not heal; the injustice lightly. His crisp, polished prose may or may not be redressed. It belies the exhaustive research that gets murkier when groups claim permits him to speak out so boldly permanent victimhood arising and broadly on what is a sensitive, from pain and injustice inflicted in often culturally weaponized subject. the past on dead victims by dead The book begins on the nowvictimizers. familiar terrain of university campuses, where the theory of An obsession with past victimhood “intersectionality” has created a can prevent a focus on the present kind of Oppression Olympics, with at the expense of the future. A various minority groups vying for collective sense of victimhood their slice of the social-capital pie combined with the tripwires of that victim status confers. race, religion and ethnicity can be university students are translated into a justification for As action, with devastating effects. all relatively privileged, biasThat is the driving thesis behind The based aggression is rare and Victim Cult: How the Culture of “microaggressions” must suffice. In Blame Hurts Everyone and Wrecks one case Milke recounts, an elderly Civilizations, a new book by professor’s insistence on graduate seasoned public policy analyst, students using proper grammar

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ended in a petition to have him removed, not to mention a charge of “criminal battery” for briefly resting a hand on his accuser’s arm.

The book treats a spectrum of victimhood, from “mild” through “moderate” to “murderous.”

Microaggression victimhood on campus earns a “mild” ranking, At the other end of the spectrum are tribal or national victim cults in which grievance narratives fuel extreme ideologies, justifying acts of terrorism or even sustained campaigns of exterminations that “wreck civilizations,” and Milke devotes whole chapters to a number of them.

In between are “moderate” group victimhoods that are the trickiest to deal with. Into this category Milke assigns slavery in the U.S. and residential schools in Canada.

In these cases the actual suffering and actual injustices, though monstrous, have passed. They have been systemically acknowledged.

Deep remorse for their respective nations’ historical wrongs has been expressed at the highest cultural and political levels. Compensation in money and equity opportunities have been lavishly dispersed. But the sense of collective victimhood lingers, and all present disparities in outcomes continue to be ascribed by descendants to the original sins.

France, Western liberalism and the Jews for all of their problems.

Hitler brought his own sense of victimhood to fertile cultural terrain, resulting in history’s most brutal genocide. Even though the Hutus were numerically dominant after Rwandan independence in 1961, they felt threatened by the more successful Tutsis. A “perfect storm of blame, fear, civil war and opportunity” erupted, ending with a million victims. Yasser Arafat, “the Peter Pan of international politics,” could never say yes to peace, because he was so deeply invested in the Palestinian victim cult he couldn’t bear to abandon his “refusenik” persona.

Many groups have been victimized, but not all groups succumb to the temptation to define themselves by their suffering. Milke doesn’t accept that colonialism is to blame, or any other explanation that puts the entire onus on an external cause. He points to the example of Japanese-Americans and Canadians who suffered internment, as well as the Chinese, who suffered great discrimination here, but did not pass resentment on to their children; to Palestinians who recoiled from Arafat’s pathological revanchism and created lives for themselves elsewhere; and to Jews, whose continual resilience and refusal to be defined by their suffering has In the 19th and early 20th proven crucial to their success. centuries, Germans blamed What groups that have eschewed victimhood have in common, Milke 36

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observes, is a culture that embraces education, family stability and a spirit of entrepreneurism.

example, are close to income parity with non-natives. He is skeptical of the utility of formal apologies (“it is not clear that government Milke goes all the way back to regrets add much to the overall Plato and then to Rousseau to stock of human compassion”) and explain the drivers of grievance strongly critical of, amongst others, culture. Plato inspired a belief in the 2019 MMIWG report: “The man’s “perfectability.” Rousseau authors missed the mark because romanticized pre-modern cultures they were possessed by the notion as more natural and authentic than that the strongest cultures are those our own. A belief in perfectability uncontaminated by outsiders — a — utopianism — led to the evils false and dangerous assumption.” of Marxism. Enchantment with the “noble savage” encouraged a Finally, Milke suggests prescriptive pernicious fascination with race measures for countering victim purity and hatred of the Other. culture: Don’t speak of cultures as Add in a new third influence, “the though they were flesh-and-blood suicidal self-loathing of a mainly creatures; the word “genocide” Western class of intellectuals and applies only to people. Limit state academics (and their followers), who reparations to suffering that is “tight, breathe in assumptions of Western straightforward and provable.” guilt,” and the cult of victimhood And listen to what Ellis Ross, follows, as night the day. former elected chief councillor of Indigenous victimhood occupies a Haisla First Nation, has to say in the generous, myth-busting portion of book’s foreword. Ross’s parents went the book. Here Milke boldly goes, to residential schools, but “my own with evidence, where few others dare personal problems were … a result to venture. Indigenous poverty on of my own decision-making.” Ross reserves is not caused by colonialism, concludes, “There is plenty of blame he argues, but by geographic to go around, but I prefer finding distance from job sources. Natives solutions.” living near metropolitan areas, such as the majority of the Métis, for ...the Author Barbara Kay is a columnist for Canada’s National Post, where this article was first published. It is republished here with permission. Email: kaybarb@gmail.com.

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Films: 1917 and remembering who we are

by Bishop Robert Barron

Director: Sam Mendes Genres: Drama

I

saw the film 1917 on the vigil of the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, and I think there’s a connection between the movie and the liturgical celebration. Bear with me.

First, as everyone who has seen it remarks, the editing and cinematography of 1917 are so astounding that it appears to unfold completely in real time, the result of one continuous shot.

Think of the famous scene from Scorsese’s Goodfellas, in which Ray Liotta and his date walk into the night club – but now stretched out for two hours. What this produces in the viewer is an almost unprecedented sense of being there, experiencing the events with the characters in the film. And to be inserted into the First World

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War is, to put it mildly, horrific.

Obviously, all wars are terrible, but there was just something uniquely appalling about World War I: the oppressiveness of the trenches, the rampant disease, the hopelessness of fighting over a few hundred yards of blasted earth, the rats (which play a prominent and disgusting role in 1917), and above all, the mass killing that was the result of combining antiquated military strategy and modern weaponry. As witnessed to by so many thinkers and writers who participated in it – Paul Tillich, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ernest Hemingway, etc. – the First World War represented, as did no other war to that date, a collapse, a sea change, a cultural calamity.

And a principal reason for the disaster of the War, too often overlooked in my judgment, is spiritual in nature. Almost all of the combatants in the First World War were Christians. For more

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than four awful years, an orgy of violence broke out among baptized people – English, French, Canadian, American, Russian, and Belgian Christians slaughtering German, Austrian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian Christians. And this butchery took place on a scale that still staggers us.

The fifty-eight thousand American dead in the entire course of the Vietnam War would be practically a weekend’s work during the worst days of World War I. If we add up the military and civilian deaths accumulated during the War, we come up, conservatively, with a figure of around forty million. And what precisely were they fighting for?

I would challenge all but the most specialist historians of the period to tell me. Whatever it was, can anyone honestly say it was worth the deaths of forty million people? Mind you, I am not advocating pacifism. But I am indeed invoking the Church’s just war principles, one of which is proportionality – that is, that there must be a proportion between the goods attained by the war and the cost involved in achieving those goods if the war is to qualify as justified. Did such a proportionality obtain between means and ends in regard to World War I? I think the question sadly answers itself.

exclusively among baptized people, all presumably schooled in the moral principles of Jesus Christ.

How many Christians of that time raised their voices in protest, refused to cooperate with the folly of the war, placed their religious identities above their ethnic or national identities? Those questions, too, answer themselves – which brings me to the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. According to the theology of the Church, Baptism involves the grafting of a person on to the Son of God, implying a share in the relationship between the Son and the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit. It is infinitely more than the joining of a club or society; it is a participation in the inner life of God. Another way to put it is this: Baptism inserts a person into the Mystical Body of Jesus, which is an organism rather than an organization. Therefore, all of the baptized, despite even dramatic differences at the cultural, political, or ethnic levels, are related to one another, implicated in each other, like cells and organs in a body.

To forget this truth, or even to underplay it, is to lose what it means to be a Christian.

For the past many years, I have been studying the phenomenon of My point, again, is that this moral disaffiliation and loss of faith in the catastrophe unfolded in the heart cultures of the West. And following of Christian Europe, almost the prompts of many great scholars, 39

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I have identified a number of developments at the intellectual level – from the late Middle Ages through the Enlightenment to postmodernism – that have contributed to this decline. But I have long maintained – and the film 1917 brought it vividly back to mind – that one of the causes of the collapse of religion in Europe, and increasingly in the West generally, was the moral disaster of the First World War, which was essentially a crisis of Christian identity. Something broke in the Christian culture, and we’ve never recovered from it. If their Baptism meant so little to scores of millions of combatants in that terrible war, then what, finally, was the point of Christianity? And if it makes no concrete difference, then why not just leave it behind and move on?

long and hard at this wonderful and disturbing film in order to see what happens when Christians forget who they are.

I wonder whether we might take the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord as an opportunity to think more deeply about the moral implications of being a son or daughter of God, and hence a sibling to everyone else in the Mystical Body of Jesus. And I wonder whether we might look ...the Author This article first appeared at: www.wordonfire.org.

Bishop Robert Barron is an author, speaker, theologian, and founder of Word on Fire, a global media ministry. This article has been reprinted with the kind permission of the editors.

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