Position Papers - January 2016

A review of Catholic affairs

The Church battles on!

Fr. John McCloskey

A way forward for a Christian Ireland?

Michael Kirke

Film review:

Star Wars: The Force Awakens John P. McCarthy

Number 495· January 2016 €3 · £2.50 · $4

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Number 495 · January 2016

Editorial

by Rev. Gavan Jennings

In Passing: A way forward for a Christian Ireland?

by Michael Kirke

Roger Scruton: ‘These left thinkers have destroyed the intellectual life’

by Mick Hume

The Church: A Historical View

by Fr. John McCloskey

Rodney Stark: “The world is more religious than it has ever been”

by Kathryn Jean Lopez

Eighteen children: “A Gift from God”

by Jessica Jones

Film review: Star Wars: The Force Awakens

by John P. McCarthy

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

2 5 14 27 30 35 37

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

Contact us 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: info@positionpapers.ie

Articles ©Position Papers, who normally will on application give permission to reproduce gratis subject only to a credit in this form: ‘Reprinted, with permission from Position Papers, Dublin’. Please note: the opinions expressed in articles do not necessarily reflect those of the editor nor of the Opus Dei Prelature of which he is a priest.

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Editorial T

his month marks the beginning of the centenary of Ireland’s Easter Rising, an event which was the start of an intense political and military struggle for Irish independence culminating in the 1922 Anglo-Irish treaty and, tragically, the subsequent Irish Civil War in 1923.

No doubt over the coming months there will be much retrospective analysis of this fateful event in our history, including debate as to the merits and morality of the Rising.

Already 1916 has been the subject of a large number of recently published books, articles and documentaries: the Irish Catholic newspaper dedicating a splendid issue in December to the matter, RTE starting a five part serial drama entitled Rebellion, with documentaries to follow, and the religious affairs correspondent of the Irish Times producing, true to form, a cynical piece on the Catholicism of the leaders of the Rising. Michael Kirke has dedicated two In Passing columns to the Rising, and I hope to carry a follow up piece closer to Easter itself.

Re-reading the famous text of the 1916 Proclamation of Independence I surmised that had the text been the work of Ireland’s current political leaders there would be some notable omissions: the invocations of God in the text would certainly be dumped and perhaps even the Proclamation’s guarantee of religious liberty might follow suit – being incompatible with the State’s current efforts to push Catholicism out of schools. Even the Proclamation’s guarantee of civil liberty might generate some unease among those seeking to repeal the Eighth Amendment and so remove from the unborn the guarantee of the most fundamental of civil liberties: that of the right to life.

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And yet, whatever of the merits or otherwise of the Easter Rising itself, it strikes me that the repeated invocation of God in the Proclamation is no accident; it constitutes an implicit recognition that all human freedom comes ultimately from God, and that God is the ultimate guarantor of human dignity. A state which explicitly or implicitly rejects God is one which eventually ends up oppressing its citizens.

This came to mind when I recently read a 1976 Epiphany homily preached in Krakow by its then Archbishop, Saint John Paul II, in which he spoke forthrightly of the atheistic Polish State’s harassment of believers. Some sections struck me as quite applicable here in Ireland: The vast majority of the population of Poland is made up of believers, and they have every reason to be afraid that atheism might become, either directly or indirectly, the basis of the existence of the state, suppressing our right to define ourselves and act in accordance with our convictions.

Particularly relevant in the light of the government’s increasing hostility to Catholic schools is a passage on the education of children:

Editorial

We do not interfere in the families of atheists since this concerns their own conscience; however, we cannot help but wish that Christian families in this country might send their children to school without the fear that a materialistic view of the world and an atheistic ideology will be forced on them.

In the Ireland of 2016 Catholic parents can no longer be certain that the bizarre doctrines of gender ideology will not be forced on their children at school. It might not be an exaggeration to say that an increasingly materialistic view of man – foreign to the view of man espoused by the 1916 leaders – now informs the policies of the modern Irish State regarding the unborn, the education of children and the nature of marriage.

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Whatever about political revolutions against oppressive regimes, Christians are called to be in a permanent state of rebellion against the regime of evil in the world. They are called to be a sign of contradiction in a world which without the salt and light of Christian witness, would irreparably decay and darken. In the words of that great advocate of the rebellion of religion, St Josemaría Escrivá, “religion is the greatest rebellion of men, who refuse to live like animals, who are dissatisfied and restless until they know their Creator and are on intimate terms with him” (Homily “Freedom, a gift from God” in Friends of God, 38). And the founder of Opus Dei urges Christians to hang on to the freedom won for them by Christ in the face of the pressures of a paganised society: This is the glorious freedom of the children of God. Christians who let themselves be browbeaten or become inhibited or envious in the face of the licentious behaviour of those who have not accepted the Word of God, show that they have a very poor idea of the faith (Friends of God, “Freedom, a gift from God”, Number 38).

Editorial

(Incidentally, when St Josemaría visited Ireland in August of 1959 he spoke of how he fervently prayed for Ireland as a teenager, when in 1916 news reached his native Spain of the Irish insurrection).

This is the rebellion (of love and not hatred) which really matters in the final analysis, and which is really transformative of a nation; and this is the task of Irish Catholics in 2016: armed with their prayer, courage and genuine love of country to proclaim and fight tirelessly to defend “the glorious freedom of the children of God”.

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In Passing: A way forward for a Christian Ireland?

by Michael Kirke

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here are many in Ireland today – and indeed more beyond her shores – who see a formerly Catholic country where religion is now decidedly on the back foot.

and hobbling them in their traditional roles in the country’s education system. Just last month the left-wing Minister for Education announced that she was going to abolish a rule by which faith schools devote thirty minutes per day to the subject of religion in the school timetable.

Last year her people, in a popular vote consigned the Christian definition of marriage and the natural definition of conjugality to the rubbish heap.

In 2013 the country’s elected parliament compromised the life of unborn children by a law permitting abortion in certain circumstances, rejecting the moral guidance of Ireland’s Catholic hierarchy in the process. The same Government is now in the process of neutering the Christian churches

Against this wave of secularization there has been some resistance, heroic at times but ultimately, to all appearances, ineffective. The redefinition of marriage in the name of equality – a false concept of equality which without a blush of embarrassment insists on proclaiming things which are different to be the same and

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demanding that they be treated in the same way – will have farreaching consequences. In its aftermath many are now anticipating the prosecution of those who beg to differ. Ireland’s justice system is now administered by a government department entitled the Department of Justice and Equality – the self-same flawed concept of equality now enshrined in the country’s constitution.

Tom Holland, the English scholar and popular historian has asserted that “Liberalism is essentially Christianity-lite, and you can include atheism and secularism in that bracket too — these are basically Christian heresies. The ethics involved are really New Testament ones.” It would seem that Christian Ireland has now fallen victim to this latest wave of religious reformation while still thinking of itself as Christian or Catholic – just about. Those driving this “reformation” will soon be forcibly imposing their doctrines on all, not with the bloody ferocity of the State-led ideologies of former times but no less draconian for all that.

Ireland now may well be in the throes of a new religious reformation, driven by a secularist State and acquiesced in by a lax and apathetic population. Ireland’s people might resist this if it were awake but does not do so because in all probability it does not really comprehend what is going on. It acquiesces because it has succumbed to the mantra of “Ireland must move with the times”, not recognizing that what is going on is a subversion of the Christian faith which has characterized the soul of Ireland for more than 1500 years.

Those Christians in Ireland who wish to hold on to the “Faith of Our Fathers” but who are now being marginalized by the Irish State must be asking themselves what hope is there of a new “counter reformation” as their ancestors did in the sixteenth century?

But perhaps Ireland’s Christian people and their leaders could do worse than look across the

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Celtic Sea for inspiration. There they might find a model for a revival of the faith in their land, the only antidote to the poisonous ideology now seeping into its political life and culture.

called the “Catholicism of openness” that dominated postVatican II French Catholic life.

While the néocatholiques are happy to listen, they also want to debate and even critique reigning secular orthodoxies.

For them, discussion isn’t a oneway street. This is a generation of French Catholics who are, as Le Figaro put it, “afraid of nothing.”

In France, the Eldest Daughter of the Catholic Church, there is now talk of a Catholic Revolution. In Paris, on October 30 last, the iconic Le Figaro ran the headline “La révolution silencieuse des catholiques de France” over an article describing how what the paper called France’s néocatholiques are now forming a new generation of leaders in the nation’s political, cultural, and economic debates.

(These people) are … skilled at bringing the insights of Catholic orthodoxy to bear in fresh and powerful ways. Certainly, la bien-pensance (political correctness) continues to suffocate French cultural life.

That culture also remains dominated by a left that tends to label its critics as “un reactionaire” or anything to which the word “phobic” can serve as a suffix. The point, however, is that Catholics in the public eye are increasingly unintimidated by this. That’s a mindset which French secular thinkers are simply unused to encountering.

America’s Catholic World Report noted, in commenting on the Le Figaro story: Significantly, the new Catholics’ idea of dialogue isn’t about listening to secular intellectuals and responding by nodding sagely and not saying anything that might offend others.

Instead, younger observant Catholics have moved beyond — way, way beyond — what was

All this will be uncomfortably familiar to the Irish who tried to

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resist the tsunami of media and political orthodoxy which persuaded – if that’s not too neutral a term – 62% of the Irish electorate into accepting gay “marriage” last May. Not since the aftermath of Ireland’s Civil War in the first half of the twentieth century did such acrimony result from a political campaign as did in this case. But if the brave French can resist and overcome the intimidation which their laicist ideology has generated perhaps the Irish can do the same.

by some of the worst progressivist experimentation within the universal Church, whether in terms of liturgy, pastoral practice, or how one approached the modern world.

Many men left the active priesthood, while others, including the Jesuit editor of the prominent journal Études, exited the Church altogether.

By the late 1970s in France, things had degenerated to the point whereby the well-known Jesuit philosopher Gaston Fessard, openly criticized the social statements issued by the French episcopate in that decade, effectively accusing it of being an unwitting fellowtraveller with the French left and endorsing its ideological program and wider tendencies to distort the faith into socialist, even Marxist ideology.

What is happening in France?

Catholic World Report traces this development over the past fifty years, noting how remarkable the change has been in French Catholicism since the Second Vatican Council.

In the years immediately following the Council, it says, there was a turn to the left among some French Catholics, especially clergy. This resulted, for instance, in an emphasis upon Catholic-Marxist dialogue and weakened resistance to changes in France’s abortion laws. Such trends were matched

Nothing quite as bad as this happened in Ireland. Or perhaps it did. Ireland did not fall victim to Marxist ideology but it did fall to a consumerist hedonism. It largely turned a blind eye to the Catholic Church’s moral teaching on sexuality and many

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of its clergy were no exception.

The sexual scandals, deviant and abusive or not, rocked the population’s trust in the clergy and filled the ammunition dumps of the anti-Catholic politicians and the media for decades of warfare against the Church. The Catholic World Report article speaks of “lowenergy Catholicism” in France of the 1970s. By the year 2000 Ireland’s Catholicism could not be described as anything else.

But, CWR asserts, with reference to France:

It was into this atmosphere of “low-energy Catholicism” that a man whose nickname was ‘le bulldozer’ was appointed first bishop of Orléans and then archbishop of Paris in 1981.

Called by one biographer ‘le cardinal prophète’, the late Jean-Marie Lustiger was anything but typical. The son of two secular Jews — one of whom was murdered in Auschwitz — Lustiger converted to Catholicism as a teenager during World War II and entered the seminary after the war. As chaplain at the Sorbonne’s Centre Richelieu and Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger

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then parish priest at a suburban Paris church, Lustiger led particularly dynamic ministries that attracted the attention of people in the bishop-making business. These included Saint John Paul II. He would have noted Lustiger’s ancestral roots in Polish Judaism. More generally, John Paul was looking for men who could shift French Catholicism out of the accomodationist rut into which he believed it had fallen — a point the Pope made clear during his first visit to France in 1980 when he pointedly asked: “France, Fille aînée de l’Eglise, es-tu fidèle aux promesses de ton baptême?” (France, eldest daughter of the Church, are you faithful to the promises of your baptism?).

Upon becoming archbishop, Lustiger didn’t stop upending things in Paris. Whether it was opening his own seminary and new schools, starting Catholic radio and television stations, or creating venues and opportunities for himself and other Catholics to engage and argue with secular thinkers, Cardinal Lustiger presented a

different way for Catholics to interact with French society. A critic of progressivism and Lefebvrism (which he saw as two sides of the same problem), Lustiger’s agenda was that of John Paul II and Benedict XVI: one that recognized there was no going-back to a pre-Vatican II, non-existent golden age, but that was also clear-eyed about just how dysfunctional much of modernity was turning out to be.

Perhaps most importantly, Lustiger attracted many vocations. Often called La génération Lustiger, many of these priests have assumed leadership in significant dioceses and subsequently adopted a distinctly Lustigerian-style. This breaks decisively with the diffident, ever-so-anxious-not-to-giveoffense mentality that once prevailed among the French episcopate, which gave the impression of having read too much Karl Rahner in the 1970s and not much else since.

And now, it seems, the postLustiger bishops are shaking up

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French Catholicism. While not aggressive, they still refuse to be overawed by secular France.

They are described as free of the disease of clericalism and they happily empower lay people to spread the Gospel. They are primarily interested in one thing: the Church’s central business: i.e., evangelizing and finding creative ways of doing so. It’s a model replicated by many young French priests. Not surprisingly, their parishes and ministries are the ones attracting people, converts, and vocations. Are there not signs that something similar may be beginning to happen in Ireland?

In Ireland there may be hope that it might happen more quickly than in France where 200 years of secularist heresy – to borrow Tom Holland’s thinking – has been corroding the deposit of its Christian faith.

Ireland’s secularism is probably only skin deep and the infrastructure of the Church has only begun to be attacked by the State. The vast majority of Ireland’s people are baptized Christians.

Put this into perspective relative to France, where only about 56 percent of the total population has been baptized Catholic and where weekly Mass-going Catholics are about 6 percent of the overall population. Ireland’s Catholic practice, while declining sharply among the young and while also harbouring a good number of practitioners of what the French call “catholicisme zombie”, is still considerably stronger than that.

The most recent reliable survey shows that 42.1% of Catholics in the Republic of Ireland attend Mass once per week.

Le Figaro maintains that the momentum in French Catholicism is with the néocatholiques. Liberal and lax Catholicism has faded into lapsed status and has failed as any kind of serious religion. The same process is at work in Ireland. As Cardinal Robert Sarah has said in a recent book, it is really a matter of “God or nothing”. Now, in France, the God option is increasingly subscribed to. If you attend Sunday Mass in Paris, for example, Le Figaro says, it’s

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hard not to notice the growth in numbers attending middle-class and working-class parishes, but also, as one French commentator, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry points out, you notice just how many Mass-goers are married couples with young children.

It is again noted by Catholic World Report that in recent years there has been much talk about the Church as a fieldhospital. It’s true that the French Church finds itself providing much help to the many people damaged by the culture of cynicism, economic statism, selfloathing, and hedonism bequeathed by France’s May 1968 generation.

The generation of Irish politicians now quietly exiting the Irish public square into retirement are from the exact same era. It is they who, by and large, have left Ireland’s social policies in the secularist mess in which they now rest – bequeathing to future generations the crowded Accident and Emergency department of social problems

which policies encouraging divorce, single parenthood, ambiguous marriage laws etc, always bequeath. That this happened on the watch of some of them was the result of their apathy. For an influential minority it was deliberate. As they do so they clap themselves on the back and consider that they have achieved their goal of modernizing their backward country.

But it is not over yet.

The new Catholics in France, it seems, are now entering an era in which they recognize that noone is supposed to remain perpetually in a field-hospital.

They are saying good-bye to mediocre Catholicism and seem to have chosen, according to the view of Catholic World Report, to live out what Benedict XVI suggested would be Western European Catholics’ role for the foreseeable future: a creative minority— one that imaginatively engages culture from an orthodox Catholic standpoint in order to draw society closer to the truth, instead of meekly relegating

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Catholics to the role of bitplayers in various secularprogressive agendas.

There are signs of a leadership emerging among Irish Catholics with a similar vision, some who really are determined that the country will not descend into that graveyard of the Faith, Christianity-lite. These are those who believe and take to heart the words of St. Paul in his letter to the beleaguered Romans of his day:

come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to

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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Roger Scruton: ‘These left thinkers have destroyed the intellectual life’

by Mick Hume

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urs is an age of intellectual conformism, in which expressing offensive opinions often seems to be deemed the worst offence of all; academia is decreed a ‘safe space’ where ‘uncomfortable’ ideas are banished, and using the wrong word can see you accused of committing a ‘microaggression’.

And you are supposed to apologise at the first sign of a wagging finger.

the veil to Islamist terrorism, from homosexuality to fox hunting. Whatever anybody thinks of his views, they should surely endorse his aversion to the ‘radical censorship of anything that disturbs people’ and his insistence that the controversial ‘needs to be discussed’ rather than continually ‘pushed under the carpet’.

Roger Scruton apparently didn’t get the memo. During our conversation, the conservative philosopher gently but unapologetically delivered blunt and cutting opinions on subjects ranging from Slavoj Zizek to Jeremy Corbyn, from banning

Now 71, Scruton has been the bête noire of British left intellectuals for more than thirty years, and gives them another beastly mauling in his new book Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. It is a tour de force that, the introduction concedes, is ‘not a

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word-mincing book’, but rather ‘a provocation’. In just under 300 pages he Scruton-izes a collection of stars, past and present, of the radical Western intelligentsia – the likes of Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson in Britain, JK Galbraith and Ronald Dworkin in the US, Jurgen Habermas, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze in Europe. An expanded and updated version of his controversial Thinkers of the New Left (1985), the book ends with a new chapter entitled ‘The kraken wakes’ dealing with the ‘mad incantations’ of Alan Badiou and the left’s marginally newer academic celebrity, the Slovenian Zizek.

The slightly pained look on his face suggests that I am not the first to ask Scruton why he has devoted a book to taking on a collection of largely declining or deceased intellectuals and a culture that he concedes ‘now survives largely in its academic redoubts’. ‘They may seem like obscure intellectuals to the man in the street but actually they are still dominant on the humanities curriculum’, he explains. ‘If you

study English or French, even musicology or whatever, you have to swallow a whole load of Lacan and Deleuze. Take Deleuze’s book, A Thousand Plateaus – the English translation has only been out a few years, but it’s already gone through eleven printings. A huge, totally unreadable tome by somebody who can’t write French.’

‘Yet this is core curriculum throughout the humanities in American and English universities. Why? The one sole reason is it’s on the left. There is nothing that anybody can translate into lucid prose, but for that very reason, it seems like a suit of armour around the ageold prejudices against power and authority, the old unshaped and unshapeable agenda.’

Defending academic freedom against the forces of conformity matters to Scruton because ‘My life began, insofar as it had a beginning, in the university.

That’s where I grew up, and I love my subject, philosophy, love the whole idea of the academic and scholarly life, that one has a

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place apart where people are pursuing the truth and communicating that to people who are eager to learn it. And this thing has completely destroyed the intellectual life.’

He considers these leftists prime culprits in what might be called the closing of the university mind, though ‘whether they caused the closing of the mind or are the effect of it is another matter’.

Scruton’s powerful aversion to ‘the French gurus of ’68 and their jargon-ridden prose’ dates from that student revolt in Paris in 1968. It gave birth to a generation of radical thinkers, and, in the process, helped turn at least one young Englishman into a conservative. ‘I was there in Paris and I was indignant at the stupidity of what I observed.

I was a normal young person in England, I was brought up in a Labour Party family and as far as I had any views they’d be vaguely on the left.’ His father was a working-class lad from Manchester who became a schoolteacher and moved his family south, where Scruton attended High Wycombe Royal

Grammar School, played bass guitar and listened to The Beatles before being expelled shortly after winning a scholarship to Cambridge University. ‘But I’d been very influenced as a teenager by TS Eliot and FR Leavis, who put culture at the centre of the their vision. They understood that culture in a way that now would be described as elitist, as an initiation into something higher than where you were. I thought the culture of our civilisation was something intrinsically valuable – I still think that. And something that is worth making distinctions in order to preserve.

So that was moving me in a conservative direction.

‘But when I was in Paris in ’68 I became indignant at the total ignorance of the people who tried to tell me that this revolution was something important. I couldn’t argue with them about the thing that really mattered to me, culture. To them that was just “bourgeois”.

This word bourgeois really got up my nose. I decided, yes, of course there is such a thing as the bourgeoisie and you are it,

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these well-fed, pampered middle-class students whose one concern was to throw stones at working-class people who happened to be in a policeman’s uniform.’

Some might also suspect the new book of settling old scores. The first version of Thinkers of the New Left was, Scruton now reflects, ‘a disaster’, a key moment in his ousting from respectable academic life. ‘I never envisaged that I could be attacked in quite such a violent way. My previous book The Meaning of Conservatism had prepared the way – that was an outspoken and provocative book – so I was already persona non grata in academic circles. But for me to attack the people on whom the whole new curriculum was founded was regarded not just as an insult; it was also necessary to show that this was the product of a small, benighted mind. So that was made into the theme, and it was quite difficult to deal with. But it was fun in the end, of course. One can’t worry too much about what others say about you.’

That Eighties furore proved ‘the beginning of the end’ for his British university career – he was professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck at the time. Scruton went to Eastern Europe to encourage the intellectual dissidents against the Stalinist regime, and received the Czech state’s highest civilian honour after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet bloc. He moved temporarily to America, too, as professor of philosophy at Boston University.

Nowadays he is based back in Blighty, a visiting professor of philosophy at Oxford University, and fighting a rearguard action against the new left’s domination of the academic and intellectual life.

At the end of the book, Scruton asks why this unrepresentative group of left intellectuals has achieved such ascendancy, and offers some reasons. As I point out, he does not suggest that one reason might be the paucity of conservative intellectuals, present company excluded of course.

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‘I agree there is a paucity of conservative thought. It is partly the effect of the dominance of the left. If you come out as a conservative in a university context, you will find yourself very much on the margins. But my main explanation of this is that conservative thought is difficult. It doesn’t consist of providing fashionable slogans or messages of hope and marching into the future with clenched fists and all the things that automatically get a following. It consists in careful, sceptical rumination on the nearimpossibility of human existence in the first place.’

In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Scruton attacks the left idea of thought for a cause, ‘politics with a GOAL’. By contrast, he tells me, ‘Conservatives are by their nature people who are trying to defend and maintain existence without a cause’. Simply to keep things as they are? ‘We obviously all want to change things, but recognising that human life is an end in itself and not a means to replace itself with something else. And defending

institutions and compromises is a very difficult and unexciting thing. But nevertheless it’s the truth.’

For Scruton, the left intellectuals’ apparent attachment to a higher cause only disguises what they really stand for: ‘Nothing.’ He writes that ‘when, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had “capitalism” as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice’. More recently, ‘the windbaggery of Zizek and the nonsemes of Badiou’ exist only ‘to espouse a single and absolute cause’, which ‘admits of no compromise’ and ‘offers redemption to all who espouse it’. The name of that cause? ‘The answer is there on every page of these fatuous writings: Nothing.’

So, what is all this Nothing-ness about? ‘My view’, says Scruton, ‘is that what’s underlying all of this is a kind of nihilistic vision that masks itself as a moving

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toward the enlightened future, but never pauses to describe what that society will be like. It simply loses itself in negatives about the existing things – institutional relations like marriage, for instance – but never asks itself if those existing things are actually part of what human beings are. Always in Zizek there’s an assumption of the right to dismiss them as standing in the way of something else, but that something else turns out to be Nothing.’

original slogan of the French Revolution – liberté, égalité, fraternité – was just a slogan, and nobody troubled to ask themselves whether liberté and égalité were compatible in practice. Really the subsequent history has been an illustration of that conflict between them.

We agree to disagree about his suggestion of there being a dreadful left continuum from the French revolution to today (me being not only a fan of past revolutions but an old historical materialist who believes in seeing things in their specific contexts). However, his book does acknowledge that something important has changed about leftwing thinking: ‘Liberation and social justice have been bureaucratised.’

‘Whatever we think about the revolutions’, he says, ‘the

‘But these great ideals, for which people did fight and die, were changed under the pressure of twentieth century politics into bureaucratic processes, that are constantly equalising, constantly passing little bits of legislation to ensure that anybody is not discriminating, not standing out, not learning something that puts them in a higher category than anybody else. And, likewise, liberté has been bureaucratised in the sense that it doesn’t any more represent the freedom of people to break out, to do the thing that they really want to do.

Rather it’s conceived as a form of empowerment – the state gives you this in the form of vouchers or privileges, privileges, for example, that you might have as a gay, or a woman, or an ethnic minority. So in all these ways, both those ideals

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have ceased to be ideals and become the property of the state, to distribute among people according to the fashion of the day.’

Some fifteen years ago, reviewing his book England: An Elegy, I suggested that perhaps Scruton could be the lost leader of the British left, since he shared some of their conservative, nostalgic national prejudices (and expressed them rather more eloquently). Now, of course, the Labour left has turned to a different sort of traditionalist, the state socialist Jeremy Corbyn. Scruton, unsurprisingly, is no fan of Corbyn or of the ‘idiocy’ of allowing activists to choose party leaders. ‘He was not elected by the parliamentary party but by people who have the luxury of sounding off without the responsibility of answering for it. Corbyn represents the idiocy of direct democracy, and the culture of resentment that takes advantage of it.’

What, then, of the state of the right? Scruton’s previous book was How to be a Conservative

(2014). That seems to be something many Tories find difficult today, despite their victory in the May General Election. ‘The election result revealed a very important truth’, insists Scruton. ‘The media, the academy and everything are essentially trying to portray the Conservative movement as evil, just out for themselves, all the usual caricatures. The election showed that people know in their hearts that it’s not true.’

But hold on, it would be hard to claim the election as an outpouring of heartfelt enthusiasm for the Conservatives. ‘No, of course, there’s no enthusiasm for the Conservative movement any more. Although when I express it, there is sometimes enthusiasm among young people – I really have a following, which is surprising. But the Conservative Party’s made the mistake of ignoring me. For years, I have worked hard to express things in a language that Conservatives could use if they only troubled to think it through. But they don’t.’ Do the likes of Cameron and Osborne

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even pass his ‘how to be a conservative’ test? ‘Well, yes, they are in their instincts, definitely. Osborne is quite an intelligent person, and so I think is Cameron. But let’s say they don’t have a grasp of the sort of complex sociological and philosophical vision that I would like them to have.’

Scruton’s preferred ‘sociological and philosophical vision’ for conservatism would involve a moral code as well as market economics. ‘The question of maintaining a serious moral order while allowing economic freedom has, I think, troubled people right from the beginning of history, and has always been a

tension within conservative thinkers, going right back to [Edmund] Burke. The traditional way of reconciling these two things was through religion, which would remove certain things from the market.

Sex is removed from the market and made into a religious ceremony, and parent-child relations, education, etc. I think that’s the great benefit that religion has deferred on people down the centuries. Take it away now and we don’t know quite what’s going to happen.’

And what of the Tory government’s modernising moral policies – as symbolised by its enthusiasm for legalising Roger Scruton

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gay marriage? ‘The arguments in favour of offering something to a previously disprivileged group are all very well and they do have weight. But much more important is the effect of this on the institution of marriage. My view is that here we need some serious anthropology. You have to recognise that rites of passage are not personal possessions, they are possessions of the whole community, they are the ways in which the community defines itself and defines its obligation towards the next generation. So you don’t make these radical, metaphysical alterations to an institution such as marriage without there being long-term consequences. And nobody seemed to want to talk about the long-term consequences.’

The issue for a Christian such as Scruton is what, for example, might his marriage and his sacred vows to his wife Sophie mean now, in the light of these changes. ‘And my marriage means my children as much as my wife, and those children are the product of our union and our whole being on this earth is

vindicated in them. That, of course, can’t be reproduced now in quite the same way.’

While opposed to any discrimination against homosexuals today, he retains characteristically unfashionable attitudes. ‘What I say in my book Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation (1986), I still think. But it’s much more dangerous to say it now. My view then was that first of all – oh why not say it, you know, I’m old now – homosexuality is not one thing. Lesbianism is usually an attempt by a woman to find that committed love that she can’t get from men any more.

Because men exploit women and move on. So it’s very often a reaction to that sort of disappointment. Whereas male homosexuality, because it’s not constrained by a woman’s need to fix a man down, is hugely promiscuous – the statistics are quite horrifying. And there’s also the obsession with the sexual organs rather than the relationship, this vector towards phallicism, the obsession with the young, all kinds of things like that, which mean that, as I see it,

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homosexual desire, especially between men, is not the same kind of thing as heterosexual desire, even though it’s not a perversion.

‘This doesn’t mean you’re condemning people or that they should be discriminated against.

But nor should we oldfashioned, sad heterosexuals, minority interest though we might be, be deprived of those institutions that we have built out of our self-sacrificing forms of love. I think that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to say now between you and me, but it isn’t a perfectly reasonable thing to say or a possible thing to say in public any more.’ You do realise Roger, I remind him with a nod at my voice recorder, that you are saying it in public? ‘Yeah yeah, I don’t care any more.’

Something Scruton does still care about is the conflict between Western civilisation and Islamists, as highlighted by the massacres in Paris. ‘I have for the past thirty years made a point of advocating the integration of immigrant communities as the main task,

and that schoolteachers should be encouraged to do this. It’s jolly hard but still we have to try.

And we didn’t try. On the contrary, people on the left accused you of racism if you even suggested it.’ Indeed, Scruton had a bitter experience of this in the Eighties when his conservative journal the Salisbury Review published a notorious article by Bradford headmaster Ray Honeyford, arguing that the celebration of multiculturalism in schools, and the failure to insist on speaking English, was failing children of all communities. ‘That destroyed my career as effectively as the book on the new left, but I would still adhere to [the idea of integration].’

Scruton is too smart to support anything as idiotic as Donald Trump’s proposed religion test to bar all Muslims from the US. But he does have his own suggested test for Muslims in the UK to pass. ‘[Muslims] have to be confronted with the fact that this is how you behave [in the UK]: you don’t treat women like this, you don’t hide your face in public. The French have been

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very good about that.’ Does he think a French-style ban on the veil would be a good idea, then?

‘Totally, because we’re a face-toface society, which defines our relations with each other through the idea of the I-thou relationship – I’m taking responsibility, looking you in your eyes.’

Some of us might think the problem is less about getting Muslims in the UK to sign up to a set of agreed British values than it is about wider British society deciding what those common values might be. If, for example, we truly believe in freedom and tolerance, it would surely be better to criticise and even condemn something like the veil rather than ask the state to ban it outright. ‘Possibly, possibly’, Scruton sort-of concedes, ‘but it needs to be discussed. Everything has been pushed under the carpet and not discussed and what we’re seeing is the inevitable result.’

Staying on the domestic front, the West’s loss of faith in its own values has led to various attacks on free speech, as documented

on spiked. This has prompted Scruton of late to write in defence of the right to be offensive, against ‘people just cultivating the art of being offended before knowing beforehand what is actually going to offend them’. ‘We’ve got to stand up not only for free speech, for the individual, but also for all that we’ve inherited from the Enlightenment and from Christianity, too. Why should we turn our backs on any of it? The thing that produced Beethoven and George Eliot and Tolstoy, what are we supposed to be defending? I don’t want to close down free speech in response. I think we will have to close down a lot of public movement in order to trace the terrorists, there are all sorts of difficulties but no, certainly not to give way to what they want. I mean, really, when it comes to things like the cartoons of the Prophet, they should be publicly displayed, and their alleged offensiveness discussed by those who have an issue with it. As it is, we have no idea what the fuss is about. Are we being asked to deny that the Koran can be interpreted as an incitement?

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That the Prophet was a warrior?

That there is such a thing as Jihad of which we infidels might be the target? Censorship is effectively encouraging Muslims not to take the critical attitude to their religion that we all need, and they most of all.’

Nobody, however, should mistake Scruton for some sort of wild libertarian or a supporter of spiked’s view on the primacy of human freedom. ‘I think that obedience, properly understood, is if not the highest virtue (that would make me an Islamist) the one that is presupposed by all the others – obedience to the law, to morality, to authority, to those you love and those who depend on you. That is what freedom consists in, as Kant wisely saw.’

One freedom Scruton has long been associated with is the freedom to hunt foxes with hounds; he had been riding out with the hunt earlier that day, following a trail laid by a man rather than a fox to comply with the hunting ban. He has five horses on his Wiltshire farm, where he has reinvented himself

as a countryman over the past twenty years. But his fondness for hunting and ‘high’ culture, coupled with his disdain for such popular pastimes as football and television, has led to accusations of snobbery. This seems to annoy Scruton almost as much as if he were called a socialist.

‘My interest in hunting stems from a love of horses and the countryside, and our hunt consists largely of farmers, and has few if any toffs.’ He thinks that those who use the word ‘snob’ as a term of abuse ‘are thereby accusing themselves of the very fault they claim to discern’, by looking down their noses at others. As for cultural snobbery, ‘Have I got to be threatened with the concentration camp in order to like popular culture when most of it is self-evidently trash?

Think what George Orwell would say. But also look at the extended praise of heavy metal in my novel The Disappeared.’

Careful Roger, or they’ll be calling you a head-banger.

More than a decade ago I became probably the first and possibly the last old libertarian

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Marxist to go on a family visit to the Scrutons’ Sunday Hill farm, our small daughters gambolling about in the field and on horseback with their little Sam and Lucy (well, there was no TV to watch indoors). The Scruton offspring are away at boarding school now. ‘They’re both extremely happy there’, he says, adding with a typically wry smile, ‘I see them every now and then’.

in Malmesbury after he defeated the Danes, the first king of all England’. Perhaps somebody will soon have to crown Roger Scruton as the last English conservative intellectual standing.

This article first appeared on spiked.com and is reprinted here with kind permission.

Meanwhile, down on the farm, Sophie Scruton has started a business selling locally made artisan cheeses (the rural equivalent of London’s booming craft-beer industry). Athelstan Farmfoods takes its name from ‘the king who was crowned here

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mick Hume is spiked’s editor-at-large.

His book, Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?, is published by Harper Collins.

Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, by Roger Scruton, is published by Bloomsbury Continuum.

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The Church: A Historical View

by Father John McCloskey

I

am a Church historian, and received a doctorate in this discipline from a pontifical university. I bring this up because of the great controversies in the media around the world surrounding the recent meeting of the bishops in Rome for the Synod on the Family, which happily has now ended without any change in traditional Catholic teachings.

This did not surprise me at all, and should not surprise any Catholic, for the simple reason that the teachings of the Church that are considered dogma cannot be changed by anyone, including the Holy Father. Let us not forget that the Church always has the help of the Holy Spirit, as Christ promised, and will continue to have it until the end of time. We should remain

certain of that, because it is the truth. And, resting in that truth, we should not be surprised at any time to witness the unfaithful misinterpretations of those who consider themselves Catholics, but whose interest is in trying to confuse the faithful, as if the Church were man-made rather than Godmade.

The reality is that the Church will always be under attack and has been from the beginning, whether those attacks take the form of controversies or of physical attacks on Christians who then become “martyrs� (meaning witnesses) of the truth. At the very beginning, in the era of the Acts of the Apostles, we see attacks by Jewish leaders and the beginnings of the Roman distrust that issued in the

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persecutions of Nero and many of his successors. A few centuries after the Edict of Milan established religious tolerance for Christians in the Roman Empire, Muslim jihadist efforts began the long effort to conquer Christendom (successful in the Holy Land, Northern Africa, and eventually what had been the Eastern part of the Roman Empire centered on Constantinople). The Age of Reason saw the persecution of the Church by French revolutionaries during the Reign of Terror; less than a century and a half later came the beginnings of communist persecutions.

And of course other threats arose from inside the Church. Indeed, one sign of the truth of Christianity is that the evil one does everything he can in order to confuse and break away people from the Church (or from belief in its teachings), in hopes of drawing more people to Hell. In the early centuries of Christianity, heretics such as the Gnostics, the Arians, the Iconoclasts, and many others often seemed destined to overwhelm the Church and indeed claimed the lives of many faithful and determined confessors and Fathers of the Church. Centuries later, the great fracture of Christianity called

the Protestant Reformation produced many martyrs.

Faced with such repeated and perilous challenges to her mission of proclaiming and handing on the deposit of the faith, the history of the Church is filled with the stories of great theologians who defended the faith, as well as thousands of saints and a variety of religious orders that were formed to meet the assorted needs and counter the reigning threat of each era.

At times, these attacks on the Church have threatened the Catholic countries of Europe or significant Catholic populations in other nations. However, from the catacombs to the Reformation, the Church has always survived.

And it will continue to do so. Why? Because we have the truth, and because the assurance of that truth makes us unafraid of death. Indeed, aside from natural fear of pain and judgment, we Christians should look forward to death, knowing that, if we have been faithful, it will bring us eventually to our loving Father in heaven. There we will become acquainted with thousands of our forebears that we never met in this life but that we will share an eternity of bliss with.

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As we strive in our own era to build strong families, work with integrity, and form true friendships, in and with and through the graces we receive from the Church, we should draw strength and inspiration from our history. In seeking to live charitable, committed, and courageous lives, we can look to the examples of the martyrs and the saints. Our role as members of the Church is to live our faith joyfully and through this joy to truly evangelize those we encounter.

After all, that is how the first Christians spread the faith in the early Church.

I hope that this realization, frequently reflected upon, will not only help you to live your faith more faithfully but also awaken your

desire to go deeper into the Church's history. Among the many good books on that history, I particularly recommend several written in our own time by a great Catholic historian, Diane Moczar.

Why not start with Don't Know Much about Catholic History: From the Catacombs to the Reformation, or perhaps The Church Under Attack?

It’s especially at times like these that we should not let passing troubles disturb us, but find confidence in the record of how the Holy Spirit has preserved the Faith in ages like ours – and even worse.

This article first appeared on The Catholic Thing in November, 2015.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rev C. John McCloskey III is a Catholic priest of the Prelature of Opus Dei and member of the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross.

He is the former director of the Catholic Information Center of the Archdiocese of Washington.

Website: www.frmccloskey.com.

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Rodney Stark: “The world is more religious than it has ever been”

by Kathryn Jean Lopez

I

s there more faith than not in the world? “The world is more religious than it has ever been,” Rodney Stark writes in his new book The Triumph of Faith: Why the World Is More Religious than Ever. Around the globe, four out of every five people claim to belong to an organized faith, and many of the rest say they attend worship services. Stark writes that “a massive religious awakening is taking place around the world.”

He talks more in this interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez of The National Review Institute.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: The triumph of religion looks like a grave and deadly thing these days. What are your thoughts about the rise and growth of religion at a time when barbarism and mass murder is being perpetrated in God’s name?

Rodney Stark: Perhaps it is fitting to get this question out of the way at the start – even though it is worded as if written

by Richard Dawkins. Throughout the book I give extensive and close attention to the dark sides of religious enthusiasm, often drawing on my recent book devoted to that matter: Religious Hostility. Unlike our president and the liberal press. I do not shy

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from the words “radical Muslim,” nor do I ignore the data showing that this is not a tiny group, but one that enjoys wide support in many Muslim nations. But, I fail to see how this phenomenon is connected to the enormous and rapid growth of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa and in China.

Or to the new-found vigor of Latin American Catholicism (in response to the rapid rise of Protestantism). Or to the remarkable Hindu revival in India.

How much of a problem is anti-Semitism in Europe?

How has it happened and how can it be helped?

Anti-Semitism is much too high in Europe – a third in France scored high on a well-conceived measure of anti-Semitism in 2014, as did more than a quarter in Germany and Austria. Things are even worse in Eastern Europe – 45 percent scored high in Poland, forty-one percent in Hungary. As to why, I don’t think this is something that happened recently, but is a hold-over from earlier times. The Holocaust was not the work of a few Nazis – it

was the culmination of centuries of vicious actions against European Jews. Most Germans did know, and everyone in Europe knew of the brutalization of the Jews by the Nazis as soon as they were in power. Even so, in that same set of national surveys measuring anti-Semitism in 2014, 39 percent in Western Europe agree that “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust” and 24 percent of Eastern Europeans think that the Holocaust “was a myth or an exaggeration.” How can this be helped? I know of nothing that hasn’t already been tried.

The world is more religious than it has ever been.

Really? Pew says America is becoming less religious.

What is the discrepancy?

Even if Pew were correct about America, that would not alter the fact that huge increases in religious affiliation and participation are going on in most of the rest of the world. But, of course, Pew is wrong about America. For one thing, when surveys only manage to get about

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10 percent of those originally drawn in their samples to agree to be interviewed (instead of at least 85 percent), it is impossible to put any confidence in the results. In fact, the group known to be most willing to be polled (less education, less income), and thus far overrepresented in Pew surveys, is precisely the group that has always been least likely to belong to or attend churches.

More importantly, the group who say they have no religion (and is said by Pew to be growing) are mainly those who once gave a denominational preference, but who did not belong to a local congregation or attend. That seems a trivial change – especially since the overwhelming majority of those who say they have no religion also affirm religious beliefs, and many of them report frequent prayer. For most of them, “no religion” means no specific church membership, not that they are irreligious.

Shouldn’t the world look different if people were really living their faith?

Wouldn’t people living the Beatitudes lead the headlines and be impossible to miss?

Wouldn’t the world be a dreadful mess if even fewer people were living their faith? “Man loves wife and kids, tithes, gives to the poor, goes to church, and obeys the law.” Surely that is no headline.

Any city editor would say, “So what’s unusual about that!” “Man kills wife, eats kids, and burns a church.” Now, there’s a headline.

These same editors love and eagerly publish attacks on Mother Teresa!

How many in the U.S. believe in angels and demons? What accounts for this?

According to a recent Baylor Religion Survey, conducted by the Gallup Poll, 61 percent of Americans say angels “absolutely” exist and another 21 percent say they “probably” do.

As for demons, the numbers are

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46 percent “absolutely” and 22 percent “probably.”

Why do you think this needs any special accounting for?

What accounts for the “seismic religious shift” toward Christianity in southern Africa?

First of all, the obvious inadequacy of the traditional tribal religions to cope with modernity and to offer hope and confidence. Second, the formation of more than eleven thousand African-originated andled Christian denominations.

What accounts for the “stunning awakening” of the Catholic Church in Latin America?

Rapidly growing Protestant competition eventually aroused an effective Catholic response.

This was not Liberation Theology, which was a misguided mess of religion and politics, but the Catholic Charismatic Movement that met energetic and emotional religion with a Catholic version of the same.

“If the percentage trend holds for another few years, there will be more Christians in China than in any other nation.” What can we do – the U.S., Christians in the West – do to help protect Christians in China from crackdown and otherwise help support them?

Very little. It probably would be best if we did not give the Chinese regime any reason to suppose that the growth of Christianity in China has any external implications. I am inclined to doubt that there will be any crackdown unless such links are apparent.

You write that “nearly everyone in Japan is careful to have a new car blessed by a Shinto priest.” How much of this is robust faith and how much of it is superstition or nostalgia?

I specifically identified this as an instance of “unchurched supernaturalism” and mentioned it in the same sentence as the fact that “38 percent of the French

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believe in astrology”. I might also note here that it usually lowers their autoinsurance rate.

What are some of the most important – and surprising – things you’ve learned about religion over your years of research?

The most important things all cluster; the rise of Western civilization was the direct result of Judeo-Christian religion. First is the belief in progress, that our history has an upward slope. In all the other major cultures, including Islam, history is regarded as headed downward.

That not only discourages all efforts to improve anything, but justifies the suppression of

improvements – both the Chinese and the Ottomans outlawed mechanical clocks.

Second is the belief that the universe is rational – that it runs according to comprehensible rules – because it was created by a rational creator. Elsewhere the universe was believed to be an incomprehensible mystery, about which one could meditate, but it was absurd to suppose one could penetrate these mysteries. In the West, from early days, it was widely agreed that it should be possible to discover the rules by which Creation runs. And so we have and continue to do so.

This interview first appeared on www.nationalreview.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute and editor-at-large of National Review Online. She is co-author of the new revised and updated edition of How to Defend the Faith without Raising Your Voice.

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Eighteen children: “A Gift from God”

by Jessica Jones

J

osé María Postigo, 54, and Rosa Pich, 49, from Barcelona always dreamt of having a large family, but have had to overcome some serious struggles to make their dream a reality.

The family, who have the most school-age children in Spain “and possibly Europe” were chosen by the European Large Families Confederation (ELFAC) as Europe's Large Family of the Year, and received the award from Spain’s Health Minister, Alfonso Alonso. They were awarded a cheque for €5,000 which they donated to help other big families.

José and Rosa’s first child was born with a severe heart defect and despite the fact that doctors only gave her three years to live, she died in 2012 aged twentytwo after completing her Masters.

The family was chosen because they are “an example of struggle and overcoming” said the ELFAC.

The couple, who are members of Opus Dei, an organisation within the Catholic Church, founded a charity to help children with heart conditions

The couple’s next two children died of the same heart condition; one aged only ten days and one at eighteen months. After the health issues of their first three children, doctors advised José and Rosa not to have any more – but amazingly they went on to have a further fifteen.

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and Rosa has written a book about her experience as a mother of Spain’s largest family: How To Be Happy With 1,2,3…

Children.

to have,” she said in a 2009 interview with Camino Católico.

“As a Christian, we see children as a gift from God and I will always accept any gift.”

The family was preselected by a jury along with six other large families around Europe and was finally chosen as “an example of struggle, desire to excel and commitment to life”, said the ELFAC.

This article first appeared on the website: www.thelocal.es

The family has appeared on television programmes around the world, from a BBC report “The biggest family in the world” to South Korean news and dozens of Spanish documentary shows.

It seems big families run in the family as José Maria is one of sixteen and Rosa had thirteen siblings. Members of Opus Dei are famous for having large families and as a mother who has borne eighteen children, Rosa described them as a “gift from God”.

“I'm a member of Opus Dei but neither Opus nor the Church has ever told me how many children

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Film review: Star Wars: The Force Awakens

by John P. McCarthy

W

ith Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Disney), the most popular series in film history resurfaces after a ten year hiatus. This is the seventh installment in the franchise as well as the first feature in a planned third trilogy. Like its predecessors, it’s essentially a family-friendly piece of entertainment, with only interludes of peril and combat barring endorsement for all.

At the controls is J.J. Abrams, creator of the television show Lost and the man who rejuvenated another iconic science-fiction franchise via 2009’s Star Trek. Hiring Abrams was a smart decision, not least because the savvy

director – who also co-wrote the script with Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt – could bring a steady hand to the project and allow producer George Lucas to concentrate on selling Lucasfilm to the Walt Disney Co. Few risks were taken, particularly on the technical side. The visuals aren’t novel or awe-inspiring, but they’re sufficiently well-crafted to transport viewers where they need to go.

The primary objective seems to have been to safely pass a beloved and lucrative property from one generation to the next.

This applies to the behind-thescenes talents (as mentioned

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above), the fan base and the cast of characters. Abundant humor and the introduction of a pair of compelling new heroes, both portrayed with irrepressible vitality, are the keys to a successful hand-off.

Thanks to an accessible plot, Star Wars neophytes, if they exist, won’t find themselves adrift in a forbiddingly alien galaxy, however far away. And there’s enough complexity and allusive layering to satisfy those fully immersed in the saga.

The Force Awakens takes place thirty years after Episode VI, Return of the Jedi. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), the last warrior battling on behalf of the chivalrous Jedi Order, has exiled himself. His twin sister, Leia (Carrie Fisher), the general leading the Jedi-friendly Resistance (successor to the Rebel Alliance), wants to find him. So, too, does the First Order, an army in the service of the Dark Side. Masterminded by Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis), this fascistic sect is bent on killing Luke and forestalling a Jedi uprising.

Leia sends her best fighter pilot, Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), to the barren planet Jakku to retrieve information on Luke’s whereabouts. When Poe and his droid BB-8 separate during a skirmish, the spheroidal machine meets a young female scavenger, Rey (Daisy Ridley), and a disaffected First Order Stormtrooper called Finn (John Boyega).

With the First Order mounting another attack, Rey, Finn and BB-8 commandeer a familiar looking, rusted-out freighter lying in a desert junkyard. Since this turns out to be the Millennium Falcon, it’s not long before that vessel’s famed commander, Han Solo (Harrison Ford), and his furry co-pilot, Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew), appear. (Droids C-3PO and R2D2 make brief appearances later.)

The good guys’ principal antagonist is Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), a descendant of archvillain Darth Vader and a disciple of Snoke’s who’s so torn between the upright and evil sides of the conflict that he has terrible anger issues. More

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ominously, First Order has a new, highly destructive weapon that makes the Death Star of earlier chapters look like a child’s toy.

The action builds to a gripping lightsaber duel in a snowy forest that ends all too quickly. Abrams never dawdles, which, as a rule, is a virtue. Yet, because he’s not a great visual stylist, his staging and framing often lack artistic flair. This makes viewers long for Abrams to linger over sequences that do have more panache. His focus, however, is on lucidity and character development. When it comes to the movie’s look, he sticks to the Star Wars template. On balance, that’s a more than acceptable trade-off.

If there are moments you suspect you might be watching the cast-reunion special of an old TV show – John Williams’ majestic music counters that feeling to a degree – it’s largely attributable to how stiff and weather-beaten Ford and Fisher appear.

That’s not ageism. It’s a criticism of the pair’s acting and, more

positively, a result of the contrast between their turns and the fresh, energized performances delivered by Ridley and Boyega. The senior duo can’t help seeming superannuated in comparison.

It’s doubtful that a movie has ever been more widely or intensely anticipated. Fueled by marketing ploys, a publicity avalanche and a glut of merchandise, this frenzy can obscure some of the things that have made Star Wars such a cherished and enduring cultural hallmark.

They include: entertaining story lines about the perennial struggle between good and evil; lovable heroes and hiss-worthy villains, both drawn with mythic characteristics; an integrated science-fiction vision; riveting chases, battles and action setpieces; and the celebration of classic values such as courage, honor, and fealty.

Early on, Ray and Finn buck themselves up by repeating the same line, “I can do this. I can do this.” Perhaps an awareness of the utility of self-confidence

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and the necessity of trying your hardest are the best takeaways from The Force Awakens. By displaying these qualities themselves, director Abrams and his team get the job done – and then some.

The film contains much stylized fantasy violence. The Catholic News Service classification is A-II – adults and adolescents. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is PG-13 – parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

Reprinted with permission from CNS. www.catholicnews.com Han Solo (Harrison Ford)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR John P. McCarthy is a guest reviewer for Catholic News Service. Copyright (c) 2015 Catholic News Service.

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Interdiocesan Retreats For Priests 7 Mar (9pm) - 11 Mar (10am) 2016 25 Apr (9pm) - 29 Apr (10am) 2016

The retreat will be preached by a priest of the Opus Dei Prelature and will also include plenty of 8me for silence and private prayer.

Book online: www.lismullin.ie

Married couples: strengthen your marriage!

Marital Love is a course over five Sunday afternoons to help married couples deepen in their married love, navigate the challenges of marriage and to learn from the experiences of other couples.

When?

12pm - 3.45pm on Sunday 17 Jan, 6 March, 24 April, 15 May, 12 June.

Where?

Rosemont School, Sandyford, Co. Dublin.

(Child-minding as well as fun activities for the children will be provided).

The cost? €220 per couple.

This includes course materials, tuition and a meal.

For further information see www.familyenrichmentireland.org