Position Papers – January 2019

Number 525 January 2019 €3 · £2.50 · $4

A review of Catholic affairs

Interview with Senator Rónán Mullen FR GAVAN JENNINGS

Vocation & our true name LUCAS BUCH

Book: Building a Bridge, Fr James Martin MARGARET HICKEY

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Number 525 · January 2019

Editorial

by Fr Gavan Jennings

In Passing: Art & safe spaces

by Michael Kirke

Why would Christians want the world to love them?

by Elizabeth Scalia

Vocation & our true name

by Lucas Buch

Interview with Senator Rónán Mullen

by Fr Gavan Jennings

Books: Building a Bridge, Fr James Martin

by Margaret Hickey

Films: Stan & Ollie

by Kurt Jensen

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

2 5 11 15 24 33 38

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

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Editorial

I

t is hard to begin 2019 in Ireland with the normal wishes for a prosperous new year since this year begins with the tragic inauguration of the legalised murder of the unborn. With a grim sense of timing Ireland’s president signed abortion into law only days before the celebration of the birth of the divine Infant. In taking this step Ireland has crossed a dark Rubicon. For the very first time in the Ireland’s history, including the centuries under British rule, the unjustified killing of innocent human beings will have the full sanction of law.

Some day in the future this law will, without a shadow of a doubt, be repealed. The names of those instrumental in introducing this law will, also without a shadow of a doubt, be tokens of opprobrium. But, in the meantime, it would be an additional tragedy if we were to allow ourselves grow accustomed to what will be taking place in Irish maternity hospitals and GP clinics. We must not allow ourselves grow inured to the gravity of this crime, and of course – as if it really needs to be said – we can have absolutely no part in the killing of an unborn child. Already we have seen the admirable firmness with which many Irish GPs are refusing to participate in abortion through referral – and this in the face of the chilling disdain of our political leaders for the rights of conscience. These doctors realise that in the matter of murder there can be no compromise. Willing cooperation (what theologians term “formal” cooperation) in an intrinsic evil being carried out by another makes one an accomplice in that act, and this can never be legitimised. And while not formal cooperation, attending a GP willing to administer abortion might at least make us uncomfortable, and lead us to look into alternatives.

While in one sense the outlook is dark for public morality in Ireland, this cloud has at least one silver lining. It is, as Breda O’Brien has pointed out in a recent Irish Times opinion piece, that the days of accommodating the secular culture are numbered. She observes – very correctly in my opinion – that Irish Catholics “… want an

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authentic Christianity. They also want a church that is not accommodationist and anxious to please the dominant culture…. The institutional Church is also realising that accommodationism is simply a quicker route to obliteration. Before the referendum there were questions about whether a strong intervention by the Church hierarchy would hinder or help. Now, that worry has been removed, if only because there is nothing left to lose.” All of this is, as she says, “curiously liberating”.

This “curious liberation” is extremely important, both for the Church hierarchy and for the ordinary faithful. It is the liberation from the excessive concern for what people think of us, a liberation from the fear of public opprobrium. It is a liberation that allows the Church to exercise her role as a “sign of contradiction” within the world (see Luke 2:34), and at the same time a liberation to place our trust in Christ, not in the world: “In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world!” (John 16:33).

I think we as a Church have a way to go yet; Irish – southern Irish at least – Catholics are still not accustomed to the kind of hostility which in fact is commonplace in many other European countries. I certainly was struck at the names I, as visibly a priest, was called on the streets of Madrid (“cuervo” – crow – is one of the more repeatable ones) when I was there for the World Youth Day in 2016.

David Quinn wrote recently of the increased levels of anti-Catholicism being experienced by Catholics in the work-place and even in their own homes. This is manifestly the case. However our reaction cannot be one of fear, or even worse of self-pity. It has to be one of courage, the kind of courage manifested by many of the saints throughout the Church’s history.

A wonderful example of such courage is visible in St Josemaria Escriva’s personal diary accounts of life in Madrid in the years leading

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up to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. The years leading up to the conflagration were marked by an incessant and brutal campaign of vilification of the Church, a campaign which achieved its intended goal especially amongst the working classes of Madrid, resulting in a bloody persecution of the Church before and during the years of the Spanish Civil War. St Josemaria was subject to verbal and physical abuse on the streets of Madrid since he wore his clerical garb till finally it would have meant certain death. However his reaction to verbal and often physical abuse was neither to shrink away, nor to respond to his attackers with hatred. Rather he feels sorry for his attackers and prays for them: September 18, 1931: I have to thank my God for a remarkable change. Until recently, the insults and taunts directed at me, as a priest, since the coming of the Republic (before that, they were very rare), made me furious. I decided that when I heard such vulgarities and obscenities, I would say to the Blessed Virgin a Hail Mary for whoever uttered them. I have done that. It has cost me. But now, when I hear those ignoble words, they only make me feel, as a rule, deeply sorry for those poor, unfortunate people. For when they act in this way, they think they are doing something noble, since others, exploiting their ignorance and passions, have made them believe that, besides being a lazy parasite, the priest is an enemy – an accomplice of the bourgeoisie which is exploiting them. Your Work, O Lord, will open their eyes! (Apuntes, 291) This to my mind serves as a good template for Irish Catholics in the increasingly hostile environment we now face: let us make excuses for those who abuse us for our religious or moral convictions (and defend them whenever possible), let us pray for them, and at the same time hope that the time will come when their eyes will be opened to the truth.

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In Passing: Art & safe spaces

by Michael Kirke

I

n past ages the powers controlling our great institutions of Church and State were much less tolerant of free speech and free interpretations of influential texts in our culture. Censorship was a routine instrument of government. Our freedoms now are more respected. Or are they?

human beings. Nor did he see the frightening denial of free speech now spreading like cancerous cells under the banner of liberal democracy. Just think of the controls exercised by the bullying trolls on Twitter – at one end of the scale. Then consider the selective management by the mainstream media of the public narrative on the political and social issues of our time.

As one cultural critic (Michel de Certeau) has observed, “Today, it is the socio-political mechanisms of the schools, the press or television that isolate the text controlled by the teacher or the producer from its readers.” He died in 1986 so did not live to see or feel the impact of social media as a controlling mechanism for the herding of

A potent example of the former was recounted recently by The New York Times. It was a sad story of the fate of a woman in Missouri who had the temerity to dream of trying to make her beloved Democratic Party a safe place for a pro-life advocate like

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herself to play a part in her State’s and her Nation’s politics.

Joan Berry, a Democrat from the day she heard John F. Kennedy campaigning in her State back in 1959, this summer successfully secured a clause in her Party’s platform which told pro-life citizens that there was a place for them in their midst. It wasn’t easy but when it went to a vote at a meeting of the State’s Democratic Committee, it passed by 32 votes to 25.

To cut a long and sad story of one public-spirited elder stateswoman short, the Party Committee was reconvened and promptly rejected Joan’s proposal. Joan Berry hadn’t even asked the Party to reconsider its position on the life issue. She just wanted her Party to be a forum where free speech was tolerated.

Cereau, however, saw an escape hatch for those beleaguered by what is nothing less than the tyrannical forces of dominant and domineering public opinion.

He pointed out that “behind the theatrical décor of this new orthodoxy is hidden … the silent, transgressive, ironic or poetic activity of readers (or television viewers) who maintain their reserve in private and without the knowledge of the masters.”

Joan went home from that meeting feeling she had struck a blow for an open society, for democratic politics and for the Party to which she had dedicated her political life. She and her husband went off for a quiet weekend in the country. Then her daughter rang her. “Mom”’ she said, “You better stay there for awhile. There is uproar on Facebook and Twitter about what you did.” Pro-choice Missouri was outraged and what they were prepared to say and threaten to do to poor Joan – and those thirty-two members of the Party who went along with her proposal was, well, unprintable.

Art to the rescue.

When I first saw Matt and Ross Duffer’s runaway Netflix success, Stranger Things, last year I wondered if I might not be drawing some consolation of this type from the experience. I wondered if this phenomenally

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successful piece of entertainment – some will say hokum – might not also be offering all of us an allegory for our time. We live in an era when alien forces baffle us and seem surround us on all sides.

and our own versions of the human condition.

Part of my fascination with Stranger Things was precisely because it seemed to say more about us, our time and our condition than a great deal of the general fare that is offered to us as entertainment.

I cannot read the minds of the Duffer brothers. But the truth is that what we read, hear and see in the artifacts of our civilization depends not only on the genius of the creators of those works. It is also often determined by our own experiences and by the power, character and developed state of our own creative imaginations.

In an interview in which the Duffers are asked about what seemed to be the universal truth they were trying to convey in the series, Matt Duffer commented that today “On television there’s been this huge avalanche of shows with antiheroes. A lot of our characters are good-hearted people. And they have a lot of compassion.” His brother Ross added that in Stranger Things, “Even when there’s darkness, people leave the show feeling a bit of hope there.… It’s about these friends that are there for each other no matter what, that there’s this mom (Winona Ryder) that’s there for her son no matter what. And to us there’s something both universal, and hopeful, about that.… That’s where we wanted to go.”

What Alice in Wonderland, Animal Farm or Lord of the Rings say to us is not only what their authors intended to say but it may also be elaborated and enriched for us by what our own thoughts, sensibilities and experience of life bring to the creative table. We interpret great works of literature not only in the context of the time of their creators. We often, and with great benefit, read and interpret these works in the context of our own times our own problems

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Yes, but I think their story resonates even deeper than that.

The darkness he talks about is really dark. Indeed it is as dark as the hell of Paradise Lost or in Tolkien’s land of Mordor in Lord of the Rings. This is the “upsidedown world” of the plot, intimately and terrifyingly known to the little girl, “Eleven”, and into which characters stray and in which some lose their lives, others lose their minds and which, throughout the series, encroaches on the real world. Its hidden forces are seeking to infiltrate and possess our world for their own grotesque and malign purposes.

Back in the 1950s we had the Red Scare. This in its turn spawned the monster of McCarthyism. We look back on that now and see it all as so much paranoia. McCarthyism revolted us and was essentially an instrument as capable of perpetrating injustice as what it railed against.

More effective antidotes of the age were the fables and fictions which countered the threat – ranging from those of Orwell, Huxley and others, to the productions of Hollywood’s own fable-factory – like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), one of the greatest science-fiction films of all time. It captures better than any other film the fears of that era. It did not say who the body snatchers were. It did not need to. It played into the real fears of the age.

On the surface these are natural forces manipulated by humans.

Netflix, in its promotional material, speaks of supernatural powers at work. But in fact what we are shown is the work of vile power-hungry people and their malfunctioning experiments.

The preternatural evil may emanate from the Father of Lies but, if it does, it happens like most of the evil in the world – through the medium of mankind.

So, if the Duffer Brothers are warning us about a threat to our civilization wrapped up in a piece of “eighties nostalgia with echoes of E.T. and The Goonies”, what might it be? I can’t say what it is for them, but I know what it is for me. The

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dystopia of Stranger Things may be read as a metaphor for many things: a world wrecked by man-made climate change; a world destroyed by the genetic manipulation of our food supply; a world mirroring that in which Planned Parenthood trades the body parts of human babies it aborts “for the good of humanity”. It may also be a warning that the nonsense of gender ideology and the attempted manipulation of our biological selves are destroying the very essence of our humanity. Take your pick. In the series we have a compelling juxtaposition of the murdering evil men and women working in a grotesque human engineering facility with the semi-innocent adults and handful of “dungeons and dragons” besotted twelveyear-old kids of a sleepy Midwest town.

ideology? Echoes of all this in Stranger Things are loud and clear.

Let us return to Michel de Certeau.

Joan Berry gets bullied and bludgeoned by the Democratic Party in Missouri because she wants freedom for people to talk about their conviction that unborn children are human beings. Students on campuses around the western world put “no-platform” bans on serious thinkers who question the orthodoxies of our time and even seek the removal of academic staff who do the same.

Gender-bending ideologues scream about inequality and repression of individuality when anyone tries to object to their manipulation of human nature to suit their whims.

Speaking truth about our times in plain language can be dangerous. When this becomes the norm in our culture we, thankfully, can turn to works of imagination to search for the truth and to reach a kind of wisdom. Through them we can

Can they be compared with the gullible victims of transgender activism whom we read about – individuals who are seeking reversals of surgical mutilation by professionals in the grip of a gender-bending political

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perhaps talk more meaningfully to each other and come to wisdom more effectively than by any other means. And we can do so with no little joy – until the world once again becomes a safe place in which to speak freely.

I don’t know what creative channel of communication might now be open to pro-life Democrats in Missouri to enable their voices to be heard in the party again. If they cannot find one then undeniably what is coming from this “upside down world” is an undeniable stench of totalitarianism.

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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Why would Christians want the world to love them?

by Elizabeth Scalia

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ecently, someone complained to me that habits of political correctness and identity politics seemed to be creating an atmosphere where – to this person’s perspective – anyone might claim to be part of a protected class. “It’s open season on Christians, though,” the gentleman groused.

People like to say so, but – given examples of the very real, violent, and costly persecution that John Allen describes in his book The Global War on Christians – I’d suggest that we in America are experiencing something more akin to mild social bullying that is (at least for now) not even terribly widespread.

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The day may come when Christians in North America face true persecution. How near or far off that day may be is anyone’s guess, but because genuine persecution is not currently being experienced in the United States, it grates on me when I hear a Christian take up the mantras and mentalities of victimhood that dominate our age.

“The world isn’t being nice to us,” makes me want to call the “whambulance” on Christians. It is a whine entirely of the world, and the antithesis of heroic witness – a single sentence that, uttered publicly, can undo whole lifetimes of evangelical effort.

When I hear it, I bristle and say, “Buck up, champ, we didn’t sign

on with Christ in order for the world to love us.” After all, “If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first,” said Jesus (John 15:18).

The world not being “nice” to us is precisely the gig we signed on for.

Pope Benedict XVI said as much to a group of German pilgrims once: “The ways of the Lord are not easy. But we were not created for an easy life, but for great things, for goodness.”

The great thing, the goodness, being God himself. Not, notice, the world or its fickle fashions.

Truth be told, it is not a lucky moment. It often comes when we are in the dregs of despair, because that’s the only time we stiff-necked creatures will look outside of ourselves.

But, that moment, it changes us.

It turns a ne’er-do-well drunk like Matt Talbot into an ambassador for Christ’s healing.

It turns a political conspirator like Chuck Colson into a prison chaplain.

It saves a wretch like me.

Haters come and go. Zealots (always dangerous, no matter what side they’re on) come and go. But Christ remains, for Christ is eternal. And Christ changes things.

That has been true for two thousand years. The reality of Christ, experienced, changes us.

There comes a moment in most lives – in all lives, I believe – when Christ knocks and we open the door and experience a “milk and honey” moment.

Some argue that the experience of conversion is one-part emotional breakdown and one-part synaptic misfiring, something not dissimilar to an intense drug experience. That would be more convincing if people who’d tripped exceedingly well – or badly – subsequently found their lives, their perceptions, their consciences, their attitudes, habits, and desires to be instantly, immediately, and permanently changed.

A drug experience, though, rarely results in such a radical shift in being.

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Conversion is a lifelong process.

One does not drink the milk and honey only once. Indeed, we humans are easily distracted and often need to be taken by the arm and steered back toward the reality of Christ, like recalcitrant children. But each sweet and thirst-quenching sip changes us.

Each new milk and honey moment – whether drunk in a garden or a desert – serves to refocus our faith, deepen our appreciation for our salvation, and brings about further surrender, and thus further intimacy with Jesus.

And so I am not worried about the world not liking us. I fully expect that the wide dissemination and acceptance of heresies, coupled with the Church’s self-inflicted wounds, portend tough times for Christians, times rife with social ridicule, hatred, suppression, discrimination, and even lawful suppression.

Should we worry? I don’t think so.

I don’t believe Cardinal Francis George was worried when he mused, “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor

will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.”

Indeed, if fifty years from now Catholics are once again hiding priests and holding Mass underground, if Christians are using signals to direct others to worship, it will not surprise me.

But the Church is always at its most fervent and alive when it is under siege, gaining strength from the blood of martyrs. As we read in 1 Peter, “There is time for rejoicing, here, although for a little while you may have to endure trials.”

Really, all of this comes with the job. Christian fretfulness is unseemly precisely because the job of the Christian is to hold fast in the face of chaos, recalling that Christ is more powerful than any man or medium – that he is alive, and that grace abounds.

When we are secure in what we believe, we need not be brought down by unwelcome words from the world; rather, we must work with what the world hands us.

Just as an Abbess or Abbot is

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entitled to use whatever resources his or her community contains to advance the stability of the abbey, the Holy Spirit has a way of confounding us by using what is out there in the world – sometimes very surprising things and people – to further the purposes and the will of Almighty God. So engage without resentment.

Pray for those who hate us. There is power there. Christians are joint-heirs with the Chosen people; it makes perfect sense that we might taste some of the sting and poison the world keeps offering to them.

There is nothing to fear here.

Changing situations in the world

are nothing in the face of the Unchanging.

Observation is valuable, but so is reflection. Most valuable of all is prayer and contemplation, and communion.

There are angels and demons in the whirlwind, but we can step away from it, and let them battle it out. Removing ourselves from noise of headlines and chatter helps us maintain perspective and see what it is we are each being called to do, and what matters not.

In that way we can ignore the whirl and leave the wind to the Holy Spirit, who creates no victims, only victors.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Elizabeth Scalia is a Benedictine Oblate and author of several books including the awardwinning Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life (Ave Maria Press) and Little Sins Mean a Lot (OSV). She is married, and living on Long Island, USA. This article first appeared at: www.wordonfire.org. This article has been reprinted with the kind permission of the editors.

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Vocation & our true name

by Lucas Buch

T

he first book in the Bible begins with an account of God the creator, who brings creatures into existence with merely his word: And God said, “Let there be light … “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters” … “Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees” …“Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds” (Gen1:1-25). But when the moment comes to create the human being, something different happens. Rather than simply creating a species or kind of being, God creates a being made in his own image, a being

called personally into existence who is given a personal name, and who God addresses personally.

If we turn from this account of creation to the last book in the Bible, we discover something surprising. Besides the name we receive from God when He creates us, we need to be given a new name at the end of our life. To him who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it (Rev 2:17). How are we to understand this new name that will be given to us at the end of our life? We are faced here with

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the mystery of vocation—a personal mystery that unfolds as we advance on our path towards true life.

Both free and unfinished A rose, an oak tree, or a horse don’t need to make any decision to become what they are: they simply exist. They grow and reach their fullness and finally disappear. But it’s not the same with the human person.

As we grow, and especially during adolescence, we come to realise that we can’t simply be “one more.” Something urges us to become someone unique, with a name and surname, a distinct and unrepeatable person. We sense that we are in the world to achieve something, and that with our life we can make this world a better place. We aren’t satisfied with knowing what we are, or how things are, but rather feel urged to dream of who we would like to be and how we would like our world to be.

Some people will see this as being naïve, as a lack of realism that sooner or later needs to be

overcome. Nevertheless, this urge to dream truly pertains to our highest self. For a Christian, the desire to be someone, with a name and surname, reveals how God has wanted to create us: as a being who is unrepeatable. He created the world and left it in the hands of our first parents, to till it and keep it (Gen 2:15). He wished to count on our work to preserve this world and make it shine forth in all its beauty, so that we will love it “passionately,” as Saint Josemaria liked to say.[1] God does the same when He grants us the gift of life. He invites us to develop our own personality, and leaves this effort in our own hands.

Therefore He wants us to put into play our personal freedom, our initiative and all our abilities. “God wants something from you. God hopes in you,” Pope Francis said in a World Youth Day address. “He is encouraging you to dream. He wants to make you see that, with you, the world can be different.

For the fact is, unless you offer the best of yourselves, the world

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will never be different. This is a challenge to you.”[2]

means “Rock”). Before the world could change, Simon’s life had to change.

He calls you by your name Simon accompanied his brother Andrew to listen to the Baptist.

The journey from Galilee to Judea was a long one, but it was worth the effort. Something great seemed to be occurring there. Centuries had gone by since God had sent a prophet to his people, and now in John a new prophet seemed to have truly appeared among them.

Andrew encounters Jesus along the banks of the Jordan and spends an entire afternoon speaking with Him. When he returns to his brother Simon, he tells him: We have found the Messiah. And he brought Simon to Jesus (cf. Jn 1:41-42). What must have Simon been thinking on the way there? Is it possible that the Messiah, the one sent by God, has finally arrived? Could the world they were living in be about to change, as Scripture prophesised? When they approached the Teacher, Jesus looked at him, and said, “So you are Simon the son of John? You shall be called Cephas” (which

The Gospels show us Simon Peter’s life as a continual discovery of Jesus’ true identity, of the mission being entrusted to him. Soon after returning to Galilee, following those days spent with the Baptist, Jesus once again comes to Simon Peter, and asks him to put his boat out a little from the land so He can preach from it. Simon must have been a bit reluctant to do so, since he had just spent the whole night fishing and hadn’t caught anything. When he finishes speaking with the people, Jesus makes a new request: Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch (Lk 5:4). It must have seemed absurd to Simon, since they had spent many hours that night fishing without success, and everyone knows that in the bright light of day fish refuse to enter the nets. But Simon obeys, and he sees his nets fill up with fish. Who must this man in his boat really be? But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Depart

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from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Lk 5:8). And our Lord responds: Do not be afraid; henceforth you will be catching men (Lk 5:10).

He said ‘yes,’ a courageous and generous ‘yes,’ and became a disciple of Jesus.”[3]

Who is Simon? A fisherman from Galilee, like the men in his family had always been? He had spent years at this work and had become very good at it. He thought that this was his identity. But Jesus sheds unsuspected light on his life.

Our Lord’s closeness reveals his true self: a sinner, but a sinner God has singled out, whom He wants to rely on. Hearing this divine call, Peter and his brother, when they had brought their boats to land, they left everything and followed him (Lk 5:11). Benedict XVI reflected on this Gospel scene: “Peter could not yet imagine that one day he would arrive in Rome and that here he would be a ‘fisher of men’ for the Lord. He accepted this surprising call, he let himself be involved in this great adventure: he was generous; he recognised his limits but believed in the one who was calling him and followed the dream of his heart.

Later on, our Lord is more specific about the mission that will reshape his life: And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it (Mt 16:18).

God’s plan for us, his call to share our life with Him, has the same transforming force as creation. Just as the human being’s creation involves a personal call, so also each personal call from God has a creative power able to transform reality. This is something so radical that it means for us receiving a new name, a new life. Who remembers today a fisherman who lived two thousand years ago by the shores of a Middle Eastern lake?

And yet how many people venerate Peter, an apostle called

by Christ and “the visible foundation of his Church.”[4] The hidden treasure The mission Jesus offers us can change our life and fill it with

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light. Therefore the realisation that God could be calling me is very attractive. But it is also deeply unsettling. For it can seem to us that if we are being called, if God is counting on us, we could lose our freedom. Now we can’t choose any other path in life! The only possible path is the one He wants for me.

Reflecting on the history of Peter’s life can help us here.

When he decided to leave everything in order to follow Jesus, did he lose his freedom?

Wasn’t this the freest and most “freeing” decision in his life?

Sometimes we can view freedom as above all the ability to choose, without being limited by anything. Nevertheless, viewed in this light freedom is reduced to specific choices that affect us only briefly: whether to eat a hamburger or chicken, whether we should play football or basketball, whether we want to listen to this song or to that one.

But there are other types of choices that give a completely new direction to our life, making it freer and more joyful. This happens when we put our entire

life on the line, and decide who we want to be. Freedom is then seen in its true light, in its “freeing” capacity. These are no longer momentary decisions, but decisions that affect our whole life. For example, when someone decides to get married to a person who is seen as the greatest treasure the world can offer. Or similarly, when a young person decides to become a doctor, knowing that this choice will require great effort and sacrifice. Giving oneself to another person, or taking on a mission, entails renouncing everything else. Certainly this will place conditions on one’s future choices. Nevertheless this step isn’t seen as a renunciation, but rather as risking one’s life for a love or goal that will fill it with meaning. And thus, over time, that person’s name is no longer only the one received at baptism: now it is also “the husband or the wife of…” or “Doctor….” Their name, their identity, takes on a clearer shape; their life takes on a clearer meaning and direction.

Jesus offers us a choice of exactly this type. He has created

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us with certain gifts and qualities that shape our way of being. Later, in the course of our life, He presents to us a “treasure,” a mission that is “hidden” in our soul. The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field (Mt 13:44). In reality, the treasure is Himself—his unconditional Love; and the mission is the same that He received from his Father. If I have discovered it, I don’t need to seek any further. I can embrace it with my entire life, and let Him shape every facet of it. Like Peter, apostle, Rock on which the Church is founded; like Paul, apostle to the Gentiles; like Mary, the handmaid of the Lord, Mother of the Saviour.

Embracing this mission— welcoming Jesus into our life and following Him—leads us to set aside everything else. For nothing can free us as much as the truth about ourselves: veritas liberabit vos (Jn 8:32). Thus we can say, with Saint Paul: But whatever

gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him (Phil 3:7-9).

Perhaps discovering how close Jesus is to us can be a bit unsettling at first—realising that He wants to count on us. But when we stop to consider it, we see how what He is asking from us fits perfectly with who we are, with our aptitudes and experience. It seems as though we were born for this.

The new name then is seen as something that was already there from the creation of the world. God has made us for this.

And nevertheless, perhaps it can seem too much for us. “This treasure, this mission…for me?

God truly has set his eyes on me?”

God doesn’t call us only at a specific moment in our life: He does so constantly. In the same way, our response lasts our

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entire life, responding to his calls to love more fully each day with an ever renewed love. “Ever since you said Yes, time has broadened your horizons, giving them new and brighter colours and making them more beautiful every day. But you have to continue saying Yes.”[5] Saint Peter said “yes” to our Lord many times. When many of those who had followed the Teacher went away scandalized on hearing Him speak about the Bread of Life (cf. Jn 6:60-71); or when Jesus insisted on washing his feet, and it seemed absurd for Him to do so (cf. Jn 13:6-10).

Peter remained alongside Jesus, professing once again his faith.

Nevertheless, there was much that he failed to understand about our Lord. He continued to dream about a glorious manifestation of our Lord to the world, when He would show Himself in his triumphant power, and become famous throughout the whole world. It took him years to realize that this wasn’t God’s way of acting.

He experienced the sadness of denying Jesus three times, being a traitor to Him. He had to

confront his own weakness. But in the end he understood, because he never turned his eyes from Jesus. “Our Lord converted Peter, who had denied him three times, without even a reproach, with a look full of Love.”[6] For the vocation is, in the end, an invitation to look at Jesus, to let oneself be looked at by Him, to share his Life and strive to imitate Him. And this leads to a self-giving, filled with love, of one’s entire life.

Peter’s call took on its definitive form that day by the shore of the Sea of Galilee, when he encountered the Risen Jesus. He had the opportunity to ask for forgiveness, and realized how much he loved Him, with his poor heart, and told Him so again. The Divine Master responded: Feed my sheep (Jn 21:17); and then He told Peter: Follow me (Jn 21:19).

This summed up everything, because Peter had already discovered that following our Lord meant loving to the end, on a marvelous path of self-giving and service to everyone: a path, not a goal. The same path we

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have to travel each day in our life, alongside Jesus.

to help Him, despite our littleness. He doesn’t ask us to do impossible things, but simply that we follow Him.

A fulfilled life Peter died a martyr in Rome.

Tradition places the site of his martyrdom, by crucifixion, on the Vatican Hill. When he learned of the sentence, he would surely have looked back on his whole life. His days as a young man, with his strong and determined temperament, his work as a fisherman in Galilee.

And then his encounter with Jesus, and from then on, so many marvellous events! So much joy and suffering. So many people who had entered his life.

So much love. Yes, his life had certainly changed greatly. And it had all been worth it.

On meeting Simon by the banks of the Jordan, our Lord saw not only a grown man, with certain characteristics. He saw in him Peter: the Rock on which he would build his Church. And when He looks at us, He sees all the good that we are going to do in our own life. He sees our talents, our world, our history, and He offers us the possibility

Our qualities are what they are, neither more nor less, and this way of being makes us wellsuited to follow our Lord and serve Him in the Church. With his help, we are called to find the best way to do so. Each of us with the gifts God has given us: Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; he who teaches, in his teaching; he who exhorts, in his exhortation; he who contributes, in liberality; he who gives aid, with zeal; he who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness (Rom 12:6-8).

Peter left behind that fisherman from Bethsaida who was so sure of himself. And God made of him a mediator, with Christ, between heaven and earth. His life story has been repeated many times throughout the centuries. And this continues being true today. The first young people who joined Opus Dei

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placed their talents in God’s hands, and they yielded an abundance of fruit they could never have imagined. As Saint Josemaria assured them: “Dream and your dreams will fall short.” Or as the Pope told the young people taking part in a prayer vigil: “May the Lord bless your dreams.”[7] Jesus’ call draws out the best from each young man and woman, in order to place their life at the service of others and lead it to fulfilment. We see this in Peter. We too have discovered how much He loves us and is counting on us, and we want to be attentive to his call: today, and each day in our life. And thus, when we come face to face

with Him, He will give us a white stone, with a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it (Rev 2:17). And we will recognise our true name.

[1] Cf. Furrow, no. 290; Friends of God, no. 206; “Passionately Loving the World,” in Conversations, nos. 113 ff.

[2] Pope Francis, Address at World Youth Day Prayer Vigil, Krakow, 30 July 2016.

[3] Benedict XVI, General Audience, 17 May 2006.

[4] Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 936.

[5] Saint Josemaria, Furrow, no. 32.

[6] Saint Josemaria, Furrow, no. 964.

[7] Pope Francis, Address at World Youth Day Prayer Vigil, Krakow, 30 July 2016.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rev. Lucas Buch is a lecturer in the School of Theology and CORE Curriculum at the University of Navarre, Spain. This article first appeared on www.opusdei.ie and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.

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Interview with Senator Rónán Mullen

by Fr Gavan Jennings 1.

No. It evolved. I have always been interested in talking. And for most of my adult life I have wanted to say things that are truthful and relevant, consistent with the sense of justice that was bred into me, and influenced by other people whom I have admired.

room where the teachers were on their break. I must have been asking them questions, perhaps about an old abacus standing by the wall. The schoolmaster, the late Joe Ferry, said something like, “Will you be a barrister when you grow up, Sir?” For a long time afterwards, I didn’t know what a barrister was but later, when I became a barrister for a short while, I thought about what he said. Some years later, still a child, I was at the dentist. I must have talking a bit because the dentist nicknamed me “the politician”. Not very flattering but he must have spotted something.

When I was in national school, I wandered into the “Masters”

It was a combination of things over time that led me to run for

In the past you have worked as a press secretary, lecturer and journalist.

Since 2007 you have a seat in the Seanad. Have you always wanted to go into politics?

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the Seanad. My family, especially my mother, encouraged me in my faith, to read at Mass and to get involved in things. I did the “Lit and Deb” college debating scene in UCG and enjoyed the people and performance side, even though I was quite homesick and unsettled for the first two years in UCG. I met good friends there during the emerging debates on abortion and that shaped my willingness to campaign for what I believe in, even against the grain of the culture, so to speak.

I got elected to the Students Union which brought me into contact with the media and led to my doing a Masters in Journalism. That and further campaigning led me to an interview opportunity for a job as a press officer in the Dublin diocesan press office. I spent five and a half years in that role where I practised explaining, and helping others to explain, the reason for the hope the Church has. That led to an opinion column in the Irish Examiner after I left the job in Drumcondra. And in 2006, no longer working in a role that might prevent politics, I got the

idea to try for the Seanad in order to advance the values I had come to believe in and express professionally.

2.

Do you see yourself staying in politics? You are an independent senator, though during the year you founded the Human Dignity Alliance as a new political party. What are your hopes for that party?

I am not in love with politics or with being in Leinster House. It is a means to certain ends that I believe in, which are to speak up for and promote certain ideas and values and to try and influence culture over time.

Given the drift of our public culture at the moment, it could certainly be said that I am playing the long game. But I do believe that what we say and do now, in adverse conditions, playing against the wind and all that, can lay the groundwork for and give encouragement to a future generation who can bring about better, more just, laws.

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Being independent has been important for me to have the freedom to say what I believe and to advance the policy and legislative ideas that I and many others want to progress. The recent abortion debate has shown us that even when political parties pretend to allow freedom of conscience and free votes, they don’t really.

Backbenchers and would-be Dáil candidates, would-be Committee chairpersons and would-be Ministers all know what side their bread is buttered on and many are afraid to step out of line. But we shouldn’t put it all down to ambition either. We can’t ignore the fact that politicians, like everyone else, are prone to conditioning by media and popular culture.

Many people have absorbed, uncritically, some very strange ideas. It takes strength of character and good formation to resist the avalanche of nonsense coming at you. A lot of our politicians remind me of the subjects of the “Milgram Obedience Experiment” which space prevents me from getting into here but which is worth looking up!

As for the Human Dignity Alliance, it is one political initiative that may, in time, bear fruit. But my role as a University Senator is not the best place from which to build a new political movement, and others will move faster in the short time. That’s ok by me. Human Dignity Alliance will be there in the constellation in due course.

In the meantime, I encourage people to also look at what Renua is offering and also Peadar Toibin’s new movement which could be very exciting. I do think that Peadar, apart from being in the Dáil, has the political background, personal and organisational skills to make something positive happen.

Time will tell.

I am not against people staying and working for the good in the existing political parties. But when you see only four Fianna Fail TDs and no Fine Gael TD voting against the abortion legislation, despite strong opposition in the country and among their party memberships, you see the corrupting and crippling impact of bad political leadership.

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3.

The “Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy Bill” has been signed into law by President Michael Higgins. You were one of the most vocal opponents of the bill in the Oireachtas.

Are you disheartened by this?

In 2013 they legislated for the X case which permitted abortion on a non-evidence based ground involving risk to life from threat of suicide. We could see then that this was a momentumbuilder for a full-scale assault on the 8th Amendment. A friend of mine said something that time which stayed with me, something like “OK, let them allow the killing of little babies.

It won’t stop us from doing our work trying to shape a pro-life culture.” He wasn’t being fatalistic. He was accepting that we are not always in control in the short term. Things can and will happen that we do not like and that go against our deepest sense of right and wrong. To say the “sky won’t fall” is not to say that no harm will be done. It is

simply to say that the sky won’t fall until the Lord allows it to fall. So panic and depression and despair are both ahistorical and unChristian responses. The temptation to these feelings is understandable. But the givingin to them is unacceptable.

Horrible things have happened before and will happen again in the future. There is nothing new about humanity turning on itself. Our job as lovers both of God and of humanity is to continually rebuild and work for a better world. Those are the values I constantly believe in and constantly fail to fully live up to.

4.

In the past three years the Irish people have voted in favour of same-sex marriage, and resoundingly in favour of abortion last May. The drive towards radical liberalism in Ireland appears to be unstoppable.

Many think it is only a matter of time before euthanasia is introduced here. Do you feel you are fighting for a lost cause?

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Martin Luther King’s line about the “arc of the moral universe” being long but bending “towards justice” means different things to different people. I believe it’s true. And I believe that, by believing it, we make it true.

pregnant but I don’t want to be a father because I have other responsibilities and I haven’t bonded with the child – well then, it’s not really a child yet, is it, because it can’t think and feel and make decisions like me? So really wouldn’t it be kinder to that non-child to end its life rather than bring it into a world where its mother and father don’t really want it?

I think that the bad laws we have been getting – the redefinition of marriage, the destruction of innocent human life, the attack on faith-based education etc are all rooted in a loss of faith in ultimate justice. When people feel alone in the universe, they reason from the point of view of their own security or what they believe makes them secure. So if I hate the idea of being old and feeble and finding it difficult to manage pain or discomfort or having to depend on people – well then I claim the right to end it all. And I demand that healthcare workers assist me and that nobody opposes my decision so that I don’t have to feel bad about my choice. My sexual activity gets a woman

And if there is an organisation that warns that these choices I make are irrational and unjust – then who the hell are they to make me feel bad about myself?

After all, they have plenty of dodgy people, abusers, paedophiles etc in their own ranks! So why should they be allowed run schools and hospitals and attempt to influence society with their troubling ideas?

No. But I may not be around for our victory celebrations. At least not in any earthly sense.

That’s how nonsense descends into badness. But what the people who advance these negative values can never do is prevent new people from emerging who will challenge their groupthink. And the core value that challenges those

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negative values is an attractive one. It is that when we live for others, and temper our actions for the good of others, we are happier ourselves and others are happier.

Seanad. “And did they all laugh?” she asked. “No,” I said, forgetting myself. “They are a dull lot.” At which point a civil servant whose name I don’t know, and whom I didn’t think was paying attention to us, burst out in laughing protest: “Now, Senator, that’s not true.”

Yet even though all of that makes perfect good sense on its own, even if there was no God, let us say, it seems also to be true that if people don’t have the sense of higher love and of ultimate purpose in their lives, they are unable to organise collectively for the common good. Which is why I believe that a revival of faith is crucial to a restoration of rationality in policy and law.

5.

He was right. They’re not all dull. Some of them are very bright people in the intellectual sense. Perhaps what I should have said is that many of them have been dulled – by political ambition, by rivalries, by the distraction of day-to-day activity, by the frenetic life of Leinster House and the demands of the constituency.

And perhaps by their own compromises along the way. Few seem to have a philosophical cast of mind, and, of the few who do, some feel they can’t indulge such thoughts because it will get in the way of their goals and their alliances.

It appears that very few Irish politicians have the intellectual acuity, or moral courage, to stand up to the dismantling of her core institutions by a small cadre of activists. Can you account for this?

One day, as I was going up in the lift to my office, I told a friend about a quip I made in the

So why are they like that? Well, much of society is like that. In some ways, we are all influenced by the culture in the way we think or, sometimes, don’t think.

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We all have a personal vanity and ego problem to overcome, we are all sometimes wellintentioned but ignorant and we are always accompanied by our human weakness. Nobody fully escapes this human mediocrity.

Some of these politicians feel pressures that everyone can relate to – a family to feed, the non-existence of a job to go back to if you lose your seat etc. And some politicians did not have the good fortune that I had – which is to know people who didn’t care what I thought of them who were ready to challenge any nonsense I might come out with.

But, when you look at our public life, it is impossible not to wonder how our supposedly Christian education system did so badly in forming people’s ideas and their characters.

Maybe we expected too much from the education system. Or maybe there wasn’t enough of the good educators at secondary and third-level.

6.

The stand you have taken against the destruction of marriage and of human life has won you the opprobrium of many in Irish society, and much extremely vulgar abuse, especially online. How do you cope with it?

I pay very little attention to Twitter and other social media. I use it mainly to log some of my ideas, responses, activities and initiatives for the attention of those who are interested.

But I have seen enough of it to know that it has a strange effect on some people. I think there were always persons who, behind a civilised and mannerly surface, were willing to hurt other people if they could get away with it. Once upon a time, they just had the walls of public toilets to write on. Now they have social media. This even allows them to identify themselves and say what they want, however irrational and hurtful, without having to look you in the eye and without

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another person being present to witness their bad behaviour.

But, perhaps in the antics of some of the hard Left, we see the next step downwards, which is that people would dare to be abusive in the street if only they can gather in numbers and avail of protection from each other.

That is something we need to watch. And that’s why I think that some of these activists who were so abusive to Joan Burton TD out in Jobstown a few years ago, got off more lightly than they deserved to.

7.

After the Abortion Bill had passed through the Oireachtas you said that: “Once more we will see stirrings of idealism and a new generation will return and will demand a return to solidarity.” What did you mean by that?

Well, I genuinely believe that the Lord touches people’s hearts constantly and new people are inspired to raise their voices and get active in building a better world for us all to live in.

I’m glad to say that I get very little abuse in public. Perhaps occasionally somebody will be churlish to you at a party or someone will say something over their shoulder when they pass you in the street. But several times every week, people come up to met to thank me for speaking up for them. And I am sure Mattie McGrath, Peadar Tóibín, Carol Nolan and those other politicians who braved their party whips to speak up for the unborn in recent weeks and months must be having the same experience.

The media headline was that people voted decisively to reject the 8th Amendment. But one in three people have a different view from the majority. And many within the majority would not have wished to see abortion generally available even though we warned them that it would come about.

Loads of new people, including many young people, got involved in the LoveBoth and Save the Eighth campaigns. They’re not going to give up on this great

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cause just because we now have a corrupt and corrupting law in place. On the contrary.

And, of course, regardless of what the law is, there is still work to be done. The law may promote a fictitious “right to choose”, but it is up to people of goodwill to help others “choose what is right”. That means standing up for the right of unborn babies to live, but also accompanying women and men who feel unable to cope with the news of pregnancy yet who, with compassion and practical support, can make the better choice of giving and cherishing life. This is work that can unite No voters and Yes voters alike.

While we disagree on whether

abortion should ever be legal, we should all work to minimise recourse to it because it is a tragic and irreversible solution to a human dilemma.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Fr Gavan Jennings, a priest of the Opus Dei Prelature, is the editor of Position Papers.

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BOOKS

Building a Bridge, Fr James Martin

by Margaret Hickey

F

r James Martin’s book, Building a Bridge. How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion and Sensitivity does not follow all the strands within the LGBT+ acronym. Nor does Fr Martin offer any thoughts on the ethics and implications of gay parenting, transgender parenting, or the emerging lexicon of political correctness that erases words and terms like “mother”, “father” and “pregnant woman” and seeks to enforce a new order of pronouns.

Most readers of Fr Martin’s book will ask themselves at what point he gets off in the light of the

more and more bizarre manifestations and consequences of our latent sexual complexity, unleashed by a culture of licence and legitimized by slogans of diversity and equality.

Extremes of sexual selfexpression and accompanying experimentation with procreation have found acceptance or at least acquiescence across wide swathes of Western society despite a court having to adjudicate whether a child’s biological mother can, as a trans-gender man, be registered as the child’s “father” and the dismissal of a teacher for refusing to supervise a boys’

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locker room when a transgender, biological female joined the group, For the Catholic Church, the natural order is foundational to the moral order. Fr Martin does not agree. For Fr Martin, both science and lived experience offer better insights into how we best flourish as human beings and as human society.

The problem with science is that it discounts the insights of faith.

Secular anthropology studies man’s nature within the world and culture in which he lives. It takes no account of man’s origin and destiny as a creature made in the image of a loving creator and placed within creation primarily “to know, love and serve Him”. It takes no account of how fallen, disordered nature is strengthened and transformed through the grace of the Risen Christ. It takes least account of all of the call to daily sacrifice and submission which opens for us the way that leads to “life, life to the full” (John 10:10).

Christian anthropology understands incarnation in terms of ensouled body or

embodied soul. The type of secular gnosticism that sees body as something we have, rather than something we are, something separate from an essential self that lies somewhere within our being, like a captain in a control cabin, free to reshape and rename the external self that envelops it, underpins modern gender science. This is not a Catholic view.

Our lived, personal experience is even less reliable than science.

Humankind’s wants and desires, however intensely felt do not necessarily serve our best interests. Taking God at his word often means struggling against compelling emotional convictions.

Not surprisingly, Fr Martin, looks to Scripture to find a reading of man’s nature that affirms diversity of sexual identity and expression. He quotes Psalm 139 in which the psalmist gives thanks for the wonder of his being. “I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made”. That does indeed include us all, however we are made and however our

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sexuality is orientated. But we are called to use all the gifts of life according to their proper use. God’s instructions to Adam and Eve connect their relationship to its sexual, procreative dimension. There is no other relationship in Scripture so connected.

The spousal relationship is powerfully used in Scripture to show that the real enemy of freedom is not bondage and enslavement but chaos and disorder. The story of Noah’s Ark is an emphatic statement of the centrality of the sexual moral order in God’s providence.

Coming after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, it upholds in vivid imagery the simply ordered, beautifully diverse and interdependent creation based on the union of male and female. Male and female, the mutual magnetism of complementary elements, is at the very heart of matter itself.

Ironically, the other icon of the Flood narrative, the rainbow, has been co-opted by LGBT+.

Fr Martin’s selection of Scripture texts to make a case for LGBT inclusion do not, not

surprisingly, include any that treat of marriage. Instead he cites Jesus’s encounters with marginalised people, his acceptance of them. Yet, it is clear that while Christ goes to the margins, or receives those from the margins who approach him, without judgment, it is equally clear that he is inviting them to a closer encounter.

Jesus invites himself to the home of Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10) but the result of that visit is that Zacchaeus repents of his wrongdoing and vows to repay fourfold those he has wronged. Jesus’s reaching out to Zacchaeus expressed a shepherd’s care for a straying sheep. It did not infer approval of in his way of life as some of the onlookers and self-appointed custodians of righteousness feared. Fr Martin is coming down on the side of the Scribes and Pharisees on this point.

Fr Martin also sees the story of the healing of the centurion’s servant as offering a template for how the Church should respond to those of faith within the LGBT community. The centurion is praised for his faith through

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which his request is answered.

Jesus does not refer in any way to his way of life. Faith is all. But faith is a recognition of truth, the truth of Jesus and his teaching. There is reason to believe the centurion is very aware and respectful of all that Jesus represents and stands for.

In Luke, the story carries the added information that this particular centurion, “loves our nation and has built our synagogue” (Luke7:1-10). We don’t know if he was the same centurion who declared at the foot of the cross in all the synoptic gospels, “truly this was the Son of God”. A pagan Roman outwardly, familiar with the God of the Jews and, unlike most of them, open to accepting Jesus as the promised Messiah. Even if it was a different centurion at the foot of the cross, it shows no easy assumptions can be made about the faith understanding of the man who approached Jesus.

The story of Christ’s encounter with another Samaritan, the woman at the well, is the most surprising of all Fr Martin’s choices. Yes, it is again framed as a story of outreach and

accompaniment. But at its heart lies a firm affirmation of monogamous, faithful marriage.

The directness of Jesus’s words, “Go, call your husband”, carries a rare punch because of its peremptoriness and because it comes as a complete nonsequitur in their conversation. It goes to the heart of the woman’s unspoken story, to the heart of her troubled, needy life. Would it be possible to remove the word “husband” and replace it with another word like partner, boyfriend, girlfriend, wife?

Everything that came from the lips of Jesus about marriage, was a defence of the primal order, of how “it was from the beginning, that a man would leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife, and the two would become one flesh” (Mark 10:8).

We have to re-assert the basic truth that moral struggle is not unique to any group. Nor is it confined to the sphere of sexual morality. It is for God alone to judge our actions because only he knows the obstacles that snag our paths. The Church respects and supports all its members equally because there is none of

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us without sin, none without the need of God’s healing and mercy.

The Church’s ministry of mercy is not at variance with her duty to faithfully impart the truths entrusted to her. It is the very antithesis of mercy to deny truth. It is for its defence of truth that the Church has been persecuted in every age.

Perhaps the greatest test faced by the Church today is presented by the persistent challenge to join the campaign of what Christ calls “the World” for the normalisation of sexual and gender diversity. And full normalisation, mainstreaming and equality is the

uncompromising goal of the LGBT+ movement. This means far more than the “sensitivity, compassion and respect” of which the Catechism and Fr Martin speaks. It means the right to marry and found a family, to change one’s body surgically and chemically. It means recognition for all that technology makes possible for human reproduction. It means all the physical, psychological and spiritual pathologies that accompany this coming of age of the sexual revolution. Yet this moral and social disintegration is met largely with polite silence, acquiescence or worse by our Church.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Margaret Hickey has written articles on social, cultural and faith issues for The Irish Examiner, Human Life Review (US), The Irish Times, The Furrow and The Irish Catholic. She is a mother of three and lives with her husband in Blarney, Ireland.

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FILMS

Stan & Ollie

by Kurt Jensen

T

o reinforce the proposition that Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were, and still are, sacred icons of film comedy, the pitchperfect, affectionately nostalgic Stan & Ollie (Sony Classics) reproduces their 1953 arrival in Cobh, Ireland, during what would be their last tour of British and Irish music halls.

story, which he did often before his death in 1965, it was a spontaneous gesture involving “all the church bells” in the port city.

As they stroll down the gangplank to cheers, the carillon at St Colman’s Cathedral, in a tribute not offered there to any performer before or since, plays the duo’s theme music, “Dance of the Cuckoos.”

Cynical minds might detect the workings of an adept publicist.

But whenever Laurel retold the

The moment is out of sequence in the film, placed at the end instead of at the beginning of the tour where it actually occurred.

But there it has more emotional impact in what amounts to a secular hagiography.

Director Jon S. Baird and screenwriter Jeff Pope have achieved a poignant story of two men fighting off the twin indignities of age and obscurity without much bitterness and no hidden dark sides – with additional nods to cherished

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moments in 1937’s “Way Out West” and their Oscar-winning short of 1932, “The Music Box.”

them a share of their films’ considerable profits.

They eventually deal with a simmering dispute from the time in 1939 when Hardy was compelled to work with another partner during Laurel’s contract dispute with Roach.

One does not have to be a devoted fan to enjoy these references. “The boys,” as they were known in their prime, always worked clean, and this is one squeaky-clean tribute as well.

Laurel (Steve Coogan) and Hardy (John C. Reilly) are on what will be their final tour of Britain and Ireland, during the waning days both of their careers and of the music halls – venues for the British version of vaudeville. Unlike most movie personalities who began in silent films, both had a background in live performance, and to British audiences they were a vestige of the innocent times before World War II. Over the years, they’ve learned to put all their trust in each other. Bernard Delfont (Rufus Jones), the producer of the tour, has booked them into secondrate houses. In Hollywood years before, producer Hal Roach (Danny Huston) refused to give

Laurel is still the perfectionist artist, always at work on new material. Hardy prefers to avoid conflicts and have an outside life of recreation, even though Laurel chastises him, “Our films will last a lot longer than your hot dog.”

Their wives, Laurel’s Russianborn Ida (Nina Arianda), a former dancer, and Hardy’s Lucille (Shirley Henderson), a script supervisor, are generally supportive and only occasionally bicker about their status.

This leaves two obstacles: A spoof of the Robin Hood legend they hope to make under a vague promise from a British studio, even though both realize that their film careers are probably firmly in the past, and the obese Hardy’s perilous health. A heart

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attack eventually ended his performing days before his death from a stroke in 1957.

Filling out the story are astonishing reconstructions, from Laurel’s scripts, of their stage act, which was never committed to film during their lifetimes.

The film contains at least one crass term. The Catholic News Service classification is A-II – adults and adolescents. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is PG – parental guidance suggested. Some material may not be suitable for children.

These two performers epitomized “the show must go on” work ethic, never disappointing an audience, no matter how small. The result here is not so much the belly laughs of their prime, but sublime joy at their invincible courage.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kurt Jensen is a guest reviewer for Catholic News Service.

Copyright (c) 2017 Catholic News Service. Reprinted with permission from CNS. www.catholicnews.com

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

The chapel before Phase 1 of our project

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

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