Position Papers - June/July 2017 by Position Papers

A review of Catholic affairs

Jackie And The Priest by Bishop Robert Barron

The Tweetable Saint by Jerome Joseph Day

Number 510 · June/July 2017 €3 · £2.50 · $4

Film review: Alien: Covenant by John Mulderig

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Number 510 · June/July 2017

Editorial by Rev. Gavan Jennings

In Passing: Cormac McCarthy – challenging us in our comfort zones by Michael Kirke

Society and the State by Tim O’Sullivan

Jackie And The Priest by Bishop Robert Barron

The Magisterium and Catholic Social Teaching by Fr John McCloskey

The Tweetable Saint by Jerome Joseph Day

Meet the Catholic mother raising 15 children alone by Jack Valero

Book review: The Closing of the American Mind: 30 years later by Rev Conor Donnelly

Film review: Alien: Covenant by John Mulderig Editor: Assistant editors: Subscription manager: Secretary: Design:

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

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Editorial

ithin the last week, two friends of mine told me, separately, how they had been approached by their immediate superiors in the multinational corporations where they work with the suggestion that they help out in organising the upcoming Gay Pride parade in Dublin this coming June. While both of them made excuses for being unable to help out, they felt that the “invitation” was a little more than an invitation. That they would voice their moral objection to the parade was of course unthinkable; that they didn’t show great willingness to help out was a source of discomfort. This subtle pressure suggests to me that amicable disagreement is no longer enough for some promoting the LGBTQ cause: they have moved on to the stage where nothing less than positive support is what is required. Tolerance no longer suffices, and this is very bad news for freedom of conscience. A look at some articles from the Huffington Post shows that not only is toleration insufficient, it is even considered insulting. Take Tom Bartolomei’s assertion that “[t]o live and let live is not enough anymore. It’s no longer sufficient for our straight friends to say, ‘Hey, I have no problem with you being gay,’ or, ‘I have gay friends.’ Guess what? We have no problem with you being straight, and we have straight friends as well.” Or again John Schwartz’s objection that, “… there’s something about that word [tolerance], with its connotation of forbearance and gritted teeth, that sets my own teeth on edge. Tolerance, to use an annoying term of my son’s, is meh — a word that doesn’t do much. And it might even do some harm.” Toleration of course is unacceptable because it withholds one’s blessing; it expresses, albeit quietly and implicity, one’s reservations or even just lack of enthusiasm for something. It appears, to Amelie, also writing in the Huffington Post, that this lack of enthusiasm is “not good enough”: “Words like “accept” and “tolerate” do not indicate good things; in the context of homosexuality, they imply that there is something wrong with being gay that parents have to put up with. That is not a good message.”

Unwittingly these writers are undervaluing the key role that toleration has in a civilised society. “Live and let live” – within the very minimal bounds of what is required for people to live together peacefully – is the very bedrock of social co-existence. When one party refuses to accept the freedom of others to dissent – which is a basic freedom of conscience – we have moved into the realm of “Thought Crime”. When one party refuses to accept the freedom of others to refuse to join their band, then we have moved into the realm of Jihad. It is remarkable that while the Western world is left reeling from savage terrorist attacks (such as is unfolding in Manchester as I write this piece) perpetrated by extremists who simply cannot “live and let live”, at the same time, within the West, some are extoling a secularised variety of disdain for the tolerance of conscientious differences – the paradox of the rainbow flag.

In Passing: Cormac McCarthy – challenging us in our comfort zones by Michael Kirke

ou can read the novels of Cormac McCarthy and treat them like a bad dream. Or you can read them like a “Stephen King nightmare thriller with no cheap thrills” – as Kenneth Lincoln says in his study of McCarthy’s work. You can also treat his stories as you might treat those grotesque surrealistic narratives which sometimes invade our sleep and with which we then might entertain each other around the water-cooler. With some of them you would not even dare do that – lest your friends might call in the men in white coats.

akin to prophesies. As the five decades rolled by over which McCarthy worked on these fables – for two of those decades in relative obscurity – they became more and more like a mirror revealing to us the horrors lying beneath the facade of modernity. They tell us in the grimmest possible terms about the terrible things we have done to each other – and continue to do – and the terrible consequences of our failure to be what we really are and were meant to be. Cormac McCarthy, although brought up a Catholic by his IrishAmerican family, does not avow any particular religion. But he is profoundly religious. The terrible contortions of humanity which we

Alternatively, you can take them seriously and come to the worrying conclusion that they are not just stories, but something

encounter in so many of his characters point to the same devastating end as do some of the lethally deranged characters which we find in the oeuvre of that profoundly Catholic writer, Flannery O’Connor. Those aberrations have all got the same gaping hole in their heart – the ignorance or wilful rejection of objective truth and a transcendental Creator.

dead.” Surveying the excesses of modernity over the last century they have pointed to the same end: Alasdair McIntyre spelled out the philosophical roots and practical consequences of our flight from virtue and reason into the quagmire of emotionalism where our private lives and public policies now wallow in disastrous self-indulgence; Charles Taylor and Brad Gregory take the story through its sociological and historical ramifications, while Rod Dreher now looks in desperation towards a neo-monastic solution for it all.

In this, the second decade of the third millennium of the Christian era, the centre no longer seems to be holding. An apocalyptic vision of mankind’s fate, and the place to which our folly has brought this world, runs through every one of McCarthy’s ten novels. But he does not preach. He portrays the victims of our folly and the interplay of the forces of evil with our foolishness – and then implicitly leaves us with the simple exhortation, “he that has ears to hear, let him hear.”

McCarthy depicts a world which has come apart at the seams. He does not spell out the reasons why this has happened. He does not tell us how to redeem ourselves. But neither does he tell us that we are irredeemable – despite his going within a hair’s breath of this in some narratives, particularly in the earlier portrayals of our plumbing the depths of depravity. In the last instalment of his tennovel output, The Road, the hope which is the basis of mankind’s salvation is burning ever so fragilely on its final pages.

He is not the only prophet of our time. Other Tiresian witnesses “have foresuffered all enacted on this same divan or bed; … have sat by Thebes below the wall and walked among the lowest of the

“SPE SALVI facti sumus” – in hope we were saved, says Saint Paul to the Romans, and likewise to us (Rom 8:24). According to the Christian faith, “redemption” – salvation – is not simply a given. Redemption is offered to us in the sense that we have been given hope, trustworthy hope, by virtue of which we can face our present: the present, even if it is arduous, can be lived and accepted if it leads towards a goal, if we can be sure of this goal, and if this goal is great enough to justify the effort of the journey (Pope Benedict XVI, encyclical, Spe Salvi,1).

breakdown of law and order which constantly threatens their lives is the consequence of the same scourge which has destroyed the foundation of all morality. “The man” in The Road lives out the last years, months and days of his life on this earth because, he says, God has entrusted him with the life of “the boy”, his son. Hope is fragile in the world of The Road, a sunless world of grey ash which has been devastated by some cataclysmic disaster – man-made, we assume. But it is still there in the boy’s heart. After they find a well-stocked larder in an underground shelter the boy says a prayer for those who left it behind: “Dear people, thank you for all this food and stuff … and we hope that you’re safe in heaven with God.”

I am not suggesting any kind of link of mutual influence to be found between the author of The Road and the author of Spe Salvi, but in both we do find a signpost to the same truth. Hope is a sine qua non for our survival as it is for our salvation. The road travelled by the man and the boy in McCarthy’s novel is symbolic of our own journey. The devastated landscape through which they travel is akin to the desert brought about by the scourge of relativism of which Pope Benedict frequently spoke. The total

The man perseveres in the struggle to stay alive and protect the boy from the pursuing cannibals and other desperate human predators, the “bad guys” in the child’s language, for as long as he can. Dimly, he sees he has to, for the boy is humanity’s last hope. As he dies, that hope is still alive and with his last breath he

tells the boy that goodness will find him, “It always has. It will again.” As the boy cries beside the body of his father, other fugitives, families, parents and children, find him. They have been following them and now adopt the boy as their own. A woman tells him that God’s breath is his “yet though it pass from man to man through all time.”

surpasseth human understanding”. But the evolution of his soul as evidenced by the sequence of his novels suggests something like it. In all McCarthy’s novels the element of evil is palpably present. In some it is the only element, in the same way in which it is the only element in the hell-centred books of Milton’s Paradise Lost when we are in the company of Satan and his diabolical legions plotting their revenge on the Creator. In two of the novels Satan himself is incarnate: in “The Judge” in Blood Meridian and in Chigurh in No Country for Old Men.

All great novels probably constitute a kind of biography of their writers and tell us something of the story of their souls. The novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, taken in sequence, tell a sad story of a young man’s struggle with the temptations of a degenerate age and his tragic surrender to vanity, ambition, infatuation and selfindulgence. McCarthy’s novels seem to tell a better story. It seems to be a story of a man’s struggle with the temptation to pessimism and despair about our flawed human condition and the state in which we have left the world. It might be too much to say that McCarthy has reached the point at which T.S. Eliot felt able to conclude The Waste Land with the three words “shantih, shantih, shantih”, the “peace which

But the apparently unredeemable grimness of the early novels now has a counter-balance of goodness in the wings – without any loss of the power of the warning about what lies in store for mankind when truth is denied. Placed before us is the horror of a world laid waste when men and women, in wilful blindness or malice, exercise their choices in favour of things evil. McCarthy’s questions, stated or implied, are begging to be answered. Where do the “bad

guys” come from? Where do the “good guys” come from? What drives the one, what drives the other? What he shows us is the lethal conflict in the heart of men and among men which follows from evil choices – untold suffering for the innocent and the guilty alike.

The boy speaks guileless truth and still brushes his teeth in the morning. He knows there are not many good people left, if any, and the odds are against them, so he comes to the point for his father. “I don’t know what we’re doing, he said.” And still they do what they’re doing, leaving a thief naked in the road to die, the boy sobbing to help him. His father says that the boy is not the one who must worry about everything, and the boy mumbles something. “He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one.”

McCarthy’s fiction is much more than fiction. It is fiction which has a frightening truth at its heart – the truth which tells us that by denying the essence of our humanity we are capable of destroying everything that mankind has achieved since the moment of his creation. The words of Rod Dreher’s friend, a monk in the Benedictine Monastery of Norcia, imply the critical choice before mankind today when he says “Those who don’t do some form of what you’re talking about, they’re not going to make it through what’s coming.” That’s not fiction. It’s time to identify with the boy of McCarthy’s fiction, “the one”.

ABOUT THE  AUTHOR

Michael Kirke is a freelance writer, a regular contributor to Position Papers, and a widely read blogger at Garvan Hill (garvan.wordpress.com). His views can be responded to at mjgkirke@gmail.com.

Kenneth Lincoln describes the boy’s final acceptance of his destiny like this:

Society and the State by Tim O’Sullivan

“T

he Seventies will be Socialist”, a famous Labour Party election slogan proclaimed in 1969. Labour did enter a Coalition Government as a junior partner in 1973 but that government lost power at the following election. The disappointment of youthful socialist dreams led to a rueful joke that the Socialists would be 70 rather than the Seventies being Socialist!

socialist ideas and perspectives have been remarkably influential in our media and in public discussion. This is reflected in a variety of ways. There is considerable emphasis on the State’s prerogatives and on the need for accountability to the State but considerably less discussion about the social importance and contribution of other bodies such as voluntary or non-profit organizations. During the recent controversy about the proposed move of the National Maternity Hospital to the St Vincent’s site, the overwhelming emphasis in media discussion was on the need for full State control of the new facility while the

Labour is currently at a low ebb while parties to its Left receive more votes than they did a generation ago but, in overall terms, socialism since the 1970s has continued to enjoy somewhat limited electoral support in Ireland. Nevertheless,

contribution of the Sisters of Charity, in building up the St Vincent’s service over generations, seemed to count for nothing. Those who advocate ever-greater State control, such as various Left-wing TDs, also get remarkably “soft” interviews on the airwaves, the default assumption appearing to be that they are, by definition, committed to justice and that their ideas and proposals – on public spending or religion in schools or the Eighth Amendment or prayer in the Dáil – need not therefore be subject to detailed scrutiny. A time warp? Some of the Irish discussion about the glories of State control and State accountability also seems curiously dated, as if stuck in a 1970s time warp. There has been growing recognition in many other countries in recent decades that the State on its own hasn’t all the answers and that partnership between the State and other actors is necessary for

effective welfare. While State monopolies like the UK’s NHS have strong popular support, they face constant crises and reorganizations. In many countries, there is widespread acceptance of the need for active non-profit involvement in welfare and particularly in areas of great challenge and complexity like addiction or long-term care. Politicians from both the Labour and Conservative traditions in Britain have shown strong interest in Catholic social thought as an alternative to narrow “statist” and free-market positions. Movements like the “Third Way” within social democracy, or the “Big Society” within Conservatism, were two attempts to come to terms with the limitations of State welfare and to develop a partnership between the State and civil society. Moreover, the emphasis in Ireland on State accountability is happening at a time when, for better or worse, the State has ceded many powers to, or “shared sovereignty” with, the European Union.

There has also been limited discussion in Ireland about how accountable State bodies themselves actually are. Thus, the regional health boards, which delivered healthcare between 1971 and 2005, received a lot of criticism, some of it justified, for “parish-pump” politics, and were abolished in the interests of a more uniform national service, but were arguably a good deal more accountable than the HSE which replaced them. For example, their decision-making board meetings were open to the media and the public and their boards had a good mixture of political and professional expertise with local politicians being in the majority. While the HSE does report to the Minister and the Oireachtas and has regional consultative mechanisms, its board meetings are held in private and it is not responsive to the population across the regions in the way that the health boards were. A lot of the Irish discussion about the rights of the State also has a strong anti-clerical edge. There are some distinctions to

be made here, for example, between secularism and socialism. Not all secularists are socialists and there is a very honourable tradition of Christian socialism in Ireland and elsewhere. Nevertheless, the dominant secularist argument in academic discussion and the media is that the Church and the religious orders “muscled into” the welfare area in Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and that an emphasis on Catholic charity hindered or delayed the development of a comprehensive welfare state – an ungenerous narrative which fails to acknowledge the enormous and often heroic contribution of the religious orders to Irish healthcare and education during this period. The State’s debt to the Church One could also point out, in opposition to this “statist” narrative, that the modern State across Europe built on, and hugely benefited from, services originally developed by charitable bodies, often linked to the Church. One thinks, in this

context, to give just a few examples, of major hospitals all across Europe with Catholic/ charitable origins like St Thomas’s Hospital in London, the Hotel-Dieu in Paris or the Ca’ Granda in Milan. In countries like Italy, the Church built up welfare services over many centuries and it was arguably an anti-clerical State which “muscled in” to this welfare area in the late nineteenth century.

have a legitimate place in our national conversation or to deny that there can be troubling differentials in Ireland between public and private healthcare and education.

In Ireland, the Church was unable to contribute to welfare in Penal times but any fair analysis should take account of the very considerable Church contributions to Irish education and healthcare after Catholic Emancipation, and right down to the pioneering work done in our own day, for example, by the Sisters of Charity in hospice care – while also acknowledging the grave scandals and governance issues that have been documented in institutional child care. Clearly, it would be wrong to dismiss socialist idealism or to argue that socialist ideas don’t

Nor does one have to be a socialist to affirm the importance of the State in our national life. The State clearly does have a key role in guaranteeing human rights, including the rights of the unborn, in guaranteeing standards and access to services, in leading campaigns against homelessness and so on. Need for balanced discussion However, there is a need in Ireland today for a more balanced and nuanced discussion on the role and prerogatives of the State and on the relationship between State and society. Within the Catholic tradition, an excellent resource for such reflection is to be found in the encyclicals. Thus, Benedict XVI’s 2005 encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, offers a very illuminating and balanced discussion of charity and justice

and of State and society. Benedict stresses that the State has a critical role in promoting justice, argues that justice is both the aim and the intrinsic criterion of all politics and quotes St Augustine to the effect that a State that was not focused on justice would be just a bunch of thieves. The document also reflects on the relationship between charity and justice, notes that there will always be suffering and loneliness and the need for concrete love of neighbour and points out that charity or love will always therefore be necessary, even in the most just society: “There is no ordering of the State so just that it will

eliminate the need for a service of love. And, while highlighting the importance of the State’s role in the promotion of justice, the document also makes useful reference to the State’s limitations: “The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy, incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person – every person – needs: namely loving, personal concern” (DCE, 28).

ABOUT THE  AUTHOR

Tim O’Sullivan has degrees in arts and social policy is a former public servant. He is a regular contributor to Position Papers.

Jackie And The Priest by Bishop Robert Barron

omehow I managed to miss the film Jackie during the Christmas season, but I watched it, twice, on recent long flights to and from the east coast. Like many others, I was struck by its moody, more “European” style, the high quality of the acting, especially on the part of Natalie Portman, and its historical verisimilitude, but what particularly impressed (and surprised) me were the scenes between Mrs. Kennedy and a sympathetic priest. The man of God was played by the great character actor John Hurt, who first burst on the scene as the nefarious Richard Rich in Man For All Seasons (“…but for Wales?”) and who died just weeks after filming these scenes

in Jackie. Anyone interested in the art of pastoral counseling, in the problem of reconciling belief in God with great suffering, and in the human search for meaning will find the exchanges between Jackie and the priest fascinating. As everyone on planet Earth knows, Jacqueline Kennedy was thrown, on November 22, 1963, into a maelstrom. Not only did her young husband die; he was murdered—and murdered in her presence, within inches of her face, so that she was literally showered in his blood and brain matter. Subsequently she had to explain this appalling tragedy to two very small children who had just lost their father, and she had to grieve in the most public way

possible. Accordingly, she became a sort of twentiethcentury icon of innocent suffering. During the days immediately following the assassination, she was, understandably enough, bewildered, angry, and deeply sad, even to the point of asking God to take her life. Seeing the pain Jackie was enduring, her brother-in-law, Bobby Kennedy, recommended that she speak to a priest—and thus we have these simple and wonderful conversations between the widowed first lady and John Hurt’s clergyman.

the priest patiently explains, “The fact that we don’t understand him isn’t funny at all.” John Hurt’s character is handling himself very deftly here indeed. He is carefully navigating between the shoals of denying that God is really involved with the world and affirming that the ways of God’s providence are clear to us. He is quietly insisting that though we don’t know precisely how God’s purposes are being worked out, we do know that he is intimately present to us —and that all of this is taking place under the aegis of the divine love.

In the course of their first exchange, Jackie tells the priest that she thinks God is cruel, to which her interlocutor says, “Now you’re getting into trouble. God is love. And God is everywhere.” “Was he in the bullet that killed Jack?” she retorts angrily. The priest calmly and correctly responds, “Absolutely.” She goes on, “Is he inside me right now,” and he says, “Yes, of course he is.” Her anger brimming over, Jackie retorts, “Then it’s a funny game he plays, hiding all the time,” and

My favorite scene with Jackie and the priest is the last one they share. She laments that she should have married “a lazy, ordinary, ugly man.” Considering the depth of her suffering, the priest says, “Let me tell you a parable.” He then unfolds the story of Jesus’ healing of the man born blind, recounted in the Gospel of John. The disciples of the Lord, he tells her, wondered whose sin had caused the man’s blindness, his own or his parents. “Neither,” Jesus answered. “Rather, he was made blind that

the works of God might be revealed in him.” Then, gazing intently at the former First Lady, the priest says, “Right now, you are blind. Not because you’ve sinned, but because you’ve been chosen—that the works of God might be revealed in you.”

Peter, and Paul – are elected for a special mission, and every single one of them suffered on account of that mission. God “worked” through them, and that working was painful – without exception.

Once again, a delicate pastoral and theological balance has been struck. It is all too easy either to deny altogether that God has anything to do with our pain or to provide pat answers according to a kind of law of karma. The far subtler (and correct) approach is to affirm that God is the Lord of his creation, that he is indeed involved in our suffering, but that his purpose is always to draw some good out of evil. God is accomplishing a “work” in us, though the nature and exact trajectory of that work remain obscure to us. And how wonderful that the priest insisted that Jackie had been “chosen” to be the vehicle of this divine purpose. Choice or election is one of the master themes of the Bible. All the great heroes of the Scriptural narrative—Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah,

A pat, easy answer? Hardly. But it is one that both honors God and provides something like real hope to a suffering soul. To any priest, minister, or seminarian wondering how to handle these famously thorny pastoral situations, I might suggest that you could do worse than to watch the moody conversations between John Hurt and Natalie Portman in Jackie.

ABOUT THE  AUTHOR

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

The Magisterium and Catholic Social Teaching by Fr John McCloskey

hat is the magisterial authority of Catholic Social Teaching (CST), and how is it applied to real world situations? Catholic Social Doctrine is simply the voice of the Church, starting with the Sacred Scripture and the Church Fathers, that lays out the principles of how justice and charity are to be lived out in the world. The contemporary era of CST began with Pope Leoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s XII' Rerum Novarum in 1891, and continues up to Pope Benedict XVI's Caritas in Veritate. Through the social documents, one can see a gradual development that reflects the Church's study of the times.

That is to say, the Church is always looking to update and clarify the basic principles of Social teaching, given new economic situations and technologies, without ever contradicting authoritative past teaching. Confusion enters in when Catholic lay faithful (and in some cases clergy) mistakenly claim for their opinions the absolute magisterial authority of the Church and correspondingly denounce as un-Catholic the conflicting positions of others, whether their political criticism comes from the left, right, or center. The basic error is the failure to see that the foundational

teachings and principles of CST can be applied in practice in a wide variety of ways â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and working out the application of such principles in any given case rightly falls mainly to the laity, not the hierarchy. The magisterial Churchâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s role, normally exercised through the local ordinary (the bishop), is to point out when these applications appear to diverge from the principles and teachings themselves. Conflicting opinions on CST fall into three basic camps: 1. Those (including both some on the Catholic Left and Traditionalists) who seem to believe that all CST is Catholic doctrine, from basic principles of social justice down to their specific applications in the documents. They would argue, for example, that Pope Paul VIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio requires Catholics to support government-to-government aid to developing nations (regardless of conflicting

opinions about whether such aid actually harms the recipients). This group makes little distinction between the principles and their application. 2. Those who hold that the principles of CST constitute definitive Church teaching and require assent, but that the applications found in Church documents are strictly prudential. 3. Those who hold that CST constitutes the combined institutional wisdom of a Church that has existed since the Roman Empire. This group would argue that, while Catholics should follow CST, the principles are of relatively recent origin and therefore do not constitute definitive doctrine. Before delving deeper into these questions, we should also consider another modern development: the post-Vatican II emergence of national conferences of bishops (known as episcopal conferences), and

the extent to which, especially in the United States, such conferences speak and teach authoritatively on issues of Catholic social teaching. There has been much confusion in this area, going back to the American bishops’ conference’s endorsement of controversial documents largely written by bureaucrats. The most noteworthy of these statements, emerging during the Reagan years in the context of the Cold War, dealt with nuclear weapons and was titled “The Challenge of Peace.” The reaction from the Catholic right was great. Michael Novak spearheaded a group of lay Catholic writers who issued a “pastoral” letter disagreeing with some of the conclusions of the conference’s document, as well as with the bishops’ authority on the subject and the extent to which their teaching was normative for their flock. The Novak piece, which took up an entire issue of National Review, was later published as Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age (Nashville: Thomas Nelson).

Happily, the collapse of the Evil Empire and the end of the Cold War made The Challenge of Peace largely a dead letter. However, in 1997, the Committee on Marriage and Family of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) issued an even more controversial document titled Always Our Children: A Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children. On the bright side, this document led the Vatican (or, more precisely, Pope John Paul II) to issue a clarifying Motu proprio (a document issued by the Pope on his own initiative and personally signed by him), Apostolos Suos, on May 21, 1998. Apostolos Suos confirmed the limited authority of national bishops’ conferences, along with their associated committees, commissions, advisors, and experts. Since Vatican II, these had tended to usurp the fundamental canonical responsibility of an individual bishop as chief teacher of the faith in his diocese.

In a statement apparently directed principally toward the USCCB, the Holy Father wrote, “Commissions and offices exist to be of help to bishops and not to substitute for them.” Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger also commented on the purview of episcopal conferences: “Episcopal conferences do not constitute per se a doctrinal instance which is binding and superior to the authority of each bishop who comprises them.” However, “if the bishops approve doctrinal declarations emanating from a conference unanimously, they can be published in the name of the conference itself, and the faithful must adhere” to them.

Church teaches about the implementation of the social doctrine of the Church. In 2004, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace issued a magnificent Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. This document, which should be on every Catholic’s bookshelf, draws from Scripture, papal teaching, curial documents, and the teaching of the saints, in 584 terse paragraphs.

In practice, this has never happened. Apostolos Suos made clear that the magisterium of the Church comes from the Holy Father and the bishops in communion with him, and not from episcopal conferences. That question is therefore settled. Now let’s turn to what the

However, I want to concentrate on paragraphs 565-574. Below I reproduce the especially relevant portions, with my brief comments following. I encourage readers to take a closer look at these paragraphs on their own and make their own judgment. 565. For the lay faithful, political involvement is a worthy and demanding expression of the Christian commitment of service to others. The pursuit of the common good in a spirit of service, the development of justice with particular attention to situations of poverty and suffering, respect for the autonomy of earthly realities, the principle of subsidiarity, the promotion of dialogue and peace in the context of solidarity: these are the criteria that must inspire the Christian laity in their political activity. All believers, insofar as they possess rights and duties as citizens, are obligated to respect these guiding principles. Special attention

must be paid to their observance by those who occupy institutional positions dealing with the complex problems of the public domain, whether in local administrations or national and international institutions. So we see the obligations of the laity to respect the principles mentioned above.

568. The lay faithful are called to identify steps that can be taken in concrete political situations in order to put into practice the principles and values proper to life in society. This calls for a method of discernment, at both the personal and community levels, structured around certain key elements: knowledge of the situations, analyzed with the help of the social sciences and other appropriate tools; systematic reflection on these realities in the light of the unchanging message of the Gospel and the Churchâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s social teaching;

identification of choices aimed at assuring that the situation will evolve positively…. However, an absolute value must never be attributed to these choices because no problem can be solved once and for all.

It is worth reiterating that final point: The well-formed Christian conscience cannot vote for a political program or any individual law that contradicts the “fundamental contents of faith and morals.” 571. The political commitment of Catholics is often placed in the context of the “autonomy” of the State, that is, the distinction between the political and religious spheres.

From the above, we see that it’s the job of the laity to use their prudential judgment in applying these teachings to concrete situations, without making their decisions normative for others. 570. When – concerning areas or realities that involve fundamental ethical duties – legislative or political choices contrary to Christian principles and values are proposed or made, the Magisterium teaches that “a well-formed Christian conscience does not permit one to vote for a political programme or an individual law which contradicts the fundamental contents of faith and morals.”

This distinction “is a value that has been attained and recognized by the Catholic Church and belongs to the inheritance of contemporary civilization.” Catholic moral doctrine, however, clearly rejects the prospects of an autonomy that is understood as independence from the moral law.… A sincere quest for the truth, using legitimate means to promote and defend the moral truths concerning social life – justice, freedom, respect for life and for other human rights – is a right and duty of all members of a social and political community.

When the Church’s Magisterium intervenes in issues concerning social and political life, it does not fail to observe the requirements of a correctly understood autonomy, for “the Church's Magisterium does not wish to exercise political power or eliminate the freedom of opinion of Catholics regarding contingent questions. Instead, it intends – as is its proper function – to instruct and illuminate the consciences of the faithful, particularly those involved in political life, so that their actions may always serve the integral promotion of the human person and the common good. The social doctrine of the Church is not an intrusion into the government of individual countries. It is a question of the lay Catholic’s duty to be morally coherent, found within one”s conscience.” The Church teaches; the laity acts, according to their consciences formed by the Church. 573. A particular area for discernment on the part of the lay faithful concerns the

choice of political instruments, that is, membership in a party or in other types of political participation…. In every case, whatever choice is made must be rooted in charity and tend towards the attainment of the common good. It is difficult for the concerns of the Christian faith to be adequately met in one sole political entity…. Christians cannot find one party that fully corresponds to the ethical demands arising from faith and from membership in the Church. Their adherence to a political alliance will never be ideological but always critical. Living and applying the social teaching of the Church supersedes and transcends party membership. Catholic social teachings are nothing less than the Beatitudes of the Gospel refined for action in the world. As such, the social doctrine is magisterial, and the laity have a serious obligation to

put it into effect in their own lives, in society, their culture, and country, according to their conscience, which should be formed by the promulgated teaching of the Church and applied to the specific situations that they encounter. When in doubt, they should consult the bishop of their diocese, who is the best interpreter of the teaching of the Church.

pornography, contraception, etc.). However, in the great majority of social, political, and economic questions, the Church gives principles that allow the laity to apply them as best they can, according to their understanding of the problem.

At the same time, Catholics have to respect other opinions about the application of CST, as long as such opinions do not contradict the teachings and principles of the Church. We are bound to obey in those social issues that are strictly defined (abortion, marriage,

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. © 1996-2017 The Mary Foundation · 501(c)3

The Tweetable Saint by Jerome Joseph Day

have a confession to make: I once poked fun of a saint.

Back in my graduate school days, as a layman, I worked as a residence counselor in an Irish university setting. Then most Irish universities provided precious few housing opportunities, but some religious organizations operated hostels for students. I found a spot at Nullamore, a beautiful old Guinness family estate in the Dartry section of Dublin. The hostel was run by a group called Opus Dei, about which I knew nothing at the time. I discovered that Opus Dei is a world-wide conservative Catholic organization, with lay members and clerical

priests, that was founded in 1928 by a Spanish priest named Josemaria Escriva. My time there was enjoyable, and I found members filled with good will and convicted faith. In the years since, Opus Dei was made famous by the fiction (and fantasy) of novelist Dan Brown, author of The DaVinci Code. Opus Dei has been the subject to some criticism because of alleged secrecy and elitism, but does much good seeking the sanctification of both ordinary people and some of society's movers and shakers. It was Msgr. Escriva's belief that conversion of heart by the leaders of a society could help

stimulate a transformation of our world. Escriva's writings included the popular works The Way, The Furrow, and Christ Is Passing By. They are filled with short, pithy invocations, injunctions, and interjections designed to stimulate thought, prayer, and reflection. In my youthful "wisdom," however, I thought they were trite and too unsophisticated for a college graduate like myself. How could all these economists, government officials, academics, business executives, bankers, physicians and researchers take it so seriously, I  wondered! My own sensibilities were formed at Saint Anselm under Benedictine influence. The sober, restrained approach to Catholic life -- intense, not showy -- appealed to me. If a monk wanted to read, he turned to the Fathers of the Church, major theologians, papal or conciliar teachings, the saints, or, always, Sacred Scripture. Two or three-line maxims from Msgr. Escriva? Come on! Yet the saint kept showing up.

Back in the U.S., within weeks of my return, some of my buds from St. A's decided to get together in Boston. I made the three-hour trek from North Adams east, and arriving at the apartment of one of the guys, I asked if I could change and clean up before we headed out. No problem, said he, use my room and the bathroom next to it. Neatly tucked into the bedroom's dresser, on the mirror, who should be looking at me? Yup, St. Josemaria! Time passed and several decades later, I myself was a Benedictine monk at Saint Anselm. Msgr. Escriva had been canonized in 2002 as a real, honest-togoodness saint and technology arrived in the age of Twitter. Tweets are those 140-character messages, all short and pithy, that politicians, celebrities and even institutions put out sometimes on a daily basis. Our college uses it, the parish secretary uses it, and most of my students use it. Oh, and who else? Pope Francis, as @Pontifex!

All this left me somewhat conflicted. I certainly realized I had undervalued Escriva, missed the mark on Benedictine spirituality, and underappreciated the impact on evangelizing of very short thoughts expressed in maxims. Michael O'Loughlin, a reporter for The Boston Globe's Crux, has just written The Tweetable Pope: A Spiritual Revolution in 140 Characters on that that very topic. It all came together. St. Josemaria's book The Way recently appeared in my sacristy. How it got there is anybody's guess, but apparently St. Josemaria is everywhere. I leafed through it, and I happened upon a maxim that

declared how fortunate we are to be working to build up the Kingdom of God rather than some earthly kingdom. And then it struck me! Thank you, St. Josemaria! The saint's use of nuggets -- tweets? -- of the gospel suits today's short attention spans well. Even more important, how blessed we really are to be called to the Kingdom and to labor for that domain of Christ. Much as we love our own nation, we all know how many problems we face and how much we must overcome. Christ, the source of all that is good, holy, noble, beautiful, true, free, life-giving and fulfilling in our world, reminds us that our real home is on high.

ABOUT THE  AUTHOR

Rev. Jerome Joseph Day, O.S.B. is pastor of Saint Raphael the Archangel Parish in Manchester, NH and an assistant professor at Saint Anselm College. This article first appeared on www.realclearreligion.org

Meet the Catholic mother raising 15 children alone by Jack Valero

hen I get in touch with Rosa Pich by Skype during Holy Week, I discover that she is on holiday with 12 of her children in Torreciudad, a shrine dedicated to Our Lady in northern Spain. “We are trying to return to normal life,” she says, following the death of her husband, Chema, of liver cancer little more than a month earlier. “We have cried a lot, we have prayed a lot, but life continues,” she says. “I have come to see that when God gives you a cross to carry, he always gives you the grace you need to bear it.” Rosa is a supernumerary member of Opus Dei and is the ninth of 16 siblings. Chema Postigo, who also belonged to

Rosa Pich (back row, centre) with 12 of her children in Torreciudad

Opus Dei, came from a family of 14. They got married young and aspired to have a family as large as those they came from. Their first child, however, was born with a congenital heart defect and was not expected to survive for long (although she actually lived till the age of 22). The second and third children died in infancy. It was then that a doctor advised the couple not to have any more children. But after much prayer and discernment they decided against this advice. “Nobody other than the spouses should enter the marriage bed,” she explains, “not the doctor, or one’s mother or mother-in-law, or the priest.” Rosa and Chema

resolved not to give up on their dream of a large family and went on to have 15 more children, all alive to this day, aged now from 25 down to seven. They became the parents of Spain’s largest family and have appeared in documentaries in several countries including one made by the BBC. How did they manage? They lived in an apartment in Barcelona with five bedrooms: two for boys, two for girls and one for the couple. In one of the boys’ rooms, there is a four-level bunk bed and another two-level bunk bed with a spare bed for guests, since their children are positively encouraged to bring their friends home to play and to stay the night. Each of the older children is assigned a younger sibling to look after, ensuring that they make their bed, eat enough, do their homework, clear their toys and get their clothes ready for the next day. Chores in the house are distributed monthly according to a schedule which is agreed by all. This allowed Chema to have a full-time job and Rosa to work part time in

the mornings, while they spent many weekends travelling the world to help other couples make their families a success through a programme developed by the Family Development Foundation (FDF). Rosa’s daily schedule entails getting up early to go to Mass, then on to work as a sales executive in a textile firm, getting back home for lunch. Meanwhile, the children help each other to get up, have breakfast, and travel to school and university. Their dining table is round, with room for 20 people. This allows everyone to see and hear everyone else as the conversation around the dinner table is always very animated. “We have three rules about our meals,” Rosa tells me. “First, you need to ensure the person to your right and to your left are served before you start eating. Secondly, when you get the tray of food, you should choose the worst for yourself, leaving the better portions for your siblings. And third, all of us, including Mum and Dad, should aim to do

one small sacrifice in each meal.”

minutes away from home because each loaf is 20 cents cheaper. This adds up to a saving of many euros per month. Sometimes the fridge becomes empty before the end of the month, so they have to skimp and make do with the basics until the next salary comes in.

This sacrifice could be as simple as taking a bit more of what you don’t like or a bit less of what you like, or delaying drinking the glass of water till the end of the meal – something small that shows solidarity with those who don’t have enough to eat or are otherwise suffering. These and many other experiences are collected in a book that Rosa wrote in 2013 and has now been translated into 10 languages, including Chinese. It was published in English by Scepter Publishers in New York this year, with the title Rosa, What’s Your Secret?: Raising a Large Family with Love. But isn’t it very expensive to have such a large family? The Postigo-Pich family consumes 1,300 biscuits, 420 pints of milk and seven lots of a dozen eggs per month. But they are extremely careful where they buy their provisions, searching for the biggest discounts they can get. Every day one of the children walks to a bakery 15

In the last four months of Chema’s life the couple were able to travel to six countries in three different continents to promote FDF courses: South Korea, China, Ivory Coast, Portugal, Italy and Belarus. In the latter they had the distinct feeling they were being followed by KGB-type secret police who were about to deport them. But all was fine, and in fact they appeared in the main news programme in Minsk. Chema felt ill during these months, losing almost two stone in weight. Eventually he went to hospital to have a number of tests. In late February, he was diagnosed with aggressive liver cancer with a metastasis in the lungs. Clearly he was not going to live much longer. He then called all his children together.

“Jesus is very good. He loves us a lot,” he told them. “He took Javi and Montse to himself when they were young and Carmina when she was 22. Now it is my turn.”

message for his mother? Pope Francis said: “Tell your mother to always look up to heaven, as your father looks at her from there.”

He then spoke to them one by one. Less than two weeks later he died. The funeral was held in the largest church in Barcelona and was attended by more than 4,000 people from all over the world. At least 30 people told Rosa that Chema was their best friend. Each person who attended was given a rosary in a little pouch prepared by the children the day before. One of the people who came to the funeral said that “in the midst of the pain, these days we have touched heaven.” Their son Gaby, 17, went to Rome for Holy Week and was able to greet Pope Francis personally after the Wednesday audience. Chema had written to the Pope, who had answered by sending his prayers and blessings. Gaby told the Holy Father that his father had died recently: would he have a

How can Rosa cope as a young widow with so many children? Yet it is precisely having so many children which allows her to live surrounded by love. The week after the funeral there was a family meeting at which all the jobs done by Chema up to then were distributed among the family members. Rosa admits that dealing with banks is not her forte and is happy that one of the older children has taken that on. As she puts it: “In a large family, joys are multiplied and sorrows are divided.” Recently she spotted her 10year-old reading the newspaper, something he had never done before. When she asked him, he said that dad would always explain the news to him every night but that now he had to find it out by himself. Rosa knows she will never be alone. “The problem today in developed societies is loneliness,” she says, “something

we have never known in our families.” She adds that, although having small children takes a lot of time and effort, the years of looking after them pass quickly, and then you have around you “these wonderful human beings, who will exist forever, forever, forever”. Each child was a gift of God and there was nothing like it: “I have many friends,” Rosa says, “who later in life have one regret: not having had more children.” She believes this is the best present parents can give to their older children. At school, many of the boys and girls want to be friends with her children because they are used

to being generous and sharing their lives with others. “I believe in this house they are getting the best possible training to run multinationals,” she says, “because they learn to negotiate, to spot the needs of others, to make the case for their suggested course of action, to give in when needed, to ask for forgiveness when they make a mistake.” What is the most important thing in a family, I ask her as we are finishing our conversation. She does not hesitate: “That the Mum and Dad love each other. Everything else comes from that.”

ABOUT THE  AUTHOR Jack Valero is the press officer of Opus Dei UK and a founder of Catholic Voices. This article first appeared in the May 2017 issue of the Catholic Herald.

Book review The Closing of the American Mind: 30 years later

A book review by Nathan Schlueter

n this essay, I offer some reasons why Closing is worthy of our attention, perhaps now even more than when it was first published. All Is Not Well Somewhat remarkably, this erudite book with a prosaic subtitle sold over a million copies and spent four months at the top of the New York Times Nonfiction Best Seller list. It also became something of a flash point between traditionalist conservatives and modern liberals in Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s culture wars. Yet both groups had a tendency to read into the book their own prejudices, leading them to misunderstand its basic

Author Allan Bloom

1987 (Simon & Schuster)

argument. That argument defies the standard political narratives of the left or right, as did the author himself. Posthumous revelations of Bloomâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s homosexuality and agnosticism do not undermine his defense of the Bible, the traditional family, or the study of Great Books. Rather, they reinforce one of the bookâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s main points: we are neither defined nor confined by our strongest desires, and reason can transcend both personal preferences and local prejudices. Alternatively hopeful, pessimistic, provocative, and troubling, yet always brilliant, Closing has lost none of its power or its relevance. If

anything, the crisis Bloom identified has only intensified, with the renaissance of angry and often violent protests on college campuses and in urban areas, the growing vitriol and vulgarity of political discourse, and the rise of nationalist movements here and abroad, which are increasingly skeptical of liberal democracy. All is not well in America, or in the university, and Bloom offers a profound and compelling diagnosis of the common illness infecting them both. That illness involves the crisis of the West, which is fundamentally a crisis of reason—namely, the loss of confidence in reason’s ability to discover truth and guide human action. (Thus, Closing can be fruitfully read alongside works such as The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis, After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre, and Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Address). A crisis of reason is also a crisis of liberal democracy, which depends upon reason to moderate competing theological and ideological claims. And a

fortiori, this is especially a crisis of the United States, which Bloom calls “one of the highest and most extreme achievements of the rational quest for the good life according to nature.” “An openness that denies the special claim of reason,” Bloom writes, “bursts the mainspring keeping the mechanism of this regime in motion.” The loss of reason and nature as standards leaves people passionately “committed” to their “values” with no means to evaluate those values or negotiate their differences. The Roots of Democracy – and of Violence and Repression Always in the background of Bloom’s analysis is the fate of Weimar Germany. How did the most liberal of Western liberal democracies become transformed into a violent and repressive totalitarian regime? And why couldn’t the same thing happen to us? For Bloom, this transformation was not simply the result of contingent historical events such as the Treaty of Versailles or the

Great Depression. Its roots were planted long before, in the romantic reaction of philosophers such ad JeanJacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche to the “bougeoisification” (or what Nietzsche called “the borification”) of human beings under liberal democracy. Readers have noticed the similarities between Bloom’s description of his American students and Nietzsche’s description of the “last man” in Thus Spake Zarathustra, but they often miss Bloom’s greater concern: “Hitler proved to the satisfaction of most, if not all, that the last man is not the worst of all; and his example should have, although it has not, turned the political imagination away from experiments in that direction.” In tracing the etiology of ideas that led to the crisis of the West, Bloom takes his reader on a whirlwind tour of the history of political philosophy. Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Marx, Freud, Weber, and Nietzsche (especially the first and the last on this list)

feature prominently in a narrative that seeks to disclose the permanent questions of the human condition. These are questions about the relations between the passions and reason, the soul and the body, the individual and community, science and poetry, politics and philosophy, reason and revelation. Rather than provide neat answers to these questions, however, Bloom invites his readers into genuine philosophical experience by making a convincing case for the competing positions. At times, this makes it difficult to tell whether Bloom is advocating a particular position or merely summarizing it. This has led to disagreements over whether Bloom’s ultimate sympathies rest with the classical Plato and Aristotle, the modern Machiavelli and Locke, or the postmodern Rousseau and Nietzsche. However one comes down on this disagreement (and I think the evidence favors the first option), one cannot deny the

singular capacity of Bloom’s style to entertain, enrich, and enlighten. Bloom’s prose, like poetry, has a luminous and suggestive quality that must be tasted, not paraphrased. This form reinforces the function of Closing. The problem is similar to that facing Socrates when he is arrested by Polemarchus in the opening scene of Plato’s Republic, a book Bloom translated and interpreted: What reasons can be offered to someone who denies the power of reason altogether? The answer for Bloom, as for Plato, is a philosophical poetry that elicits and feeds the natural human desire for wisdom. The High Does Not Stand without the Low Consider this example of Bloom’s style from Part Two: A true political or social order requires the soul to be like a Gothic cathedral, with selfish stresses and strains helping to hold it up. Abstract moralism condemns certain keystones, removes them, and then blames

both the nature of the stones and the structure when it collapses. The soul as a Gothic cathedral is a striking image, making visible what is otherwise invisible. It effectively captures the elevation of soul one experiences on visiting a great Gothic cathedral such as Chartres or Notre Dame or Cologne – the sense of sacredness, solemnity, and transcendence. The simile also alludes to the subtle source of magic in the Gothic cathedral, its almost ironic combination of weight and verticality that is made possible by the arch-like flying buttresses supporting the walls. In the soul, as in the Gothic cathedral, “the high does not stand without the low,” to quote C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves. Who cannot detect, in the “abstract moralism” Bloom denounces, modern liberalism’s frustrated attempts to eliminate economic competition or root out gender differences? The image provides a salutary reminder that human virtue is not simply natural but requires the artifice of education, which is at least as important and as

difficult as the construction of a Gothic cathedral. No political regime (especially liberal democracy) can be indifferent to the virtue – and therefore the education – of its citizens. The Danger of Indignation I conclude by examining one final quotation, this time from Part Three. Bloom writes the following of the student protesters and their abettors in the sixties: Indignation and rage was the vivid passion characterizing those in the grip of the new moral experience. Indignation may be a most noble passion and necessary for fighting wars and righting wrongs. But of all the experiences of the soul it is the most inimical to reason and hence to the university. Anger, to sustain itself, requires an unshakable conviction that one is right. Whether the student wrath against the professorial Agamemnons is authentically Achillean is open to question. But there is no doubt it was the banner under which they fought, the proof of belonging.

As it was in the sixties, so again today. Indignant anger has become a public passion. Yet Bloom shows how complex and problematic this passion is. Anger is distinctive to human beings (or rational beings), because it is not merely a physiological reaction to stimuli but is bound up with a judgment about right and wrong. But as Bloom points out, anger can also be the most irrational and destructive of passions, especially when it is directed toward perceived threats to oneself or one’s own. Bloom’s allusion to the central theme of Homer’s great epic the Iliad highlights this point: “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus / and its devastation.” Ordinary animals do not nurse wounded pride, slash at rivers that get in their way, or spend days relieving their anger on the maimed corpses of their enemies. Homer’s description is not far from the atrocities committed daily in parts of the Middle East. This may be our fate as well if we refuse the kind of moral education of anger that can only come from the recovery of reason.

Like a great book, The Closing of the American Mind sparks intense disagreements. Is Bloom’s description of the principles of the American Founding accurate? Does he caricature the flat souls of his students? Do philosophical ideas really have the power he attributes to them? Is his genealogy of ideas accurate? How does he understand the relationship between philosophy and morality? What does nature teach about the moral life? Can the restoration of a Great Books education in the university really be the remedy for the crisis of the West?

make the love and learning of great books attractive in the midst of America’s increasingly vulgar culture, and to restore the intimate connection between liberal education and liberty. For this alone, Bloom merits our profound attention, respect, and gratitude.

Whether or not Closing is itself a great book, it has the power to

ABOUT THE  AUTHOR

Nathan Schlueter is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Hillsdale College. He is the author, with Nikolai Wenzel, of Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives? The Foundations of the Libertarian-Conservative Debate. This article originally appeared in Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, NJ, and is reprinted with permission. See http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/ 2017/05/18956/ for the original article.

Film review Alien: Covenant

Director Ridley Scott Stars Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup

by John Mulderig

nce you’ve seen one vicious extraterrestrial gnaw its way out of a human body from the inside, you’ve seen ’em all. Or so at least the jaded – or squeamish – moviegoer might be tempted to think.

so-called synthetic, (i.e., an android) named Walter (Michael Fassbender).

And yet, the success of the durable Alien franchise, which dates all the way back to 1979, and was last added to by the 2012 reboot Prometheus, would seem to argue otherwise.

Naturally, all this is too peaceful to last. So, cue an unforeseen phenomenon that not only badly damages the Covenant but also kills a number of those on board, including the vessel’s commander, Capt. Jacob Branson (James Franco).

For those eager to watch the showcased race of creatures come busting out all over one more time, there arrives the competently shocking Alien: Covenant (Fox). As before, the watchword remains – to borrow a phrase from Cole Porter – Don’t Fence Me In.

As they analyze this incident, Branson’s successor, Christopher Oram (Billy Crudup), and his colleagues detect a weak audio signal that alerts them to the existence of a much closer – and possibly populated – world that seems just as suitable for settlement as their original destination. After some debate, Oram orders a change in course.

When we first meet those whose anatomical bounds are likely to be burst, namely the crew of the titular spacecraft, they’re taking a long cryogenic nap as they speed toward a distant planet on a colonizing mission from Mother Earth. They’re watched over by a

Anyone who has ever seen an Alien film (and even many who have not) will know what a mistake this turns out to be. Those in the imperiled landing party Oram leads – and Walter accompanies – include Branson’s widow, Daniels (Katherine Waterston), and

Oram’s wife, Karine (Carmen Ejogo). As director Ridley Scott, who originated the series, unleashes his trademark mayhem, the plot increasingly focuses on a duel between Walter and David (also Fassbender), an earlier model of synthetic who featured in Prometheus and who now turns up – at first, it would seem, providentially – down on the surface. Grown viewers with a strong tolerance for gore will note an undeveloped theme concerning Oram’s religiosity. Though the early dialogue highlights his faith-based decision making, and the opposition his beliefs are likely to excite once he takes over, all this fizzles away rapidly as the franchise’s ultimate form of indigestion begins to take hold.

tionship. And this whispered declaration comes at a moment when even vigilant observers could be forgiven for being distracted – yet another cast member having just erupted like a crimson Krakatoa. The film contains intervals of gruesome bloody violence, brief graphic marital lovemaking, a same-sex kiss, about a half-dozen uses each of profanity and milder swearing as well as pervasive rough and some crude language. The Catholic News Service classification is L – limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is R – restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

Moviegoers on the lookout for the gay material tipped in pre-release publicity – of the thousand or so couples on the Covenant, at least one is made up of two men (Demian Bichir and Nathaniel Dean) – will observe a similar disappearing act. The characters are there, but only a single statement by one of them indicates the nature of their rela-

ABOUT THE  AUTHOR

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