Position Papers - June/July 2018

Number 520 June/July 2018 €3 · £2.50 · $4

A review of Catholic affairs

After the Referendum MICHAEL KIRKE REV. PATRICK G. BURKE

The Sixties and Humanae Vitae FR KEVIN E. O’REILLY OP FR PATRICK O’DONOHUE

Film review: The Shape of Water BISHOP BARRON

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Number 520 · June/July 2018

Editorial

by Fr Gavan Jennings

In Passing: Ireland goes the way of the world – for now

by Michael Kirke

May 1968

by Fr D. Vincent Twomey

Humanae Vitae and the Crisis of Faith

by Fr Patrick O’Donohue

The day after Ireland fell

by Rev. Patrick G. Burke

The New Technologies and Christian Coherence from www.opusdei.ie

Me? A Catholic? (Part II)

by Andrew Larkin

Film Review: The Shape of Water

by Bishop Robert Barron

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

How the vote went

O

n May 25 the Irish people went to the polls to vote, either to abolish the existing Article 8 of the constitution which protects the life of the unborn (Yes), or to retain that pro-life article (No). The very fact that the vote was framed to give the pro-life side the negative option reflects how from the very beginning and throughout the campaign the Irish government did much to ensure that they would get the result they wanted: the introduction of abortion into Ireland.

The result of the poll was a landslide 66% Yes in favour of the repeal of the prolife clause against a 34% No vote. The magnitude of the Yes victory took everyone by surprise. The Yes voters were dominant among the young: 87% of 18-24 year olds voted Yes and only the 65+ age bracket voted in the majority for No.1 More women than men voted in favour of abortion (72% as against 66%). Only one of the twenty-six counties in the country – Donegal – returned a majority No vote.

It was a shocking result, particularly when considered in the light of John Waters’ observation: For the first time in history, an electorate has voted to deny the right to life of the unborn. The victims of this dreadful choice will be the most defenseless, those entirely without voice or words. This is the considered verdict of the Irish people, not – as elsewhere – an edict of the elites, imposed by parliamentary decree or judicial fiat (John Waters, First Things, May 28, 2018).

Why was the victory so resounding?

The leaders of all the main political parties enthusiastically backed the repeal campaign, in particular the leader of the ruling Fine Gael party.

All the main media outlets were overtly or covertly in favour of the repeal campaign. Irish celebreties such as Bono, Saoirse Ronan, Liam Neeson and Cillian Murphy appeared on videos urging a Yes vote.

1. These statistics are taken from a Behaviour & Attitudes exit poll taken of 3,779 voters during the course of the voting. See: https://www.rte.ie/news/politics/ 2018/0526/966120-eighth-amendment-referendum/

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The campaign was also supported by a large number of the intelligentsia of the country (insofar as Ireland can be said to have an intelligentsia since political correctness thoroughly dominates public debate and perhaps even private thought). With two weeks to go Facebook banned all foreign adverts on the vote while Google banned adverts from all sources – a step clearly designed to favour the Yes side given that they had all the other communications media in the country virtually sewn up.

The No campaign was fighting a losing battle from the outset, pitted as they were against all the forces of what is essentially Ireland’s new and unassailable liberal establishment. They fought a brave and highly professional campaign despite this, and despite the regular destruction of their street posters and the undisguised animus against them in radio and TV interviews and debates.

Given that 43% of voters were influenced by personal stories in the media, the Yes campaign’s use of the hard-cases was key: women whose unborn suffered from life limiting conditions (the so-called “fatal foetal abnormalities”); women who experienced great hardship in travelling to the UK for abortions; and in particular the tragic case of Savita Halappanavar: an Indian woman who died tragically in an Irish hospital in 2012 because of a five days’ delay by the hospital in diagnosing fatal sepsis, but whose death was presented as a consequence of Ireland’s ban on abortion. Anecdotal evidence would suggest that for some a Yes vote was used as a vote against the Catholic Church. Much of the post-Referendum jubilation is peppered with observations about the demise of the Church in Ireland.

What is the next step in the legalisation of abortion?

The Irish Government will shortly bring forward proposed legislation to the Dáil (the Irish parliament), but until this is passed the current law remains in place. The Government’s proposed legislation will make abortions accessible within the first twelve weeks of pregnancy

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without restriction. It is also foreseen – despite denials to the contrary – that abortion will be legalised on the grounds of disability, and perhaps beyond the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. It is hard to see how it could be otherwise given that the the Yes campaign was built on arguments which justify abortion up till birth: the issue of personal choice (for 62% of the votes the “right to choose” was the most significant issue in the campaign), of “trusting women”, and of not “policing” women’s bodies.

The Irish result has already lead to calls for the abolition of Northern Ireland’s pro-life law with politicians coming under pressure to introduce abortion there.

What is the significance of this vote for Ireland?

Una Mulally a pro-choice journalist with the Irish Times makes this summation of the significance of the vote: The handover period is over. The fiction of Ireland as a conservative, dogmatically Catholic country has been shattered.

The past is left back there, and a new legacy is being created. A legacy of compassion, empathy, and maturity – a country taking responsibility for the care and health of women and girls. What happened in the referendum vote was seismic, but more seismic still was the realisation that this vote was reflecting change, not just instigating it (Irish Times, May 28, 2018).

While her optimism about the treatment of women in Ireland appears to be slightly naive (for example during the very week of the Referendum two bizarre and brutal murders of young women occurred in Dublin), she is quite right to say that the fiction of a Catholic Ireland is over. Coming hot on the heels of the nation’s choice to legalise homosexual marriage in a referendum in 2015, this landslide vote in favour of abortion confirms the fact that “Catholic Ireland” is now a thing of the past.

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The Irish Catholicism of post-independence Ireland was marked by a naive and uncritical docility to the hierarchy and little commitment to, or perhaps trust in, the more intellectual side of the Faith. Ironically the same naive and uncritical docility is now at work in post-Catholic Ireland, but directed to our new masters. This is a bit worrying. It appears that the censorious intolerance that marked areas of life in Catholic Ireland has now found its Doppelganger in the Irish media. Already there are suggestions coming from the victorious Yes side that their opponents should now no longer have a public platform; they were, in the words of Una Mullaly, “fringe fundamentalists” who should not have “gained such a platform and unfettered access to the media”. It does not appear unlikely that there will be more organised, perhaps legal measures, to limit the remaining dissident voices in Irish society. And given the resounding defeat for the small voice of dissent which was the No campaign, it would not be alarmist to say that Ireland will probably soon introduce other liberal laws including the legalisation of euthanasia.

Where does this leave the Catholic Church?

Ireland is in the anomalous situation of fast becoming the world’s most liberal society while at the same time maintaining the trappings of cultural Catholicism. Groups of schoolgirls will happily wear Yes stickers on their school-uniforms emblazoned with mottos such as Cruci dum spiro fido (“As long as I breathe I trust in the Cross”); parents will bring their children to make their First Holy Communion on Saturday and then skip Mass the following day; politicians who have high profile roles in campaigning for abortion will at the same time have high profile roles in the celebration of the sacraments in the local parish Church. There is a growing awareness that this anomaly must stop; that the Church must make a clean break with cultural Catholicism – for the good of all concerned. Faithful Catholics are saying that the Church must downsize to adapt to the current reality of a post-Christian secularised Ireland. The “fiction” of a Catholic Ireland which Una Mullaly speaks of has indeed been shattered, and the Church here needs to take cognisance of this.

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It will of course take courage to end the sham which is cultural Catholicism – already Bishop Phonsie Cullinan of Waterford had to endure criticism for insisting that in his diocese sponsors in Confirmation ceremonies be Catholics in good standing. John Halligan, a government minister, campaigner for abortion and self-declared atheist decried his exclusion as confirmation sponsor as petty pro-life tactics.

Given how deformative of consciences such cultural Catholicism must be both for faithful Catholics as well as for lapsed Catholics, the task of reevangelising Ireland cannot begin to take place while these self-deceptive practices are so firmly established in Irish life. This may yet be the one significant blessing to come from the Referendum. In this way, the tragic vote of May 25 is also an opportunity for the Church in Ireland to clarify in her own mind and praxis her relationship with Irish society. Joseph Ratzinger’s words from a 1969 radio lecture, accurately sum up the painful, but ultimately positive, position that the Irish Church now finds herself in: From today's crisis, a Church will emerge tomorrow that will have lost a great deal. She will be small and, to a large extent, will have to start from the beginning. She will no longer be able to fill many of the buildings created in her period of great splendor. Because of the smaller number of her followers, she will lose many of her privileges in society. Contrary to what has happened until now, she will present herself much more as a community of volunteers As a small community, she will demand much more from the initiative of each of her members and she will certainly also acknowledge new forms of ministry and will raise up to the priesthood proven Christians who have other jobs There will be an interiorized Church, which neither takes advantage of its political mandate nor flirts with the left or the right. This will be achieved with effort because the process of crystallization and clarification will demand great exertion. It will make her poor and a Church of the little people. All this will require time. The process will be slow and painful.

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In Passing: Ireland goes the way of the world – for now

by Michael Kirke

T

he words of James Joyce, which were once an offence to the people of his country, now, over one hundred years later, have become stunningly real for the estimated one third of Irish people who vainly tried to halt the tide of a modernity hostile to the unborn in the referendum which took place there on Friday.

country knowingly, willfully, declares that the deliberate killing of the unborn in the womb is permissible for no other reason than that it interferes with an individual’s comfort, convenience or life-style?

The Irish Government, willingly bowing to pressure, national and international, proposed to the electorate that the right to life of the unborn, guaranteed in its Constitution since 1983, be removed. This was to allow the legislature of the State to enact laws to facilitate unrestricted abortion up to twelve weeks gestation and up to twenty-four weeks on grounds which, in practice, will be abortion on demand. Needless to say, the

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus, talking about his country with his friend: “Do you know what Ireland is? asked Stephen with cold violence. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.” Too strong? No, says pro-life Ireland.

What other interpretation is there when the majority in a

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proposals as presented were less stark than that, but given the pattern of what has happened in every other country with a liberal abortion law, the reality will inevitably be termination on demand. All the dissembling in the world will not change that.

the very word abortion, they complained, characterized the pro-choice campaign throughout.

But the truth is, the Government which put this proposal to the people cannot be blamed anymore. This result has now clearly shown that it is the express will of the majority of the people of Ireland – about 90% of its young electorate – that the child in the womb not be constitutionally guaranteed a right to life. Choice is the supreme moral norm. The good or evil of what is chosen is, apparently, a matter of indifference. What has shocked the dissenting third of the Irish people is that so many have failed to see that the killing of the unborn is an evil thing.

Among the slogans of the proabortion campaigners were “Trust women”, “Trust doctors” and “Trust politicians” – that last somewhat bizarre given the economic debacle Irish politicians visited on their country just ten years ago. With regard to the two former, campaigners for the right to life of unborn children were a little baffled by both women and doctors asking for trust with those very lives which they were claiming the right to choose to terminate. They complained that logic or reason played very little part in the pro-choice armory and that all the emphasis was on emotional exploitation of the hard cases – rape, incest, limited life prospects of the baby in the womb and more. The human right to life, the human nature of the child in the womb, even its very existence, the avoidance of

Once again, for a world which has habitually looked on Ireland as a bastion of family values and marriage, all this comes as a surprise. The first sign of this upheaval came just three years ago. Then, when a similar majority voted in a referendum to change the very meaning of marriage to allow gay people to

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marry, there was one question, “How did this happen so quickly?”

the people of the teaching of the mainstream Christian churches.

This, however, is different. This can hardly be seen as anything other than an upfront rejection by the majority of the Irish of the Christian teaching on the sacredness of human life, from the womb to the tomb – and beyond. There is no ambiguity here. There is little basis for a benign response, “they know not what they do.” It has all been done with astounding willfulness.

Many explained away that rejection of one of the social foundations binding a community. They read it firstly as a sympathy vote for a minority. Secondly, it was thought of as the result of a failure to grasp the social consequences which promarriage campaigners warned of. Again, reason and logic were trumped by emotion and a deceitful misuse of the concept of human equality.

In this instance the Anglican, Presbyterian and Catholic leaders were almost all unanimous in the guidance they gave to their followers on the

It was not seen by the majority as an out and out rejection by

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matter of the sacredness of life.

On May16 the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Diarmuid Martin, explained in a statement:

it is good to know where one stands.

“The Church must always be pro-life. That means that the Christian community must be a beacon of support for life especially at its most vulnerable moments and a beacon of support at vulnerable moments of any woman or man along their path of life….. Christians must be pro-life when it comes to the unborn and those who are vulnerable at the end of their lives.”

The significance of all this in Irish history is twofold. She has now abandoned the principle held for at least 1,500 years that all human life is sacred. She has joined the community of secularist nations where relativism rules the roost and life is allowed to flourish only on the basis of the choice of someone other than the living subject in the womb. This is where Ireland now stands – and if anything good might be said by pro life people about this, it is only that

The second and more general significance which this revolution has is what it says about Catholicism and the Christian Faith in Ireland. What is now clear is that the Irish people’s traditional culture, derived from Christian culture, is now rudderless. Its values with regard to life, the family – and its grasp of the Catholic Faith which has held firm for centuries in the face of “fire, dungeon and sword” – have now “all changed, changed utterly”.

For many – well for approximately 32% – something other than “a terrible beauty” has dawned on them. They now face the challenge of starting again. But one third of a population is not the weakest of bases from which to start. This will be the challenge for all the Christian churches to take up, as it picks up the pieces.

There was evidence throughout this campaign of anti-Catholic sentiment – despite the efforts of the pro-life organizations to present their arguments on

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predominantly rational grounds, grounds of scientific evidence of the human nature of the child and grounds of natural rights and justice. A Catholic priest, an American working in Dublin, made this interesting response on social media to a correspondent who said that the vote was nothing more or less than a vote against the Catholic Church.

“Yes, the vote was a vote against the Church. To my mind, a strange way to think about human rights.” Then, after reflecting for a moment on the undoubted failures of the Church on many levels, and remarking on its servants’ sad record when it “always found the temptation to wed itself to power irresistible”, he concludes, “The Church arose in a pagan culture by being willing to die for truths, not kill for them. Profound humility and joyful witness to the good life is the way forward. The only way forward for the secular West is to figure out how to argue for love when it announces a loveless universe, and for the Church to live love so

attractively it is irresistible despite being powerless.”

For the hard-working campaigners for the unborn who have sweated it out on the streets and the doorsteps of Ireland’s cities and towns for the past four months – a truly marathon run-in to a poll – there may echo in their ears the dying words of Hildebrand, that great medieval campaigner for truth and rights under the law, “I have loved justice and hated iniquity. Therefore I die in exile.”

On Friday, perhaps appropriately, the Catholic Church celebrated his feast day.

To be a Christian in Ireland just now will, for many, have the taste of exile about it. It will demand not a little of the mettle of Hildebrand to begin again the mission to which all of them after all, by the very terms and conditions of their contract, are indeed committed.

A triumphant liberal proabortion columnist in yesterday’s Irish Times declared that “Middle Ireland” was dead.

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Now there is just Ireland.

Without even thinking about the totalitarian implications of that proclamation, one third of Ireland probably begs to differ.

They are already promising to make their voices heard loud and clear. Perhaps they will remain in exile for a while, strangers in a wilderness of moral social values. But they believe that eventually, by “living love so attractively that it will be irresistible, despite being powerless”, in the face of the secularist West and its “me, me, me” selfish and loveless universe, they can hope to triumph. They know that if it happened before it can happen again.

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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May 1968

by Fr D. Vincent Twomey

T

he Swinging Sixties were characterized by a sexual liberation the likes of which history had never experienced before – thanks to the combination of philosophy and technology, namely existentialism and the pill. These resulted in unfettered freedom (licence) and the primacy of the pleasure principle. The philosophy was articulated by Sartre and de Beauvoir but it fed into an underlying utilitarianism, one of the undercurrents of Western culture since the Enlightenment.

Since, for Sartre, there is no creator God, then there is no nature. And if there is no such thing as a common human nature, then there is no such

thing as a perennial, universal moral order arising out of our very humanity. In a word, there is no such thing as objective morality. The founder of modern Feminism, de Beauvoir, saw the significance of freely available contraception and abortion on demand, as liberating woman from the slavery imposed on her by a woman's own biological make-up and so enabling woman to be as selftranscendent and creative as man.

The basic thrust of existentialism was largely disseminated by pop-music.

What started out at the beginning of the 1960s as relatively harmless (Elvis

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Presley) was radically transformed by the Beatles’ chart-topping album: Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. According to the Wikipedia article, “the album was lauded ... for providing a musical representation of its generation and the contemporary counterculture.”

More radical were pop-stars like Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones (Sympathy for the Devil), who song, Street Fighting Man, summoned youngsters to the barricades in 1968. Jagger’s songs extolled “the transvaluation of all values and the confusion between appearance and being” (Phillipe Margotin and Jean Michelle Guesdon ).

The effect of such a radical change in moral sensitivity would soon find legal expression. The legal dam break came with the US Supreme Court decision in Griswold v.

Connecticut (1965) which ruled that the Comstock Law forbidding contraception was unconstitutional. And two years later, in 1967, Westminster, the Mother of all Parliaments,

legalized abortion; the rest of the world would soon follow suit.

The proclamation of Humanae Vitae on the 29th July 1968 amounted to little less than a rejection of the very basis of the 1960s’ sexual liberation. But, indeed, its significance touched on more than sexuality. Apart from rejecting the essentially technological solution to birth control (artificial contraception, especially the pill), the encyclical also rejected the fundamental [im]moral principle that the end justifies the means (or to do evil that good may come of it: see HV 14, with ref. to Rom 3:8). That was the same principle which at the macro-level in Marxism justified sacrificing hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings with the objective of achieving utopia. The same principle had been used by the USA to justify dropping the atom-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war.

Humanae Vitae shocked that brave new world to its core. The Western media was in uproar.

Almost immediately, theologians expressed their public dissent by

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the essentially political act of publishing manifestos in the media and gathering hundreds of signatures. (This, too, a historical first!) Some Episcopal Conferences, under the influence (or the pressure?) of the same theologians, issued ambiguous statements – ostensibly welcoming the teaching in general but indicating clearly that couples who might not agree should follow their conscience (understood as private judgement) – in other words ignore the Papal Teaching. How did this happen?

The general euphoria after the Council included a growing feeling that even traditional Church teaching on morality could change. Vatican II had mandated theologians to find a new approach to moral theology.

The Majority Report of the Birth Control Commission advising Pope Paul VI voted for change in the traditional teaching. In hindsight, it could be said that the renewal of moral theology demanded by Vatican II was not sufficiently developed at the time for dissenting theologians to be able to accept Humanae

Vitae. Most moral theologians, such as Charles Curran and Bernard Häring, were still working within the fundamentally legalistic, indeed casuistic mental framework of the pre-Conciliar manualist tradition, while, at the same time, vociferously rejecting the same tradition!

The required renewal of moral theology only became possible with the recovery of virtue (as articulated by Aristotle and Aquinas) as the theoretical framework for moral reflection, a recovery which only began to mature in the 1980s and found its first expression in the fundamental moral section of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992).

The teaching of Humanae Vitae can only be understood in terms of virtue, more precisely the virtue of chastity within marriage. This in turn is predicated on the existence of an objective moral order arising from our common humanity created by God (cf. Rom 1:18 2:12, espec. 2:14-16).

Existentialism – the underlying

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philosophy of the 1960s – denied, as mentioned above, that there was any such thing as objective morality, since, they claimed, there is no creator God; man is absolutely free to choose and so create himself as a future project.

by God and defined by its own moral order arising from our bodily/spiritual composition (cf.

Rom 2:14-16), what is traditionally understood as natural law (or primordial conscience), difficult though it is to articulate.

Rejecting this, Humanae Vitae teaches that there are certain actions (few in number) that are wrong in themselves since they contradict the moral order arising from our human nature and so can never be justified even for the most noble or desirable of ends. Such actions do not make us virtuous or draw us closer to God. An approach to moral theology based on a calculus of foreseen consequences (proportionalism, a version of utilitarianism) denies that any such actions are intrinsically wrong. It leads to a morality that is literally unprincipled: and so the end justifies the means. By way of contrast, morality understood in terms of virtue is concerned with character, integrity, principle – and with growth in grace, union with God. Further, it assumes a common human nature created

Pope Paul VI’s prediction (HV 17) of the negative social effects of widespread contraception was prophetic: increased marital breakdown, abuse of women, State-imposed birth control, etc.

The separation of the unitive and generative significances of conjugal intercourse led not only to the trivialization of sex (now seen as a mere “leisure activity”) and the dramatic increase in sexually transmitted diseases but also to the making of babies in the laboratory (IVF) and, more recently, to so-called gender theory. The demographic consequences of the rejection of Humanae Vitae are becoming more and more acute with most European nations facing a demographic winter – making Europe dependent on mass migration, which in turn is producing a populist backlash arising from fears of a radical

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change of European culture and identity.

lives without catastrophic effects in the long term.

But the most significant effect of the rejection of the teaching of Humanae Vitae might well be the way that rejection – by embracing the principle that the end justifies the means – undermines the primacy of personal integrity (virtue) and so fosters corruption in society, the main source of injustice. The macro-level of society and the micro-level of the human person are, after all, intrinsically related to each other. And both are related to God. The divine cannot be excluded either from society or from the most intimate realms of our human

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fr D. Vincent Twomey is a member of the Divine Word Missionaries and professor emeritus of moral theology, Pontifical University, Maynooth. Among his published works are: The End of Irish Catholicism? (Dublin, 2003), and Benedict XVI. The Conscience of Our Age: A theological Portrait (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007). This article is adapted by the author from a longer version which appears in the missiological quarterly Verbum SVD, 59: 1-2 (2018).

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Humanae Vitae and the Crisis of Faith

by Fr Patrick O’Donohue

I

t is now half a century since the papal encyclical letter Humanae Vitae defended the dignity of matrimony and reaffirmed the Church’s opposition to contraception. By explaining the inherent connection between the unitive and the procreative qualities of sexual intercourse, Pope Paul VI addressed why the use of contraception is always wrong.

He wrote that “each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life” and that “an act of mutual love which impairs the capacity

to transmit life which God the Creator, through specific laws, has built into it, frustrates His design which constitutes the norm of marriage, and contradicts the will of the Author of life.”1 The Pontiff also references previous magisterial teaching, including Casti Connubii which outlined the gravely sinful nature of all deliberately contraceptive acts.2 From Humanae Vitae‘s publication, however, the very name of the encyclical became synonymous with its

1

Paul VI, Encyclical Letter Humanae Vitae, 11-13 (25 July 1968).

2

Pius XI, Encyclical Letter Casti Connubii, 56 (31 December 1930).

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widespread rejection. At the same time as the crucifix was vanishing from altars and homes, so too did the selfsacrificial love it represents disappear from the lives of countless spouses. All this was reflective of the anthropocentric revolution of the 1960s which put man in the place of God as the sole arbiter of good and evil. Alongside this denial of the Church’s teaching authority, many married couples began to regulate the size of their family based on the opinions of the world rather than putting their trust in the Lord.

The good news is that, even after the clamour of this revolution, there is hope. It is never too late to change and, through the Sacrament of Penance, recover the supernatural meaning of marital love. Even in cases where it is too late to have more children, spouses can support younger couples in having larger families. Like Saint Paul, using the time spent against God as a stimulus for serving Him more totally.

Over the past fifty years the fruits of the contraceptive culture foreseen by the encyclical have become an

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unfortunate reality. Humanae Vitae’s predictions have been well documented, namely, marital infidelity, a lowering of moral standards and the intervention of public authorities in the responsibilities of husband and wife. But what the encyclical did not foresee was the devastating impact that the use of artificial methods of birth control would have on the faith of the baptised. What exactly is this relation between contraception and the crisis of faith through which we are now living?

The role of contraception in the decline of faith is difficult to deny. To be a Catholic is not only to have received baptism and self-identify as Catholic, but to accept what the Church has always taught regarding faith and morals. Love of God and neighbour is proven in action as well as in words. This connection between faith and morality reminds us of the maxim that if we do not live what we believe, we end up believing what we live. The Gospel is not to be accepted in

fragmented pieces on one’s own terms. Accepting only the less difficult Commandments could never be the way of a Catholic.

Our Lord Jesus once said “No man can serve two masters.” So too, Catholics cannot serve both God and the spirit of the world. God never blesses those actions that go against the law He has written on every human heart. His plan encapsulates the whole human person, the whole family unit and the whole of society. Such is the depth of His love for us that He would never be satisfied with a mere partial response.

One of the privileges of priesthood is serving families who generously embrace God’s plan to have many children and who desire that the charity of Christ reigns in their homes.

What an awe-inspiring mystery it is that married couples are called to cooperate with God’s creative plan for this world and the world to come. That God would create a soul to exist for all eternity through matrimony is a marvel. Someone once said

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the most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children. May this fiftieth anniversary bring about a rediscovery of the extraordinary blessings God has in store for those who pursue His plan for their families.

the human life that He gives them, and in so doing they will find true life.

The world needs a renewed faithfulness to the immutable moral law, proclaimed through the infallible voice of the Church, so that the bond of husband and wife may be, once again, marked as well by faithfulness to one another and to the Author of life. Those who are open to “the God of the living” will always be open to

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Fr Patrick O’Donohue serves at the apostolate of the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter in Reading, UK, and holds a Licentiate of Sacred Theology.

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The day after Ireland fell

by Rev. Patrick G. Burke

I

was surprised when I woke to overcast skies on Saturday May 26. There had been a red sky the night before, something that never once in my experience had failed to produce sunshine the following day. And then I remembered the exit polls from the evening before, predicting Ireland had voted two to one to repeal the Eighth. The grey skies seemed more fitting. I was tempted to wonder if it was a sign that heaven was frowning down upon us … but decided that might be a bit fanciful.

I had a month’s mind of a relative to go to in Portlaoise that morning. As I drove along from Castlecomer, going by way of The Swan and Timahoe, I

wondered if the exit polls could have been mistaken. Even if the referendum had passed, surely the divide between “Yes” and “No” couldn't have been so extreme. I switched on the radio.

Counting had begun. And as boxes all over the country were opened they showed it was no mistake. The people had voted to repeal; and it was going to be a landslide.

It was the feast of St Philip Neri.

The Gospel at Mass was the one from St Mark where the disciples were trying to stop people from bringing children to our Lord so that he might bless them. And Jesus was displeased and said to them “Suffer the little children to come unto me,

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and forbid them not; for of such is the Kingdom of God.” And, of course, given the day that was in it, those words seemed as much a rebuke of the people of Ireland as of those who were with our Lord that day. And they tore at my heart. If this were a work of fiction, it would have seemed a step too far to mention this passage in the context of this day. But this was real life; as real as the way the people had voted.

In the car afterwards I switched the radio back on. Some of the count centres had reached a final tally and were announcing that those constituencies had voted overwhelmingly in favour of repeal. The cheers from the crowds in the background were like a punch in the gut. Was it too much of me to have been reminded of the Colosseum in the days of pagan Rome, when human blood on the sand was roared at approvingly by the masses? I know they weren’t cheering abortion; they were expressing their delight and conviction that Ireland was now a better place. But if this wasn’t the result you wanted or expected, if you didn’t believe

this heralded a better future, then it was hard not to see it the other way.

The big vote in favour of repeal had the radio commentators claiming it gave a clear mandate to the government to introduce the legislation they had been talking about, abortion on demand up to twelve weeks. I’m not so sure. One elderly woman I was talking to told me she had voted “Yes” so that women could have a termination when they really needed one, but she didn’t want it abused for abortions when both the mother and baby were fine.

“That would be sinful,” she said.

“Especially when there are so many that can't have children.”

If there enough who voted “Yes” who think like her, then the government will have to tone down the legislation. They may want abortion, but limited abortion, abortion for the “hard cases”, not abortion as a form of birth-control – a safety valve for those who “took a chance”, or forgot to take the pill, or whose condom leaked, or who had

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wanted a baby but didn’t any more because their financial circumstances had changed or they had gotten cold feet.

Any abortion is, of course, an appalling vista. Human life is sacred. But if it has to come – and for now it appears that it must – at least we may hope that it doesn’t have to be as liberal as was threatened before the referendum. If that is the case, then things may not be not be as bleak as they first seemed. But then again, perhaps they are and all this is just the wishful thinking of someone who can’t bear to think of how far Ireland has fallen from what she once was.

When I got back home I sat down to my dinner. Suddenly the skies opened and the rain began to pour down. Big, fat drops, coming straight down from above out of the still grey sky. “Where did that come from?” said my wife. “That wasn’t in the forecast.” Perhaps they are tears from heaven, I thought as I watched them fall, and fall, and fall. But I said nothing. I didn’t want to seem too fanciful.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Rev. Patrick G Burke is the Church of Ireland rector of the Castlecomer Union of Parishes, Co Kilkenny. A regular contributor to Position Papers, he was formerly a broadcast journalist with the Armed Forces Radio and Television Network. He blogs at http://thewayoutthere1.blogspot.ie/

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The New Technologies and Christian Coherence from www.opusdei.ie

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echnology is becoming ever more present in people’s daily lives. Easy access to mobile phones and computers, together with the Internet’s global and capillary presence, has made it possible to send words and images within seconds to faraway places.

This new culture of communication has given rise to many benefits. Families can keep in contact across great distances; students and researchers have quicker and easier access to documents, sources and scientific discoveries; moreover, the interactive nature of many of the new means facilitates more dynamic forms of learning and

communication, thereby contributing to social progress.

[1] We can even say that, besides the physical environment where our lives unfold, there now also exists a “digital environment” that cannot simply be seen as “a parallel or purely virtual world, but is part of the daily experience of many people, especially the young.”[2] Unity of life in the “digital world” The new technologies offer great possibilities. They widen our knowledge in many areas, including news, work methods, business opportunities, and

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open up many options for those who have to make a decision on a specific matter. They enable information to be processed and updated quickly and spread all over the world, making it available anywhere, even in the smartphone we hold in the palm of our hand.

world” and another in “the real world.” Unity of life leads us to enter and take part in the digital world in a way that is coherent with our personal situation, employing all the possibilities available to us to fulfill our daily family, work and social duties better.

Christians see these new possibilities in the context of the positive exercise of personal freedom, as “a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness.”[3] This virtuous exercise leads to acting in accord with what each one is, with the authenticity of the person who has “just one life, made of flesh and spirit. And it is this life that has to become, in both body and soul, holy and filled with God.”[4]

That is why each of us needs to enter the digital world with our own identity, a Christian identity.[6] On the other hand, since the new technologies allow a person to act with some anonymity, and even create a false identity, the risk exists of making them a “refuge” that distracts us from the unavoidable reality we have to face. “Stop dreaming. Leave behind false idealisms, fantasies, and what I usually call mystical wishful thinking; if only I hadn’t married, if only I were healthier, if only I were young, if only I were old… Instead turn seriously to the most material and immediate reality, which is where our Lord is.”[7]

The call to holiness gives meaning to and unifies all the deeds of a Christian. As Saint Josemaria said: “We Christians cannot resign ourselves to leading a double life – our life must be a strong and simple unity into which all our actions converge.”[5] We do not have one way of acting in “the virtual

Today the digital world is like an “extension” of our daily life, and it is only natural that it also be a

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place where we seek holiness and apostolate, since we also influence others when we are on the web. This is especially important for those who, because of their job or position, have a strong influence on others: parents, teachers, managers, etc.

To behave as authentic Christians means to act “in such a way that those who know them sense ‘the good aroma of Christ,’”[8] and can “recognize the Master’s face in his disciples,” also in the digital world.[9] Practicing the virtues and being “souls of criteria” Obviously, the use of the new technologies depends on each person’s situation, on one’s age, profession, social environment, possibilities and knowledge. Not everyone is meant to use them, and those who don’t shouldn’t be looked down upon because of that. We could compare computer skills to driving a car: not everyone needs to know how to drive, but it is very useful that some have this skill.

In a similar way, specific skills that are required and suitable ways of behaving when “traveling” in the digital world have gradually been formulated.

In fact, in some places legislation on the use of information technology is being drawn up because of its repercussion on the common good. This new technology contributes to the integral good of the person when it facilitates the practice of the Christian virtues and respect for the moral law. Thus technical progress and an ethical life should go hand in hand, so that each person is strengthened in their “inner being,”[10] and learns to use these means with freedom and responsibility.

In order to manage prudently the new technologies, besides having a minimum of technical knowledge, one needs to discern their possibilities and risks. This means keeping in mind, for example, that anything done on the Internet (writing an email, making a telephone call, sending a text message, uploading a video, etc.) is never completely private; other people can read,

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copy or change the content, and we may never know who did it or when.

Moreover, the user of this new technology needs to foster a reflective attitude in order to make effective use of the many possibilities offered. Often the ethical command “if you should, you can” is transformed by commercial interests into its opposite: “if you can, you should.” Prudence helps us to rise above the sense of urgency with which commercial offers are sometimes presented, and to take the time needed to ensure that our decisions in the “virtual world” correspond to our real needs. In the end, it is a question of striving to grow in being and not only in having, because Christ’s warning also applies to these new resources: For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?[11] In a certain sense, the new technologies offer us “worlds” of information, news, contacts, and thus each person needs to reflect on how to make best use of these resources given their specific

circumstances, in a way that is positive and without losing selfmastery over their actions. In any case, we need to reject “the idea that technology is selfsufficient, when too much attention is given to the ‘how’ questions, and not enough to the many ‘why’ questions underlying human activity.”[12] It is not simply a matter however, of following a “list of rules” or “criteria,” since these could quickly become obsolete given the continuous change in this area. Such rules are useful, but the ideal is that using the new technologies should help foster the integral growth of the person.

Therefore it is more important – and more attractive – to center our efforts on acquiring good habits, the virtues. A person who has acquired a virtuous “style” when using electronic devices and the Internet, will be able to adapt easily to any changes, and discern the advantages and risks of new developments in this area under the light of the Christian vocation. Using some words of Saint Josemaria, we could also

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say that the ideal here is to become “souls of criteria.”[13] A new field for formation Normally, one doesn’t learn how to drive on one’s own. We need to spend time with a relative or an instructor who gives us advice and points out the dangers on the road. Something similar happens with the use of the new technologies. We realize how important it is to be accompanied by someone, especially if the person starting to use them is young. For that person to attain the independence needed, like the driver who will soon have to drive alone, requires a solid work of education. “We are living in an information-driven society which bombards us indiscriminately with data – all treated as being of equal importance – and which leads to remarkable superficiality in the area of moral discernment. In response, we need to provide an education which teaches critical thinking and encourages the development of mature moral values.”[14]

Therefore centers of education will need to pay more attention to training students in the virtuous use of information technology. This task is not limited to providing “technological literacy” or knowledge of the latest developments, but will also help the students acquire the moral habits needed to use these devices with sound criteria, with good use of time.

Formation doesn’t end when one’s youth is left behind. At all stages in life it is natural to lean on the advice of people with more experience, family members and friends. After all, we are talking about an “extension of daily life” that we share with others. For example, many people find in personal spiritual direction a good opportunity to study together the best times to use the Internet or social media, how to confront a particular problem or misunderstanding that may have cropped up when using them, or apostolic initiatives that this area offers.

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In the next articles we will go deeper into the virtuous use of the new technologies. We will cover habits and attitudes that are of particular importance, due to the nature of these instruments, such as temperance, study, recollection.

Moreover, since many personal interactions nowadays take place in the digital world, we will also pay attention to virtues more closely related to our social nature, which enable us to make a reality of Saint Peter’s advice to Christians: always be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you.[15]

[1] Cf. Benedict XVI, Message for the XLIII World Social Communications Day, “New technologies, new relations,” 24 May 2009.

This article first appeared on www.opusdei.ie.

[7] Conversations, no. 116.

[2] Benedict XVI, Message for the XLVII World Social Communications Day, “Social Networks: portals of truth and faith; new spaces for evangelization,” 24 January 2013.

[3] Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1731.

[4] Saint Josemaria, Conversations, no. 114.

[5] Saint Josemaria, Christ is Passing By, no. 126.

[6] Cf. Francis, Discourse to the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, 21 September 2013, no. 2.

[8] Christ is Passing By, no. 105.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Cf. Eph 3:16.

[11] Lk 9:25.

[12] Benedict XVI, Enc. Caritas in veritate, 29 June 2009, no. 70.

[13] Saint Josemaria, The Way, “To the reader.”

[14] Francis, Evangelii gaudium, 24 November 2013, no. 64.

[15] 1 Pet 3:15.

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Me? A Catholic? (Part II)

by Andrew Larkin

This is the second part of the text of a talk to Sixth Year students on the occasion of Catholic Schools Week in March 2018. The first part was carried in the May issue of Position Papers.

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would now like to turn to the very important consideration of marriage. Here too, my Catholic faith plays a central role. It was through another Catholic organisation for young adults called Pure in Heart that I met my wife. It involves attending Mass, Eucharistic Adoration and the all important cup of tea and chat afterwards. I remember vividly the moment of being introduced to a seriously beautiful girl. I lost no time, as I

pursued her – across continents as it turned out! I remember before proposing praying hugely to God for guidance to enlighten me as to whether she was the woman for me for the rest of my life. As a Catholic, marriage is a life-long affair; it is till death do us part as true love demands.

When you think about it for a moment life long is a very long time! But when you look at people who managed to do this – you see that they have had to work at it. It’s not just a nice thing to happen.

The love that I have pledged to my wife and that she has pledged to me is unconditional.

That is, after all, the nature of genuine love: it is endless. To

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love another human being is to delight in their very existence: you make like this or that about someone – and dislike much else. But you love the entire person, their entire existence.

That my wife and I have proclaimed our love publicly is as it should be. It’s what two people who love each other naturally desire. Of course love is intimate and personal, but it is in the nature of love that it wants to be known and recognised. And it’s a reminder that marriage is much more than a private agreement between two individuals: it is an integral and vital part of human society.

That’s why living together shortchanges marriage.

Marriage, properly understood and faithfully lived, is a vocation: an honourable, noble and beautiful vocation. Which is to say that, in responding to each other’s love and in publicly vowing to live in married and fruitful love, we are responding to God’s call, a call addressed to us personally, to be living proof of his love in this world: first and foremost, for one another and,

please God, for our children, but also for all of us and for the world, as such. We have become ‘one flesh’, a communion of life, and love, and mutual attentiveness, reflecting and mirroring in human terms, that communion of life and love which is God, a Trinity of persons, united in mutual love.

It isn’t difficult to see why God has made marriage a sacrament: all love, but especially the lifebearing love between husband and wife, is an echo and expression of our desire for that infinite, divine love for which we have all been made, an expression of our desire for God. In marriage, God has taken my love for my wife, and made of it a sacrament of his love and the means by which we will be drawn closer not only to one another, but closer to him.

My wife and I will be married six years in April 2018: in this time, I have witnessed how we have grown in love and understanding. It has been a joy and a privilege to do so. That is not to say there have not been misunderstandings, difficulties

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and burdens. Of course there have, but one of the things we do when such things arise, is we learn to say sorry, where we learn to forgive (a lot easier to say than do in practice).

But remember this for later on in life: you’re marrying and accepting not just each other’s strengths, but each other’s weaknesses too. And you’ll get to know both in marriage as nowhere else. Love may be blind, but marriage is an eyeopener.

I would like share a conversation I had with my daughter (who is four years old) one evening as we were saying our night prayers together. She asked me with delightful simplicity why do we pray if God never answers us? I think you’ll admit that that is an excellent question and one I am sure we have all asked ourselves.

Why doesn’t God respond? Well, it’s difficult to explain to a four year old who lacks the life experience and understanding of certain concepts but I will try here and now to give an answer.

Well, God does respond; maybe not in the way we would like,

maybe not as quickly as we would like but in a quiet unassuming way. As it says in the Book of Kings when the prophet Elijah was seeking the presence of God, we are told “God was not in the hurricane, neither in the earthquake, nor in the fire. Then came a gentle breeze and Elijah went out to meet the Lord.” I think that is an excellent symbolic way of how our Lord talks to us. It’s not trumpeted loudly, it’s not in the spectacular showy moments, it is in the quiet of our hearts that God talks to us, it is in His word that he has given us in the Bible, it is in quiet realisations of our life. You see God can communicate with us when we are listening out attentively to God. If we always have headphones in our ears or are absorbed in technology is it any wonder that God cannot make us hear! IF you complain that God never answers you, perhaps examine yourself first of all: am I listening to God? Do I dedicate quiet time, without technology, just to sit and listen to him. I sometimes start my prayer with the phrase from the book of Samuel: “Speak Lord, your

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servant is listening”. All that God has to say to us, has been recorded for us in the Bible and so we just need to read it regularly and with care to hear what he wants to say to us.

When we are worried, we read “Do not be afraid”. When we are happy, we read “Rejoice in the Lord, I say to you Rejoice!”.

When we are doubtful, we read “Trust in me/Trust in the Lord”.

When we are overcome with the stresses of life, we read, “Come to me all you who are overburdened and I will give you rest. When we need advice, we read “I will instruct you and teach you in the way which you should go”. In short, all our human needs, and longings are answered by God in the Bible.

Conscience = God’s voice within us.

But, as some of you will no doubt say to me later on: what if I don’t believe? What if I find it hard to be believe? I have many wonderful atheist and agnostic friends of whom I am very fond and whose conversion I pray for a lot. There is an excellent detective series by G.K. Chesterton about an amateur

sleuth, Fr Brown. In one story the detective, a catholic priest, is talking to the murderer who is very clever and who has dressed up as another priest. When the villain is exposed at the end he asks “How could you tell I was not really a priest?” Fr Brown replies “You attacked logic. It’s bad theology”. I am reminded often of this quotation when I listen to people who have decided there is no God. They attack any proposition before they can fairly evaluate its truthfulness. It’s a bit akin to kicking a bunch of flowers. Ok, so you can knock the petals off the roses but that’s not the point, is it? The point was that the flowers were there to beautify life around them.

Theology is there to point out the beauty of God and God’s plan.

Let’s listen to these words of scripture again: “Ask and you shall receive, seek and you will find; knock and the door will be open to you. Therefore I tell you, whatever you have asked in prayer, believe that you have received it and it will be yours.”

Having doubts is normal – we all

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have them at times. How to resolve them is by asking God, sincerely in prayer, believing that he will reveal the answer to you in his time. There is a powerful scene from a wonderful book you should all read called Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. In it, the protagonist, Charles is an agnostic. Towards the end, he is at the deathbed of his lover’s father, a lapsed Catholic who was living a sinful life. The priest comes in to give the Last Rites. Here Charles …. knelt, too, and prayed: ‘O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin,’ and the man in the bed opened his eyes and gave a sigh, the sort of sigh I had imagined people made at the moment of death, but his eyes moved so that we knew there was still life in him. I suddenly felt the longing for a sign, if only of courtesy, if only for the sake of the woman I loved, who knelt in front of me, praying, I knew, for a sign. It seemed so small a thing that was asked, the bare acknowledgment of a present, a nod in the crowd.

…The priest took the little silver box from his pocket and spoke again in Latin, touching the dying man with an oily wad; he finished what he had to do, put away the box and gave the final blessing. Suddenly, Lord Marchmain moved his hand to his forehead; I thought he had felt the touch of the chrism and was wiping it away. ‘O God,’ I prayed, ‘don’t let him do that.’ But there was no need to fear; the hand moved slowly down his breast, then to his shoulder, and Lord Marchmain made the sign of the cross. Then I knew the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.”

I too have an experience I would like to share with you that happened just before Christmas.

As some of you were aware, I was supposed to go to Mexico for Christmas. However, my

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mother who suffers from Parkinson’s disease developed aspirate pneumonia – a condition which signifies death.

As she lay there dying surrounded by her family, I called my friend who is a priest to ask him to come and give the last rites. It is a very powerful sacrament. Given the fact that my mother was unconscious and breathing labouredly, he gave her general absolution from all her sins that she had ever committed in her life. Then he touched her forehead and lips with oil. At that moment, my mother who had given no response, slowly lifted her hand to her forehead to bless herself. I am firmly convinced that God in his wisdom, had decided her

time had not yet come. My mother has recovered to be able to talk with us.

In conclusion, in this brief exposé of my life we have looked at four of the sacraments, Confession, the Eucharist, Marriage and the Sacrament of the Sick to see how these lead to a truly happy, fulfilled existence.

I would not live my life any other way. God desires my happiness, even when I don’t understand what it is at times that will give me true happiness. Perhaps it is best to end off with a question: Are you happy? And I ask it again, deeply, profoundly are you really happy?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrew Larkin is a teacher, musician and music critic based in Dublin. He is also a director of Family Enrichment Ireland.

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Film review The Shape of Water

by Bishop Robert Barron

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knew that The Shape of Water would win the Academy Award for Best Picture. It checked three of the major Hollywood boxes: celebration of oppressed people, valorization of complete sexual freedom, and a Christian villain.

It used to be that a black hat or shifty eyes or a foreign accent would give someone away as the bad guy, but now, it is the quoting of the Bible.

conversation with Charlie Rose, he admitted to being “a raging atheist,” and in a 2007 interview, he said, “I hate structure; I’m completely antistructural in terms of believing in institutions. I hate them. I hate any institutional social, religious, or economic holding.”

One might wonder what he makes of the studios that produce his films or the banks that invest his money, but I’ll leave those considerations for another day.

Of course, this shouldn’t surprise us in regard to The Shape of Water, for the auteur behind the film is the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, who has gone on record many times as a despiser of religion, especially Catholicism. In a

The title of his award-winning movie gives away the game, for the one thing that water does not have is shape. Its very essence is fluidity, formlessness, and freedom from structure.

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And this is precisely what is celebrated in the film. Against all odds and despite enormous obstacles, the heroine, a young, fearful, and marginalized woman, falls in love with an amphibian creature whom the government (structure: boo!) keeps locked up in a laboratory facility. The lady and the aquaman build up over time a mutual trust, give their consent to one another, and finally, with the help of well-intentioned friends, manage to do the deed.

I gathered that the hope of the director was that the viewer would thrill to this brave flouting of convention and rejoice in the trans-species love on display. For sex, apparently, has no proper form, objective structure, or natural end; it has the shape of water, flowing according to the desires of those who engage in it.

say, tensions or contraries that characterize living things at every level. A good part of the drama and difficulty of human life follows upon our consciousness of living in the midst of these polarities. The first is dynamics and form.

Plants, animals, and human beings could not live unless they were marked by novelty, movement, change, and the constant adaptation to the environment in which they find themselves. At the same time, all such organisms possess a fundamental structure that preserves their identity and stability across time. Without a reliable cellular, molecular, muscular, and nervous system, no animal or plant could subsist; instead it would be, in short order, absorbed by its surroundings. What we call “life” is in fact a subtle and carefully calibrated balancing act between dynamics and form; too much of one or the other would spell disaster.

All of this actually put me in mind of Paul Tillich, one of the most significant Christian theologians of the last century.

In his massive Systematic Theology, Tillich presented what he called the three ontological polarities, that is to

The second of the ontological polarities is freedom and destiny. The former is liberty to choose, to move, to be different,

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to find one’s own path. Without freedom, no living thing could possibly thrive. Tillich remarks that the uniqueness of each tree, plant, animal, and person is, to a large extent, a function of this capacity. However, freedom is in tension with destiny, by which Tillich means the substrate upon which freedom stands, the givens with which freedom works. Liberty never operates in a vacuum, nor is it capable of positing itself; rather, it works with the raw material of one’s family experience, education, language, body, and culture.

Throughout life, these two poles remain in creative tension with one another, but any one-sided resolution would result in collapse: either the chaos of pure arbitrariness or the petrification of static traditionalism.

The third polarity is individualization and participation. Each person wants to be herself, to find her path, to stand out from the crowd. In fact, if individualization doesn’t take place, one remains in a good deal of psychological peril,

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permanently infantilized or simply a cog in some societal structure. But at the same time, everyone longs to belong to something beyond herself, to participate with others in a shared political, religious, or cultural endeavor. Tillich saw the Germany of the 1930s as a society that had oscillated dangerously in the direction of pure participation: as the Nazi slogan had it, “one people, one nation, one Fuhrer.” But he saw the Western countries as having moved (admittedly not as drastically) in the opposite direction, toward pure individualism. Once again, the delicate balance between the two is the key.

A film called The Shape of Water, produced by someone who, by his own admission, hates structure, is sadly emblematic, I fear, of a society that is indeed in danger of oscillating to one side of the Tillich polarities. Is it not the case that the leading avatars of our culture consistently valorize dynamics, freedom, and individualization, while they just as consistently denigrate form,

destiny, and participation? And is not sexuality the thin edge of the blade? Increasingly, any limits that have been classically set to sexual expression are swept away as fussy holdovers from a primitive time, and any sense that sexuality possesses a form and finality independent of individual free choice is mocked as an arbitrary imposition.

dynamics, freedom, and individualism, but if all we have is the shape of water – which is to say, no shape at all – we’re actually in bad shape.

But if Tillich is right, this onesidedness is a sign of sickness.

The Biblical authors appreciated water as a positive symbol for life, but they also understood it as a symbol of chaos and formlessness. Think of the Tohu-va-bohu (watery abyss) from which God drew creation. We do indeed need

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.

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Nazareth Family Institute Pre-marriage preparation.

Marriage enrichment, restoration & healing.

Dates of marriage preparation weekends: 18/19 May 2018 7/8 September 2018 2/3 November 2018 Venue: Avila retreat centre, Donnybrook, Dublin.

Extended course: A seven week course by arrangement with the course directors Course director, Peter Perrem 01-2896647 For more information see: www.nazarethfamilyinstitute.net

Ratzinger Symposium 2018

Professor Tracey Rowland will lecture on the topic:

“What happened in 1968?”

Saturday June 9, 2018 11.00am-1pm St Catherine’s Chapel (entrance on Dorset Street) St Saviour’s Priory, Dublin 1 Luas Green line stop ‘Dominick’ (direction Broombridge) Professor Rowland is the John Paul II Chair of Theology at Notre Dame University (Australia), Former Dean of the John Paul II Institute, Melbourne and Member of the International Theological Commission.

Her select publications include: Culture and the Thomist Tradition after Vatican II (2003), Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (2008), Catholic Theology (T&T Clark/ Bloomsbury, 2017).

For information email: info@ratzingersymposium.org.

Registration is not necessary.