Position Papers – June/July 2019

Front cover: Blessed Guadalupe Ortiz by Ignacio Valdés (the Royal Oratory of Caballero de Gracia in Madrid)

Number 530 June/July 2019 €3 · £2.50 · $4

A review of Catholic affairs

Guadalupe: A Path to Heaven in Daily Life MONS. FERNANDO OCARIZ POPE FRANCIS

Violence against Christians TIM O’SULLIVAN BISHOP ROBERT BARRON

Films: Tolkien

JOHN MULDERIG

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Number 530 · June/July 2019

Editorial

by Fr Gavan Jennings

In Passing: Destructive deception masquerading as truth

by Michael Kirke

Notre-Dame is still standing!

by Tim O’Sullivan

The Love of the Church

by Fr Donncha Ó hAodha

UN trumpets an extinction crisis

by Michael Cook

Guadalupe: A Path to Heaven in Daily Life

by Mons. Fernando Ocariz

Books: My Father Left Me Ireland

by James Bradshaw

Books: James Bacque’s Other Losses – a deeply flawed book

by Peter Damian-Grint

Films: Tolkien

by John Mulderig Editor: Assistant editors: Subscription manager: Secretary: Design:

2 5 10 13 18 23 28 35 38

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

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Editorial

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wo important documents on the subject of gender ideology are due from the Vatican in the near future. The first, in the form of a letter to the episcopates of the world from the Congregation for Catholic Education, will reiterate certain important educational principles in the face the claims of what the Vatican now generally terms “gender ideology”, ie. the ideology, coming from radical feminism, that sexual or gender difference is nothing more than a nefarious “social construction”.

The second document will be released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and will deal with anthropological aspects of gender ideology. This latter promises to be a particularly important document, and one worthy of serious study when it is published.

In some ways such documents are long overdue. Gender ideology has made huge inroads into Western society in the last two decades and shows no signs of slowing down – indeed quite the contrary. Nonetheless the Pope has already delivered significant warnings on the danger of this ideology; his words in a 2016 meeting with Polish bishops are a case in point: We are experiencing a moment of the annihilation of man as the image of God…. In Europe, America, Latin America, Africa, and in some countries of Asia, there are genuine forms of ideological colonization taking place. And one of these – I will call it clearly by its name – is [the ideology of] “gender”. Today children – children! – are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex. Why are they teaching this? Because the books are provided by the persons and institutions that give you money. These forms of ideological colonization are also supported by influential countries. And this is terrible! (Pope Francis, Meeting with the Bishops of Poland in the Cathedral of Krakow, July 27, 2016).

Pope Francis has spoken in the strongest terms of an ideological war being waged against marriage: “There is a world war against marriage.

Today there is an ideological colonization that destroys, not with weapons, but with words. We need to defend ourselves from ideological colonization” (Tbilisi, Georgia, October 29, 2016).

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It should come as no surprise that this war has arrived in Irish schools in the wake of the 2015 same-sex marriage referendum. The Provision of Objective Sex Education Bill 2018 currently before the Dáil seeks, according to its official description, “to guarantee the right of students to receive factual and objective relationships and sexuality education without regard to the characteristic spirit of the school.” In other words, a school’s ethos – as selected by the parents of the children there – will not stand in the way of an ideology which places LGBT sexual practices on a par with those that are heterosexual. (A recent government report complains that our school sex education programme “constructs heterosexual intercourse as the primary definition of sex and is not inclusive of the experiences and sexual practices of those identifying as LGBTQI+.”)

These developments are taking place by stealth, and objections to them are typically denounced as homophobic – an accusation designed to put a quick end to all objection. Pope Francis, in Amoris Laetitia, warned of gender ideology’s programme to eliminate “the anthropological basis of the family” by anulling sexual difference. He warned also that this is done by diktat, through “educational programmes and legislative enactments … which assert themselves as absolute and unquestionable, even dictating how children should be raised”. Sadly this sounds all too familiar.

Soon long ranks of enormous rainbow flags will flank the river Liffey through central Dublin and the Pride parade season will begin.

Employees at large firms, at least here in Dublin, will be invited to volunteer to help out with the Parade (“or do you have a problem with that?”) and to don rainbow lanyards (“or do you suffer from some phobia we should know about?”) and shop owners will be offered rainbow stickers to display in their windows (“or does your struggling business have some objection?”). Anyone with even a modicum of knowledge of twentieth century European history will be well aware of the intimidatory power of stickers, flags and parades.

While a recent poll here suggests the faintest glimmer of a reaction (in the recent survey of Irish behaviour and attitudes 69% of people consider that Ireland has become too politically correct) we Irish have

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Editorial

been particularly supine in our adoption of gender ideology; here there has been nothing remotely like the spirited resistance of the French Aaa “Manif Pour Tous” movement with its enormous public marches to protest against the impositions there of gender ideology.

Hannah Arendt wrote of the roles of ideology and terror in totalitarian systems; such systems must instil fear in order to crush dissent from its ideology. And we can add that truth and courage will be the weapons required to oppose such systems – including that system being constructed around gender ideology in the West. We only have to look at the great dissidents of the twentieth century – figures like Bishop Von Galen, Hans and Sophie Scholl, Cardinal Stepinac and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – all of whom fearlessly adhered to the truth in the face of some of the most awful regimes the world has ever known.

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And where better is the truth about man more clearly seen than in the lives of the saints? And the witness of women saints in particular gives the lie to the radical feminist attempt to reduce femininity to a “social construct”. One such woman is Guadalupe Ortiz de Landázuri, beatified in Madrid on May 18. She is the first lay member of Opus Dei to reach the altars, and the fact that she is a woman is also providential. She did not need to embrace (as radical feminism has) the masculine paradigm of success. She managed to do pioneering work for Opus Dei in Mexico (a role that required her to “pack” a pistol for a time), work in the governing of Opus Dei, and do award-winning research in chemistry – all without detriment to her wonderful feminine charm, warmth and empathy. What a wonderful example she presents for other lay women in this time of carefully nurtured confusion regarding the meaning of womanhood.

Pope Benedict wrote that “The saints are God’s true constellations, which light up the nights of this world, serving as our guides.” Blessed Guadalupe is now a bright new constellation in the dark night of our times.

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In Passing: Destructive deception masquerading as truth

by Michael Kirke

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here is careless and sloppy journalism and there is cold calculated malicious journalism.

Sadly both fit into the spectrum to which Janet Malcolm notoriously drew attention in a New Yorker essay thirty years ago when she wrote:

probably framed to get attention and not really meant to be taken at their literal value – no more than Lord Acton meant us to take at its face value his statement that “all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. But such exaggerated statements do make us think. There is good journalism but it is becoming harder and harder to find.

“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

Malcolm’s hyperbole was written in the context of a famous crime reporter, Joe McGinniss, who won the confidence of a notorious murderer, accompanied him throughout the period of his trial and conviction for the killing of his wife and two children, and then

They were harsh uncompromising words,

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allegedly deceived and betrayed that confidence by revealing details of the man’s life which he had never wished to be made public.

smeared in the media, fired by the government and had his life’s work assailed. Scruton is the latest, though far from the first victim of the modern outrage mob.”

McGinniss protested Malcolm’s categorisation of his as a deceiver: “My only obligation from the beginning was to the truth.” Malcolm’s view was that McGinniss’s obligation to be truthful to the criminal, even though he was convicted, should have preceded his obligation “to the truth.” Complicated?

When Janet Malcolm passed her judgment on our professional standards and integrity as journalists, she did not have to add into the mix the irreparable damage which the incendiary fuel of so-called “social” media now pours on to the bonfire. We do.

But not so complicated is the patent betrayal and deception, followed by gross misrepresentation, of one of the voices of reason of our own time, Sir Roger Scruton.

In January, we saw some of the most prestigious news media organisations in the United States pass summary judgement on a group of raucous but harmless schoolboys for allegedly surrounding and taunting a native American tribal elder. By the time the facts of the case became clear (there had been no taunting, the boys had done nothing wrong) they had been thrown to the antisocial mob and denounced as racists in front of millions.

Douglas Murray, writing in a recent issue of The Spectator, might see it as just one further splinter in what the late Bernard Levin once referred to as “the cracked mirror of our times”.

Sometimes, he writes, a scandal is not just a scandal, but “a biopsy of a society. So it is with the assault on Sir Roger Scruton, who in recent weeks has been

In Scruton’s case, he was interviewed by a deceptively

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friendly and reassuring New Statesman journalist, joint deputy editor, George Eaton.

Their conversation was then misrepresented in the magazine article which followed. Professor Scruton was accused of outrageously breaching every rule in the Canon of Political Correctness. Not long after the magazine appeared on the newsstands the thought police got to work.

Before the interview had even hit the newsstands its author was on Twitter heralding its arrival and telling his followers that “the government adviser and philosopher Roger Scruton has made a series of outrageous remarks”, and included a link to the interview. Unfortunately for him the recording of the interview now exposes the deceit and misrepresentation – and all the idiotic public figures, journalists and politicians who responded with knee-jerk reactions now have egg all over their faces. Indeed a worse and more costly fate may await some of them.

As Murray says, “The hit job on Sir Roger can be seen as a classic of the genre: he was sacked (from a Government post) within five hours of the Twitter storm breaking. His fate offers a perfect case study in the art of modern character assassination.”

Scruton was alleged to have talked outrageously about “Hungarian Jews”. He was alleged to have been racist about “the Chinese”. He was alleged to have described “Islamophobia” as “a propaganda word invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue”. He had described accusations of anti-Semitism against Viktor Orban as “nonsense” and talked of Muslim “tribes”. Outrage and resignation calls soon followed.

But in some ways Sir Roger may be classed as one of the lucky ones. The case against him unravelled and the New Statesman and its standard of journalism is in the dustbin.

Murray managed to get his hands on the recorded interview and exposed the deceptive charade.

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The perfect Twitter storm had been started.

(“they’re creating robots out of their own people”) rather than echoing racist stereotypes.

Eaton then gloated on Instagram with a photo of himself necking a bottle of champagne. His caption: “The feeling when you get right-wing racist and homophobe Roger Scruton sacked as a Tory government adviser.”

The other tweets took words somewhat out of context as many (perhaps most) tweets of that sort inevitably do.

Whether Scruton’s words were “outrageous”, as Eaton claimed, depends on who is reading them. MPs, former chancellors and present ministers can make up their own minds. Yet Eaton’s use of the adjective “outrageous” suggested, as did the Instagram post, that he approached the interview as a political activist, not as a journalist.

The New Statesman’s public editor has now issued a response to the controversy but it is so hedged that it is unlikely to do anything to restore its reputation.

He admits that Eaton was clearly at fault in his Instagram post. A journalist should not interview a subject and then insult him or her. One tweet – concerning Scruton’s comments on the Chinese as “replicas of each other” – was misleading. Both the published interview and the full transcript make clear, as the tweet did not, that Scruton was criticising the policies of China’s rulers

It is more difficult to judge the extent to which the published interview was misleading. Certainly, the full transcript shows that most of Scruton’s comments on Muslims, Orbán and antiSemitism were more thoughtful and nuanced than those highlighted by Eaton.

But all journalism is necessarily selective.

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All journalism may be necessarily selective but when that selection is as egregiously serving a political ideological bias as in this case, you have a totally different phenomenon on your hands. When your bias unjustly leaves the reputation of an author of more than fifty serious books on diverse subjects needing to be rescued from the rubbish dump, your lawyers would seem to have a mountain to climb to keep you from ending up in financial ruin.

Spare me the cries about suppression of freedom of speech – freedom is not a license to hate.

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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Notre-Dame is still standing!

by Tim O’Sullivan

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otre-Dame est toujours debout”, exclaimed Archbishop Michel Aupetit of Paris during Holy Week, in the days following the terrible fire at the iconic Cathedral. The words mean literally that “Notre-Dame is still standing” but also have the sense that “Our Lady still stands” – at the foot of the Cross.

As the French discovered in the aftermath of the fire, and perhaps a little to their surprise, millions of people around the world felt a great connection to their beloved cathedral.

Although an enthusiastic Francophile since my youth, I had forgotten that the screensaver on my own laptop

was a photo from Paris, with the two towers of Notre-Dame in the background! As an occasional visitor to the French capital, I loved to visit Notre-Dame but also to walk along the river near the Cathedral and to view the extraordinary building from different angles as I strolled by the Seine.

I found the words of Archbishop Aupetit after the fire uplifting and inspiring, at what must have been a time of anguish for him.

The Archbishop is a former GP who was ordained to the priesthood in his forties. In his beautiful message to the Catholics of Paris just after the fire, the Archbishop said:

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France weeps, and, with her, all her friends from the whole world. She is touched in her heart because these stones are the witness of an invincible hope, which, through the talent, the courage the genius and the faith of the builders, raised this luminous lacework of stones, wood and glass. That faith remains our faith. It is the faith that moves mountains and will permit us to rebuild this masterpiece.

He went on to highlight the need to rebuild not only the Cathedral but also “our Church, whose face is so disfigured�.

The French Catholic TV station KTO provided precious access to the Holy Week ceremonies in Paris. KTO lost substantial equipment in Notre Dame and had to re-group quickly in order to be able to continue with its services at the church of SaintSulpice, where the Chrism Mass and other ceremonies were transferred with great urgency.

At this Chrism Mass, the Archbishop linked the cathedral

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and the human person. The cathedral was not just a heap of stones and the human person is not just a collection of molecules. Both have a principle of organization. Both have received anointing. Both are vessels of a Presence. The Cathedral is the House of God and the house of all – a point reinforced by the huge outpouring of concern for Notre Dame from almost the entire French nation, religious and non-religious alike. Our cathedral will rise, the Archbishop stated, like everyone of us. Like St Francis of Assisi and the San Damiano church, he added, we are called to re-build Notre Dame but also the Church itself.

On Holy Thursday, Msgr Aupetit suggested that renewal in the Church would come from evangelical poverty and service.

As the Son of God got on His knees to wash the feet of His apostles, so we too must get on our knees in service of our brothers and sisters. With Notre Dame again in mind, he also referred to the lesson of Holy Week that, from a terrible evil,

God could produce an even greater good.

Later, in an interview with the Catholic radio station, Radio Notre-Dame, the Archbishop suggested that people are the living stones of the Church. He also pointed out that more people come to Notre-Dame than to the Louvre museum.

While there is “more to see” in one sense in the Louvre, one does not find the same sense of life and mystery there as in Notre-Dame.

When I was a student in France in the 1970s, the country’s Catholic heritage seemed almost irrelevant to modern life. Few of my fellow-students attended

Mass, Marxist ideas were highly influential and churches like Notre Dame appeared destined to become museums rather than living places of worship. France today still faces enormous challenges of all kinds but, over the years, one has an impression of a very slow re-connection by the French with their Christian heritage and vocation – something vividly manifest in the huge national emotion about the Notre Dame fire. Perhaps this can be a sign of hope for us too in Ireland, as we too seek to re-connect with our Christian mission and heritage and to rebuild the Church here in our own country.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tim O’Sullivan has degrees in history and social policy and taught healthcare policy at third level. He is a regular contributor to Position Papers.

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The Love of the Church

by Fr Donncha Ó hAodha

ne of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water” (John 19:34)

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ultimate impossibility of comprehensively portraying the reality of Christ, who is the “real self” of the Church.

A picture of the Church

Nonetheless, were one to paint a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, pierced by the lance and flowing with blood and water, it would be a worthy effort to portray the mystery of the Church. In the words of the Second Vatican Council: “The origin and growth of the Church are symbolised by the blood and water which flowed from the open side of the crucified Jesus.”

If you were asked to draw a picture of the Catholic Church, what would you do? Sketch an image of your parish church? Or of St Peter’s basilica? Or of a multitude of people from every part of the world? No representation can capture the essence of the Church. The fact that the greatest works of art ever, were produced precisely to express the redemption, and especially the eucharistic mystery, is a testimony both to the infinite richness and

The Church is indeed Christ crucified and risen who freely opens his heart to share his divine life with all peoples of all

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places and all times, especially through the sacraments. As St John Chrysostom explains: “The water was a symbol of baptism, and the blood, of the holy eucharist. The soldier pierced the Lord’s side, he breached the wall of the sacred temple, and I have found the treasure and made it my own.”

which is Christ’s heart. By his passion and resurrection, Jesus has opened wide the doors of the sanctuary and releases freely on all who care to welcome them the streams of his life-giving grace. From the cross, the river of life which flows from Christ’s side vivifies history, enriches culture, and gives eternal life to souls.

The river of life One of the most beautiful images in the prophecy of Ezekiel is that of the river which flows out of the temple and revitalises everything it meets on the way.

“Everything will live where the river goes”, the prophet is told (Ez 47:10). “And on the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of tree for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing” (Ez 47:12).

This is how the Church contemplates herself in the mystery of the Sacred Heart:

This river of life is a foreshadowing of the great river of risen life which flows from the true and ultimate “sanctuary”

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For raised up high on the cross, he gave himself up for us with a wonderful love and poured out blood and water from his pierced side, the wellspring of the Church’s sacraments, so that, won over to the open heart of the saviour, all might draw water joyfully from the springs of salvation.

God’s initiative We can tend to see and evaluate the Church from the human angle. This is understandable, given we are human beings and we are truly members of the Church. However the Church is above all God’s doing: God’s work, God’s action, God’s life, God’s word, God’s people. The Church is God who loves us first (cf. 1 Jn 4:19), who seeks us out (cf. Lk 15:3-7), who gives himself so that we might have fullness of life (cf. Jn 10:10). In the words of recently canonised Pope St Paul VI: The Church is “the visible plan of God’s love for humanity”.

constant help, in the great and small battles of our daily life.”

The Church is the living Christ with us here and now. The life of the Church, the life of grace, sacramental life, eternal life, comes from the heart of Jesus.

As Chrysostom says:

Contemplating the Sacred Heart flowing with redemptive life we are reminded of this wonderful reality, which St Josemaría expressed succinctly and powerfully: “This is what the Church is: Christ present in our midst, God coming towards men in order to save them, calling us with his revelation, sanctifying us with his grace, maintaining us with his

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There flowed from his side water and blood. Beloved to not pass over this this mystery without thought; it has yet another hidden meaning… I said that water and blood symbolised baptism and the holy eucharist. From these two sacraments the Church is born.… Since the symbols of baptism and the eucharist flowed from his side, it was from his side that Christ fashioned the Church, as he had fashioned Eve from the side of Adam.… As God then took a rib from Adam’s side to fashion a woman, so Christ has given us blood and water from his side to fashion the Church. God took the rib when Adam was in a deep sleep, and in the same way

Christ gave us the blood and the water after his own death.

Collaborating in the work of Redemption We can picture the great river of life which flows out from Christ’s side to renew the face of the earth (cf. Ps 104:3) as also returning afterwards through his heart to the Father, by the work of the Holy Spirit. The river of life flowing from Christ’s side is to be brought to all people of all places and all times.

The water and the blood from Christ’s side are part of our biography too. Each and every member of the faithful, of Christ’s mystical body, is a channel of that divine life.

Through living in and through Christ by the sacraments and prayer, by sanctifying our daily life and work, by being apostles in our dealings with family, friends and everyone we meet, and in spite of our sins and limitations, we contribute to making the great river of life fruitful for the renewal of human beings and of the entire cosmos.

This is what is meant by

“recapitulating” all things in Christ (cf. Eph 1:10).

God comes out of himself in creation and the Incarnation, and the mission of his Church and hence of each of the baptised is to return all things to the Father, by the working of the Holy Spirit, in and through his Son. A picture drawn by God In a certain sense Christ has in fact “drawn a picture” of his Church. St Faustina Kowalska (1905-1938), the first saint to be canonised in the new millennium, was shown by an image of Divine Mercy which the Lord asked her to have painted.

In this image, now to be found in every corner of the world, “two large rays, one red, the other pale” emanate from Christ’s side.

The Lord revealed the meaning of the image to St Faustina: “The two rays denote blood and water. The pale ray stands for the water which makes souls righteous. The red ray stands for the blood which is the life of

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souls… These two rays issued forth from the very depths of my tender mercy when my agonised heart was opened by a lance on the cross.”

Here indeed, “all may grasp and rightly understand, in what font they have been washed, by whose Spirit they have been reborn, by whose Blood they have been redeemed.”

Contemplating the Pierced One St John ends his account of the passion by evoking the prophecy of Zechariah 12:10: “They shall look on him whom they have pierced” (cf. Jn 19:37). We too pause to look on the on the pierced one. To contemplate the open heart of Christ in this month of the Sacred Heart or at any time, is a lesson in God’s love and a revelation of the Church.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rev. Donncha Ó hAodha is a priest of the Opus Dei Prelature, author of several CTS booklets and a regular contributor to Position Papers.

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UN trumpets an extinction crisis

by Michael Cook

o one bats an eyelid at guys walking down Fifth Avenue with placards warning, “The World Ends Tomorrow. Read the Book of Revelation!”

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with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history,” says the IPBES, “and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating.”

But if they put a criticallyendangered Hawksbill Turtle on the placard, it turns all heads.

Grim, unparalleled, catastrophic, shocking, terrifying were just some of the adjectives decorating the world’s headlines. One summed up the media consensus: “UN: Life on Earth is nearing a state of collapse.”

This week the UN’s Intergovernmental SciencePolicy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released a summary of a terrifying 1500-page forecast of humanity’s relationship with Mother Nature (yes, “Mother Nature” is back in vogue).

“Around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened

What’s to be done? Walk down Fifth Avenue with another placard, “We’re all doomed.

Revolution NOW”?

Well, yes, that’s basically it. The IPBES

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recommends “transformative change”, woolly words which could mean anything from restoring wetlands to amending the constitution. The IPBES Chair, Sir Robert Watson, a veteran climate change bureaucrat, says that the world needs “a fundamental, systemwide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.”

This is the rhetoric of revolutionaries, not of conservationists, of the Communist Manifesto, not of Silent Spring.

The media swallowed this turgid report whole without cutting it, chewing it or digesting it. It is an abdication of journalistic objectivity, scepticism and common sense. As astronomer Carl Sagan used to say, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

How many journalists factchecked these dire figures?

Are one million plant and animal species really in danger of extinction? That’s the marquee question which journalists should have tackled.

Many of the IPBES’s dire predictions may be true and should be heeded. It’s impossible for a 1500-page report with 15,000 references written by 150 experts to get everything wrong. The extinction of a species, especially a cuddly vertebrate, is regrettable. Who would not like to see live dodos, or passenger pigeons, or Tasmanian tigers?

But can we risk implementing radical “transformative change” to save the Seychelles earwig or the pygmy hog-sucking louse?

For starters, how many species are there? This is a fundamental question, but, surprisingly, all scientists can do is guesstimate.

An influential 2011 paper in PLOS Biology estimated that there are 8.7 million species in the world, plus or minus 1.3 million. The IPBES seems to have adopted this figure. (There are no footnotes in its summary, making it difficult to check its claims, and the full report will be released later this year.)

Previous estimates of the number of species ranged between 3 and 100 million. But

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of these 8.7 million, only about 1.3 million have been named and catalogued.

So the claim that a million species are at risk of being wiped out means that species are disappearing before we even know that they existed. This may be true, but it illustrates how mind-bending the extinction claim is. Taxonomy is a subtle science which depends upon algorithms nearly incomprehensible to the public.

But that’s the job of journalists: to make the incomprehensible comprehensible. Before repeating the IPBS’s claim, they should have tried to understand the algorithm or at least ask questions about how the calculations were made.

“Every day, up to 150 species are lost. Every year, between 18,000 and 55,000 species become extinct,” said Ahmed Djoghlaf, head of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in 2007.

This is the kind of wild biodiversity rhetoric which coloured this week’s reporting.

Responsible journalists should have dug deeper.

The Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature is regarded as “the world’s most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of plant and animal species.” According to the IUCN, “In the last 500 years, human activity is known to have forced 869 species to extinction.”

Isn’t there a disconnect here?

Using Mr Djoghlaf’s figures, 20,000 extinctions a year for 500 years implies that 10 million species have become extinct. Yet we can only name 869 of them.

How can we prove that the other 9,999,131 species are extinct – or even existed? Perhaps the word “extinct” means different things to different people, just as “democracy” means something different in Switzerland and North Korea.

In any case most of the world’s species are arthropods – mostly insects and spiders. As one naturalist recalls, “There is a story, possibly apocryphal, of the

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distinguished British biologist, J.B.S. Haldane, who found himself in the company of a group of theologians. On being asked what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation, Haldane is said to have answered, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.” So a high proportion of these extinctions must involve beetles as well.

Beetles Great Again” will be a tough sell for the IPBES, if its price is going to be a dramatic lowering of per-capita consumption and reducing human population growth.

The doomsday rhetoric of the IPBES and its unrealistic political demands are illadvised.

No doubt beetles have a warm place in the heart of Mother Nature and the world will be a poorer place without the bark beetle-like fungus weevil and the coral pink sand dunes tiger beetle, to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of beetles which will go extinct before we even knew that they existed.

Because we do face serious problems. As the report points out, land degradation may have reduced the productivity of 23 percent of the global land surface, up to US$577 billion in annual global crops are at risk from pollinator loss and 100 to 300 million people are at increased risk of floods and hurricanes because of loss of coastal habitats and protection.

But it takes a lot of cheek for academics to use a beetle apocalypse as a platform for arguing that “If we are to halt the continued loss of nature, then the world’s legal, institutional and economic systems must be reformed entirely. And this change needs to happen immediately.” “Make

In 2015, 33 percent of marine fish stocks were being harvested at unsustainable levels. Plastic pollution has increased tenfold since 1980; 300 to 400 million tons of heavy metals, solvents, toxic sludge and other wastes are dumped annually into the world’s waters, and fertilizers entering coastal ecosystems have

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produced more than 400 “dead zones” in the oceans whose combined area is greater than that of the United Kingdom.

We do have a fraught relationship with “Mother Nature” and reconciliation is imperative.

But over-egging the case for reform with horror stories makes it politically impossible to sell. Reforms, however worthy, are destined to fade from the front page into obscurity unless the IPBES respects human dignity, national interests and the political process. Sir Robert Watson says that “by its very nature, transformative change can expect opposition from

those with interests vested in the status quo, but also that such opposition can be overcome for the broader public good.” The threats swaddled in this globalist gibberish will be spurned in Washington and Beijing, as well as Brazilia and Antananarivo.

Elected politicians understand, even if the UN doesn’t, that the survival, welfare and freedom of human beings is far more important than the fate of critically endangered salamanders.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet. This article is reproduced from MercatorNet with the kind permission of the author.

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Guadalupe: A Path to Heaven in Daily Life

by Mons. Fernando Ocariz

T

he servant of God Guadalupe Ortiz de Landázuri will be beatified on May 18 in Madrid. This news fills us with joy and hope because it confirms for us once more that God calls everyone to a fulfilled life close to Him, to holiness, which is within our reach amid the ups and downs of ordinary life.

The future blessed loved the life that God had chosen for her; she made it her own and found happiness there. As a young woman, she confronted her father’s execution with serenity and strength. Despite the difficulties, she chose to continue pursuing studies in chemistry, a profession seldom

taken up by women at that time.

Later on, she would dedicate herself to teaching, putting to use all her capacities. When she met Saint Josemaría Escrivá and discovered that God was calling her to live her Christian life according to the spirit of Opus Dei, she did not hesitate to respond generously to the invitation to seek holiness in ordinary life. Guadalupe was open to whatever God was asking of her at each moment.

She set aside her professional career for some time and took it up again later; she moved to Mexico to help start Opus Dei’s apostolic work there, and upon returning to Spain worked as a teacher again, starting and

23

completing a doctoral thesis in her later years.

Guadalupe’s example can give us light as well as encouragement to undertake our ordinary life as a path to holiness – our daily efforts, dreams, challenges and plans, where we also encounter unexpected difficulties and problems. Guadalupe stands out for her attitude of loving whatever God wanted of her, accepting his will, trusting and hoping in Him, and living completely in the present, exactly as it is, leaving the future in God’s hands.

enterprising and affectionate person. Her certainty of God’s closeness and love led her to a simplicity and peace that allowed her not to be afraid of her mistakes and defects, but to keep going forward no matter what, seeking to love God and others in everything. Often we might be tempted to avoid aspiring to great things, to renounce our dreams, simply because we experience our own errors and limitations all too clearly. Guadalupe teaches us that, despite all the difficulties, we can dream and go far if we trust in God and in his love for us.

Guadalupe was a joyful, courageous, decisive,

Guadalupe made compatible an intense professional life as a

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chemist with her relationship with God and service to others.

Her many letters illustrate how she strove to give God priority in her life and, when things didn’t work out the way she wanted, how she would begin again with renewed determination. She dedicated time to a personal encounter with God in prayer each day, where she drew strength to find Him again later amid daily events and circumstances. We too can find God amid our daily tasks, knowing that He waits for us patiently at every moment, especially in the Eucharist. The fact that the date of Guadalupe’s beatification, May 18, is also the anniversary of her First Holy Communion seems to me a divine coincidence that highlights the close union between the Eucharist and personal holiness.

The future blessed is also a model of how to discover God in our work done as well as possible. Guadalupe found God in her professional activity, and in it and through it made Him known to others. Her love for God and her professional

enthusiasm led her to be generously involved in the social issues of her time. She was never indifferent to the suffering of others and helped begin projects for the advancement of the poor both in her own country and in Mexico, making use of all her knowledge and talents.

Guadalupe was passionate about chemistry, but for her, work was not just a question of professional achievement but above all an opportunity to seek God and to serve others.

Many people who knew her remember her joy and contagious laughter, how she made life pleasant for those around her. Although her cheerful and open character was partly a matter of temperament, it was also the result of her struggle and hidden sacrifice.

She suffered for many years from a heart disease that often left her tired and exhausted, but she accepted it cheerfully and always strove to smile, without giving importance to her suffering. Thinking of Guadalupe, I am reminded of something Saint JosemarĂ­a

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often said: “To give oneself sincerely to serving others is so effective that God rewards it with a humility filled with cheerfulness.”

During this month of May especially dedicated to Mary, we can ask our Lady that Guadalupe’s example may inspire us to always accept God’s invitations for our life, so that like her we too will be happy – “blessed” – as the Church will declare Guadalupe in a few days’ time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Monsignor Ocáriz is the fourth person to head Opus Dei since its founding in 1928.

He is widely published in philosophy and has been a consultor of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith since 1986.

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Pope Francis’ letter to Mons. Fernando Ocáriz on the occasion of the beatification of Guadalupe Ortiz de Landázuri Vatican, 12 April 2019 Dear Fernando, The beatification of the Servant of God Guadalupe Ortiz de Landázuri, the first layperson of this Prelature to be beatified, is soon to take place, and I wish to unite myself to your joy and thanksgiving for this witness of holiness, which she lived out in the ordinary circumstances of her Christian life.

It is right to rejoice and to thank God, because He never abandons His Church – not even in the darkest moments – and with spousal love He continues to inspire examples of holiness in the Church that bring beauty to her face, fill us with hope, and show us clearly the path we are to follow.

Holiness means opening one’s heart to God and allowing Him to transform us with His love; it also means going out of ourselves so as to meet others where Jesus awaits us, to bring them a word of encouragement, a helping hand, a look of tenderness and consolation.

With the joy that came from knowing she was a daughter of God , as she had learned from Saint Josemaría himself, Guadalupe Ortiz placed her many human and spiritual qualities at the service of others, helping in a particular way other women and families in need of education and development. She did all this not with a proselytizing attitude but simply through her prayer and witness.

I encourage all the faithful of the Prelature, and all who take part in their apostolates, always to aspire to this holiness of “normality”, which burns within our hearts with the fire of Christ's love, and which the world and the Church are so in need of today.

I also ask you not to stop praying for me, while at the same time I impart my Apostolic Blessing to you all. May Jesus bless you and may Our Lady look after you.

Fraternally,

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BOOKS

My Father Left Me Ireland

by James Bradshaw

M

y Father Left Me Ireland is the hotly-anticipated memoir of one of the most talented young writers in American conservatism: Michael Brendan Dougherty. As the title suggests, the senior writer at National Review has an unusually strong connection to Ireland.

Dougherty’s mother was an IrishAmerican whose ancestors departed these shores after the Famine, and his father is a native Dubliner. His parents met in Europe and after their brief relationship ended, Dougherty’s mother returned to New Jersey and raised him on her own, while his father went back to Dublin, married and had a family of his own.

My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son’s Search for Home Michael Brendan Dougherty Sentinel, 240 pp.

In spite of his Irish parent playing only a minor role in his early life, the Dougherty household was an intensely Gaelicised environment, thanks to his mother’s singleminded determination that her son should know and love the country his family came from.

The childhood that Dougherty tenderly describes went far beyond the usual practices of the typical Irish-American. His mother brought him to Irish cultural festivals, taught him Irish history and tried hard to learn the Irish language. Like so many other Irish-Americans, she did not hesitate to donate money to the IRA when a collection plate was being passed around an Irish bar Stateside.

28

As Dougherty grew up, he and his mother gradually turned away from this path, as did many other Irish-Americans. The links between the two countries weakened. Fewer Irish émigrés arrived, and the Peace Process brought an end to much of the political activism among IrishAmericans.

War and poverty were replaced by peace and prosperity. Irishness had become fashionable and commercially attractive, and this new Irish identity was not appealing to a young man who had grown out of his Irish identity and become a man, while remaining detached from the father he had never properly known.

Then something changed.

Dougherty, who was carving out a career as a successful writer on sports and politics, found out that his wife was pregnant. The knowledge that he now had to be a father awakened a desire to reconnect, not just with his father in Ireland, but with the idea of Ireland as well.

“This child, my child, is coming presently, and I am determined not to withhold any part of my heart from her,” he writes early on. “And I need to be fully present to her. I feel this invigorating need to be stronger and better than I have been. That my manhood is at stake. And if there is an inheritance to be had in being Irish, I will recover it for her.” The fruits of his efforts to reconnect with home are demonstrated in this book, which takes the form of a series of long letters to his father, Brendan.

As a literary work, My Father Left Me Ireland is both deeply personal and political.

It taps into a widely-held feeling which is of increasing relevance across the world.

While cultural elites the world over often dismiss the virtues of traditional nationalism, Dougherty is concerned about the sundering of the ties between generations, including the dead and those yet to be born. The prospect of becoming a father heightened these concerns about what he calls an “age of disinheritance” where the past is

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forgotten along with those who lived in it.

The proximate cause of the author’s disinheritance is clear enough. Due to the circumstances of his birth and the distance between Ireland and America, Dougherty grew up without a father. The lengthy reconciliation process between the two men gives rise to the book’s most heartwarming, and heartbreaking, moments.

Given the title, it is no surprise that the book is predominantly focused on the author’s absent father, but his mother – to whom it is dedicated – also forms a massive part of the story.

JD Vance, who took the political and cultural worlds by storm with Hillbilly Elegy in 2016, has called Dougherty’s book “heartbreaking and redemptive”.

While Dougherty’s childhood and adolescence lacked the violent melodrama of Vance’s, the same focus on identity and belonging is present here, and the prose is arguably superior.

The parallels between the two works are clear, and My Father

Left Me Ireland deserves its place among an emerging category of literature dealing with the connections between people and place, and how individuals navigate the complexities of modern family life.

Moments of typical IrishAmerican kitsch are present but mercifully rare (“As a child, when we took vacations to the Jersey shore, I would point out over the water, squint, and tell my mother I could see it.”)

The personal component of Dougherty’s account is compelling, moving, almost faultless.

The political aspect of the book, on the other hand, is far more problematic.

From the beginning, Dougherty assails the revisionist trend in Irish history and how he believes it has caused Irish people to break with previous traditions and generations. He links this tendency to dismiss the sacrifices of the past to the broader problem of living in “an age of disinheritance.”

30

His main fixation is on the Easter Rising, and a considerable – and excessive – portion of his argument centres around the merits of the Rising, the actions of those who fought and the motivations of its leaders.

Curiously, he takes aim early on at the words of a “prominent Irish leader” who falls into the revisionist camp when it comes to the Rising.

“Sacrifice breeds intransigence,” this leader said, “The dead exert an unhealthy power over the living to hold out for the impossible, so that the sacrifice of the dead is not perceived to have been in vain.” Dougherty emphasises his disagreement with this point, and in a convoluted and unconvincing manner, attempts to link his quest to provide his children with the comfort of a homeland with efforts to overcome such revisionist sentiments about Ireland’s past.

John Bruton, Taoiseach between 1994-1997, wrote the offending words in 2014 in a thoughtful essay about that period in Irish history. The essay, like Bruton’s other writings and speeches on

the subject, focused on the process which led to the successful passage of the Third Home Rule Bill in 1912, and the reasons why he believes that the Easter Rising was a needless mistake. One can accept or reject that argument: the question is beyond the scope of a book review, or Dougherty’s short memoir.

Yet for Dougherty to imply that John Bruton is an exemplar of a dismissive attitude towards the country’s past is deeply unfair. Of all our recent heads of government, none was more historically aware than Bruton, and more hostile to modernist dogmas. More importantly though, Bruton’s argument is not just a critique of the Rising, but of the tendency to ignore or negate the tradition of constitutional nationalism which existed up until the Irish Parliamentary Party’s collapse in the 1918 General Election. The purveyors of that nationalism are barely even mentioned by Dougherty.

O’Connell is virtually a ghost in this book, Parnell too.

The author has a great deal to say about an armed uprising which

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lasted five days, and nothing at all to say about the extraordinary achievements of the Irish nation in the century leading up to it: Catholic Emancipation; the reversal of the Cromwellian and other land thefts; the forging of a parliamentary tradition which saw Irish concerns taking centre stage in Westminster, and which paved the way for the creation of a viable parliamentary democracy after independence.

All of this mattered enormously and yet barely any of it is acknowledged here. It is as if Irish history began when Connolly ordered his troops to charge into the GPO. My Father Left Me Ireland is not a historical volume, so the narrow focus is not a fatal flaw. But it does represent a tendency among IrishAmericans to associate Irish patriotism with armed rebellion, in a way which does a tremendous disservice to the countless patriots who chose to live and work for Ireland, rather than killing or dying for it.

While focusing attention on the historical revisionism of the latter end of the twentieth century,

Dougherty writes remarkably little about its main cause. He acknowledges the fact that many Irish-Americans – including his mother – supported the Provisional IRA’s armed campaign. It was an easy thing for them to support. The consequences of their actions were rarely revealed on the evening news or in the morning papers. No bombs ever ripped through Irish bars in Boston or the Bronx.

And when the ceasefires came and peace was made, the departure of Dougherty’s mother from physical force Irish nationalism was remarkably sudden. Interestingly, Dougherty writes that she sang along to the Cranberries’ song Zombies while unloading boxes in the new family home “without ever feeling a need to explain the apparent change in her politics”.

As a work of historical revisionism, Zombies was a classic. In it, the band protests the IRA’s bombing of Warrington in 1993, which killed a 12-year-old boy and a three-year-old toddler who had been shopping for a Mother’s Day card. The connection between the violence

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of the past and the present could not have been clearer in Dolores O’Riordan’s words:

probably not understood. There is however a bigger problem here though. Dougherty criticises the historical revisionists – including John Bruton – who have sought to re-examine important parts of Ireland’s past, and praises counter-revisionist historians for challenging them.

It's the same old theme Since nineteen-sixteen In your head, in your head, they're still fighting Either Dougherty was not listening, or he did not understand.

The nature of violent Republicanism in the latter half of the twentieth century is not reflected upon in this book at all, and the author makes little or no effort to understand why the killing of thousands of people in the name of Irish Republicanism would cause people to reassess whether men of violence should be afforded such reverence, whether they had fought in Dublin in 1916 or in Belfast and South Armagh more recently.

Irish-Americans never had to consider these questions.

Glorifying violence never carried a cost, and when the “war” ended, people like the author’s mother found it easy to detach themselves from a situation which they had

But there is a broader and far more consequential historical battle taking place in Ireland now, and that is the intensive effort to erase Christianity from Irish public life and public memory. In the space of a generation, the history of 1,600 years of Irish Christianity has been subjected to a systematic onslaught which goes far beyond any revisionist critique of the period immediately prior to independence.

Every historical documentary, every cultural work and every political speech about the past now carries the traces of this.

“Catholic Ireland” has become a dark slur. Everything that is wrong with Ireland starts with religion, and progress must always be synonymous with ensuring there is a firm rupture with the past.

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Any real-life story or tragedy which supports this revisionist narrative is magnified and amplified. Other tales are distorted or invented entirely. And the countless acts of heroism, charity and kindness in the name of Christianity are ignored entirely.

Aside from quickly reshaping Ireland, this trend is also impacting the relationship between modern Ireland and modern Irish-America, which is still for the most part Catholic, often devoutly so. More and more Irish-Americans are coming to realise that the religion which their ancestors brought with them to America is becoming more marginalised and despised in Ireland by the day. The making of Vice-President Mike Pence into a hateful caricature is a useful example of how people here now perceive any American of Irish extract who display any sign of religiosity.

Ireland which exists now. The subject appears to be of minor importance to him. The unhealthy obsession with 1916, and the disproportionate focus on political and cultural changes at the expense of spiritual ones mars this book. It leaves the reader with the sense that the author understands his father’s homeland – and his, to be fair – deeply, but only narrowly.

But it does not greatly detract from a moving and profound work by a wonderfully gifted writer. In an era where fatherlessness and rootlessness is becoming ever-more common, the importance of My Father Left Me Ireland cannot be overstated.

Dougherty has succeeded in his quest to find home, and those looking to commence their own journeys would do well to start here.

Dougherty, a practising Catholic who has written perceptively about the Church, has remarkably little to say about the chasm which has grown up between the Ireland his father was born into and the

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Bradshaw works in an international consulting firm, based in Dublin, and is a regular contributor to Position Papers.

BOOKS

James Bacque’s Other Losses – a deeply flawed book

Author: James Bacque Genre: History Publisher: Stoddart

In our March 2019 issue, we published a review by Fr Conor Donnelly of the book Other Losses by James Bacque. Historian Fr Peter Damian-Grint offers a different perspective on that work.

J

ames Bacque’s book Other Losses caused a scandal when it was first published thirty years ago. Bacque alleges that General Eisenhower intentionally caused the deaths by starvation or exposure of around a million German prisoners of war held in Western internment camps briefly after the Second World War. After the book’s publication, a group of academic historians held a symposium at the University of New Orleans to review it. They came to the unanimous conclusion that the book was seriously flawed:

documents are misread, evidence against the author’s conclusions is presented in a misleading fashion or hidden in footnotes, the statistics (a key argument for Bacque’s allegations) are hopelessly inaccurate, there are innumerable errors of fact and figures, and the major historical source is simply ignored. The texts of interviews of people involved in looking after German prisoners are actually falsified.

The papers at given the New Orleans symposium were published as Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood (New York: Louisiana

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State University Press, 1992), which one academic reviewer said “should discredit permanently James Bacque’s allegations”: see Russell F. Weigley, in German Politics & Society 30, The Past as Arsenal: Debating German Unification (Fall 1993), pp. 129–132.

his experience as a prisoner of the Americans after being arrested in May 1945:

Bacque’s response to this was essentially to accuse his critics of cover-up: he has not, as far as I know, answered a single one of the criticisms. The subsequent academic fist-fight has polarised the field, but Bacque’s critics are all good historians; Niall Ferguson, an eminent British historian, argues that American prisoner deaths were actually lower than those of almost every other country apart from Britain: see Niall Ferguson, “Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War: Towards a Political Economy of Military Defeat”, in War in History 11:2 (2004), pp. 148–192.

There is no doubt that the millions of disarmed German soldiers were kept in primitive conditions by the Americans.

This is how Pope Benedict recalls

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… for a few days we lay about in an open field at the military airport of Bad Aibling, until we were shipped off to an area of enormous farmlands near Ulm, where about fifty thousand prisoners had been brought. The magnitude of these numbers apparently taxed the abilities of the Americans themselves. Until the end of our captivity, we slept outdoors. Our rations consisted of one ladleful of soup and a little bread per day… When, after a period of good weather, the rains started, “tent clubs” began to be formed for primitive protection against the inclemency of the weather…

Then, around the beginning of June, if I remember correctly, the releases began… On June 19, 1945, I had to pass through the various inspections and interrogations, until, overjoyed, I held in my hand the certificate of release that made the end of the war a reality for me, too. (Joseph

Ratzinger, Milestones: Memoirs 1927–1977, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998, pp. 17–18, 19) The food shortages have been investigated in detail by historians. The point has been made that the Americans greatly underestimated the number of disarmed German troops they would have to feed and house (about two million of them fled west to avoid being taken prisoner by the Russians), in addition to the millions of displaced persons they were also responsible for. There were significant food shortages in Europe after World War II; even in Britain, rationing of some foods was made stricter after 1945 and bread was rationed from 1946 to 1948; food rationing did not end in Britain until 1954.

der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges (The History of German prisoners of war of in the Second World War, Bielefeld: Gieseking, 1962–1974), compiled by the Scientific Commission for the History of the German Prisoners of War headed by the historian Erich Maschke.

The Maschke Commission also found cases of ill-treatment of German prisoners by Allied troops; this, again, is not contested by serious historians.

But there is no evidence for the conspiracy that Bacque claims, or for the figures that he proposes; what he has written is essentially a work of historical fiction.

It is not news that German prisoners of war suffered greatly at the end of World War II and that thousands of them died, and that many were required to work as forced labourers. This was the conclusion of the 22-volume historical study, Zur Geschichte

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rev. Peter Damian-Grint: Honorary Research Fellow, School of History, University of St Andrews.

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FILMS

Country: USA, 2019 Director: Dome Karukoski Stars: Nicholas Hoult, Lily Collins, Colm Meaney

Tolkien

by John Mulderig

B

y turns lyrical and moving, Tolkien (Fox Searchlight) is a sophisticated profile of the future novelist’s youth that succeeds on a number of levels.

This may not be the biography that every fan of Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) is looking for, and it may not even fully accomplish what its makers set out to achieve. But, if nothing else, it does tell the story of the young Tolkien and his times.

Director Dome Karukoski and screenwriters David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford trace Tolkien’s passage from orphaned and impoverished schoolboy (Harry Gilby) to Oxford University scholarship student and beleaguered officer

in the trenches of World War I (Nicholas Hoult).

Beginning with Tolkien’s quest to locate a friend and fellow soldier during the 1916 Battle of the Somme, extended flashbacks take us to earlier periods both happy and sad. Most significantly, they show us how Tolkien bonded with a trio of precociously gifted peers – Geoffrey Smith (Anthony Boyle), Robert Gilson (Patrick Gibson) and Christopher Wiseman (Tom Glynn-Carney) – and fell for his future wife, Edith (Lily Collins).

After a shaky start at Oxford, Tolkien also eventually finds his initial vocation as a philologist after coming under the spell of magisterial professor of that

38

subject, Joseph Wright (Derek Jacobi).

satisfactorily delineated in the film.

As Tolkien wanders the scarred, mud-ridden landscape of the battlefield, vague visions of huge dragons and galloping warriors emerge from, then return behind, the smoke of war. This suggests that Karukoski and his collaborators are intent on showing how his service in the global conflict shaped Tolkien’s most famous works, his 1937 novel The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy published 1954-55.

As for the strong faith that also contributed to Tolkien’s outlook, its only representative is Father Francis (Colm Meaney), the caring but stern priest who served as his guardian after the death of both his parents. This may leave Catholic moviegoers feeling somewhat cheated, though it’s not clear how strong a hold religion had on Tolkien in these early stages of his life.

If so, however, the connection between real life and MiddleEarth remains elusive.

Certainly, the horrors of Tolkien’s experience may have inspired his portrayal of the forces of darkness and the travails to which his adventurers are subjected. And the deep friendship shared by the members of the club Tolkien and his pals formed may be reflected in the fictional fellowship referred to in one of his titles.

But none of this is clearly or

What the creators of Tolkien are most successful in capturing is the broad range of emotions to which their protagonist must have been subjected by his varied fortunes. Thus the buoyant camaraderie that led the imaginative, artistically inclined quartet to regard themselves as brothers gives way, in the poignant latter part of the movie, to the grim fate in which they were all caught up and the toll it exacted on them.

The film contains some harsh combat violence, a few gruesome images and a bit of slightly bawdy humor. The Catholic

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News Service classification is AII – adults and adolescents. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is PG-13 – parents strongly cautioned.

Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Mulderig is a reviewer for Catholic News Service. Copyright (c) 2019 Catholic News Service. Reprinted with permission from CNS. www.catholicnews.com

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LEARN TO COMMUNICATE IN YOUR MARRIAGE Next Programme: 4-6 October 2019

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