Position Papers - May 2016

A review of Catholic affairs

Amoris Laetitia

by Pope Francis Rev. Robert A. Gahl, Jr Archbishop Charles Ch aput

Book review:

Life is a Blessing Rev. Conor Donnelly

Film review:

Number 499 · May 2016 €3 · £2.50 · $4

The Jungle Book Joseph McAleer

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Number 499 · May 2016

by Rev. Gavan Jennings

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In Passing: Modernity laid bare: the beetle on the road to Munich (Part II)

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Editorial

by Michael Kirke

Pope Francis on love in the family

by Archbishop Charles Chaput

7 key takeaways from Pope’s new statement on marriage, families and sex

by Rev. Robert A. Gahl, Jr

The Visitation: Magisterium, Saints, Poets A selection of texts

A Point of View: Why it's time to turn the music off

by Roger Scruton

Doing Justice to our 1916 Patriots

by Richard Greene

Book review: Life is a Blessing

by Rev. Conor Donnelly

Film review: The Jungle Book

by Joseph McAleer Editor: Assistant editors: Subscription manager: Secretary: Design:

8 11 20 24 29 35 38

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

Contact us The editor, Position Papers, P.O. Box 4948, Rathmines, Dublin 6 email: editor@positionpapers.ie; website: www.positionpapers.ie Tel.+ 353 86065 2313 For new or renewed subscriptions contact: info@positionpapers.ie

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

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Editorial W

hen you picked up this month’s Position Papers you may have noticed that this is the 499th edition! Each month (or every two months during the summer) since its beginning in January 1974 copies of Position Papers have rolled off the presses, tracing the course of the developments in the Church and in society at large in the intervening forty-two years.

To mark our arrival at the five hundredth edition, next month we will be producing a special issue of Position Papers, along with feature articles to mark the event, including a retrospective from Fr Charles Connolly, a founder and long-time editor of this magazine.

Over the more than forty years since its inception Position Papers has sought to keep Catholics informed on faith matters in a way that combines complete fidelity to the Church’s magisterium with a sensitivity to the key role of the laity in transforming the world from within, according to their vocation ‘in a special way to make the Church present and operative in those places and circumstances where only through them can it become the salt of the earth’ (Lumen Gentium, 33).

These are the two characteristic features which Position Papers has maintained throughout the past four decades.

Other than these two elements, we have tried to avoid espousing any particular position on matters properly speaking political. I personally take for my inspiration on this question a phrase from St Josemaría Escrivá who affirms

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that: ‘in politics there are no dogmas’. For example, on the question of Irish nationalism and the 1916 Rising, we carry an article this month by Richard Greene in response to an earlier article by Michael Kirke on the same matter. Both writers adopt quite different stances towards the legitimacy of the Rising. This strikes me as a legitimate pluralism on a matter which is, broadly speaking, political in nature.

Editorial

We have decided to mark our significant anniversary – or perhaps use it as a pretext – to change the name of Position Papers, and in this task I would be very grateful for suggestions from our readers (which could be emailed to editor@positionpapers.ie). It appears that our existing name leads some prospective readers to expect they are picking up what is literally a ‘position paper’ in the sense of ‘an essay that presents an opinion about an issue, typically that of the author or another specified entity, such as a political party’ (Wikipedia). While the name has served us well over the years the time has come for a re-christening.

We are looking for a name which would reflect the faithfully Catholic nature of the magazine, along with its commitment to the transformative role of the laity in the world. I’m afraid there are no prizes, other than lasting glory, for the person who comes up with a new title for us, but your assistance would be much appreciated.

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In Passing: Modernity laid bare: the beetle on the road to Munich (Part II)

by Michael Kirke

E

vegeny Vodolazkin was born and raised in the Soviet era.

For him, studying Medieval history and literature was a way to escape from the gulag that was Soviet Russia, a kind of emigraton. Medieval history was the only piece of reality where the Soviet mentality was absent in the 1980s when he was growing up.

discovered death.’ Little children, he says, know that death exists, but they don’t believe it concerns them. They think that a death is a personal misunderstanding, or something that happens to this particular person who died. At that moment he says he experienced a terrible fear – not that he would die and cease to be, but rather that everything is pointless without God.

His parents were agnostics and he was not baptized as a child. ‘It was a period of my personal paganism’, he says. ‘As a child, I asked someone, some unknown person, to help me, please.

When I was 16, I was baptized. A movement inside me led me to that point. Where did it come from? When I was 14 or 15, I

In the Soviet Union in those years after his conversion it was prohibited for young people to visit a church. Doing so constituted a huge risk and would be regularly punished by expulsion from university. He was undeterred by this and

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describes it as his secret life. He felt like one of the early Christians.

He sees a new literature now being born. It has, he says, many, many features of the Middle Ages in its structure.

Modernity he thinks, quoting Nikolai Berdyaev, the great Russian religious and political philosopher, is in its end days as a cultural epoch.

For Vodolazkin it is now time to think about the destination, and not just about the journey. This is a central theme in Laurus. If the way leads nowhere, it is meaningless. He recalls a film released in Russia during the perestroika period. It was called Repentance, by the Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze. It’s a movie about the destruction wrought by the Soviet past. The last scene of the film shows a woman baking a cake at the window. An old woman passing on the street stops and asks if this way leads to the church. The woman in the house says no, this road does not lead to the church.

And the old woman replies, ‘What good is a road if it doesn’t lead to a church?’

Berdyaev says people in the Middle Ages were not so individualistic as people in modernity. Modernity developed our appreciation of individuality and that in itself was not a bad thing. But now, we are entering a time when our appreciation of another set of values is growing, values which are ultimately more important than individuality.

So a road as such is nothing, Vodolazkin argues. It is really the endless way of Alexander the Great, whose great conquests were aimless. ‘I thought about mankind as a little curious beetle that I once saw on the big road from Berlin to Munich.

This beetle was marching along the highway, and it seemed to him that he knows everything about this way. But if he would

He is intrigued by the response to Laurus. Some critics have described it as a postmodern novel. He disputes this because for him postmodernism is just a game that plays with quoting literature of the past, but has no grounding in anything real.

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ask the main questions, “Where does this road begin, and where does it go?”, he can’t answer. He knew neither what is Berlin, nor Munich. This is how we are today’.

end when their time on earth ended. Their days on earth were part of a greater whole. ‘Every day is an eternity in the church, and all that surrounded these people. Eternity made time very long, and very interesting. Their life was very long because they had as part of daily life this vertical connection, the connection to the divine realm, a connection that most of us in modernity have lost.’

He sees us as essentially duped by technical and scientific knowledge. This leads us to believe that we can solve every problem in life, he says. That for him is a great illusion.

Technology has not solved the problem of death, and it will never solve this problem. The illusion is that everything is clear and known to us. Medieval people, one hundred percent of them believed in God – were they really so stupid in comparison to us? he asks.

He is puzzled by the fact that liberals and conservatives both liked his book. ‘I tried to say with it that there is another way to live: the way of the saints. It is not an easy way to walk, but maybe we can walk alongside it.’

He says he is not trying to teach people in his book. His only purpose is to show us what this other way looks like.

Laurus reveals in a powerful way how, for medieval people, God was the most important thing about life. It shows as well that the second most important thing was time. While in terms of years spent on this earth, Medieval people lived rather short lives, in other terms life was very, very long, because they lived with their minds in eternity. For them life did not

With a little note of doubt as to whether people will understand what he is really saying, he thinks that maybe it was easier to see the truth about things in the first ages of Christianity than it is now in our post-Christian culture. ‘Nobody knew about Christianity back then. These

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people, these first Christians, brought the fire of a new faith, of a new religion. Now everyone thinks they know everything.’

should make his appearance in our culture at the juncture in time when another – to whom he has been compared – should have left us. Umberto Eco preoccupied himself with many of the things with which Vodolazkin does – but came to very contrary conclusions. Eco remained with the beetle on the road to Munich. Vodolazkin transcended the road and helps us see both the origin and the destination of everything that gives that road its purpose. The New Yorker reviewer said that Vodolazkin aims directly at the heart of the Russian religious experience. He does, but he does much more than that. He goes to the heart of the hunger for religion in every soul.

This is a book of great complexity, with archaic flourishes which sometimes baffle the reader but are all part of the meaning of the whole.

According to one reviewer, ‘Laurus cannot be faulted for its ambition or for its poignant humanity. It is a profound, sometimes challenging, meditation on faith, love and life’s mysteries.’

But while the book itself is one phenomenon, the other is Evegeny Vodolazkin himself. It is not a little ironic that he

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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Pope Francis on love in the family

by Archbishop Charles Chaput

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e live in an age when people’s nerves are rubbed raw by information they don’t like, don’t trust and very often don’t need. We drown in ads, lobbying and a politics of malice. Meanwhile, really vital, life-giving messages float by unnoticed. And on difficult issues, it’s easier just to skip the thinking and get straight to the arguing.

likeness ends. This is a document accessible to any adult interested in his or her faith.

And it deserves to be read thoroughly at a reflective pace.

It also needs to be weighed carefully in light of St John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio, the theology of the body, and other preceding Church documents on marriage and the family.

Like his earlier text Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”), Francis’ post-synodal thoughts on the family are vividly written and rich with excellent teaching, offered in a style appealingly his own. Those seeking a change in Catholic teaching on marriage, divorce, family and sexuality will be

Pope Francis takes a different approach. At more than 250 pages, the Holy Father’s recent Apostolic Exhortation on love in the family, Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”) can seem daunting — a bit like staring at the summit of Mt. Everest from base camp. But that’s where the

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disappointed, as headlines in the secular press have already shown. Others may find moments in the text of Chapter 8 when the stress on pastoral sensitivity in irregular marital situations seems ambiguous in its content.

Amoris Laetitia lies in Chapters 4-7. The Pope’s extended reflection on Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians is exceptionally beautiful.

Paragraph Nos. 178-181 on infertility, adoption, foster care and the family’s vocation are excellent. So is No. 187 on the extended family. No. 193 on the importance of historical memory is invaluable, as are Nos. 174-177 on the roles of mothers and fathers. No. 167 has some welcome praise for large families, and the text throughout has a deep understanding of the gift of children.

Thus, people need to understand “The Joy of Love” in the context of the large body of Catholic thought and learned wisdom that frames it. This context will shape the response of the Church here in Philadelphia. As Romano Guardini wrote – and recall that Guardini, one of the great Catholic scholars of the last century, is a key influence on the mind of this Pope – mercy is the higher virtue than justice. But as Guardini also wrote, no real mercy can exist unmoored from truth. And the truth of Christian marriage, taught by Jesus himself, is that marriage is a permanent, irrevocable covenant, with everything that implies for Catholic sacramental life.

Paragraph Nos. 47 and 48 show a genuine sensitivity for children with special needs and the elderly. No. 80 strongly reaffirms the message of Humanae Vitae, just as No. 83 reaffirms the sanctity of all human life. And in No. 56, Francis clearly rejects gender ideology and the sexual identity confusion it promotes.

Chapter 8 is a sensitive discussion of the need for including the divorced and civilly remarried in the life of the

Every reader will have his or her own favorite passages in this text. For me, the rich heart of

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Church, and treating all persons in irregular unions with appropriate care. In my experience, it’s a rare pastor who deliberately seeks to place obstacles in the way of anyone wanting to live a good Christian life. At the same time, we need to remember that Catholic teaching is not an “ideal” to be attained by the few, but a way of life that can and should be lived by all of us.

It would be a mistake to misread the compassionate spirit of Amoris Laetitia as a license to ignore Christian truth on matters of substance – matters that include the Catholic teaching on marriage, and the

discipline of the Church in the administration of the sacraments.

As I write these thoughts this week, diocesan guidelines for understanding and applying Amoris Laetitia are already being drafted and will be widely circulated in the coming month once they’re completed. In the meantime, especially in the wake of last year’s World Meeting of Families, Philadelphia Catholics can only be enriched by reading and praying over “The Joy of Love”.

Originally published in: www.catholicphilly.com

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7 key takeaways from Pope’s new statement on marriage, families and sex

by Rev. Robert A. Gahl, Jr

S

exuality, marriage, and family face a mounting crisis in the world and in the Catholic Church. A higher percentage of couples are in their second, third, or fourth relationship, while hoping that the current one will finally work.

together in committed relationships without marrying.

Consequently, more children are born from single mothers and more and more live in homes without the presence of a father married to their mother.

But more people getting married multiple times doesn’t mean that marriage has become more popular. In many regions, statistics show people getting married later and later. There are fewer weddings and many of those end in divorce. More and more same sex couples receive marriage licenses even though these couples will never be able to engender their own biological children. More people live

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What’s more, complementary sexual difference, which had always been seen as constitutive of the marital bond, is now rejected, as a quaint, superseded and once falsely fixed component of one’s identity.

Human subjectivity is more dynamic and increasingly in flux. Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman expressed this increasing fluidity of human identity with his proposal that we are now passing through a

new époque called ‘liquid modernity’. Personal identity has become more and more fluid, without fixed reference points.

Now, sexuality, with its biological rootedness is seen as a stifling enslavement and gender identity is proposed as a preferred alternative because of its inherent fluidity. Way beyond the relative stability of ‘sexual orientation’, gender identity, whether individual or social, is constantly open to innovative transition. With new forms of gender and its reconfiguration of the family, humanity is freed from the constraints of sexuality.

Quite suddenly, young celebrities like Ruby Rose, Jaden Smith, and Miley Cyrus have contributed to the trend among teenagers to identify themselves as ‘gender lazy’. There now seem to be fewer limits on what one can become, and fewer guideposts.

While the institution of marriage is rapidly transitioning in civil society, there is also a marriage crisis within the Catholic Church. Catholics divorce at

rates similar to their fellow citizens. Catholics marry later, increasingly after periods of extended or even indefinite cohabitation. At least in advanced Western countries, most Catholics disagree with papal teaching on sexual morality, for instance regarding the requirement that sexual activity be limited to husband and wife and always be open to children.

Pope Francis has focused much of his papacy on facing this crisis within the Church and has attempted to apply his energetic commitment to reform to find solutions with his new strategy of synodality. Soon after his election, he convoked an extraordinary synod on the family in 2014 and then a followup ordinary synod in 2015.

Those gatherings of Church leaders, cardinals, bishops, priests, and some lay people, engaged in heated discussions regarding the nature of marriage, the continuity of Jesus’s teaching on marriage, sexual morality, and how to offer solutions for the entire world.

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Francis facilitated the free discussion of innovative pastoral approaches while safeguarding the continuity with the faith received from Jesus and handed down through the apostles.

Now, Francis has spoken. The Pope has published his final conclusions from the lengthy, convoluted synod process.

Nonetheless, the debate and disagreement continue. Inside and outside the Church, efforts to spin the Pope’s conclusions began before they were announced in the new PostSynodal Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), subtitled On Love in the Family, formally approved on March 19 and published on April 8.

As the world anxiously waited for the publication of The Joy of Love, the greatest expectation regarded whether Francis would have changed Church teaching on the hot button issues of homosexuality and divorce.

Indeed, some of the cardinals who participated in the two Synods that the Pope consulted in preparing the document had

recommended changes, for instance, recognizing something inherently good and comparable to marriage in stable same sex partnerships and in offering innovative solutions to the quandary of divorced and civilly remarried Catholics who are prohibited from receiving Communion so long as they continue to engage in sexual intercourse with partners to whom they have not been married in the Church.

The suspense leading up to the publication was heightened by the fact that Francis seemed to signal his personal sympathy for some of the changes and encouraged free-wheeling debate about new pastoral proposals.

Moments after publication of The Joy of Love, in the first lines of their news article from Vatican City, the Associated Press declared ‘that church doctrine cannot be the final word in answering tricky moral questions,’ ‘that Catholics must be guided by their own informed consciences,’ and that local pastors could admit the divorced

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and remarried to Communion ‘on a case-by-case basis in what could become a significant development in church practice’.

CNN and The New York Times also rushed to publish pieces implying that Francis had effected great changes to the Church’s doctrine and practice.

Perhaps those newsy responses to the Pope’s letter of love failed to take into account what the Pope himself advised in the first paragraphs of the document: ‘I do not recommend a rushed reading of the text’ (n. 7). ‘The greatest benefit’ will come, he wrote, ‘if each part is read patiently and carefully.’ In fact, Francis comments on the debates in the Synod Hall and in the media by warning against two extremes: on the one hand ‘immoderate desire for total change without sufficient reflection or grounding,’ and on the other, ‘an attitude that would solve everything by applying general rules or deriving undue conclusions from particular theological considerations’ (n.

2).

As the head of the Catholic Church, the Pope is committed to conserving the faith in its integrity, which includes offering the mercy of Jesus who came to save the world. Since mercy and justice are both found perfectly in Jesus, who is Truth itself, there can be no opposition between universal, objective, teaching and local application of that teaching. Just as Jesus personally encountered the Samaritan woman at the well of Sychar and Peter after his threefold denial, all Christians are called today to offer personally tailored compassion and care in our apostolic and pastoral invitation to conversion from sin to grace.

While there are no changes to Church teaching in The Joy of Love, there are many developments and numerous nuggets of wisdom hidden throughout its 250+ pages. I’d like to highlight seven important themes.

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1. Marriage as a divine image

unions as somehow equivalent to marriage.

In these times of crisis, Francis reaffirms the Gospel vision of marriage as a commitment for life between a man and a woman to found a family. Francis expands upon Jesus’ condemnation of divorce by placing renewed focus on the children while drawing from the painful pastoral experience of broken families.

In The Joy of Love, Francis condemns the abusive political intervention in affairs of states or in educational programs to impose false models of sexuality and gender that erase the intrinsic and natural beauty of sexual difference.

Given that marital love and family life are meant to image God’s love, a breakdown in the love between parents makes it harder for children to grow up confident in God’s unconditional and all-encompassing love for them. Our appreciation for our divine sonship and daughterhood relies upon our experience of the faithful love of our parents. The sanctity of marriage as a reflection of God’s creative plan for our participation in his life also serves as the basis for the Pope’s appreciation for sexual difference and his rejection of attempts to recognize same sex

2. Theology of the body The Pope draws deeply from John Paul II’s theology of the body to re-propose the beauty of sexual attraction and erotic love when experienced within the context of mutual and definitive self-gift with transcendent openness to God’s creative power for new life. In Chapter 4, ‘Love in Marriage’, he realistically analyzes the love between man and woman while describing the passionate pleasure, joyful rewards, and the daily challenges to self-sacrifice.

The marital vocation is an elevated call to holiness which inevitably involves suffering while promising an infinitely rich reward.

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Francis’ challenge to overcome the throwaway culture requires fidelity to those near us, especially in the face of a consumer culture’s tendency to treat persons as objects of consumption and therefore dictates turning away from the weak, the suffering, or the outcast.

gifts of the sacramental life: Confession for forgiveness of sins, Communion for divine nourishment, and marriage, if possible, to sustain spousal love and faithful family life.

4. Feminism and gender

3. Mercy and tenderness Francis’ signature theme of divine mercy and tenderness offers the lens for understanding how to begin to solve the crisis of marriage and family. Before we can love God, he loves us first. Jesus demonstrates in his conversations with the woman caught in adultery and with the Samaritan woman at the well of Sychar that He comes not to condemn through harsh judgment but to save through mercy. He lifts up the sinner by offering the grace of conversion and the opportunity to love.

Likewise, in the Church today, all of us must seek out those who have suffered some form of failure in marriage to invite them to experience the grace of conversion and, to pursue the

Francis evaluates the positive features and the shortcomings of feminism. While rejecting some forms of feminism, he asserts that the Holy Spirit may be seen in the working of the efforts to promote the full dignity and rights of women. Focusing on the feminine, Francis writes: I certainly value feminism, but one that does not demand uniformity or negate motherhood. For the grandeur of women includes all the rights derived from their inalienable human dignity but also from their feminine genius, which is essential to society. Their specifically feminine abilities – motherhood in particular – also grant duties, because womanhood also entails a specific mission in this world, a mission that society needs to protect and preserve for the good of all (n. 173).

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The Pope rejects gender theory in its effort to eliminate sexual difference as constitutive of human identity and emphasizes that ‘biological sex and the socio-cultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished but not separated’ (n. 56).

father who is always present.

When I say ‘present’, I do not mean ‘controlling’. Fathers who are too controlling overshadow their children, they don’t let them develop (n. 177).

The Pope draws from the Synod’s recommendation to promote authentic virility and to see St. Joseph as a model of gentle and fatherly manliness.

5. Innovative models of manliness To complement the positive achievements of feminism, Francis notes the importance of promoting a healthy manliness:

6. New pastoral approaches

In our day, the problem no longer seems to be the overbearing presence of the father so much as his absence, his not being there. Fathers are often so caught up in themselves and their work, and at times in their own self-fulfillment, that they neglect their families. They leave the little ones and the young to themselves (n. 176). …

‘God sets the father in the family so that by the gifts of his masculinity he can be ‘close to his wife and share everything, joy and sorrow, hope and hardship. And to be close to his children as they grow...To be a

In Chapter 8, the penultimate chapter of The Joy of Love, ‘Accompanying, Discerning, and Integrating Weakness’, proposes new pastoral approaches to offer mercy and tenderness to irregular situations and other anomalous family situations.

Much earlier in the document, Francis quotes at length from a sermon by Martin Luther King, Jr. to offer a deeply Christian mindset for finding solutions to situations that seem to be destined to become ‘a chain of evil’.

‘If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and so on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum. It just never ends.

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Somewhere somebody must have a little sense, and that’s the strong person. The strong person is the person who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil…. Somebody must have religion enough and morality enough to cut it off and inject within the very structure of the universe that strong and powerful element of love’ (n. 118, quotation from Sermon Delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery Alabama, Nov. 17, 1957).

These words of Martin Luther King help explain the Pope’s approach to irregular marital situations. With his tender and fatherly heart, Francis wants pastors to approach these imperfect situations with an eye to what is good in them and with a loving proposal for conversion.

Francis repeats John Paul II’s doctrine regarding the law of gradualness (and not the gradualness of the law) by suggesting that pastors help individuals and couples by encountering them in their present situation, with compassion trying to

understand and to help them to understand and to discern, to accompany them on their path of conversion by helping them to strive for the highest ideal while encouraging them every step of the way.

The Pope distinguishes such an approach from the method of simply pronouncing the objective standard and throwing it at the wounded as a kind of stone of condemnation. Instead, the good shepherd helps the individual achieve an understanding of the truth of his situation in accord with his wellformed conscience.

This chapter’s treatment of subjectivity, conscience, and the internal forum will surely cause controversy within the Church, because, even though the Pope asserts that his pastoral approach of mercy is meant to implement traditional teaching, some will continue to try to use it, as they did during the Synod, to create false claims of exceptions to the indissolubility of marriage and the universal condemnation of adultery.

Nothing here justifies the

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pretence to, for instance, authorizing the reception of the sacraments without any purpose of amendment or to dissolve the marital bond in the internal forum.

love, purifies it and brings it to fulfillment. By his Spirit, he gives spouses the capacity to live that love, permeating every part of their lives of faith, hope and charity’ (n. 67).

7. The Holy Family as a model

A quotation that Francis draws from Benedict XVI encapsulates the core of the challenge for families offered by The Joy of Love: ‘marriage based on an exclusive and definitive love becomes an icon of the relationship between God and his people, and vice versa. God’s way of loving becomes the measure of human love’ (n. 70, from Deus Caritas Est, n. 11).

While closely following Pope Paul VI, Vatican Council II, and John Paul II, Francis explains how the mystery of the Incarnation made manifest in the Holy Family serves as a model and illumination for all families. God himself grew up in a family. In the person of Jesus Christ, God made man, he was raised by human parents. ‘In the Incarnation, he assumes human

This article first appeared on www.MercatorNet.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rev. Robert A. Gahl, Jr. is Associate Professor of Ethics in the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome.

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The Visitation: Magisterium, Saints, Poets A selection of texts about Mary’s visitation to her cousin Elizabeth VOICE OF THE MAGISTERIUM The Magnificat (Lk 1: 46-55) is a canticle that reveals in filigree the spirituality of the biblical anawim, that is, of those faithful who not only recognize themselves as ‘poor’ in the detachment from all idolatry of riches and power, but also in the profound humility of a heart emptied of the temptation to pride and open to the bursting in of the divine saving grace….

‘He has shown strength ... he has scattered the proud ... he has put down the mighty ... he has exalted those of low degree ... he has filled the hungry with good things... the rich he has sent

empty away ... he has helped ...

Israel.’ In these seven divine acts, the ‘style’ that inspires the behaviour of the Lord of history stands out: he takes the part of the lowly. His plan is one that is often hidden beneath the opaque context of human events that see ‘the proud, the mighty and the rich’ triumph.

Yet his secret strength is destined in the end to be revealed, to show who God’s true favourites are: ‘Those who fear him’, faithful to his words: ‘those of low degree’, ‘the hungry’, ‘his servant Israel’; in other words, the community of the People of God who, like Mary, consist of people who are ‘poor’, pure and simple of heart. It is that ‘little

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flock’ which is told not to fear, for the Lord has been pleased to give it his Kingdom. And this Canticle invites us to join the tiny flock and the true members of the People of God in purity and simplicity of heart, in God’s love.

Let us therefore accept the invitation that St Ambrose, the great Doctor of the Church, addresses to us in his commentary on the text of the Magnificat: ‘May Mary’s soul be in each one to magnify the Lord, may Mary’s spirit be in each one to rejoice in God; if, according to the flesh, the Mother of Christ is one alone, according to the faith all souls bring forth Christ; each, in fact, welcomes the Word of God within.... Mary’s soul magnifies the Lord and her spirit rejoices in God because, consecrated in soul and spirit to the Father and to the Son, she adores with devout affection one God, from whom come all things and only one Lord, by virtue of whom all things exist’ (Exposition of the Holy Gospel according to Saint Luke, 2: 26-27).

In this marvellous commentary on the Magnificat by St Ambrose, I am always especially moved by the surprising words: ‘If, according to the flesh the Mother of Christ is one alone, according to the faith all souls bring forth Christ: indeed, each one intimately welcomes the Word of God’. Thus, interpreting our Lady’s very words, the Holy Doctor invites us to ensure that the Lord can find a dwelling place in our own souls and lives.

Not only must we carry him in our hearts, but we must bring him to the world, so that we too can bring forth Christ for our epoch. Let us pray the Lord to help us praise him with Mary’s spirit and soul, and to bring Christ back to our world.

Benedict XVI, General audience, February 15, 2006 VOICE OF THE SAINTS When the angel revealed his message to the Virgin Mary he gave her a sign to win her trust.

He told her of the motherhood of an old and barren woman to show that God is able to do all that he wills.

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When she hears this Mary sets out for the hill country. She does not disbelieve God’s word; she feels no uncertainty over the message or doubt about the sign.

She goes eager in purpose, dutiful in conscience, hastening for joy.

Filled with God, where would she hasten but to the heights?

The Holy Spirit does not proceed by slow, laborious efforts.

Quickly, too, the blessings of her coming and the Lord’s presence are made clear: as soon as Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting the child leapt in her womb, and she was filled with the Holy Spirit.

The child leaps in the womb; the mother is filled with the Holy Spirit, but not before her son.

Once the son has been filled with the Holy Spirit, he fills his mother with the same Spirit.

John leaps for joy, and the spirit of Mary rejoices in her turn.

When John leaps for joy Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit, but we know that though Mary’s spirit rejoices, she does not need to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Her son, who is

beyond our understanding, is active in his mother in a way beyond our understanding.

Elizabeth is filled with the Holly Spirit after conceiving John, while Mary is filled with the Holy Spirit before conceiving the Lord. Elizabeth says: Blessed are you because you have believed.

You also are blessed because you have heard and believed. A soul that believes both conceives and brings forth the Word of God and acknowledges his works.

Let Mary’s soul be in each of you to proclaim the greatness of the Lord. Let her spirit be in each to rejoice in the Lord. Christ has only one mother in the flesh, but we all bring forth Christ in faith.

Every soul receives the Word of God if only it keeps chaste, remaining pure and free from sin, its modesty undefiled. The soul that succeeds in this proclaims the greatness of the Lord, just as Mary’s soul magnified the Lord and her spirit rejoiced in God her Savior.

In another place we read: Magnify the Lord with me. The Lord is magnified, not because the human voice can add

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anything to God but because he is magnified within us. Christ is the image of God, and if the soul does what is right and holy, it magnifies that image of God, in whose likeness it was created and, in magnifying the image of God, the soul has a share in its greatness and is exalted.

Wast in His mind, who is thy Son and Brother; Whom thou conceivst, conceived; yea thou art now Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother; Thou hast light in dark, and shutst in little room, Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.

John Donne, 1572-1631

Saint Ambrose of Milan (4thC) ‘Commentary on the Gospel of Luke’

This article first appeared on the website: www.opusdei.org.

VOICE OF THE POETS Salvation to all that will is nigh; That All, which always is all everywhere, Which cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear, Which cannot die, yet cannot choose but die, Lo, faithful virgin, yields Himself to lie In prison, in thy womb; and though He there Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet He will wear, Taken from thence, flesh, which death’s force may try.

Ere by the spheres time was created, thou

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A Point of View: Why it's time to turn the music off

by Roger Scruton

I

n almost every public place today the ears are assailed by the sound of pop music. In shopping malls, public houses, restaurants, hotels and elevators the ambient sound is not human conversation but the music disgorged into the air by speakers – usually invisible and inaccessible speakers that cannot be punished for their impertinence. Some places brand themselves with their own signature sound – folk, jazz or excerpts from the Broadway musicals. For the most part, however, the prevailing music is of an astounding banality – it is there in order not to be really there. It is a background to the business of consuming things, a surrounding nothingness on

which we scribble the graffiti of our desires. The worst forms of this music – sometimes known, after the trade name, as Muzak – are produced without the intervention of musicians, being put together on a computer from a repertoire of standard effects.

The background sounds of modern life are therefore less and less human. Rhythm, which is the sound of life, has been largely replaced by electrical pulses, produced by a machine programmed to repeat itself ad infinitum, and to thrust its booming bass notes into the very bones of the victim. Whole areas of civic space in our society are now policed by this sound, which drives anybody with the slightest feeling for music to

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distraction, and ensures that for many of us a visit to the pub or a meal in a restaurant have lost their residual meaning. These are no longer social events, but experiments in endurance, as you shout at each other over the deadly noise.

There are two reasons why this vacuous music has flown into every public space. One is the vast change in the human ear brought about by the mass production of sound. The other is the failure of the law to protect us from the result. For our ancestors music was something that you sat down to listen to, or which you made for yourself. It was a ceremonial event, in which you participated, either as a passive listener or as an active performer. Either way you were giving and receiving life, sharing in something of great social significance.

With the advent of the gramophone, the radio and now the iPod, music is no longer something that you must make for yourself, nor is it something that you sit down to listen to. It follows you about wherever you go, and you switch it on as a

background. It is not so much listened to as overheard. The banal melodies and mechanical rhythms, the stock harmonies recycled in song after song, these things signify the eclipse of the musical ear. For many people music is no longer a language shaped by our deepest feelings, no longer a place of refuge from the tawdriness and distraction of everyday life, no longer an art in which gripping ideas are followed to their distant conclusions. It is simply a carpet of sound, designed to bring all thought and feeling down to its own level lest something serious might be felt or said.

And there is no law against it.

You are rightly prevented from polluting the air of a restaurant with smoke; but nothing prevents the owner from inflicting this far worse pollution on his customers – pollution that poisons not the body but the soul. Of course, you can ask for the music to be turned off.

But you will be met by blank and even hostile stares. What kind of a weirdo is this, who wants to impose his will on everyone?

Who is he to dictate the noise levels? Such is the usual

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response. Background music is the default position. It is no longer silence to which we return when we cease to speak, but the empty chatter of the music-box. Silence must be excluded at all cost, since it awakens you to the emptiness that looms on the edge of modern life, threatening to confront you with the dreadful truth, that you have nothing whatever to say. On the other hand, if we knew silence for what once it was, as the plastic material that is shaped by real music, then it would not frighten us at all.

I don't think we should underestimate the tyranny exerted over the human brain by pop. The constant repetition of musical platitudes, at every moment of the day and night, leads to addiction. It also has a dampening effect on conversation. I suspect that the increasing inarticulateness of the young, their inability to complete their sentences, to find telling phrases or images, or to say anything at all without calling upon the word ‘like’ to help them out, has something to do with the fact that their ears

are constantly stuffed with cotton wool. Round and round in their heads go the chord progressions, the empty lyrics and the impoverished fragments of tune, and boom goes the brain box at the start of every bar.

Pop pollution has an effect on musical appreciation comparable to pornography on sex. All that is beautiful, special and full of love is replaced by a grinding mechanism. Just as porn addicts lose the capacity for real sexual love, so do pop addicts lose the capacity for genuine musical experience. The magical encounter with the Beethoven quartet, the Bach suite, the Brahms symphony, in which your whole being is gripped by melodic and harmonic ideas and taken on a journey through the imaginary space of music – that experience which lies at the heart of our civilisation and which is an incomparable source of joy and consolation to all those who know it – is no longer a universal resource. It has become a private eccentricity, something that a dwindling body of oldies cling to, but which is regarded by many of the young

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as irrelevant. Increasingly young ears cannot reach out to this enchanted world, and therefore turn away from it. The loss is theirs, but you cannot explain that to them, any more than you can explain the beauty of colours to someone who is congenitally blind.

Is there a remedy? Yes, I think there is. The addictive ear, dulled by repetition, is shut tight as a clam around its pointless treasures. But you can prise it open with musical instruments.

Put a young person in a position to make music and not just to hear it and immediately the ear begins to recover from its lethargy. By teaching children to play musical instruments, we acquaint them with the roots of music in human life.

The next step is to introduce the idea of judgment. The belief that there is a difference between good and bad, meaningful and meaningless, profound and vapid, exciting and banal – this belief was once fundamental to musical education. But it offends against political correctness.

Today there is only my taste and yours. The suggestion that my

taste is better than yours is elitist, an offence against equality. But unless we teach children to judge, to discriminate, to recognise the difference between music of lasting value and mere ephemera, we give up on the task of education. Judgment is the precondition of true enjoyment, and the prelude to understanding art in all its forms.

The good news is that, in their hearts, people are aware of this.

All who have had the experience of teaching music appreciation know it to be so. The first step is to introduce the precious commodity of silence, so that your students are listening with open ears to the cosmos, and are beginning to forget their addictive pleasures. Then you play to them the things that you love. They will be bewildered at first. After all, how can this old geezer sit still for 50 minutes listening to something that hasn't got a beat or a tune? Then you discuss the things that they love. Had they noticed, for example, that Lady Gaga in "Poker Face" stays for most of the tune on one note? Is that real

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melody? After a while they will see that they have in fact been making judgments all along – it is just that they were making the wrong ones. When Metallica appeared at the 2014 Glastonbury festival there was a wake-up moment of this kind – the recognition that these guys, unlike so many who had performed there, actually had something to say. Yes, there are distinctions of quality, even in the realm of pop.

The next stage is to get the students to perform – to sing in unison, and then in parts. Very soon they will understand that music is not a blanket with which to shut out communication, but a form of

communication in itself. And gradually they will know the place of this great art form in the world that they have inherited.

Our civilisation was made by music and the musical tradition that we have inherited is as worthy of praise as all our other achievements in art, science, religion and politics. This musical tradition speaks for itself but to hear it you must clear the air of noise.

This article is reprinted with permission of Roger Scruton, and first appeared on BBC Radio 4 ‘A Point of View’, see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/b006qng8

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Roger Scruton is visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Senior Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall Oxford and visiting Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. He has written over thirty books, several novels and a number of general textbooks on philosophy and culture, and he has composed two operas.

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Doing Justice to our 1916 Patriots

by Richard Greene

D

avid Quinn, the prominent Catholic commentator, in his column in the Irish Independent (18 March) suggests that the 1916 rising was immoral and not necessary for our freedom to be achieved.

Patsy McGarry, religious correspondent for the Irish Times is also promoting the same theme. They are following in the footsteps of many commentators who follow Fr. Shaw S.J. (Studies 1972) who began the trend of denigrating the ideals and motives of the 1916 patriots. All of this reminds me of Doctor Samuel Johnson who said ‘The Irish are a very fair people, they never speak well of one another’. A few years ago a poll was held in the UK to

find out who they would chose as the greatest Englishman of all time. Protestant UK chose a canonised Catholic saint for that distinctive honour despite his alleged over-zealous pursuit of Protestant heretics. The British people obviously respected St Thomas More for his idealism, integrity and sacrifice. Any other nation would cherish patriots of the moral integrity, idealism, culture, education, political and artistic gifts that Patrick Pearse and James Connolly possessed and gave totally to their country, not denigrate them. James Mary Plunkett wrote perhaps one of the most beautiful religious poem of the twentieth century ‘I See His Blood Upon the Rose’.

All of the 1916 leaders were

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described by our greatest poet William Butler Yeats, their contemporary, as ‘the ablest and most fine natured of our young men’.

Michael Kirke in the first of two Position Paper articles on the 1916 Rising states there was ‘a strong undercurrent of rebellion against the Catholic ethos of Ireland’ amongst the leaders of the rebellion and he quotes from Roy Foster’s book Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation 1890-1923 to support this without mentioning that Roy Foster is noted as the foremost revisionist Irish historian. In a forward to a book on the writings of Patrick Pearse by Seamus O’Buachalla, Ireland’s most distinguished modern historian F. S. Lyons (TCD based) refutes any notion that Pearse was obsessed by a blood lust or an unseemly attraction to violence. He called an end to the Rising out of his concern for the of loss innocent civilian lives. I was privileged, to know the late Capuchin priest Fr Leonard Coughlan a great pro-life and pro-family defender whose community ministered to the

executed leaders and indeed to many of the dead and wounded combatants and civilians during the Rising. It was he who first informed me of how fervently Catholic all of the executed leaders were and he took great care and effort in putting into print the memoirs of his community and on to tape and later on cds their invaluable contributions to the history of the Rising and the last days of the executed leaders.

To those who wish to know and appreciate the calibre of these men and the depth of their faith, I also suggest a marvellous book

by Piaras F. MacLochlainn Last Words, letters and statements of the executed after the Rising at Easter 1916. Another historian who has done great work to restore the reputation of the 1916 leaders is Dr. Brian P. Murphy in his brilliant book Patrick Pearse and the Lost Republican Ideal. Dr Murphy, who is a member of the Benedictine community of Glenstal Abbey, has restored an old garden in the monastery and planted in it sixteen trees to commemorate all of the 1916

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executed leaders and has a very informative article: Limerick’s Rebel Prelate in History Ireland’s 1916 edition of their magazine. He also has challenged John Bruton’s often repeated contention that the 1916 Rising was not necessary and destroyed the work and career of his great hero John Redmond (Irish Times, March 30, 2016). I hope to visit Dr Murphy who I know and view these memorial trees in this centenary year.

most significantly Archbishop William Walsh of Dublin.

It is believed that Pope Benedict XV blessed the Irish Volunteers before the Rising: he certainly was aware that it was to take place, and did not condemn it beforehand. His Secretary of State, Pietro Cardinal Gasparri, unaware of that, issued a condemnation of the Rising after it. Gasparri had to tone down his attitude in a second telegram.

Seven of the Catholic bishops of Ireland condemned the Rising in its aftermath, most of the Catholic bishops kept their counsel, and three more or less supported it: Bishop Edward O'Dwyer of Limerick, Bishop Michael Fogarty of Killaloe and

There was the threat of conscription by the British from the start of the war in 1914. Most of the Catholic bishops of Ireland urged the men of Ireland to enlist in the British Army. I find it extraordinary that many of those who question the morality of the 1916 Rising never question the morality of the First World War and those leaders and their generals who could allow and tolerate that in the first two days of the opening offensive in the Somme The Ulster Volunteer Force (36th Ulster Brigade) lost 5,000 men.

The National Volunteers, who fought in the 10th division lost 9,000 men and the 16th Irish Division was practically wiped out. An estimated 35,000 Irishmen were killed in the First World War; 20,000 of them Catholics and approximately 200,000 Irishmen were injured or maimed in body or mind.

Actually some hold that over 60,000 were killed. Pope Benedict XV in 1917 described the war as a ‘useless slaughter’,

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and a war fought for economic reasons.

When you consider the appalling slaughter of the First World War the 450 deaths (excluding the sixteen leaders executed) during the insurrection seems very small. The majority of these deaths were caused by the British themselves in their ruthless crushing of the rebels; a fact admitted by Michael Portillo a former British Cabinet Minister in a recent BBC documentary on the Rising from a British perspective. Of the dead, 230 were civilians, 64 were volunteers out of a total rebel army of 1,558 and 2,614 volunteers were wounded. 116 British soldiers were killed, 368 wounded and 9 missing. 16 policemen were killed and 29 were wounded. Unlike the British Generals in the First World War and in the 1916 Rising, Pearse sought to seek the minimum loss of life of his men and that of innocent civilians.

The First World War was not a just war. By 1918, 27 of the 31 Catholic Bishops of Ireland considered force justified in opposing the imposition of

conscription by the British.

Perhaps they felt responsible, for having sent so many young Irishmen to their death in the British Army.

The 1916 Leaders believed their Rising would lead to victory eventually. Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic philosopher-theologian, was a friend of the late Garret FitzGerald’s father, Desmond, a 1916 veteran. Maritain considered the 1916 Leaders to have been ‘a prophetic shock minority’, and their cause just.

He was happy that they were willing to submit their decision to the popular vote when the opportunity would arise and did so a couple years after the Rising. We must not forget that when the 1916 Rising occurred Britain held one fifth of the world in its empire and they held their subject peoples under control by force of arms and the largest naval force on earth. In the BBC documentary mentioned above Michael Portillo asked the internationally respected war correspondent Robert Fisk whether Ireland would have achieved its freedom

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from the British Empire without recourse to arms, his answer was an emphatic NO. Michael Kirke and David Quinn and other historians and commentators who blame the 1916 leaders for the thirty years of violence in North are wrong.

The real cause of the decades of Northern violence is not reliance on 1916 thinking, but rather the grossly unjust drawing of the Border in 1925 and decades of state tolerated anti-Catholic discrimination and bigotry.

Whatever about their followers, Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins all accepted that a special arrangement would be needed for the North-East, and would have supported a just deal on the Border. The French are not ashamed of their revolution a few centuries ago and they have reason to be in that their revolutionaries massacred over 700,000 of their people in Brittany and West France in order to impose their Liberty, Equality and Fraternity ideals and make France Une et Indivisible. Our patriots died for us and we should be proud of

them and preserve the places where they lived, where they fought and where they died. I am overjoyed, therefore that the relatives of the 1916 leaders recently won a landmark court battle to have the buildings and surrounding areas of Moore Street declared a historic battle site and be protected from destruction and being turned into another needless shopping centre and that the laneway where The O’Rahilly died and places where Pearse and the other 1916 leaders surrendered will not be destroyed by the developer’s wrecking ball and crane. It now has the potential to be turned into a very successful cultural and museum area with perhaps an Irish army base where the changing of the guard can be by viewed by millions of visitors from home and overseas. Kilmainam Jail was saved from destruction by patriotic volunteers and now is one of the State’s most successful tourist attractions and is visited by about 1,300 people a day. Thanks to the 1916 relatives long campaign, Moore street will become a must see visitor destination.

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Let us not be ashamed of our 1916 patriots and to be fair the majority of our citizens are justly proud of them as demonstrated by the massive turnout for the State’s centenary commemoration of the men and women of 1916 on Easter Sunday and the massive numbers of people who attended 1916 events on Easter Monday. It is some of our commentators and historians who seem to have a problem. Perhaps they should study President Higgin’s excellent speech to the relatives of 1916 on Easter Saturday at the RDS when he stated that the negative aspects of the 1916 Rising have been constantly noted but the negative aspects of British Imperialism ignored or

not highlighted by some commentators. The President said: ‘the assumptions of the imperialist mind: that those dominated in any colony were lesser in human terms, in language, culture and politics.

The historical evidence for this view was all around, in housing, hunger, emigration, exclusion and language loss. The cultural freedom allowed was a freedom to imitate and ingratiate.’

Despite our freedom some seem to wish to continue to act in that way, the result of what the late Sean McBride, a one time neighbour of mine, described to me in a conversation, as the servile mind or slave mentality formed by centuries of colonial rule.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Greene served as a public representative on Dublin County Council and Dún LaoghaireRathdown County Council. He campaigned over many years for innocent people jailed during the Northern Ireland conflict and founded with others the Irish National Congress in the late Eighties in order to encourage the various IRA factions to engage politically with the Northern problem. He is a longtime member of the 1916-1921 Club whose mission is to honour all the men and women who fought for Irish freedom regardless of what side they took in the Civil War.

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Life is a Blessing A biography of Jerome Lejeune Author: Clara Lejeune-Gaymard Ignatius press, Jerome Lejeune Foundation and The National Catholic Bioethics Centre (Philadelphia)

Book review: Life is a Blessing

139 pages

by Rev. Conor Donnelly

A

s a medical student in the 70s in Dublin there was a curious, almost unanimous silence, with only one exception, among the medical academic elite about the origin of human life. It seems something similar was happening in one of the cultural and intellectual capitals of the world, although that title may have passed its “use by” date. This stunning biography written by a daughter of Jerome Lejeune describes an atmosphere in Paris at that time which was hostile to scientific truth.

Prof Lejeune won admiration and honours all over the globe.

He was the first professor of Genetics in France. He

discovered Trisomy 21, the chromosomal disorder responsable for Down’s Syndrome. But because he was against abortion he was ostracized, sidelined and denied a Nobel prize which could have been his.

The description of the hostility, harassment and prejudice against him is well handled and brings out his virtue. He took on the intellectual medical establishment. He did not care what people thought or said or how he was treated. His is a story of courage, fortitude, heroism, leadership and manliness.

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Here is a man who has left his mark on medicine in the second half of the 20th century and is relatively unknown. I came across this book by accident. I had heard of him only in connection with the Honorary Doctorate conferred on him by the University of Navarre in Spain by the then Chancellor, now St Josemaria Escriva, in the early 70s. Somebody was aware of who this man was. The truly greats often pass unnoticed.

He founded and was the first president of the Pontifical Academy of Life, started by St John Paul. From 1974 he was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which gathers the most brilliant

scientists from all over the world. The main fields of specialization are represented and more that 40% are Nobel prize winners. Many are not Catholic.

Coupled with his academic achievements is the beautiful story of his marriage to a Danish lady and family life narrated by a first class witness. He was a loving husband and father who managed to juggle all the demands that such a life entails.

His spiritual life was his anchor.

It rings of Thomas More.That aspect make this book good material for all parents.

Among other interesting details is that he and his wife lunched

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with St John Paull II on May 13 1981, the day the Pope was shot.

He supported a pro life lady doctor to be inducted into the French Academy of Medicine, the first woman to do so since Madame Curie, and the following day the media were strangely silent, what else is new?

stage has been completed. Let us hope he will one day he named the “patron of scientific truth”.

It is an inspiring read. All young medics should read it as well as pro life people.

On his passing Charlie Hebdo magazine described him as “an enemy of the worst kind” while recognizing his scientific talent.

His process of beatification was opened in 2007, the diocesan

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Fr Conor Donnelly qualified as a medical doctor in University College Dublin in 1977 and worked as a house physician and surgeon for one year at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin. He was ordained a priest in 1981 for the Prelature of Opus Dei. He obtained a doctorate in Theology from the University of Pamplona, Spain in 1982. He is at present the chaplain of Kianda School for Girls, Kenya.

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Director Jon Favreau Writers Justin Marks (screenplay), Rudyard Kipling (book) Starring Neel Sethi, Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley

Film review: The Jungle Book

USA

by Joseph McAleer

F

orest, fauna and beast never looked as good as they do in The Jungle Book (Disney), a lavish retelling of the 1894 collection of stories by British author Rudyard Kipling.

What makes this “live-action” 3D adaptation particularly compelling is that, apart from the “man-cub” Mowgli (Neel Sethi), everything on screen, from the breathtaking jungle landscapes to the meticulously detailed creatures great and small, was created on a computer. A cheeky line at the end of the credits, “Filmed in Downtown Los Angeles,” attests to this surprising fact.

Hence, this Jungle Book has much in common with another in-house creation, Disney’s beloved 1967 animated take on the tales. In fact, director Jon Favreau (“Chef”) and screenwriter Justin Marks pay homage to that movie with moments of humor and by incorporating its toe-tapping tunes, “The Bare Necessities” and “I Wanna Be Like You”.

A few scary sequences aside (the jungle is a dangerous place, after all), this version makes delightful, good-natured, heartfelt entertainment for the entire family.

Kipling’s basic plot endures: Mowgli, orphaned as a baby, is

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discovered by a kindly panther, Bagheera (voice of Ben Kingsley). He brings this child to a pack of wolves which raises him as one of their own, instilling a strict moral code and respect for family and other critters. Fortunately for Mowgli – and the audience – all of the anthropomorphic animals speak perfect English.

But danger lurks in the guise of Shere Khan (voice of Idris Elba), a menacing tiger who threatens the peaceable kingdom. Man is a threat, he warns, especially the “red flower” he commands – fire.

Shere Khan demands that the wolves surrender Mowgli, now ten years old, to him for killing.

“How many lives is a man-cub worth?” he challenges.

Mowgli decides to leave home to protect his wolf family and, with Bagheera’s help, makes his way toward the distant “man village.”

An accident separates the duo, and Mowgli is swept deep into the jungle, where he is threatened by Kaa (voice of

Scarlett Johansson), a seductive python.

All hope seems lost until Mowgli encounters a happy-go-lucky bear named Baloo (voice of Bill Murray). An unlikely friendship strikes up, which will serve Mowgli well in a showdown with Shere Khan and another wouldbe despot, King Louie (voice of Christopher Walken), boss of all primates.

The Jungle Book barrels to an action-packed conclusion that may frighten the youngest moviegoers. But ultimately it’s all good escapist fun. Besides possible scares, parents also may want to take note of a passing reference to a non-biblical creation story. This myth could serve as the opportunity to discuss, in an age-appropriate way, the Christian understanding of life’s origins.

Amid the “sturm und drang” generated by most Hollywood blockbusters, The Jungle Book presents a welcome opportunity, as Baloo croons, to “forget about your worries and your strife”.

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The film contains a few scenes of peril. The Catholic News Service classification is A-II – adults and adolescents. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is PG – parental guidance suggested. Some material may not be suitable for children.

Copyright (c) 2015 Catholic News Service.

Reprinted with permission from CNS. www.catholicnews.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Joseph McAleer is a guest reviewer for Catholic News Service.

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