Position Papers – November 2019

Number 533 November 2019 €3 · £2.50 · $4

A review of Catholic affairs

Religious Liberty WILLIAM P. BARR

The Return of the Social Question?

TIM O’SULLIVAN

Films: The Irishman JAMES BRADSHAW

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Number 533 · November 2019

Editorial

by Fr Gavan Jennings

In Passing: The Day the Music Died

by Michael Kirke

The Return of the Social Question?

by Tim O’Sullivan

If I climb the heavens, you are there

by Mark

Religious Liberty in America (abridged)

by US Attorney General William P. Barr

Waging war on catastrophism

by Frank Furedi

Enjoying the best of company: The Communion of the Saints

by Rev. Donncha Ó hAodha

Films: The Irishman

by James Bradshaw

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

2 5 12 16 19 30 33 36

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

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Editorial

I

n the Aug/Sept issue of Position Papers I dedicated a short editorial to the question of unity with the Pope. However a number people have said to me that they, or people they know, have been perplexed by the goings on at the Oct. 6-27 Synod of Bishops on the Amazon taking place in Rome. They are disconcerted particularly by footage of some of the indigenous ceremonies which have taken place in the Vatican, and other churches in Rome; the presence of what are said by some to be pagan idols in ceremonies; and the calls by some ecclesiastics for married clergy and women deacons.

What I would like to offer here are some personal reflections on the way I approach this Synod, and similar events. For want of space I have to be brief, and cannot add in nuances which otherwise might be helpful; as a result what I say here might come across as a bit blunt. I frame these reflections as seven basic do’s and don’ts when approaching such issues. Here goes: 1. The Pope is the Pope – respect him The Pope is the Vicar of Christ on earth. That is a very serious business.

He is the rock on which the Church stands – that is simply the way that Christ has established his Church. He, by virtue of his office and not any other quality, is the sign and means of unity of the Church, or to put it simply: no Pope, no Church. Or in the words of the Servant of God, Sr Lucia of Fatima: “He who is not with the Pope is not with God; and he who wants to be with God has to be with the Pope” (interview of March 3, 1998).

2. Avoid disunity – it does great harm to the Church In a 2016 homily in Santa Marta, Pope Francis spoke of the diabolical assault on unity in the Church. Referring to the First Letter of St Paul to the Corinthians (11:17-26), Pope Francis noted how St Paul reproaches his interlocutors “because there are divisions” among them: “He

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rebukes them for the division that is among them, they are divided: they fight, one on the one side, and one on the other”. And “division destroys the fabric of the Church”. Since the Pope is the sign and means of unity in the Church, to speak disparagingly of him, let alone to engage in bitter criticisms of him, has the whiff of sulphur about it.

3. Avoid the sowers of disunity (like the plague) There are websites which seem to delight in overt or covert criticism of the Pope (Rorate Coeli and Church Militant are two such sites). Such sites exhibit an almost obsessive tendency towards heresy bashing.

There are a number of problems with this: in the first place there is the great danger of sinning against charity and Christ’s injunction to love your enemies (see Mt.5:44, Lk.6:35); secondly there is a danger of selfrighteousness: the heretic becomes the epitome of evil and I think of myself as one of the just, or even of the “elect”; and thirdly we distort the Church in the eyes of the world in reducing it a fight to preserve orthodoxy. Ironically many of these trenchant critics of the Pope have adopted the same position as those “liberals” who claimed freedom to dissent from Pope Paul VI’s teaching on contraception. St Josemaría Escrivá spoke of these dissenters at the time in words which today could be applied to those defenders of so-called orthodoxy: “The teachings of the Popes cannot be disregarded just like that. Nor ought they to allege, as they do with incredible flippancy, that the Pope when he does not speak ex cathedra is simply a private theologian subject to error. To say nothing of the tremendous arrogance it supposes to affirm that the Pope makes mistakes, while they do not.” (In Conversations, #95) 4. Before deciding, know the facts Many of the criticisms being levelled at the Synod, and indirectly at the Pope, appear at best rash. A case in point might be the reaction to the presence of Amazonian “idols” in the Church of Santa Maria in Traspontina in Rome. Were these items genuine idols? Were the unusual ceremonies which took place in the Vatican these days really

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examples of nature worship? Granted they looked odd to Western eyes, but that is a long cry from idolatry. It would require a bit of investigation, of calm and patient study of such matters before raising a hue and cry about such matters. So if you have studied the matter in depth (and not relied on some of the websites I’ve alluded to), and then find that indeed this is idolatry, in that case by all means raise a storm … but not before.

5. Be patient – things usually improve By now it is clear that Pope Francis works by allowing people engage in a free-wheeling, brain-storming manner, and then drawing from that what he wills. That being the case, we shouldn’t be too put out (I think) by the calls from the Synod for married clergy etc. A Synod is a purely consultative body and the Pope is free to draw from their findings what he wishes for the usual post-synodal apostolic exhortation. That is where our attention should lie, not in the fireworks of a passing Synod.

6. Don’t be over-focussed on matters ecclesiastical And now for an unusual ‘don’t’: don’t be overly interested in ecclesiastical assemblies – that is clericalism! The Pope is engaging in a consultation with by and large ecclesiastics on matter concerning ecclesiastical practices in a certain ecclesiastical circumscription of the Church (and not a circumscription in which you or I live, or are ever likely to live in). Besides what you know or don’t know about a Synod happening in Rome will have exactly 0% impact on that Synod – so why get worked up?! We (including myself as a priest) have many other things to be occupying our working day.

7. Pray Finally we must all pray for one another in the Church, and in particular we pray for the Pope – not in the sense that some disingenuously say: “Pray for the Pope!” implying “because he’s a heretic!” To say that would be real heresy. We pray for the Pope (and his collaborators) because we have the joyful obligation as his spiritual sons and daughters to do so.

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In Passing: The Day the Music Died

by Michael Kirke

C

ivilisations do not crumble in a moment, in an hour, or because of an event of one day.

Like all decaying things it is a process. Ultimately it is a process driven by the gradual and cumulative effects of mankind’s compromise with the mystery of evil.

history of mankind from earliest times.

That was then. This is now.

Joan Didion’s The White Album is a short collection of reflective journalism published in 1979. In it she chronicles and observes events in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Most of what she writes is set against the background of life in California, the vortex around which the helter-skelter culture of those years revolved. Its title of course suggests that iconic Beatles album, with is white nameless sleeve. Didion’s collection constitutes a kind of snapshot of that time, in much darker shades

It is said that on the 9th of August, 378, on hearing the news that the barbarous, invading Goths had defeated and overthrown the Roman legions in the battle of Adrianople, leaving the body of the Emperor Valens mutilated on the battlefield, St. Jerome dropped his pen in despair and abandoned the chronicles in which he was recording the

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than our rose-tinted nostalgia bestows on it.

slouched out of the Californian desert on August 9, 1969, like the Beast of the Apocalypse. Not taking account of calendar reforms, an interesting coincidence of dates, just nine years short of 16 centuries after Adrianople?

Popular imagination deludes itself in thinking this hectic and dreamy era was a liberating one.

Didion’s ironic observations, written as it unfolded, lay bare much of that illusion.

She chronicles her reaction to that horrific events of that night, and writes of how people in Los Angles, looking back, believed that the Sixties ended on that date. The tensions which people felt up to that event ended on that day, she writes; the “jitters “ they were experiencing morphed into some kind of equilibrium – now there seemed to be some explanation of what was going on.

Her essays reflect the character of the Sixties, hopeful but hopelessly and dangerously naïve. The cultural climate which we saw forming before our eyes in that decade, and the handful of years in the decade that followed, was anything but a harbinger of peace and love for western civilization. Didion, in this book and in her other collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, chronicles the highs and lows, the hopes and follies of those years. From them we can now clearly trace a line of descent to the ills and woes of the early 21st century.

But that didn’t help. Things in fact got worse.

That day might look like no more than a symbol for the levels to which our race has sunk in the decades which followed. It can serve as such. But it is more.

The forces – diabolical but also driven by hedonistic and corrupt multiple visions of what mankind is – behind the horrors

Didion writes about the moment when the culture of death, which now has the official stamp of practically every state jurisdiction within what we call the Civilized Western World,

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of the early hours of that day were also the forces which were being let loose in a benighted military operation in South-East Asia. They were also the forces being let loose at home by the dark, dark reasoning of the American Supreme Court judgment in the case of Roe Vs Wade. That judgment in effect falsely elevated the pursuit of pleasure, the cult of individualism and crass materialism, to the level of a compassionate principle. It has resulted in a blind acceptance of a totally false vision of what human compassion and true freedom are, leading us deeper and deeper into confusion with each decade that passes.

Franklin Avenue, (where she, her husband and their little girl, lived at the time). I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town.

There were rumours. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of “sin”— this sense that it was possible to go “too far”, and that many people were doing it – was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community.

The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full.

Didion described what those times and that day in August 1969 were like for her – how it was so ordinary and yet strange, how it ended in a nightmare.

On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone

“We put Lay Lady Lay (Bob Dylan) on the record player, and Suzanne (Leonard Cohen). We went down to Melrose Avenue to see the Flying Burritos. There was a jasmine vine grown over the verandah of the big house on

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rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed.

excitement. Human life was routinely expendable. Didion clearly shows what was at its heart. Her words then are full of apprehension about the future – the future which is our present.

In a later decade an iconic pop star was to take the name of Manson, much as a Christian or Muslim might take the names of the saints who populate their faiths’ histories. A meaningless gesture? No.

I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.

In yet another essay, on the Women’s Movement, she touches on other effects which have flowed from the “mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’”.

The Cielo Drive murders, orchestrated by Charles Manson, still reverberate fifty years later.

They might look isolated but they were in fact a symptom of a wider malaise which had gripped the culture of a generation. This malaise is our sad inheritance from that time.

The Women’s Movement for her was essentially Marxist, redefining as it did human nature in purely materialistic terms. While on its popular surface it might just look like a reworking of romanticism, it was anything but romantic. Many movements rife with erroneous readings of our human nature do have an up-side. They point to real problems and injustices and move us to correction. This however does not negate the

Another essay in the book illustrates more of this effect.

She describes the cult following by young adolescents of the Hell’s Angels movies of the time – where pillage, rape and murder were presented for purposes of entertainment and

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inherent dangers in their errors.

Of the feminism of this movement, she writes:

Feminism, in this reading, was turning the male per se into the enemy – or at best, the heartless manipulator – of his life partner, the female. Out of all this came ultimately the denial and attempted obliteration of the real natural distinctions between male and female which we see all around us today.

Something other than an objection to being “discriminated against” was at work here, something other than an aversion to being “stereotyped” in one’s sex role. Increasingly it seemed that the aversion was to adult sexual life itself: how much cleaner to stay forever children.

Didion foresaw this: All one’s actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it – that sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death – could now be declared invalid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all.

Or, might we add, forever childless? A “woman’s role” had nothing to do with what “real women” are, want or need. It was all a construction imposed on them. It was the work of their enemy.

The transient stab of dread and loss which accompanies menstruation simply never happens: we only thought it happened, because a male chauvinist psychiatrist told us so. No woman need have bad dreams after an abortion: she has only been told she should.

One was only told it, and now one is to be reprogrammed, fixed up, rendered again as inviolate and unstained as the “modern” little girls in the Tampax advertisements.

The aftershocks and echoes of the event of August 9, 1969, no more than the events of

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September 11, 2001, or May 25, 2018, when Ireland went the way of Roe Vs. Wade, continue to reverberate around our world – be it in massacres in school classrooms, mosques, Christian churches or synagogues.

The Roman Empire and the civilisation which it had embodied struggled on in a decaying state for another couple of centuries after Adrianople. To St Jerome the butchered body of Valens was but a powerful symbol of the terrifying truth that a millennium-old civilisation was in terminal decline. In those centuries after 378, however, a new light was already shining.

That Light, picking up the remnants of that dying culture, cleansed them and revitalised them. Eventually a new civilisation emerged, which we now know as the Christian civilisation of the High Middle Ages.

decadent era – to where can we look for a light to lead us out of this darkness? Where else but to that self-same regenerative power which led our forefathers out of their desert?

What then is the lesson we might glean from observing our record of folly and evil? It is that we should call evil what it is and that we resist the temptation to indulge in “mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’”. Christians recognise a Revelation which assists them in this battle. The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us wisely: Only the light of divine Revelation clarifies the reality of sin and particularly of the sin committed at mankind’s origins. Without the knowledge Revelation gives of God we cannot recognise sin clearly and are tempted to explain it as merely a developmental flaw, a psychological weakness, a mistake, or the necessary consequence of an inadequate social structure, etc. Only in the knowledge of God’s plan for man can we grasp that sin is an abuse of the freedom that

If we accept the butchery of August 9, 1969, as a symbol of the sad decline of our own brilliantly scientific and technological – but artistically, philosophically and morally

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God gives to created persons so that they are capable of loving him and loving one another.

Edmund Burke may or may not have said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Whether he did or didn’t, the idea is right. It is certainly true that unless common sense and decent humanity, both of which are highlighted in Joan Didion’s writing from those times, gets a chance to express itself in this world, and unless more of us pay attention to the timeless truths about ourselves, we are destined to continue down this vortex in which human lives are distorted and destroyed in multiple ways.

Edmund Burke

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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The Return of the Social Question?

by Tim O’Sullivan

T

he return of the “social question” was how one Catholic commentator in France described the protest movement in his country of the gilets jaunes or “yellow vests”. The rise of the gilets jaunes in France since 2018 has received superficial coverage in Ireland, with commentary focusing either on the original petrol price rise that prompted the movement or on the quite unacceptable violence used by groups attaching themselves to the protests or on the problems the movement caused for the Presidency of Emmanuel Macron.

movement and its causes have received less attention. A recent summer school* in France provided a stimulating analysis of the gilets jaunes conflict.

These aspects are all important but deeper questions about this

Drawing on research evidence, another speaker characterized

The Catholic bishop of Montauban spoke of his efforts to encounter and engage in dialogue with the protesters. A Christian trade union leader linked the conflict to the question of a “just wage”, highlighted by St Thomas Aquinas and later by Pope Leo XIII and successive Popes. A just wage, he noted, implied the right for the worker and his or her family to live in a decent way.

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the gilets jaunes as people who were working rather than unemployed. However, they were usually not in wellrewarded jobs and often lacked university qualifications. They generally lived more than forty kilometres from large cities so did not benefit from the public transport facilities of such cities.

Their work required them to make daily or at least very regular work trips by car so they needed a car in the same way as the city dweller needs public transport.

They were people who were struggling financially and felt themselves to be “off the radar” of public life in key areas of life such as welfare policy and cultural life, including television coverage, while overall Government priorities highlighted EU and environmental concerns but not so much the needs of those living in the “peripheral” areas of France.

The plight of the gilets jaunes can be linked to general trends such as the concentration of jobs and services and opportunities

in big centres – a well-known intellectual from Paris has stated that he felt closer to an inhabitant of Berlin than to someone from Picardy! Other factors of importance include the small pensions of certain categories of worker or farmer, and the relative lack of influence of “intermediate groups” – for example, voluntary associations or trade unions – between the Government and the individual.

Many parallels could be drawn with Ireland, including the concentration of resources and activity in the greater Dublin area, even if the capital city also faces huge housing, healthcare and other challenges. A national newspaper columnist recently acknowledged that many rural communities both felt “left behind” and had actually been left behind. This reality has arguably impacted on issues such as the beef protests, the controversies about the placing of “direct provision” centres, without adequate consultation, in small towns, and concerns about the loss of local facilities such as schools, post offices and Garda stations.

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In his encyclical, Centesimus Annus, in 1991, Pope St John Paul II underlined the need for the Church to engage with the social challenges of its time. He noted that two perspectives on faith and society prevailed in the late nineteenth century, neither of which was receptive to an active Church voice on social questions. One perspective, he contended, “was directed to this world and this life, to which faith ought to remain extraneous; the other directed towards a purely other-worldly salvation, which neither enlightens nor directs existence on earth” (CA, 5).

In other words , a form of compartmentalisation operated – on the one hand, it was felt, there was this world and this life, with which faith should not get involved or interfere; and on the other, there was a belief in a purely other-worldly salvation, which has nothing to do with life on earth.

Leo XIII’s great 1891 encyclical on the situation of the industrial working class – Rerum Novarum – made clear, John Paul stressed, that the Church

could not turn aside from the challenges of the world but had to engage fully with those challenges.

In Ireland, the term “social issues” has often been used in the media in recent decades to mean the lengthy debates about questions such as abortion, divorce, and same-sex marriage.

These issues are of fundamental importance and Christians will need to continue to make their voices heard on the right to life, the dignity of marriage and related issues.

However, the “social question” for the Church originally meant the plight of the working class in nineteenth century Europe, to which Leo XIII responded powerfully in Rerum Novarum.

That document highlighted the importance of a “just wage”, defended the worker’s right of association and underlined the State’s particular responsibility to protect the poor.

One way of linking “the social question” and “social issues”, as described above, might be to say that a radical individualism

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often characterises the approach of the State and the media to both and that they are often inter-twined, for example, in relation to the possible impact of divorce on poverty or mental health.

As well as marriage and life issues, the social and economic problems of today are thus of critical importance for the Church, for example, issues relating to the provision of healthcare, housing and education, to migration policy and the rights of all concerned, to a family “living wage”, and to urban-rural divides. Whether or not it ever went away and thus needs to “return”, the “social question” is clearly of

fundamental importance for Christians in Ireland and elsewhere, particularly in these times of great uncertainty. *That French-speaking summer school, the l’Université d’Été de la Sainte-Baume, (https:// uesb.fr) is an excellent annual event, which is held each August near an ancient shrine associated with St Mary Magdalen.

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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If I climb the heavens, you are there

by Mark

R

adiotherapy frightened me. It made me feel more unwell than I had ever felt before, and I knew I had eight weeks of it ahead of me.

Each morning I was placed with finely practised precision on a narrow bed, the huge machine arching above me, followed by a sinister synthetic buzz as it delivered its dose. The bed would then rise, to my mind dangerously high, as the machine slowly swung beneath me. Again the buzz heralding the dose to my back.

contents of their stomach.

Although alone in the treatment room I was constantly being monitored. Small cameras observed by the occupants of the operations room. I think this was the loneliest room I had ever been in. It was coldly clinical, so hardfaced in its functionality.

It is only now as I write this that I recall the poetry of the Psalms:

Apart from me and the machine the room was, of course, empty.

Radiation, however necessary for me, isn’t nice and is best avoided by anyone who wants to retain their hair, their fertility, and the

… if I climb the heavens, you are there.

If I lie in the grave, you are there.

If I take the wings of the dawn And dwell at the sea’s furthest end,

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Even there your hand would lead me, Your right hand would hold be fast.” (Ps 138).

Perhaps if the psalmist were alive today he would add: “In the cold of the radiotherapy suite, even there your hand would lead me.”

Many years before my treatment I had been given a rosary, a simple rosary with small wooden beads on cotton thread. As it had no metal parts I was able to take this rosary with me into the treatment room and whilst the machines danced around me I held this rosary in my hands and quietly mouthed the Hail Mary.

I recall at this time my own anxious mother, seeing how sick I was from the treatment, voicing that sentiment that is, by God’s grace, a voice that only mothers possess and saying, “if only I could take your place”.

And Mary, my spiritual Mother too, when all humanity was banished from the room, stood beside me and I was no longer alone.

At last the weeks of treatment were at an end and the young radiographer who had overseen the process from beginning to end came to wish me well. I thanked him and just then he said, “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but while you were lying on the bed I saw you on the monitors. I saw your beads and although I couldn’t hear you I watched your mouth. Would you tell me what you were doing?” I told him that I was praying the rosary, simple prayers to the Mother of God, because I was afraid. I told him that through the rosary Mary was with me and I was no longer alone and there was no longer any need to be afraid. I rook the rosary from my pocket as we were talking and gave it to him. I simply said, “Please”. He took it. The thing about cancer is regular check-ups, lots and lots of check-ups, and I became a regular visitor to the C.T. (computer tomography) and all manner of scanning departments.

It was many months, perhaps as much as a year later that whilst sitting in the waiting room I heard a familiar voice and, looking up, there, bounding across the room, was the young radiographer. “Hi,

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I’ve got something amazing to tell you," he said. “My wife and I have been received into the Catholic Church. I saw you praying with your simple beads and I longed to know more.” He went on to tell me, “You know I had cancer too.”

I did know, he had told me in the first week of my treatment to reassure me that the treatment worked. He continued “It is painful for my wife and me that due to the treatment I received we will almost certainly not be able to have children but we pray the rosary together.” He took the old rosary from his pocket, “Yes, your old rosary, and it is such a comfort to us, as it was to you… Do your remember? I want to thank you.” I was moved to my very core, and a tearful silence was all I could offer in reply.

a year later I travelled again to the Radiology Department.

I hadn’t seen the young radiographer since his amazing news, but as I sat quietly in the waiting room his voice rang out again. “Mark, Mark”, his excitement was hardly contained.

He checked himself, respecting the small room full of anxious patients, took me aside and in a whisper that was almost deafening proclaimed, “We are expecting a baby, against all the odds we are going to have a baby.

Isn’t it wonderful?!”

It was wonderful; indeed it will always remain so. We embraced and now with tears on both sides, we allowed the silence to say it all:

But there’s more and God’s bounty is without limit. My regular check-ups continued and

Blessed art thou amongst women, and Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Amen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR The writer, Mark, was ordained into the Anglican ministry and served as a curate

in the east end of London. Following his reception into the Catholic Church he worked closely with the St Barnabas Society, a charity which supports non Catholic clergy who have been received into full communion with the Catholic Church. Mark has worked as a journalist in both the UK and Ireland.

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Religious Liberty in America (abridged)

by US Attorney General William P. Barr

The supreme test of a free society

The challenge we face is precisely what the Founding Fathers foresaw would be our supreme test as a free society.

They never thought the main danger to the republic came from external foes. The central question was whether, over the long haul, we could handle freedom. The question was whether the citizens in such a free society could maintain the moral discipline and virtue necessary for the survival of free institutions.

Today, I would like to share some thoughts with you about religious liberty in America. In the twentieth century, our form of free society faced a severe test. There had always been the question whether a democracy so solicitous of individual freedom could stand up against a regimented totalitarian state.

That question was answered with a resounding “yes” as the United States stood up against and defeated, first fascism, and then communism.

Good government requires self-government

But in the twenty-first century, we face an entirely different kind of challenge.

By and large, the Founding generation’s view of human nature was drawn from the

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classical Christian tradition.

These practical statesmen understood that individuals, while having the potential for great good, also had the capacity for great evil. Men are subject to powerful passions and appetites, and, if unrestrained, are capable of ruthlessly riding roughshod over their neighbours and the community at large. No society can exist without some means for restraining individual rapacity. But, if you rely on the coercive power of government to impose restraints, this will inevitably lead to a government that is too controlling, and you will end up with no liberty, just tyranny.

On the other hand, unless you have some effective restraint, you end up with something equally dangerous – licentiousness – the unbridled pursuit of personal appetites at the expense of the common good. This is just another form of tyranny – where the individual is enslaved by his appetites, and the possibility of any healthy community life crumbles.

Edmund Burke summed up this point in his typically colourful language: Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put chains upon their appetites....

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

So the Founders decided to take a gamble. They called it a great experiment.

They would leave “the People” broad liberty, limit the coercive power of the government, and place their trust in self-discipline and the virtue of the American people. In the words of Madison, “We have staked our future on the ability of each of us to govern ourselves…”

This is really what was meant by “self-government.” It did not mean primarily the mechanics

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by which we select a representative legislative body.

It referred to the capacity of each individual to restrain and govern themselves.

according to those enduring principles.

As Father John Courtney Murray observed, the American tenet was not that:

A supreme authority But what was the source of this internal controlling power? In a free republic, those restraints could not be handed down from above by philosopher kings.

Instead, social order must flow up from the people themselves – freely obeying the dictates of inwardly-possessed and commonly-shared moral values. And to control wilful human beings, with an infinite capacity to rationalise, those moral values must rest on authority independent of men’s will – they must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being.

In short, in the Framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people – a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and man-made law and who had the discipline to control themselves

“Free government is inevitable, only that it is possible, and that its possibility can be realized only when the people as a whole are inwardly governed by the recognized imperatives of the universal moral order.”

How does religion promote the moral discipline and virtue needed to support free government?

Rules to live by First, it gives us the right rules to live by. The Founding generation were Christians. They believed that the Judeo-Christian moral system corresponds to the true nature of man. Those moral precepts start with the two great commandments – to Love God with your whole heart, soul, and mind; and to Love Thy Neighbour as Thyself.

But they also include the guidance of natural law – a real,

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transcendent moral order which flows from God’s eternal law – the divine wisdom by which the whole of creation is ordered. The eternal law is impressed upon, and reflected in, all created things. From the nature of things we can, through reason, experience, discern standards of right and wrong that exist independent of human will.

Modern secularists dismiss this idea of morality as other-worldly superstition imposed by a killjoy clergy. In fact, JudeoChristian moral standards are the ultimate utilitarian rules for human conduct. They reflect the rules that are best for man, not in the by and by, but in the here and now. They are like God’s instruction manual for the best running of man and human society.

By the same token, violations of these moral laws have bad, realworld consequences for man and society. We may not pay the price immediately, but over time the harm is real. Religion helps promote moral discipline within society. Because man is fallen, we don’t automatically conform

ourselves to moral rules even when we know they are good for us. But religion helps teach, train, and habituate people to want what is good. It does not do this primarily by formal laws – that is, through coercion. It does this through moral education and by informing society’s informal rules – its customs and traditions which reflect the wisdom and experience of the ages. In other words, religion helps frame moral culture within society that instills and reinforces moral discipline.

The rise of social pathologies I think we all recognize that over the past fifty years religion has been under increasing attack.

On the one hand, we have seen the steady erosion of our traditional Judeo-Christian moral system and a comprehensive effort to drive it from the public square. On the other hand, we see the growing ascendancy of secularism and the doctrine of moral relativism.

By any honest assessment, the consequences of this moral upheaval have been grim.

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Virtually every measure of social pathology continues to gain ground.

Along with the wreckage of the family, we are seeing record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic.

But what has replaced the Judeo-Christian moral system?

What is it that can fill the spiritual void in the hearts of the individual person? And what is a system of values that can sustain human social life?

The fact is that no secular creed has emerged capable of performing the role of religion.

As you all know, over 70,000 people die a year from drug overdoses. That is more casualties in a year than we experienced during the entire Vietnam War. I will not dwell on all the bitter results of the new secular age. Suffice it to say that the campaign to destroy the traditional moral order has brought with it immense suffering, wreckage, and misery.

And yet, the forces of secularism, ignoring these tragic results, press on with even greater militancy.

Among these militant secularists are many so-called “progressives.” But where is the progress? We are told we are living in a post-Christian era.

Scholarship suggests that religion has been integral to the development and thriving of Homo sapiens since we emerged roughly 50,000 years ago. It is just for the past few hundred years we have experimented in living without religion.

We hear much today about our humane values. But, in the final analysis, what undergirds these values? What commands our adherence to them?

The uncertain pendulum What we call “values” today are really nothing more than mere sentimentality, still drawing on the vapor trails of Christianity.

Now, there have been times and places where the traditional

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moral order has been shaken. In the past, societies – like the human body – seem to have a self-healing mechanism – a selfcorrecting mechanism that gets things back on course if things go too far.

The consequences of moral chaos become too pressing. The opinion of decent people rebels.

They coalesce and rally against obvious excess. Periods of moral entrenchment follow periods of excess. This is the idea of the pendulum. We have all thought that after a while the “pendulum will swing back.” But today we face something different that may mean that we cannot count on the pendulum swinging back.

The organised destruction of religion First is the force, fervor, and comprehensiveness of the assault on religion we are experiencing today. This is not decay; it is organised destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the “progressives,” have marshalled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment

industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values. These instruments are used not only to affirmatively promote secular orthodoxy, but also drown out and silence opposing voices, and to attack viciously and hold up to ridicule any dissenters.

One of the ironies, as some have observed, is that the secular project has itself become a religion, pursued with religious fervor. It is taking on all the trappings of a religion, including inquisitions and excommunication. Those who defy the creed risk a figurative burning at the stake – social, educational, and professional ostracism and exclusion waged through lawsuits and savage social media campaigns.

The pervasiveness and power of our high-tech popular culture fuels apostasy in another way. It provides an unprecedented degree of distraction. Part of the human condition is that there are big questions that should stare us in the face. Are we created or are we purely material accidents? Does our life have

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any meaning or purpose? But, as Blaise Pascal observed, instead of grappling with these questions, humans can be easily distracted from thinking about the “final things.”

Indeed, we now live in the age of distraction where we can envelop ourselves in a world of digital stimulation and universal connectivity. And we have almost limitless ways of indulging all our physical appetites.

The rise of the nanny State There is another modern phenomenon that suppresses society’s self-corrective mechanisms – that makes it harder for society to restore itself. In the past, when societies are threatened by moral chaos, the overall social costs of licentiousness and irresponsible personal conduct becomes so high that society ultimately recoils and reevaluates the path that it is on. But today – in the face of all the increasing pathologies – instead of addressing the underlying cause, we have the State in the role of alleviator of bad consequences.

We call on the State to mitigate the social costs of personal misconduct and irresponsibility.

So the reaction to growing illegitimacy is not sexual responsibility, but abortion.

The reaction to drug addiction is safe injection sites. The solution to the breakdown of the family is for the State to set itself up as the ersatz husband for single mothers and the ersatz father to their children. The call comes for more and more social programs to deal with the wreckage. While we think we are solving problems, we are underwriting them. We start with an untrammelled freedom and we end up as dependents of a coercive state on which we depend.

Interestingly, this idea of the State as the alleviator of bad consequences has given rise to a new moral system that goes hand-in-hand with the secularization of society. It can be called the system of “macromorality.” It is in some ways an inversion of Christian morality.

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Christianity teaches a micromorality. We transform the world by focusing on our own personal morality and transformation. The new secular religion teaches macro-morality.

One’s morality is not gauged by their private conduct, but rather on their commitment to political causes and collective action to address social problems. This system allows us to not worry so much about the strictures on our private lives, while we find salvation on the picket-line. We can signal our finely-tuned moral sensibilities by demonstrating for this cause or that.

Law as a weapon of the new orthodoxy A third phenomenon which makes it difficult for the pendulum to swing back is the way law is being used as a battering ram to break down traditional moral values and to establish moral relativism as a new orthodoxy.

Law is being used as weapon in a couple of ways. First, either through legislation but more frequently through judicial

interpretation, secularists have been continually seeking to eliminate laws that reflect traditional moral norms. At first, this involved rolling back laws that prohibited certain kinds of conduct. Thus, the watershed decision legalizing abortion. And since then, the legalization of euthanasia. The list goes on.

More recently, we have seen the law used aggressively to force religious people and entities to subscribe to practices and policies that are antithetical to their faith.

The problem is not that religion is being forced on others. The problem is that irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith. This reminds me of how some Roman emperors could not leave their loyal Christian subjects in peace but would mandate that they violate their conscience by offering religious sacrifice to the emperor as a god.

Similarly, militant secularists today do not have a live and let live spirit - they are not content to leave religious people alone to practice their faith. Instead, they

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seem to take a delight in compelling people to violate their conscience.

raise their children. They often do so without any opt out for religious families.

The attack on education: curricula, funding and coercive law

Indeed, in some cases, the schools may not even warn parents about lessons they plan to teach on controversial subjects relating to sexual behavior and relationships.

Ground zero for these attacks on religion are the schools. To me, this is the most serious challenge to religious liberty. For anyone who has a religious faith, by far the most important part of exercising that faith is the teaching of that religion to our children. The passing on of the faith. There is no greater gift we can give our children and no greater expression of love. For the government to interfere in that process is a monstrous invasion of religious liberty.

Yet here is where the battle is being joined, and I see the secularists are attacking on three fronts.

The first front relates to the content of public school curriculum. Many states are adopting a curriculum that is incompatible with traditional religious principles according to which parents are attempting to

This puts parents who dissent from the secular orthodoxy to a difficult choice: Try to scrape together the money for private school or home schooling, or allow their children to be inculcated with messages that they fundamentally reject.

A second axis of attack in the realm of education are state policies designed to starve religious schools of generallyavailable funds and encouraging students to choose secular options.

A third kind of assault on religious freedom in education have been recent efforts to use state laws to force religious schools to adhere to secular orthodoxy. We see the State requiring local public schools to insert themselves into

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contentious social debates, without regard for the religious views of their students or parents. In effect, these states are requiring local communities to make their public schools inhospitable to families with traditional religious values; those families are implicitly told that they should conform or leave.

At the same time, pressure is placed on religious schools to abandon their religious convictions. Simply because of their religious character, they are starved of funds – students who would otherwise choose to attend them are told they may only receive scholarships if they turn their sights elsewhere.

Simultaneously, they are threatened in tort and, eventually, will undoubtedly be threatened with denial of accreditation if they adhere to their religious character. If these measures are successful, those with religious convictions will become still more marginalized.

Personal renewal I do not mean to suggest that there is no hope for moral renewal in our country.

But we cannot sit back and just hope the pendulum is going to swing back toward sanity. As Catholics, we are committed to the Judeo-Christian values that have made this country great.

And we know that the first thing we have to do to promote renewal is to ensure that we are putting our principles into practice in our own personal private lives.

We understand that only by transforming ourselves can we transform the world beyond ourselves. This is tough work. It is hard to resist the constant seductions of our contemporary society. This is where we need grace, prayer, and the help of our church.

The Catholic education of children Beyond this, we must place greater emphasis on the moral education of our children.

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Education is not vocational training. It is leading our children to the recognition that there is truth and helping them develop the faculties to discern and love the truth and the discipline to live by it.

we can to promote and support authentic Catholic education at all levels.

We cannot have a moral renaissance unless we succeed in passing to the next generation our faith and values in full vigor.

The times are hostile to this.

Public agencies, including public schools, are becoming secularized and increasingly are actively promoting moral relativism. If ever there was a need for a resurgence of Catholic education – and more generally religiously-affiliated schools – it is today. I think we should do all

Finally, as lawyers, we should be particularly active in the struggle that is being waged against religion on the legal plane. We must be vigilant to resist efforts by the forces of secularization to drive religious viewpoints from the public square and to impinge upon the free exercise of our faith.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

This is an abridged version of a speech given to the Law School and the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, USA on Friday, October 11, 2019. The original can be accessed on: http://bit.ly/2pEExTX or seen on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/FnCXNydQs5A.

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Waging war on catastrophism

by Frank Furedi

F

rank Furedi is one of Great Britain’s leading cultural commentators. MercatorNet asked him to comment on the climate change demonstrations which have broken out across the UK.

of the media, the cultural elites, the celebrities etc are behind them and they enjoy tremendous cultural authority since eco-alarmism has become an integral part of the current zeitgeist.

_____________

To be fair to the protesters, it is scientists, notably the IPCC, who have been creating an apocalyptic vision of the future.

Assuming that their alarmist reports are true, aren’t the protests a rational political response to government inaction?

MercatorNet: Like it or loathe it, you have to admire Extinction Rebellion’s ability to capture the imagination of its followers. Were you surprised by its widespread appeal?

Frank Furedi: Not really.

These protestors are kicking against an open door. Almost all

I agree – if I thought extinction was imminent I too would be

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protesting – probably more forcefully than they.

Extinction Rebellion has occupied the moral high ground by projecting fear, even paralysing terror, of the future as the main issue of politics. What does this say about our culture? Does being scared witless somehow validate people’s lives?

I think the West has become estranged from itself to the point it does not think it has a future. Catastrophism has become a powerful force that continually creates a background noise. At the same time misanthropy is flourishing – which why the ecomelodrama is so influential.

What has happened to institutional authority – Parliament, the professions, teachers, the churches? They seem to have gone MIA in their role of reassuring the public.

Institutions have lost moral authority – and they look to

celebrities and environmental activists to provide them with a degree of legitimacy.

Sustainability has become the functional equivalent of sacred.

How does a culture of fear affect our ability to debate issues rationally?

Like everything else – we fear debate on the grounds that speech can hurt/offend its target. That is why an institution like a “safe space” can emerge; it offers a quarantine from criticism.

There seems to be a strong millenarian theme in the Extinction Rebellion protests: you have sinned, God’s cup of wrath is brimming over, God will punish you… It seems unkind to call it a death cult as some of its critics have. But is it fundamentalist Christianity in disguise?

No. Christianity might believe in the apocalypse but it also believes that it will be followed by transcendence. There is no

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transcendence in the ecocrusaders nightmare – just an end

education and the young grow up on a diet of alarmism. So at least in the short and medium term their influence is likely to grow and impact on a widening section of society.

There’s a danger of imagining that everyone shares these apocalyptic fears. Most of the demonstrators in London, at least, seem to be white and middle-class. Will force-feeding the public on a diet of fear deepen the social and political divides in British society?

Unfortunately the climate alarmists possess powerful cultural resources. Though they constitute a small minority their ideas are recycled in society through institutions like

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Frank Furedi is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent’s School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research. His most recent book is How Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the Twenty-First Century. This interview first appeared in MercatorNet and is reprinted under a Creative Commons license. The original article is available at: http://bit.ly/32C9tTh

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Enjoying the best of company: The Communion of the Saints

by Rev. Donncha Ó hAodha An unsurpassed image “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5). This metaphor of Jesus spoken at the Last Supper is powerful and timeless and invites frequent meditation. The vine and its branches speaks of the unheard of intimacy with our Lord, a real communion of life which surpasses the greatest of human hopes. We truly share the life of Christ. We are rooted in him (cf.

Col 2:7). We share his life-giving sap, the grace of the Holy Spirit.

We can truly say with St Paul: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20).

The vine and the branches also speak of the profound

communion among themselves of the branches of this one vine. The Christian faithful are intimately united since they share the life of the one Vine. They share the “divine sap” which is the Holy Spirit. This is the wonderful reality of the Communion of the Saints. As Monsignor Fernando Ocáriz has written: “We Christians, more than being many brothers and sisters, are one: ipse Christus [Christ himself]”.

A consoling dogma The vine and the branches speak therefore of the reality of the Church which “is in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race” (Lumen Gentium 1).

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In the month of November we are particularly immersed in this consoling mystery of the Communion of Saints, since we celebrate the Solemnity of All Saints, the Commemoration of all Souls and the Feast of All the Saints of Ireland. Besides we pray and offer suffrages for our loved ones who have died and for all the faithful departed. We are thus presented with the “big picture”, the immense horizon of all our brothers and sisters, of all places, times and cultures, intimately united in, with and through Christ. As Joseph Ratzinger wrote: “In the Body of Christ, death no longer works as a limit; the Body, past, present and future interpenetrate”.

In our spiritual life we are not alone. We sustain others on earth and in purgatory through our efforts to respond to God’s gracious invitation to grow in holiness. In turn, we are constantly supported and protected by the prayers and lives of so many brothers and sisters, on earth, in purgatory and in heaven. The Letter to the Hebrews encourages us: “Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is

set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (12:1-2).

The greatest family reunion “The term ‘communion of saints’ has two closely linked meanings: ‘communion in holy things’ (sancta), and ‘among holy persons’ (sancti)” (Catechism 948). In other words, the Communion of the Saints, which is the Church, is simultaneously the family of those who share the life of grace, and also their sharing in the sacraments (“holy things”).

The high-point of the Communion of Saints is the Eucharist, where all the faithful are intimately united in and through Jesus Christ, truly present in the “holiest of things”, the Blessed Sacrament.

The Mass is the greatest family reunion ever. Here, as Ronald Knox put it poetically, “we find ourselves at one with the living and the dead; there is a rush and a stir about us of the angels’ wings, and we hear the hum and bustle of the Church’s prayer, all part of ours, and ours part of it”.

In the Confiteor, we ask “Blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the Angels and Saints” and all our brothers and sisters to pray for us to the Lord our God. Even if there are very few people at a given Mass,

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the whole Church of all places and times is there gathered around the Lord. We sing the Holy, holy “with all the Angels and all the Saints”. We do not merely call to mind our heavenly brothers and sisters, but we realise that they are intimately united to us in the Eucharistic Sacrifice. We are really “in communion with those whose memory we celebrate” (Eucharistic Prayer I).

Holy Communion unites each of the faithful to Jesus in an ineffably close way. At the same time all who receive Jesus are made “one body in Christ” (cf. 1 Cor 12:12-14). In Holy Communion, Christ gives us his Eucharistic Body and makes us his Mystical Body. In every Celebration of the Eucharist the heavenly, earthly and purgatorial Church are one in adoration of God and love of each other (cf. St John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia 19).

towards heaven, which involves effort and struggles as we respond to God’s loving grace, we are not “lone rangers”.

In the mission entrusted to each and every baptized person of sharing and spreading the Gospel always and everywhere, we are not powerless or alone. The Christian can be tempted to be fearful when faced with the challenges of becoming a saint and of being a daring apostle in daily life. However, as Pope Francis reminds us, “feeling that all of heaven is in his favour, that the grace of God will not be lacking because Jesus is always faithful, then one can set out feeling calm and encouraged. We are not alone” (Audience, 21 June 2017).

Yes, thank God: we are not alone.

The Hope of being Saints In his catechesis of 21 June 2017, the Holy Father recalled that at Baptism “we were given the gift of the companionship of ‘big’ brothers and sisters - the saints who had taken this same path before us, who knew the same struggles and who live forever in God’s embrace. On the journey

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

FILMS

Initial release: 2019 Running time: 209 minutes Country: United States

The Irishman

by James Bradshaw

T

o say The Irishman has been hotly anticipated is an understatement. For over a decade, film lovers have been taunted by the knowledge that Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro were planning to make an epic crime film about the life of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran: the Philadelphia hitman who confessed to murdering the union leader Jimmy Hoffa. The longtime Teamsters Union president disappeared in 1975.

The circumstances of Hoffa’s death, and the whereabouts of his remains, have long been the subject of morbid speculation.

Hoffa’s rise to become one of the most powerful men in America and his subsequent fall was a

story made for the big screen. It took many years for this to come to pass, not to mention a budget of up to $200 million. It was worth the wait and worth the cost.

The Irishman traces the story of Frank Sheeran from his early steps into a life of crime. Initial forays into the criminal world see this Philadelohia truck driver fall under the influence of the leading Italian-American mobster Russell Bufalino (played by Joe Pesci). Soon, Sheeran is carrying out contract killings (“painting houses” in mob parlance) for Bufalino and others and it is not long until his talents are noticed by Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). What

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transpires between the three men over the following decades makes for an outstanding storyline.

The production of this film by Netflix has sparked much discussion. The fact that the film is being brought to the viewing public by Netflix rather than by one of the major Hollywood film studies could represent a turning point in the industry. Twenty years ago, TV drama was still regarded as being hopelessly inferior to film. The critical and commercial success of The Sopranos changed the entertainment industry forever, and the big studios are about to face another challenge.

The huge budget that Netflix was willing to devote to this project was in part necessitated by the use of expensive CGI technology to de-age the main cast and allow Pacino (who is 79) and De Niro and Pesci (who are both 76) to portray middle-aged characters.

Technology is nothing without talent, though. From start to finish, The Irishman is a case

study in excellence. The direction is vintage Scorsese and bears the usual hallmarks of his style: the wide narrative arc, the long tracking shots, the freeze frames, the frequent narration by the main character. Here, the world’s greatest living director reaches heights he has not ascended to since Casino.

This venture is a reunion for many of its cast and crew: Scorsese and De Niro, De Niro and Pesci, Pacino and De Niro.

But it is never boring or repetitive. It lasts for over three hours but does not feel all that long.

De Niro excels in the title role, an Irish-American gunman who thanks to CGI resembles Jimmy Conway of Goodfellas fame in more ways than one. Frank Sheeran is not the most complex character who De Niro has played. Sheeran is less expressive and more taciturn than Conway. He does not appear disturbed by his brutal crimes and he never grows too attached to those around him, swapping one wife for another with the viewer barely noticing

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(the lack of any impressive female characters is one of The Irishman’s only flaws) and gradually drifting away from the rest of the world.

Pacino’s character is probably the most rounded of the three.

Hoffa is vain and foolish. He sows the seeds of his own destruction early on and repeatedly fails to remove himself from a path which can only lead to one place. But there is goodness in him too, as shown by the bond he establishes with Sheeran’s estranged daughter, and in the trust he places in his friend, Frank.

But there is a depth to his performance that is reminiscent of the great man at the peak of his powers. Seeing De Niro’s best acting is enough to forget the last quarter of a century of B-list comedies. He is not the only star who rolls back the years. It has been two decades since Joe Pesci retired, and although he has been tempted back in the interim, here he shows just how badly he has been missed.

Age has taken its toll: there is no sign of the psychotic rage and energy he displayed in Goodfellas and Casino. But there does not need to be. His chemistry with De Niro is superb, as it always was before.

And by excelling in a new role as a reserved, calculating mob boss – one who calls the shots rather than carrying out the hits – Pesci shows just how incredibly talented and versatile he is.

What is it about the mob genre which results in such incredible performances? Why do audiences find movies about organised crime – particularly the Mafia – so engrossing?

Granted, the Mob’s ill-gotten wealth can appear glamorous.

But that is hardly what draws in the viewer: if wealth alone made for entertainment, there would be more movies about software engineers and investment bankers. There aren’t! Nor is it the violence that attracts people.

There is something deeper at work.

Crime on that level involves a type of double life which interests outside observers who could never countenance such

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an existence, but who find it compelling nonetheless. It’s not that “The Irishman” shoots people to make a living, or that he profits handsomely from doing so, it’s that he is laughing in a bowling alley with his daughters in the very next scene.

How? Why? The Italian Mob is particularly fascinating, given how ancient, ritualistic and familial it is. The best gangster movies inevitably culminate in the fraying of codes of honour, brothers betraying brothers. All that is here in spades. There is something more to The Irishman, also, something which lies at the heart of many of the films about the Mafia.

The influence of Catholicism on Scorsese’s work all throughout his career cannot be overstated.

This might seem strange considering how shockingly violent and profane Scorsese’s best movies have been. But there is a persuasive logic to this. In many popular films, death and violence are addressed in the most glib fashion. A slain character falls to the ground in dramatic fashion, to be followed

by another who is felled a fraction of a second later. We see death at a distance, far removed from its ugly reality. Not so with Scorsese’s work. A viewer of The Irishman or his earlier films is made to feel the pain of every victim. We see the spurt of blood as a bullet enters a person’s skull or as a knife is plunged into a defenceless torso. We see the red pool slowly growing around the lifeless body of the deceased. We see it because the director insists we see it.

As others have suggested, the violence in Scorsese’s movies is far from antithetical to the religious tradition in which he was raised. Life is sacred, and the taking of life must always be shocking, not matter who the victim is or what he has done.

Sometimes, the influence of Catholicism in Scorsese’s work is only present in mild doses, as with the sort of cultural Catholicism which ItalianAmerican life is imbued with: the baptism of a child or the presence of a crucifix on a wall.

Here it is much deeper. The film’s first long tracking shot includes a priest ministering to

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patients in a nursing home, while Sheeran sits on his own some distance away, shunning all human contact.

Towards the end, Bufalino’s church attendance surprises Sheeran. But at the very end, the same priest from earlier appears to be Sheeran’s only visitor, and the one who he has turned to as he reflects upon his life and on the life to come. Faced with their own mortality having taken so many lives, neither Pesci’s Bufalino nor De Niro’s Sheeran are fully capable of expressing remorse, and yet they know that they should. In spite of all they have done, we cannot but feel sympathy.

This is Scorsese at his best. This is cinema at its best.

Rating: 9/10

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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