Position Papers – October 2019

Number 532 October 2019 €3 · £2.50 · $4

A review of Catholic affairs

The problems of gender ideology MICHAEL KIRKE JENNIFER KEHOE

The canonization of John Henry Newman FR DONNCHA Ó hAODHA

Films: The Goldfinch

JOHN MULDERIG

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Number 532 · October 2019

Editorial

by Fr Gavan Jennings

In Passing: Mad dogs and Englishmen

by Michael Kirke

RTÉ reconstructs Daniel O’Connell

by James Bradshaw

Disturbing questions in the Pell case

by Margaret Hickey

Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius

by Fr Donncha Ó hAodha

Never Surrender! Oh, really?

by Jennifer Kehoe

Books: The Legacy of Irish Missionaries Lives On

by Fr Conor Donnelly

Books: Primal Screams: How The Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics

by Luma Simms

Films: The Goldfinch

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

2 3 5 12 16 21 29 31 38

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

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Editorial O

n Sunday, October 13, the much anticipated canonisation of John Henry Newman will take place in Rome. Newman will be the first English person who has lived since the seventeenth century to be officially recognised as a saint by the Catholic Church. That this is a great event for England is borne out by the fact that Prince Charles will attend the ceremony.

However the canonisation of Newman is also very significant on this side of the Irish Sea. For one, the Irish, and especially some of our nineteenth century bishops, can claim a degree of credit for the sanctity of Newman: they ensured that the years between 1851 and 1858 which he spent setting up a Catholic university in Ireland were painfully frustrating (and hence sanctifying!).

A great deal of his bitter frustration was caused by the differing conceptions of the role of the laity held by Newman and the Irish hierarchy. Newman’s appreciation of the laity was ahead of its time, and contributed to the the Second Vatican Council’s radical reappraisal of the role of the laity in the Church.

In contrast, the attitude of the Irish hierarchy was to treat the laity, as Newman put it, “like good little boys – told to shut their eyes and open their mouths and take what we give them”. Unfortunately the kind of Catholicism which was consolidated in Ireland during the nineteenth century was intensely clerical and anti-intellectual, and Newman’s efforts to establish a Catholic university here were severely hampered by precisely these features of Irish Catholicism.

Undoubtedly the storm to be unleashed on the Church in Ireland in the following century would never have been so severe had Ireland been more open to Newman’s insight regarding the importance of “an intelligent, well-instructed laity”. We can only hope that Newman has forgiven the Irish by now, and is interceding for us, in particular for the hierarchy of Ireland and for the students, staff and graduates of that university, now University College Dublin, whose founding cost him so dearly.

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In Passing: Mad dogs and Englishmen

by Michael Kirke

N

oel Coward’s famous song, Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun may need to be revisited – with a little bit of reworking – in the light of a recent report in the Daily Telegraph. It reports that a British watchdog, its Equality and Human Rights Commission, has a secret proposal on its desk to compel girls’ schools in England and Wales to admit boys who present themselves for admission as girls.

Or whatever. God help us. With clearly rabid watchdogs like that roaming the streets they better all say goodbye to the sun. A dark age has arrived.

The paper reports that Girls’ schools would have to admit transgender pupils under proposals being considered by the equalities watchdog. The confidential Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) draft guidance, leaked to The Telegraph, reveals schools could be set to consider admissions of trans students to single-sex schools on a “case-by-case approach”. Schools were supposed to be issued with the first official national guidelines on transgender children in March 2018. Following repeated delays, it has never been published. The Telegraph can now, however reveal details which have never before been made public.

Is it any wonder that the homeschooling movement is taking off at record speed?

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Is transgender madness a bottomless pit?

Gender-neutral terms checklist

The EHCR report says that: “A refusal to admit a trans pupil to a single-sex school which is the same as the trans pupil’s sex recorded at birth would be direct sex discrimination. Admitting such a pupil will not affect the school’s single-sex status.”

Forefathers – ancestors, forebears Gentleman’s agreement – unwritten agreement, agreement based on trust Girls (for adults) – women Housewife – shopper, consumer, homemaker (depends on context)

“A pupil who has transitioned, or wants to, must be allowed to continue to attend the school; to remove them would amount to direct gender reassignment discrimination.”

Manpower – human resources, labour force, staff, personnel, workers, workforce Man or mankind – humanity, humankind, human race, people.

The document also says: “An admission policy of only admitting pupils in accordance with their sex recorded at birth would particularly disadvantage trans pupils, and would be indirectly discriminatory against trans pupils, unless it could be demonstrated to be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.”

So, watch your language.

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.

For good measure, in case you did not know, these (courtesy of the Telegraph again) are samples of the new language being dictated to us:

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RTÉ reconstructs Daniel O’Connell

by James Bradshaw

R

TÉ’s recent two-part documentary Daniel O’Connell: Forgotten King of Ireland did a great service in highlighting O’Connell’s contribution to Irish history, and in particular, the role he played in laying the foundations for our parliamentary democracy. It did a great disservice, however, to The Liberator’s religious beliefs and those of his co-religionists.

a pilgrimage to Rome. The historians who were interviewed were in the main excellent.

Gifted academics such as Trinity College’s Professor Patrick Geoghegan provided fascinating insights into O’Connell’s life and times. Many highlights stood out, as when O’Leary stood in the House of Commons chamber and recounted the dramatic moment almost two centuries ago when the newly-elected MP for Clare calmly perused the anti-Catholic oath, before shocking the British politicians gathered there by boldly stating he would never recite it.

Let us start with the positives.

Forgotten King of Ireland was a wide-ranging, well-researched and skilfully produced documentary series. The presenter Olivia O’Leary did an excellent job of taking the viewer through O’Connell’s life, from his birth in Kerry in 1775 to his death in Genoa in 1847 while on

As O’Leary rightly pointed out, the Irish education system does a poor job of teaching students

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about O’Connell’s enormous importance. And as Ireland continues to slowly make its way through a long list of controversial centenaries, there could not be a better time to focus attention on a political leader who proved that national progress could be achieved without violence. O’Connell’s achievements are impossible to overlook. From the Treaty of Limerick onwards, the position of Ireland’s dispossessed and disenfranchised Catholics appeared as if it would never change. The Penal Laws enforced a system of antiCatholic bigotry designed to degrade the majority population, whose only prospects of material advancement depended on rejection of their faith.

Union and re-establish an Irish parliament marked the first real step on the road to eventual independence. O’Connell’s successes pointed the way towards further reforms in the late nineteenth century which undid many of the worst legacies of British misrule in Ireland.

Without him, there could have been no Home Rule movement, no Parnell, no holding the balance of power in Westminster.

Above all else, he accomplished all this without violence.

Recognising Ireland’s numerical inferiority and material poverty compared to Britain, O’Connell wasted no time on vain hopes of armed rebellion. Blood sacrifice held no appeal for him. He would risk his life, but no one else’s.

O’Connell was born into the old Catholic gentry which had lost its titles but preserved its nobility. He was not made to bow. His Catholic Association was a mass movement that brought great pressure on the British government, and his election as an MP cemented his status as the chosen leader of a risen people. Afterwards, his campaign to repeal the Act of

“Not for all the universe contains would I, in the struggle for what I conceive my country’s cause, consent to the effusion of a single drop of blood except my own.”

Later generations of republican militants would pour scorn upon this approach, and in the

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documentary, Sinn Féin’s Eoin Ó Broin criticises O’Connell for cancelling a planned mass demonstration at Clontarf which the British government were preparing to prevent using force.

But the mere fact that Ó Broin (currently) rejects the use of violence in pursuit of Irish freedom is an implicit endorsement of O’Connell’s approach, one which serves as a more morally defensible model for modern-day Irish politics.

people was right until they suddenly decided it was wrong.

A Fine Gaeler standing under a portrait of Michael Collins will denounce Gerry Adams. A Sinn Féiner will reply by denouncing Michael Collins and De Valera for abandoning the struggle, forgetting of course that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness did the exact same thing.

O’Connell’s consistent strategy of incremental progress through non-violent means stands as a challenge to the militants who followed him. Just as O’Leary rightly suggests, it was little wonder then that the founders of the Irish state were not eager to remember him, or to afford The Liberator the place in the national pantheon which he deserves.

The attitude of the main Irish political parties to political violence is rather muddled after all. Fine Gael believes that physical force republicanism in defiance of the will of the majority of Irish people was right up until 1921 or so. Fianna Fáil believes that physical force republicanism in defiance of the will of the majority of Irish people was right up until around 1923. Sinn Féin believes that physical force republicanism in defiance of the will of the majority of Irish people was right up until 1998 or thereabouts.

We are nearing the centenary of the foundation of the Irish state, and it is long past time that this wrong was righted and RTÉ and Olivia O’Leary deserve enormous praise for (hopefully) starting this necessary process of revisionism. Unfortunately though, there was another far less creditable agenda at play in this programme, one that is becoming a hallmark of an

The parties differ on this point, but only by degree: killing

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increasing amount of the state broadcaster’s historical output.

At the outset, O’Leary acknowledged the widespread view that O’Connell’s importance has been diminished by modern society’s secularism: a Catholic Liberator has little appeal in post-Catholic Ireland.

religion and conforming to the established Anglican church. He did not. Catholic Emancipation need not have occurred at all had O’Connell simply denied his religion on the floor of House of Commons before taking his seat.

He did not.

Ireland’s lowly position in the United Kingdom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – and the structure of institutional bigotry which prevented ordinary Irish Catholics from playing a full part in politics, commerce and education and much else besides – did not stem from cultural or ethnic difference.

There is nothing especially problematic about this from the standpoint of an historian, even one who does not share the beliefs of the subject of their historical study and investigation. The challenge for a serious historian is to put aside one’s own personal beliefs and to attempt to fully understand the past, without distorting the beliefs or motivations of those who have gone before us. On virtually all of these points, the producers of this documentary fail miserably.

It stemmed from the stubborn three hundred year refusal of the Irish people to substitute the religion of Henry VIII for the religion of Saint Patrick. Every form of pressure was exerted on them to do so, and they had every incentive to renounce Catholicism, and yet they did not. Throughout both episodes of Forgotten King of Ireland, the show’s presenter went to great lengths to minimise, ignore or twist the record of Daniel O’Connell in this respect.

The driving force behind a great deal of O’Connell’s political actions was Catholicism.

Whether we are post-Catholic or not, this is the historical truth of the matter. As a young man, Daniel O’Connell could have profited – as many others did – from renouncing the Catholic

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In the first episode, O’Leary visits O’Connell’s grave in Glasnevin Cemetery where his dying requests are immortalised on the wall: My body to Ireland, my soul to Heaven and my heart to Rome. A Catholic who dies on a religious pilgrimage to Rome in the company of his personal chaplain, and who wills that his heart be removed so that it at least can reach the city, is surely committed. It is hard to negate his own words, but this longtime RTÉ journalist did her best.

the ideals of Irish liberalism, circa 2019.

The viewer is told with great solemnity that O’Connell was a supporter of the separation of Church and State. He certainly was, but not in the modern-day sense of opposing any role for religion in public life. The established church of the day – the Church of Ireland (Anglican) – forced Irish Catholics to pay heavy tithes for the maintenance of a religion not their own.

O’Connell worked with others to chip away at this injustice, and used his legal skills to successfully defend many Catholics who were caught up in the raucous Tithe War. O’Leary lamented the fact that after his death the Church became the main upholder of O’Connell’s legacy, and informed those watching that O’Connell said he was a Catholic, but not a Papist.

This too requires a good deal more clarification than it received here. During O’Connell’s lifetime, the Pope was also ruler of a large portion of what is now Italy. Catholics elsewhere were subjected to the false (but given the circumstances, somewhat

“I always thought his heart probably was dedicated to Ireland, to be quite frank, rather than to Rome,” she says, while standing over his coffin. “But then we would claim that, wouldn’t we?”

Indeed they would.

The remainder of the documentary is marked by repeated references to a sort of vague anti-clericalism on O’Connell’s part, as if the strategy to rejuvenate The Liberator’s reputation required his post-mortem conversion to

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understandable) charge that they were loyal to a foreign ruler.

(Because all religious people are terribly afraid)

Like most other Irish people then, O’Connell separated temporal issues from spiritual ones, but never at the expense of rejecting his own Church. As a child, his family had gone to great efforts to ensure he would receive a proper Catholic education, and he supported religious schooling, going as far as to insist that denominational education exist at university level as well.

“…when he was clinging to his chaplain that he would have become very much more the obedient servant of the Church…”

In the coming years, RTÉ is likely to focus a great deal of energy on minimising the rights of Catholics to educate their children in the Faith, but they cannot suggest that Daniel O’Connell was on their side.

O’Leary’s emphasis on the positive nature of O’Connell’s religion verged between condescension and offensiveness when she attempted to explain away the circumstances of his death on the road to Rome.

“Now it may have been at the very end of his life, afraid of death, fearful…”

(Clinging and obedient…)

“I think the evidence is there that he was a man of independent mind. While being a Catholic, he was a man of independent mind.”

(A noble exception to all the other sheep) Oversensitivity is to be avoided when discussing history.

Ultimately, everyone has biases and these impact on how we perceive the past, just as they affect how we look at the world around us today. The issue here is that this was not an isolated incident, as in recent years RTÉ has repeatedly attempted to weaponise the past through antiCatholic distortions. In 2016, RTÉ spent €6 million of taxpayers’ money on a five-part historical drama about the 1916 Rising called Rebellion. RTÉ’s portrayal of Easter Week

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downplayed the religious faith of those who fought, exaggerated the socialist element, depicted a young women going to England after becoming pregnant out-ofwedlock (what on Earth could they have been alluding to?) and featured a bishop telling a priest that the main concerns of the Church were in preserving its property and treasure amidst the destruction. In 2019, the station broadcast Resistance, a drama about the War of Independence that involved a made-up account of a child being taken from its parents and sold by nuns to rich Americans (the episode was based on a real-life incident which involved a custody battle, but in which cold-hearted nuns did not feature, at all).

Spotting a pattern, at the,time, a wag speculated online that a future RTÉ drama about Bloody Sunday could well involve nuns shooting into the crowd at Croke

Park. Time will tell what lengths RTÉ might go in future to insult an enormous number of people whose taxes and television licence fees are spent on allowing them to function.

Daniel O’Connell deserves to be remembered as he was: his country’s uncrowned King. A Catholic Irishman, who would not abandon his faith or his country. His life and deeds should be reflected upon, and not distorted by a broadcaster seeking to control not just the present but the past as well. At a time when RTÉ is pleading for €55 million more in annual funding from the taxpayer, the station should reflect on whether Catholics are a valued part of their target audience, or whether they are a part of the audience to be relentlessly targeted.

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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Disturbing questions in the Pell case

by Margaret Hickey

F

rom the evidence in the public domain before the trial of Cardinal George Pell, his conviction seemed very unlikely.

A historic case, a single uncorroborated witness who was also the alleged victim. An implausible allegation of sexual attack in a most unlikely context.

A number of credible defence witnesses, present at the time of one of the alleged attacks, to strongly support the implausibility argument.

“Beyond reasonable doubt” seemed a low enough bar for the defence to scale. But testimony and evidence played out in a courtroom take on a different colour when personalities stamp them. The victim’s “compelling”

credibility swept aside the problem presented by implausible circumstances. For both jury and panel of appellate judges the testimony of the victim, “a witness of truth” tipped the scales against all other considerations.

Subjective weighing up is a major element in delivering a verdict. Vocal inflexion, body posture, pitch and speed of responses, impressions of sincerity or the opposite all combine to convey the jury their verdict. Usually however there is harder evidence to inform and underpin those impressions. But in cases, like Pell, where there is not, there are questions that need to be raised.

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To what extent can bias, conscious or unconscious, play a part in jury deliberations?

Academic disciplines have developed many controls to ensure objectivity in research and continue to refine those controls because it recognises, amongst other things, how subjectivity can distort vision and perception. We all have habitual ways of observing and judging. We all absorb prejudices from lived experience and the culture around us.

Are there sufficient controls inherent in the twelve person jury system? Has the test of time led societies to conclude that a group of twelve random but vetted peers of the accused contains the checks needed to correct bias? Are these checks deemed sufficient to withstand the impact of public opinion and expectation on a jury’s deliberations especially when it involves high profile individuals? More especially when a jury is struggling to reach consensus?

These questions matter. They matter when a jury arrives in full

public sight at a verdict based on supported evidence, forensics, and alibis. It matters vastly more when everything hangs on the unsupported testimony of a single witness. It matters in a very significant way when, on grounds of compassion for the alleged victim, there is an almost complete media black out of the alleged victim’s testimony. A more fundamental question implicit here is whether a “one size” system can reasonably be expected to deliver justice whatever the circumstances of the case.

Such questions need to be pressed because there is nothing remotely scientific about the choice of twelve rather than another number. It was chosen back in 725 A.D. by a Welsh king, Morgan of Glamorgan because Jesus chose twelve apostles. It has become largely an unquestioned norm ever since. The Ancient Greeks who developed the system had several hundred strong juries.

Today, juries of as little as six are used in some US states for less serious crimes. Judicial systems also vary requirements

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for majorities, usually demanding unanimity for serious crimes. However, the twelve strong jury is considered the largely unexamined gold standard.

available, doesn’t always agree with a lower.

Research by eighteenth century French philosopher, Nicholas de Condorcet, concluded that a jury with six members was more likely to reach a guilty verdict where the evidence was less conclusive than a jury of twelve.

This suggests that the larger the jury and the more diverse the views, the more difficult it will be to reach consensus. The harder it will be to eliminate “reasonable doubt”.

In the Pell case, it took two juries to reach a verdict. A majority of ten to two voted for acquittal at the first trial. The second trial reached the required unanimous verdict but rather extraordinarily that verdict was a guilty one.. On appeal, the most experienced and arguably the best qualified of the panel of three appellate judges dissented with his colleagues. In the light of the earlier trials, it is reasonable to ask if a different panel of judges might have reversed the decision?

In more recent times, statistical modelling has been used to establish the accuracy of verdicts. Conclusions have proven elusive for many reasons.

Firstly, actual juries work in camera so the dynamics of their deliberations can’t be monitored. The appeal process offers one measure of their accuracy. But that too is problematic because a higher court of appeal, where such is

The workings of the law do not always deliver justice. Cardinal Pell has had due process under Australian law but it is indeed questionable if he has had justice. Justice is blind to partiality but the system that delivers justice must be visible and held to question and account. That justice must be done and seen to be done is a foundational principle of jurisprudence. Cardinal Pell's

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trial did not deliver on that essential point.

Subjective assessment alone is inherently unreliable.

Corporations as well as individuals can be captured by convincing liars. There is no need to cite examples. There are the inherent biases we all bring to listening and perceiving, whether we are hearing truth or lies. When these factors are compounded by a social climate that predisposes a jury in a particular direction, then the absence of hard, verifiable evidence should surely require a strengthening of safeguards within the system. Unanimity from a jury of twelve secured the conviction of Cardinal Pell. If

unanimity from the appellate bench was required rather than a majority vote, he would now be a free man.

Cases like this throw up questions that put the judicial system on trial in the minds of fair-minded people. The jury of public opinion will always be out on the question of Cardinal Pell’s guilt or innocence not because there were strong arguments and evidence on both sides but because there simply weren’t enough of either.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Margaret Hickey has written articles on social, cultural and faith issues for The Irish Examiner, Human Life Review (US),The Irish Times, The Furrow and The Irish Catholic.

She is a mother of three and lives with her husband in Blarney.

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Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius

by Fr Donncha Ó hAodha

An immense grace The canonization of John Henry Newman is an immense grace for many reasons. His humility and fortitude, his patience and perseverance, his commitment to the truth and to conscience, his love for Jesus and his Church, his devotion to Our Lady, his theological endeavours and commitment to education, his exemplary priestly life and care for the poor, are all so many beauties which will shine more brightly in the sky of the Church and will encourage the People of God towards holiness.

Among all these blessings The Dream of Gerontius is also well worth noting and savouring. His longest and most successful

poem, it was written in January 1865. He told a friend afterwards: “It came into my head to write it, I really can’t tell how. And I wrote on till it was finished, on small bits of paper, and I could no more write anything else by willing it than I could fly”. Indeed Gerontius has a movement all of its own. A dramatic and powerful text, it describes the journey of an elderly Catholic man, Gerontius, from the moment of his death until his judgement. It is a poem, a dream and a prayer and invites reading, rereading and meditation.

A literary masterpiece From the start Gerontius had immense appeal, and not just

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among Catholics. Gladstone who was a devout Anglican wrote to Newman in 1868: “I own that it seems to me the most remarkable production in its own very high walk since the unapproachable Paradiso of Dante”. The Free Churchman, General Charles Gordon, who died in 1885 at the taking of Khartoum, used the poem in his very last moments, marking with a pencil all the passages which struck him regarding death and prayer. In 1900 the composer Edward Elgar put Gerontius to music in which was his greatest choral and orchestral work. It was also the composition he most prized in his life. As he confided to a friend: “I think you will find Gerontius far beyond anything I have yet written – I like it … and have written my own heart’s blood into the score”.

Newman’s poem is full of literary value, variety and colour. The language at times moves slowly and other times takes on a swift pace. The sounds convey the atmosphere at each step of the journey.

There are litanies and hymns,

most notably Praise to the Holiest in the height. Because it is a “dream” Gerontius does not make everything explicit about the soul’s journey from death bed to Purgatory. For this reason the poem invites personal reflection and prayer. The overall framework of the poem is a dialogue between the soul of Gerontius and his faithful guardian angel, who accompanies him to the entrance to Purgatory.

Though a literary masterpiece, Newman’s poem appealed and continues to appeal to people above all by its religious theme: the mystery of death and judgement. For example the description of the separated soul, surely a near-ineffable concept, is striking. Straight after death Gerontius says: “I went to sleep; and now I am refreshed. / A strange refreshment: for I feel in me / An inexpressive lightness, and a sense / Of freedom, as I were at length myself, / And ne’re had been before. / How still it is! (…)

Ah! Whence is this? What is this severance? / This silence pours a solitariness / Into the very

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essence of my soul; / And the deep rest, so soothing and so sweet, / Hath something too of sternness and of pain, / For it drives back my thoughts upon their spring / By a strange introversion, and perforce / I now begin to feed upon myself, / Because I have nought else to feed upon.”

intensely personal in so far as we are privileged witnesses to the unique experience of Gerontius in the sublime moment of transition into the next life, the text is constantly full of others who lovingly accompany the old man on his journey, especially those praying around his deathbed, and his guardian angel and the other angels.

Accompanied solitude Gerontius is an extraordinarily rich text and contains many aspects of Catholic teaching and perspectives for prayer. Here we might focus on one aspect of the drama of the old man’s death and entrance into the next life.

This we could call the “accompanied solitude” of a Christian’s death. Death is a profoundly personal event.

Everyone dies alone. At the same time, within the Communion of the Saints, within the Church, we are never alone, in life or in death. Communion with Christ always means communion with all those who are united in Christ.

Newman expresses this consoling reality in two ways in particular. While the poem is

The pilgrim Church at prayer The poem opens with Gerontius’ realization: “JESU, MARIA – I am near to death, / And though art calling me; I know it now”.

Shortly after he asks his friends for prayers: “‘Tis death, - O loving friends, your prayers! – ‘tis he! (…) This it is my dearest, this; / So pray for me, my friends, who have not strength to pray”.

This is followed by the first of several litanies, which echo the liturgy and contain invocations to Mary and the saints, and appeal to God’s mercy in virtue of the mysteries of Jesus’ life: “By Thy birth, and by Thy Cross, / Rescue him from endless loss. / By Thy death and

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thy burial, / Save him from a final fall; / By thy rising from the tomb, / By thy mounting up above, / By the Spirit’s gracious love, / Save him in the day of doom.”

The faithful presence of the earthly Church is also manifest in the priest who recites the final Commendation as Gerontius is dying. Towards the end of the poem the prayer of the faithful on earth is heard again. The Angel tells Gerontius’ soul: “Thy judgment now is near, for we are come / Into the veiled presence of our God”. The soul replies: “I hear the voices that I left on earth”. The Angel explains: “It is the voice for friends around thy bed, / Who say the ‘Subvenite’ with the priest. / Hither the echoes come”.

At the beginning and at the end of the poem, Gerontius is supported by the prayers of the living. Newman shows that the Communion of Saints is a reality in life, in death and beyond death. As the council teaches: “All indeed who are of Christ and who have his Spirit form

one Church and in Christ cleave together” (Lumen Gentium 49).

His faithful angel In speaking of how the angels, and especially the guardian angel accompanies the soul, Newman is echoing a long tradition held by many saints and mystics including Saints Thomas Aquinas, Bernardine of Sienna, Catherine of Genoa and Francis de Sales.

Gerontius’ Angel introduces himself with the words: “My work is done, / My task is o’er, / And so I come, / Taking it home, / For the crown is won, / Alleluia, / For evermore.”

Throughout Gerontius’ journey the Angel is his faithful guide and always speaks to him with great love and tenderness. The poem ends with these words of the Angel, which again express the “accompanied solitude” of death within the Communion of the Saints: Softly and gently, dearest, sweetest soul, In my most loving arms I now enfold thee,

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And, o’er the penal waters, as they roll,

And Masses on the earth, and prayers in heaven,

I poise thee, and I lower thee, and I hold thee.

Shall aid thee at the Throne of the Most Highest.

And carefully I dip thee in the lake,

Farewell, but not forever! brother dear,

And though, without a sob or a resistance,

Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow;

Dost through the flood thy rapid passage take,

Swiftly shall pass the night of trial here,

Sinking deep, deeper, into the dim distance.

And I will come and wake thee on the morrow”.

Angels, to whom the willing task is given,

Newman said that the Dream of Gerontius “was written by accident – and it was published by accident”. A providential and wonderful “accident” indeed.

Shall tend, and nurse, and lull thee, as thou liest;

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

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Never Surrender! Oh, really?

by Jennifer Kehoe

S

ome years ago we had gerbils.

We had this idea that if the children showed commitment toward little things we could trust them with the greater thing of a dog. It’s not a fair test. In fairness, gerbils are boring little creatures by and large. They don’t interact, you can’t teach them much and they’re a little bit too similar to vermin to really win hearts. Our children hadn’t really asked for them in the way they had begged and pleaded for a dog. I suppose you could say I imposed the “wee beasties” on them hoping they wouldn’t notice that they weren’t dogs. Well they weren’t so easily fooled and lost interest in them pretty fast.

That is to say all for one child, our youngest. A lion-hearted little creature, once she loves it is for always and she loved those little “mice”. As a toddler she would let them out of their cage to play with her …. have you ever tried catching two gerbils running in opposite directions while a toddler squeals with joy at the spectacle. I had to padlock them in. Then she would read them stories, push their cage to wherever she was playing so they could see her and as they got older and less active they were happy to sit and watch the cute YouTube videos she would put on my phone and hold to to their window for them to enjoy.

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Gerbils don’t have a long life span, a few years. Ours lived slightly over expectation as even though I had little interest, they were little creatures with just one life which we had freely taken upon ourselves. We looked after them well and they had a good life. Well finally one, then another “went on holiday” never to return and we were left with one lone sleepy gerbil. One morning Little Girl was doing her usual check when her older sisters tried to explain to her that the little object of her childish affection was more than asleep.

“I’m afraid he’s not asleep, he’s dead.”

“He IS asleep!! I've seen him do this before, he’ll wake UP!” “He’s not going to wake up, he’s gone to heaven with all the other little pets.”

“YOU might give up… I NEVER give up!!”

Even in the face of stark evidence this child believed that her will would prevail. She didn’t like something therefore her will could make it otherwise. Her

stout protestations reminded me of Sir Winston Churchill’s “We will NEVER surrender!'

Why do I tell this story, you may ask. I’ll tell you why. I do a lot of driving these days and a lot of driving means a lot of thinking. I have been thinking about our post-Christian, post-truth culture and, in particular about the catastrophic blow it has wrought upon the relationship between men and women. The recent confusion about what it even means to be a man or a woman seems to have appeared overnight, a new fashionable ideology with shallow roots.

Unfortunately, the roots of the gender movement are far from shallow and have been incubating for many decades. An entire culture does not embrace an extraordinarily fantastical idea, such as that a man can be a woman, unless it has been slowly and imperceptibly prepped for such acceptance. The emperor’s subjects did not suddenly become blind to his nakedness, they had been already prepared to be so foolishly duped by fear of the opinion of others, fear of standing out from the crowd, fear

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of this, fear of that … to the point that their fears overrode truth so they cheered and gushed and gasped at the non existent grandeur of the Emperor’s “gowns”.

Not one person looking at the emperor saw anything but his naked body and his bloated grotesque vanity, yet every single one was happy to proclaim otherwise. “Beautiful clothes, gorgeous … fabulous even!” Yes, fabulous, oh so fabulous. That “fabulous” movement where seedy men dress as hideous demonic perversions of women and young mothers are unbelievably tricked into thinking it’s somehow a good idea to allow their children to be groomed by these men under the guise of “story-time”. How can we not see the naked emperor in this? Our culture is cheering the phenomenon of child drag queens and the mutilation and sterilisation of ever younger children by the transgender craze. In fact our culture cheers everything which rebels against natural order. We have been so well marinaded we are overcooked.

Every story has a beginning. I suggest that the beginning of this goes right back to the actual beginning. To Genesis. God’s design for mankind was the perfect fit. A mutual delight in the other without conflict, male and female he created them.

After the fall this was distorted: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed” (Gen 3:15).

Why did Adam and Eve don some sort of covering for their bodies? Before the fall each only willed the good of the other, the gaze of Adam held no danger to the naked Eve. The naked Adam had no shame because his body was for the good of his wife. His gaze held no self interest. Their differences were completely in harmony, no jealousy, no pride, no grasping of the other for self interest. Adam was what Eve was not and she was what Adam was not. And then things went awry.

Adam’s desires were no longer for his wife but for his own satiation. Eve no longer wanted to be helpmate. They covered their bodies because it was his body which manifested his maleness, what made him MAN. Eve’s body was what manifested

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her femaleness … what made her WOMAN. Adam as man became inclined to dominate, Eve as woman became resentful … enmity between the two. Man and woman have been hornlocked in the battle to some extent ever since.

And here’s where I get back to the little girl and her protestations that she will NEVER give in. She is a little girl, not an ounce of guile. Children under the age of reason are to some extent a mirror of our original state. Parents smile

endearingly at the uninhibited nakedness of the toddler after a bath or on a beach. We smile and say “The innocence of Adam… Oh for such innocence.” Even though innocent, as a child of such parents she has inherited the human tendency “I will never give in.” Man and woman are deadlocked, each rebelling against the natural order, each inflicting unhappiness on themselves and on the other. Yet somewhere in us we long for the original harmony. As women, we long for release from the underlying resentment of being

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“looked” at, we wish we didn’t feel so resentful at the label “helpmate”. As men, we long for a release from the suspicion with which the world views us. We long for a release from selfcentred longings and from our wrongful concept of superiority.

We know things aren’t quite right.

adoring the golden calf. Oh my goodness! What a bunch!

I'm currently reading the “Bible” with my nine year old. It’s an excellent graphic-novel style presentation which is perfect for that age. (The Action Bible. God’s Redemptive Story. Ill by Sergio Cariello) I’ll admit I’d never actually tackled the Old Testament chronologically before, what an exciting tale!! My little daughter and I are currently wandering in the desert with the Hebrew people – Moses has just broken the tablets bearing the Ten Commandments. Who would blame him? What a rum lot the Hebrews were. Complain, complain, complain. Unfaithful, ungrateful, self-interested….

Remind you of anything? It reminds ME of every single generation since time began.

Literally Moses had barely turned his back and the Hebrews were

Every generation has had it’s Golden Calf. I think it’s fair to say that our current era’s Golden Calf is our EGO. Like the child who thought she could will the impossible and make it possible, we think we have domination over the impossible. In our inflated sense of entitlement and self interest we see even our bodies and our nature to be impediments over which we can impose our will. Nowhere more is this war waged than between the sexes. No, I tell a lie. Our war is no longer simply between the sexes, but precisely with sex itself. What is the greatest pariah in the Western world today than a woman who is happy to be a woman, who is happy to embrace her fertility, to care for her children and to love, care for and support her husband? What is considered more demeaning than for a woman to “identify” as wife?

Not much, except a wife who is financially dependent on a man and is happy to make him dinner.

Women as a whole reject their own bodies and their lifenurturing capabilities. We no

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longer see anything special in the feminine. Not alone that, we no longer see anything special in the masculine either. The marketleader of razor blades was only reflecting current thought when they made their patronising antiman advert. The ensuing boycott to the sum of eight billion dollars was at least an encouraging indication of the remnant of some sort of common sense.

Our Ego-God has one commandment: Non Serviam. I will not serve. I will not submit to nature, to my body, to God and,

by Jinny, I’ll not serve any man!

A few years ago I was at Sunday Mass when the reader announced from the lectern “There will be no second reading today”, closed the book and walked away. Three guesses which reading was too choking for him that he felt need to censor the word of God? Actually one guess. Got it in one.

St Paul. Oh St Paul, how you set the cat amongst the pigeons when you wrote those words. The most misinterpreted, the most misquoted, the most reviled passage from the entire Bible: Ephesians 5. A whole passage reduced to a one line monstrosity:

“Wives, submit to your husbands.”

Oh dear.

Such a problematic one liner.

Remember we live in an age where to use the maximum 280 characters on Twitter means your tweet will be scrolled on by because it is just too long. St Paul did indeed write those words.

The thing is, he wrote a lot of other words both before and after them. As women, our rebellious selves recoil from such subservience. As men, our fallen nature grasps at those words as licence to rule and dominate, even to cruelty. For generation after generation the misinterpretation of the role of husband as head and the role of wife in submission has caused untold damage to families. The idea that a husband should dominate his wife is unbecoming to any Christian. The idea that a wife submits to her husband to the point that simple household decisions must be approved by him is equally unbecoming for any Christian.

Neither of these extremes is correct. Even a simple reading of Ephesians 5: 21-32 rubbishes

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these theories. Pope St John Paul II has unpacked this passage in such a beautiful and freeing way.

For the sake of this piece not becoming unwieldy, the reference is: Theology of The Body, Number 89. General audience of August 11, 1982.

In brief, the Pope explains the original nature of marriage “In the beginning, it was not so.”

Husband and wife are equally called to submission, a mutual full gift of themselves to the other. There is no humiliation in submission in this context. God created man and woman as

equal. Equal and different.

Catholicism recognises marriage as a reflection of the Holy Trinity, a prefiguring of our ultimate union with God. Within The Blessed Trinity we know that God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are equal. All God, none less or more God than the other two persons. And yet, within that equal trinity, God the Son is subject to the Father, God the Holy Spirit is sent by Jesus and thereby clearly subject to him. God the Father is Father, the head. In creating woman subject to her husband and him as the head God is not reducing

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one and elevating the other. If that was true, it would mean an inequality within God himself and we know this cannot be.

Our culture is ailing. False ideologies always bring sickness and unhappiness to the world.

Marriage is ailing. Young people do not want to marry for many of the reasons above, even older couples are divorcing at an unprecedented rate. This is a tragedy not just for families but for the world. Pope John Paul famously said “As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.” The restoration of the whole world depends on the family. It depends on men becoming men of character. It depends on women reclaiming womanhood. It depends on husband and wife, family by family, husband and wife both “subject to one another out of reverence to Christ”.

ordinariness of families based on the mutual submission of husband to wife and wife to husband is precisely the instrument God can use to retune the entire orchestra of mankind. That means you, that means me. Ordinary and equal and loved by God. How do we know this? Because we are here.

In case you’re wondering.

Although they failed the gerbil test, our children are passing the little schnauzer test with flying colours, and so am I.

Well I think that’s lovely. There’s nothing to resent. G.K. Chesterton nailed it when he wrote “The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.” The

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jennifer Kehoe is a mother of six, living in Kildare, Ireland.

She runs a blog “Raindrops on my Head,” at http://jenniferkehoe.blogspot.ie.

BOOKS

The Legacy of Irish Missionaries Lives On

Matt Moran On Stream Publishers 2016 180 pages

by Fr Conor Donnelly

Photo: Presentation of the book launch

“I

mmeasurable� is word that crops up frequently in the course of this work and is very apt to describe what these Irish people have done. A relatively small number compared to the Irish population have been the backbone of the educational and health care system of numerous countries all over the world.

chairman of Misean Cara an amalgam of eighty-seven Irish missionary organisations for a number of years. That figure alone tells a story.

Matt Moran has made a stunning compilation of testimonies, many from secular sources, about so much good that has been done and touches on the enormity of the contribution. Each item mentioned probably deserves a book in itself. Here we have a helicopter view from a man who was at the centre of financial support from the Irish government. He was the

There is a contrast between what the author describes and the obscurity of what has been achieved, almost unknown in Ireland. Like Ronnie Delaney in 1956, who now knows about these historic achievements? This book could be on the reading list of secondary schools.

It is another motive to be proud of our Church and an important piece of Irish history. It reflects how as a country materially we may have had little to give the world but spiritually we have punched high. The background

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support of the ladies of Apostolic Work in so many dioceses receives high mention.

The role of faith and faith based groups is highlighted with surprising testimonies from government representatives. It is no longer a secret. The story needs to be told.

What is narrated in the book is impressive but the reality on the ground is much bigger, difficult to capture in words.

“It is worth noting that the Catholic Church is the largest non state provider of health care services in Kenya. It has an expansive network which consists of close to 500 healthcare units and over 50 community based orphanages and vulnerable children’s programs. Currently the Church has over 8,000 primary and secondary schools, five colleges, a fully fledged university, and also provides facilities for people with special needs. These programs have gone a long way to improve the life of the people of Kenya and the socio-economic development of the country” (Senator Beatrice Elachi quoted on page 41).

Looking ahead one wonders if Irish medical schools should create more rotations with hospitals in needy areas abroad and give students a more global perspective for their future careers. One can only be inspired by what Irish doctors and nurses have managed under difficult circumstances.

We need more books like this to make this great story known.

The story is the same in all other places. As a businessman and marketer Matt Moran brings his lay professionals skills to the fore in a refreshing, clear, articulate and enthusiastic narrative.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Fr Conor Donnelly qualified as a

medical doctor in University College Dublin in 1977 and worked for a year at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin. After ordination he has spent twenty-two years doing pastoral work in Asia, in the Philippines and Singapore. He is currently an assistant chaplain at Kianda School in Nairobi.

BOOKS

Primal Screams: How The Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics

by Luma Simms

I

n her new book, Mary Eberstadt argues that today’s identity politics arose from the deep anthropological wound slit open by the sexual revolution.

The ascent of identity politics reveals that people are having an identity crisis, and they are having an identity crisis because the sexual revolution resulted in family – and, by extension, individual – breakdown.

With Primal Screams: How The Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics, Mary Eberstadt rounds out her insightful analysis of the sexual revolution which she began with her first book, Home Alone America. We see a thinker who

Author: Mary Eberstadt Publisher: Templeton Press 192 pages

has grappled with her subject for an extended length of time, one who has understood its complexity and analyzed it from a variety of perspectives, a thinker who has given her readers a body of work to build on – one deserving of its praise.

In Primal Screams, Eberstadt argues that today’s identity politics arose from the deep anthropological wound slit open by the sexual revolution. That is, the ascent of identity politics reveals that people are having an identity crisis, and they are having an identity crisis because the sexual revolution resulted in family – and, by extension, individual – breakdown. This sent mankind

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throughout the West into a crisis. The fundamental question “Who am I?” can no longer be answered outright.

When it is answered, it is answered via ersatz identities.

Eberstadt calls this question “the preeminent psychic howl of our time.”

The book progresses much like her earlier work, How the West Really Lost God. It begins with a summary of the subject matter thus far, an outline of her new theory (“The Great Scattering”) where she demonstrates via social and cultural analysis the scattering of human families, three chapters of impressive supporting evidence to show the connection between The Great Scattering and the contemporary manifestation of identity politics, and a conclusion. Unlike her previous book, however, after the conclusion we are given an opportunity to read responses

by Rod Dreher, Mark Lilla, and Peter Thiel to her ideas. The book concludes with an afterword, in which Eberstadt gives a brief rejoinder.

Identity, Belonging, and Sin The question “Who am I?” has been with us since Eden, along with other questions like “Where do I belong?” “What is the purpose of my life?” and so on. These questions and others like them are the “quest for meaning which has always compelled the human heart,” as Pope John Paul II wrote in Fides et Ratio. There was a time when these questions were answered with more certainty through the many spheres of a person’s belonging: immediate and extended family, friendships, religion and religious community, and other spheres of attachments, including one’s city. As I wrote in National Affairs, the shared bonds between the people in these overlapping spheres shape each one’s identity, and gives the person a sense of self as part of a greater whole.

Today, man is in a grave identity crisis, not because he’s asking (or not asking) the question “Who am I?” but because the thickness of life that used to offer meaningful

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answers has thinned down to gauze.

happens in man’s historical arc, and it happens particularly within each person’s life journey.

What caused this thinning down? Thinkers and writers disagree, giving different answers to that question. I have argued that the root cause is a breakdown in our metaphysical understanding of the world and of the human person, and that the seeds for this loss were sown by Ockham and Luther, well before Descartes and Voltaire. As with the course of many ideas, some sow, others water, yet others reap the harvest. But why did this metaphysical ripping begin in the first place? Well, the answers to that must be taken all the way back to the Garden, when Adam and Eve appropriated to themselves the prerogative to decide what is good and what is evil.

Man’s history is a story of oscillations. We drift back and forth between times of allowing God his rightful claim to authority over that question, and times of ripping it out of his hands and claiming that authority for ourselves. This

In his response to Eberstadt, Mark Lilla complains that conservatives are “addicted to narratives of decline,” that our probing and analysis lead us to blame something or someone for our social ills. He goes on to make this insightful point: “The most convincing [reason for social problems] to me has always been the one that traces our woes back to choices made in Eden. But it’s hard to mobilize people politically to fight a sin we are all guilty of.

Politics demands serpents.” My response is: he’s right, to a point, but it’s both/ and. Eberstadt never writes that the one and only cause of identity politics is the sexual revolution. What she does do is show how profoundly that cause affected human society.

Ultimately, this is an origins problem – that is, the fact that politics demands serpents is itself one of the effects of our original sin.

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The Anxieties of Modern Man At the writing of Gaudium Et Spes in 1965, the Council fathers already witnessed man’s anxieties and gave us a summary of them. Man is unsure of himself, thanks to the discrepancy between the wealth and economic power of some people and the utter poverty of others, the discrepancy between unbounded freedom and new forms of “social and psychological slavery,” the rise of destructive ideologies, and the insatiable desire for a materially advanced world without spiritual progress.

During Vatican II, the Council fathers recognized that an anthropological problem was at hand. That anthropological problem was one of the causes (there are several) of the sexual revolution.

Eberstadt rightly points out that our identity crisis is tied to the radical individualism that has blossomed along with, and since, the sexual revolution. She shows further that the breakdown of the family has

been the lubricant that made this radical individualism possible. And although she did not say it this way, I believe she would agree that it works both ways. Individualism increased throughout American history, and as it increased, it created fertile ground for the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution was a sort of precipice, after which the family was in free fall. This in its turn increased the momentum of atomization, leading to radical individualism.

The sexual revolution didn’t come out of nowhere. It was a natural outcome of an unchecked democratizing spirit. It’s been most successful in democratic societies – nations – that incrementally shed elements of the traditional society since their initial move – most through a revolution – out of more traditional societies. It so happened that these Western countries have simultaneously become the wealthier countries in the world. Mark Lilla is correct to say, “it is hard to grasp the tremendous revolution in

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human societies – and, I would say, human psychology – brought about in our lifetimes by prosperity and technology.”

The love of material prosperity coupled with individualism (which in Tocqueville’s time was a neologism that he used to archetypal effect describing America) brings absolute havoc into a society. As a side note, social scientists have found a correlation between wealth and divorce. When, for example, a society is in a recession, the divorce rate plateaus and drops.

The Sexual Revolution and Traditional Societies

Yet when the Pill first started coming into Iraq, for example, many of the educated, socially conservative Christian women began taking it, and thereby reduced their family size. As Lilla also notes, “embourgeoisement” comes with wealth, and “middle-class tastes and demands” as well.

After birth control became readily available, rarely did educated Christian Iraqi women have more than two or three children at the most. With five children, I stood out so much in the Iraqi-American immigrant subculture that some thought I had converted to Mormonism.

We should also note how only mildly successful the ideas of the sexual revolution have been in nations still made up of traditional societies. These harmful ideas were mitigated by societies that still maintained thick traditional elements regarding marriage, family, and politics. They did not think in terms of the individual or personal rights, nor were they democratic in their political structures.

Even so, people who discount the role of the sexual revolution and those who (rightly) claim that there was sexual abuse or sexual promiscuity before the sexual revolution are not taking into consideration the fact that the permissiveness imparted by the sexual revolution compounds any problem that existed beforehand. It’s one thing when an aristocratic class delves into deviancy here and there. It’s quite another when

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entire societies run their everyday life with this ethos.

Eberstadt rightly states that the sexual revolution is now an untouchable dogma on the Left.

I would ask those who subscribe to that dogma to tell me whether they deny that a society-wide pursuit of individual sexual satisfaction has led to a historically unprecedented increase in broken homes and underparented children. I would also ask how they would propose to help a daughter of divorced parents who is in constant turmoil over the personal trauma she has experienced.

Restoring Our Humanity Mary Eberstadt’s thesis is exactly right, and she backs it up with evidence. She demonstrates not only the devastation to families brought about by the sexual revolution but also the resulting identity crisis, the outward manifestation that necessarily followed the revolution. And although her thesis is that the sexual revolution created a

mass identity crisis and therefore gave rise to identity politics, she writes early in the book that she recognizes there are other factors at play as well: To say that the phenomenon of identity politics has more than one cause is not to minimize the importance of others. And just as family meltdown is not the only reason for identitarianism, so are there multiple causes behind other phenomena that play major roles in our national division quite aside from identity politics.

Quite honestly, individualism and its benefits are very difficult to resist, even for conservatives who may intellectually know its destructive nature. We all must be on guard. Primal Screams is rich with ideas. Eberstadt identifies, and offers important insight into, our culture’s widespread desire for recognition; the childlike behavior of those who wield identity politics as a political weapon; the resentment of cultural appropriation; the endowment effect; domestic dispossession; androgyny as a

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survival strategy; the #MeToo movement; the modern shape of feminism and the causes for its vulgarization, and more.

In his response to Primal Screams, Rod Dreher writes that, like Rome before us, we have forgotten the art of creating and sustaining families. I would go even further. I’ve believed for a long time that we have forgotten how to be human.

Fundamentally, that is what we must relearn. Restoration is arduous, and it is not for the weak-willed. Still, human societies have restored themselves before. Nothing is impossible with God.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Luma Simms is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her essays, articles, and book reviews have appeared in a variety of publications including National Affairs, Law and Liberty, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Institute for Family Studies, and others. This essay originally appeared at Public Discourse: The Journal of the Witherspoon Institute and is reprinted with the kind permission of the editor. See www.thepublicdiscourse.com

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FILMS

Genre: Drama Directed By: John Crowley Written By: Peter Straughan Studio: Warner Bros

The Goldfinch

by John Mulderig

A

17th-century Dutch masterpiece becomes a complex souvenir in the patchy drama The Goldfinch (Warner Bros./Amazon). Though initially intriguing, director John Crowley’s adaptation of Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2013 best-seller flags long before its taxing two-and-a-half-hour running time is spent.

Through most of the story, characters yearn to make up for past mistakes. Yet the film’s ultimate message can be said to be in tension with scriptural values since it suggests that good consequences can sometimes result from wrongdoing, though it leaves open the question whether people ought to count

on such an outcome as an inducement to – or excuse for – transgressing moral norms.

Art lovers will know that, in reallife, the image from which both book and movie take their titles, painted by Carel Fabritius in 1654, resides in Amsterdam’s Mauritshuis museum. For Tartt’s and screenwriter Peter Straughan’s purposes, however, it’s temporarily loaned to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, sensitive, sophisticated teen Theo Decker (Oakes Fegley), who is wandering through the Met with his mom, is gazing at the small masterwork when an explosion

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takes place. Though the bombing claims his mother’s life, Theo survives and, for reasons only gradually made clear, in the chaos that immediately follows the attack, he rescues Fabritius’ picture from the rubble. He goes on to conceal his possession of it for years.

(Willa Fitzgerald). Theo also reconnects with Boris (Aneurin Barnard), and the two pals become entangled in a web of intrigue surrounding the purloined painting.

Theo’s trauma eventually affects all those with whom he has sustained contact. They include Mrs. Barbour (Nicole Kidman), the matriarch of the wealthy family that takes him in, his lowlife dad, Larry (Luke Wilson), Hobie (Jeffrey Wright), the furniture restorer who becomes his mentor as well as Pippa (Aimee Laurence) and Ukrainian-born Boris (Finn Wolfhard), his two closest friends.

With his life still overshadowed by his loss, grown-up Theo (Ansel Elgort), now an antiques dealer in partnership with Hobie, reunites with Pippa (Ashleigh Cummings). But his enduring attraction to her complicates his engagement to Mrs. Barbour’s daughter, Kitsy

At first, Crowley succeeds in sustaining interest by keeping viewers guessing. But about halfway through, The Goldfinch drifts into the doldrums and only perks up periodically thereafter.

Partly, the flat tone may be accounted for by Theo’s withdrawn, taciturn personality.

Perhaps his interior life, more difficult to convey on screen than in print, makes better fodder for readers than for moviegoers. Additionally, he’s naturally easier to sympathize with as an orphaned teen than as the shady adult he becomes in the latter portions of Tartt’s tale.

In addition to the questionable philosophical conclusion embedded in the wrap-up, the narrative winks at young Theo and Boris’ swiping of items from a grocery store. Their drinking and drug taking are also shown

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to have no considerable consequences. As for mature Theo, it’s taken for granted that he and Kitsy have shacked up on their way to the altar.

Though it’s never explicitly stated, the script unmistakably implies that Hobie and his former business partner also were living together as a couple.

As for an emotionally charged scene in which Boris kisses Theo on the mouth, the meaning of the gesture is kept ambivalent by the fact that Boris’ liking for girls has already been established. At any rate, his relationship with Theo thereafter remains strictly one of friendship.

The film contains a suicide theme, brief physical child abuse, cohabitation, benignly viewed shoplifting, underage narcotics use, drinking and smoking, an implied homosexual relationship, several profanities and numerous rough and crude terms. The Catholic News Service classification is AIII – adults. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is R – restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Mulderig is a reviewer for Catholic News Service. © 2019 Catholic News Service. Reprinted with permission from CNS. www.catholicnews.com

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

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