Ink Desk | St. Austin Review

May 17th, 2012His Peace She Gives Usby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

Dawn Eden with Yours Truly

Dawn Eden is a friend of mine and one of the most intelligent women I've ever met. She shares with me a love for G. K. Chesterton and an adult conversion that brought her from much suffering and sin into a life of grace. So we have some things in common, and I admire her greatly.

But Dawn is braver than I am, for in her first book, The Thrill of the Chaste , published a few years back, she quite bluntly confronts the sexual promiscuity of her past and reveals the pain it caused, exposing what we moderns are loath to admit - that such a life never brings us even natural happiness, much less supernatural joy. It took ample courage to write that book, a courage that would be beyond most men.

Now Dawn's second book, My Peace I Give You - Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints, is even more personal and even more helpful than her first - and clearly took more courage to write. In this book, Dawn deals with the sexual abuse she suffered as a child. She shows how, through the wounds of Christ and through the lives of saints who were healed by those wounds, even the most dreadful and darkest parts of our lives can be redeemed.

If this book does nothing more than make clear the Church's teaching that victims of sexual abuse are simply victims - that virgins who are physically violated against their will are still virgins - that chastity is a moral virtue and not just a physical condition - then it will have done much good. For, enlightened as we are about the sex act and about the horror of abuse - we still harbor that Calvinistic judgmentalism, that insane notion that the victim somehow sinned in his or her being victimized, that the one whose innocence was stolen cooperated in the theft.

Now this is crazy, but it's one of the main things even the abuse victims themselves struggle with.

I will point you to an illustration of this, and then show how this same illustration can be the key to the central message of Dawn's book. I warn you that this illustration is disturbing - but no more disturbing than the sin itself.

Somewhere, somehow, in all of my readings, I had read somewhere that it may indeed be possible that Our Lord was sexually assaulted by the Roman centurions before his crucifixion. Scripture does not make this claim, but Scripture is silent on many things, and we certainly know that the level of cruelty and mockery and violence the Romans were willing to subject Him to - nay, delighted in tormenting Him with - would not on principle have excluded sexual abuse. Whether He did or did not endure this, the theology is not changed - for He endured all sins for our sake, whether literally during His passion or not.

But look at the response to this hypothetical by a certain Protestant blogger. He writes, "Furthermore, it must be said that to state that Jesus was sexually abused is tantamount to insulting Christ, for that means that Jesus sinned and thus did not remain sinless till His death."

What an utter misunderstanding.

Yes, it is disturbing to think of Our Lord abused in this way, and it adds an element to His passion that we can hardly bear to imagine - but to be victimized in such a way is not to sin; it is to be the victim of sin.

So even in this enlightened day and age, even after all the Oprahs and Dr. Phils, that basic distinction is still not clear in our minds.

And yet this disturbing image of an additional and almost unspeakable suffering of Our Lord - whether historically true or not - is quite true spiritually. Jesus Christ suffered everything for us and with us. And therefore when we suffer, we are suffering everything for Him and with Him. It is this profound spiritual insight that is the core of this book (see also Col. 1:24 and elsewhere, for St. Paul writes about this at length).

Indeed, in the final chapter, Dawn tells us about Bl. Karolina Kozka, who died defending her chastity during an assault and rape. But, Dawn writes, "to say that Karolina, or any martyr of chastity, died defending 'her' chastity is misleading. She was not only defending her own chastity, but also mine and yours. And she was not only defending physical chastity, but also spiritual chastity - the chastity that Thomas Aquinas linked with charity, which brings us into union with God and one another. Because she knew what it meant to have Christ within her, she knew that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. It was in defense of the sanctity of that temple - the sanctity of all our bodies - that she resisted unto death."

This is a profound insight into the nature of the Body of Christ - the Church - of which, Dawn quotes St. Joan of Arc saying, "About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they're just one thing, and we shouldn't complicate the matter." And when we become members of this Body of Christ, (through baptism, repentance, faith, the reception of the Eucharist, and so forth) we "rejoice in our sufferings for his sake" and in our flesh "we complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions, for the sake of His Body, that is, the Church."

By His wounds we are healed, and by our wounds we participate in Him - and He in our pain.

This is a profound and prayerful book, the fruit of much suffering, much meditation and prayer, and a great willingness on the part of the author to use her own pain to lift others out of theirs. It is a great act of Charity.

And so in the midst of this sinful world and this crazy time, when even the President of the United States is bullying us to celebrate with the term "marriage" acts that do not express love, that can never be fruitful, and that are often examples of the most hideous things one person can force another person to do - when we call evil good and good evil, darkness light and light darkness - may be say a prayer for the courage of a woman who I'm sure would have been more comfortable keeping her pain secret, but who, in union with Christ and his saints, brings just a glimpse of it to light for His sake and ours; and may we say a prayer for all of those innocent ones now being led to an altar of brutality that only a greater altar can save us from.

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May 16th, 2012As the Globe Turnsby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

Chesterton Academy in Minneapolis recently produced my play As the Globe Turns, a comedy about a traveling troupe of Shakespearian actors.

Click here to see all the pictures!

This script of mine, along with many other scripts by many other playwrights, will be featured later this summer on Miracle Plays, a website devoted to offering scripts for school groups, amateur groups and professional theaters - all of which will be written from a Christian perspective.

More on Miracle Plays when the site premiers!

Meanwhile, it sounds like As the Globe Turns was a big hit. For more on Chesterton Academy, the best high school in America, click here.

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May 16th, 2012A Pat on Our Backsby Joseph Pearce

I'm not sure that it's fully decorous to publish notes from StAR subscribers that praise the quality of the journal, nor am I sure that it's decorous to publish notes that praise my own work as series editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions. This being so I am rather bashful as I post Harry Colin's recent e-mail to the Ink Desk. I have his permission to do so, and I have the excuse that both StAR and the ICEs warrant praise! I hope, therefore, that I will be forgiven the sheer chutzpah of the post:

Hello Joseph!

I'm somewhat reluctant to even send this note, since I'm sure the last thing you need is yet another email, but I did want to express my congratulations on the recent StAR - the Faith and Fiction - issue! While each issue of the magazine brings joy to my journey back from the mailbox, I thought this one was particularly exceptional.

Secondly, my further congrats on the next batch of Ignatius Critical Editions that I see are due for release here soon; I'm particularly eager to see Loss and Gain and Dracula. The first is hard to find in any edition and the latter has been so distorted by Hollywood variations that there is great need to restore it to its roots! (Regis Martin certainly whet my appetite for this with his StAR article)

God bless you and your family,

Harry Colin
W PA Chesterton Group member

p.s. I agree with you on the pizza! An industry that needs to restore the fundamentals of Distributism!

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May 16th, 2012Saying the Blackby Sophia Mason | http://girlwhowassaturday.blogspot.com/

Having written what I wrote last week, I should admit that I don't positively dislike the Tridentine Mass—I just prefer the Novus Ordo. That said, there are things about the TLM that I find … less than felicitous. The parts that are important can’t be heard, the parts that can be heard can’t be understood, and the parts that can be understood can’t be spoken by me. I realize of course that the silence of the TLM lends itself (for the prayerfully minded) to contemplation of the mysteries enacted; this is not a bad thing. But there is a time for contemplation, and there is a time for public worship. The two may and should overlap, but ultimately they are definitionally different and it cannot be expected that the circumstances most ideal for the one are going to be equally good for the other.

The TLM enables contemplation; it also, dare I say it, enables distraction. For a young child, my mother likes to say, attending the TLM is a bit like attending a dinner at the Norwegian embassy in Burma where one can’t hear the speakers, simultaneous with the full awareness that the content of their conversation is vital for your salvation. The costumes are beautiful; the banquet is impressive; but …

There is a reason that many (not all) Catholics assume that the “active participation” in the Mass, called for in Mediator Dei and Sacrosanctum Concilium, includes (but obviously not limited to—see Sacramentum Caritatis) vocal participation. C.S. Lewis hit the nail on the head when he said that we men are creatures of body and soul, who ignore the attitudes and conditions of the flesh at our peril. An attitude of submission and reverence—heads bowed, hands clasped—the sort of attitude of reverence such as the modern TLM encourages—is essential for us. But if it is important that we should kneel, and beat our breasts, because those actions bring certain truths home to our psychosomatic selves, then it is equally important that we not only know (though catechesis, through reading) what is said at Mass, but that we also hear it—that our ears should participate in the activity of the mind in following the progress of the liturgy. And in the same way, we should give assent to the words of the priest not merely with our minds, but with our lips as well. It’s true, what they tell us, that if you say something often enough you start to believe it. Just try saying “mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” in a crowded chapel most every day of your life for three or four years. It gets ugly.

Which brings me … to an aesthetic point about active participation in the Mass. The Latin Novus Orod is not vital to Catholicism, any more than a trip to St. Peter’s is necessary for the saving of one’s soul; but there is something in a LNO that, like the trip to St. Peter’s, speaks to the heart of what it is to be Catholic. Everyone should at some point have the experience of attending a Mass where he rises with the congregation, some two or three thousand strong, men, women, and children, and they say with one voice “CREDO IN UNUM DEUM.” Where they plead together as one, “SUSCIPIAT, DOMINUS …” Where he opens his mouth to sing, and hears the chanted words “ADVENIAT REGNUM TUUM” reverberating through the rafters with the force of the biggest, baddest Met opera chorus you’ve never heard. It produces a whole new appreciation for the phrase “the Church militant.”

Having said all this, let me make concessions. I would be happy with the TLM if it were altered in three regards.

First, if the propers could be in English. Even children who know no Latin can read the text of the ordinary and follow those portions of the Mass pretty well—I know I had no trouble with that before I started Latin in highschool. But expecting children to use a missal (or expecting Mom and Dad—who are strict in their definition of “grave reasons” and therefore at six and counting—to help them ALL) is a bit much. And honestly, there are some people who even as adults capable of reading Thomistic Latin pretty darn well (me!) find using a missal … complicated and obnoxious, and following the Latin propers by ear difficult if not impossible. Not to mention the fact that, if one attends daily Mass, the priest saying the TLM has a surprising amount of latitude as to what propers to use … which leads to all of us who dutifully premarked our missals fisk-fisking around to find the memorial that he decided was appropriate …

Second, if the congregation could hear the Eucharistic prayer. I’m not asking for the priest to be loud—saying it in a subdued voice is very helpful for creating a reverent silence. But there is a lot of room between LOUD and INAUDIBLE; the virtue’s in the mean.

Third, if the congregation could participate vocally in all the altar boys’ responses. The low TLM was said this way briefly—what was referred to as a “dialogue Mass”—but the norm now is for the congregation to be wholly silent, even on weekdays and certainly on Sundays. I don’t think this is a horrible practice, but I think—as stressed above—that vocal participation would be an improvement on it.

Interestingly enough, I’ve had TLM friends (including one who commented on my last post) tell me that they would be OK with the NO if:

* the propers were in Latin

* the priest faced the altar

* the congregation comported itself with reverence at all times.

Three recommendations to which I heartily subscribe. As I’ve said, my love for the NO is based on the fact that it exists under those conditions. That is the NO I am familiar with, and that is how the NO will look fifty years from now (more or less. Please God).

Clearly there’s a lot more common ground here than the radicals on both sides of the TLM v. NO question seem to think. Under the conditions outlined above, the only major difference between the TLM and the LNO is in the penitential rite (basically, in the TLM the prayers are longer, and they are said kneeling).

A final point regarding the Vatican’s position on all this. There is a phrase that (along with “active participation”) crops up frequently in these debates; in the letter to the bishops which accompanied the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, Pope Benedict writes that “the two Forms of the usage of the Roman Rite can be mutually enriching: new Saints and some of the new Prefaces can and should be inserted in the old Missal.” Well, that’s one way for the two Forms to enrich each other. But I don't think the Pope wishes or intends for the “enrichment” to stop there.

Last summer my siblings and I sang at a Catholic wedding in the Tridentine Rite. On the Sunday after the wedding the music director, somewhat bemusedly, told my brother the following anecdote.

Apparently one of the liturgical directors at the Vatican had been in attendance at the wedding ceremony, and was impressed by the beauty of it all. He approached the director afterwards and observed that it was a wonderful thing to see the motu proprio in effect. He then proceeded to inquire about the parish’s ordinary schedule of Masses. Our director told him: we have one Tridentine Mass every Sunday, and the other four Masses are Novus Ordo.

“All in English?”

“All in English.”

The lowly Vatican liturgist’s brow furrowed. “You mean, you say the old Mass and you say the new Mass, you have the two extremes, but you don’t say Mass the way the Pope says it? You have no Latin Novus Ordo here?”

The future, my friends. I don’t know whether, when the dust settles down, we’ll call the Mass of the Roman Rite the “Tridentine” or “Novus Ordo”. But I do know more or less what it will look like. Papa Bene’s called it.

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May 15th, 2012San Isidroby Tom Kallene

Today, May 15th, Madrid celebrates its patron saint, San Isidro. As an adopted "madrileño," it’s a big day for me. Not only because this town and this country has a deep significance for me as a Pilgrim. It is also because I find this saint so personal, and his low-key sainthood so attractive—in a similar way to Saint Joseph. San Isidro left no great works, sayings, or monuments behind. He was a humble farm worker all his life.

He is known principally for one of the great virtues which should be part of every Christian’s life: generosity. This he displayed not only with his fellow man but even with animals.

Generosity goes hand and hand with charity, the Christian love that comes from God. But rarely is it mentioned as part of spiritual life, when surely it should be one of its cornerstones.

A generous person gives, be it money, favors, love, or friendship, and as Saint Paul reminds us, God loves the cheerful giver. The generous person gives to those around him, to friends or to strangers, to the Church and its works. You don’t need money to be able to give; you just need to give regardless.

In "Wedding Song," Bob Dylan nails it: "When I was deep in poverty, you taught me how to give." Or as Jack London memorably pointed out: "Giving a dog a bone is not charity. Charity is sharing the bone with the dog, when you are just as hungry as he is."

Sentiments I am sure that San Isidro, the generous Saint of Madrid, would heartily agree with.

¡Viva San Isidro, Viva Madrid!

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May 15th, 2012The Catholic Underground?by Joseph Pearce

Colin Jory in Australia has sent me this grimly amusing poster. It advertises the London Underground system, or the tube as Londoners call it, and is displayed prominently in many tube stations throughout the nation's capital city. It is darkly humorous and points an accusing finger at the dastardly king. One wonders whether a secret Catholic is involved in designing the advertising campaigns on London's tube, engaging in a little surreptitious historical revisionism.

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May 15th, 2012Finnis Shakespeare Interviewby Paul Adams | http://ethicsculture.blogspot.com/

I was surprised and pleased to see an interview with John Finnis, a leading natural law theorist, emeritus professor of law at University College, Oxford (where I ﬁrst encountered him in my student days there) and now professor of law at Notre Dame. The interview was conducted at University of Notre Dame Australia, in Sydney.

What surprised me was that the interview was about Shakespeare, Identity, and Religion. On the question of Shakespeare’s own religion, Finnis concludes “It’s very hard to see how Shakespeare could be other than, at the least, a very, very strong and inward fellow traveller, but I think it’s essentially much more likely to be an actual Catholic, and then when you look at the wider corpus of work by Shakespeare you see, I think, massive evidence that that’s where his heart lies. Many, many of the plays are addressed both to the State Church, members in the audience and to the Catholics in their hearts who are also in the audience and who can hear a kind of under-message in play after play.”

You can download the audio and transcript of the interview at: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/shakespeare2c-identity-and-religione28099/4001422

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May 14th, 2012Will We Defend All of Marriage - or Part of It?by Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

Nearly fifteen years ago, when I was Episcopalian, a leader of our local "Journey of Faith" program described to the group how she had made some sort of knitting or crochet or tapestry thing for a friend of hers when the friend had gotten married many years prior. It was some sort of heart with the names of the couple - let's say Ted & Alice - sewn or crocheted or knitted in (I don't know how this stuff works), all framed and gift wrapped.

At some point, Ted and Alice got divorced and Alice brought the gift back to this woman who had made it for her. "I've left Ted and I'm getting 'married' to my Lesbian lover, Carol. Will you please pull out Ted's name and sew in Carol's?"

"And much to my surprise," our leader told us, "I found myself reluctant to do so." She was an urban liberal who prided herself in her tolerance.

"But," I interjected, "what if Alice had come to you and said, 'I've dumped Ted and I'm getting married to Bob. Will you please yank out Ted's name and sew in Bob's?' Would that have bothered you?"

She looked at me, her eyes sparkling. "Not at all," she answered, smiling.

***

Last week I was doing battle with a leftist Chestertonian, who was making the case that Chesterton's liberalism - meaning his critique of capitalism and Puritanism - could be useful to the liberal cause. Of course, Chesterton's defense of the family, his healthy disgust at perversion, and his love for clear thinking and dogma had to be ignored.

Likewise, I have written in the past of how the right wing was doing the same thing, only in reverse. They were painting a picture of a 300-pound neo-con, a moral conservative, whose Distributism was embarrassingly wrong, and in their eyes, crypto-communist - and thus had to be ignored.

Either way, the whole of Chesterton gets jettisoned.

When we make of him what we want him to be, we lose the fullness of who he is, and ultimately, over time, we lose any ability to comprehend his writings at all. For example, the liberals have made both Newman and Shakespeare into mirror images of themselves, and in doing so, have utterly lost the ability to read and understand anything that either of them wrote.

***

This is simply heresy in action - picking out what suits us and ignoring the rest. Of course "heresy" is not the right word to use when someone does this to an author, though "Cafeteria Chestertonians" are analogous to "Cafeteria Catholics".

But heresy in its original sense - religious heresy - is at its heart a kind of idolatry - it is taking the fullness of Who God is and what He teaches us and cutting it down, shaping it into a false god that suits us.

False gods are always more fun. We can offer them a kind of belief and devotion, but if things get too difficult or demanding, we can always pull back because we don't really believe in them anyway. Since idols are artificial, they are safe.

***

And this brings me back to marriage.

My last post, Pre-Occupied with the One-Half of One Percent , bothered me in that it implied that the battle to save marriage is lost.

I did not mean to imply that.

But I do mean to say this. You can't tell Alice that it's wrong to rip out Ted's name and sew in Carol's, if it's right to rip out Ted's name and sew in Bob's.

We can't be heretics here. We can't say, "We defend marriage and we insist that marriage is between one man and one woman" - for in doing so we are selling short, we are, quite literally, selling Christ short. We must add, "between one man and one woman for life", though this is something that makes everybody uncomfortable - and stands as a witness against modern society in general.

***

The question becomes is marriage of God or is it of man?

When Jesus asked this question of the Pharisees concerning the baptism of John, they were caught in a conundrum, "If we say from God, he will say, 'Why, then, did you not believe him?' But if we say, 'Of man' we fear the people, for they took John for a prophet." So they copped out and said, "We cannot tell."

If we save not marriage but a parody of it - if we save it for what it has become in the secular world, an arbitrary social construct that serves only the convenience of one or the other party that enters into it - then we will face this problem again again as time goes by. Because if that's all that marriage is, then the "gay marriage" boosters are right.

We must either defend Marriage or forsake it. To defend the idol called "marriage", the parody of the sacrament, we are simply doing the devil's work.

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May 14th, 2012Food for Thoughtby Joseph Pearce

Yesterday afternoon my wife suggested that we go out to get a pizza, a suggestion which was unusual and at the same time welcome. I like pizza but we are not fast food junkies and we seldom indulge in the modern mania for eating on the run. Susannah normally cooks the family meal and we make a point of eating and praying together in the evening. It was Sunday, however, and Susannah decided that this particular Sabbath would be a day of rest from cooking. I relished the prospect of indulging myself with a good pizza and Susannah suggested that we drive to a family-owned pizza restaurant, which had won awards for the quality of its food. We’d eaten there before and my mouth was watering at the memory and the prospect.

After driving past numerous pizza-chains, we arrived at our destination, only to discover that the small family-owned restaurant had been closed down. The sense of anger and disappointment was exacerbated when we noticed that the small family-run Thai restaurant next door had also closed. We’d eaten at this Thai place and I think it was the best Thai food I’d ever had, though it must be conceded that the service was a little on the slow side.

With Chesterton’s mantra about the modern world’s standardization to a low standard ringing in my ears, I was determined that we would not succumb to a second-rate cardboard pizza from one of the giant chains. With our four-year-old daughter showing definitive signs of hunger-induced impatience, we needed to make a snap decision. “Whole Foods does pizza,” my wife reminded me. I was disconsolate and lamented that we were being forced to go to a chain in the absence of any genuinely small and local alternative.

Arriving at Whole Foods, the family remained in the car while I went in to order the pizza. On being told that the wait would be around 25 minutes due to the fact that the pizza oven was small and could only cook two pizzas at a time, I groaned at the prospect of the wait and then felt immediately guilty at my own fast food mentality. Making a virtue out of necessity, I bought a bottle of St. Therese’s Ale, an excellent English-style pale ale produced at the nearby Highland Brewing Company. The sensation of hops on the tongue soon made the waiting more pleasurable and I was even able to squeeze in a second bottle of ale before the pizza emerged. Feeling much happier and hungrier I returned to the car and placated my daughter with a chunk of pizza crust while we made the return journey home.

The pizza was good but I couldn’t help feeling that our family expedition was indicative of a deep-rooted problem in the American economy and culture. The perverse irony was that the so-called “free” market, manipulated by big business to its own advantage, was taking away my freedom of choice. It was increasingly difficult for small restaurants to survive and, in consequence, was increasingly difficult to get anything except the same bland and generically unhealthy food wherever one went. The problem is not, however, merely one of economics. It’s a cultural problem also. The fact is that modern Americans prefer junk food to good food as they prefer junk culture to good culture. Their “freedom of choice” is manipulated by big business in the same way in which big business manipulates the so-called “free” market. Bombarded with advertising and propaganda (which are the same thing) and seemingly unable to tell the difference between the truth and the lie, they are slaves to the sin of spin. They buy junk food, they are addicted to consumerism, and they vote for Obama. The sobering thought is that the American people will continue to lose their right to choose freely until they learn to value the right to choose freely.

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May 12th, 2012The Inclusiveness of Manby Joseph Pearce

The indefatigable Louis Markos of Houston Baptist University has been conducting a crusade against the butchering of the bible in the name of feminist-driven "inclusive language". In a reply to an e-mail from Dr. Markos, to which I was privy, the incomparable Anthony Esolen of Providence College waxed lucid and lyrical in defence of man and mankind. Having requested and received his permission to post his thoughts on the StAR Ink Desk, here's the text of Dr. Esolen's e-mail:

I pay close attention to these habits in my students' papers. I'd say that a majority of them regularly use "man" and "mankind," both men and women, and that a minority opt for "humankind." I also see the pronoun "he" used in an indefinite sense. Nobody seems to mind. By the way, when I was writing my notes and introductions to my three Dante translations, I used the standard old masculines all over the place, and no one objected -- no one at Random House, a secular publisher.

Really, there is no substitute for "man" in English. What's needed is a single word, universal in sense, personal, concrete, and singular, to denote both every one of us considered all together, and each one of us considered singly as an exemplar of all. Every language has such a word, because all peoples have such a concept: not "people," but MAN. "Be most afraid of MAN," says Bambi's mother. She means "all people" and "each individual person." Heck, even a doe can understand that we are all summed up in one man, Adam, or one man, Christ.

None of the suggested substitutes works. "People" is plural and general, but not universal. If I say, "People will talk," I do not mean that all people everywhere are gossips, but that a lot of people are. "Mankind" is a collective, and neither singular nor personal. To be afraid of mankind is not necessarily to be afraid of Joe; to be afraid of man is. "Humanity" is less precise even than "mankind", and really denotes a quality; it is in any case neither singular nor concrete nor personal. "Men and women" introduces a distinction of sex that is irrelevant, and excludes children, and is not singular. "One" is indefinite rather than universal, and is impersonal.

There is no substitute. "Man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that cometh from the mouth of God." It is absolutely necessary for the thought and the poetry of the sentence that "man" be balanced against "God." We are not just talking about people in general, but about the contrast between the human being -- considered individually and universally -- and God. If we say "human beings do not live by bread alone," we have introduced a plurality; and we lose the stark contrast of human person with divine person.

And all to placate feminists. Who wants to placate them, anyway? Who can placate them?

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May 12th, 2012Pre-Occupied by the One-Half of One Percentby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

Occupy Wall Street and related groups were indignant, and rightly so, that the wealthiest one percent of the population seems to control the government.

We would all agree that in a democratic republic, policy that affects every American should not be set by an elite, particularly if that elite is only one percent of the people.

But what if that elite is only half that size?

The (un-"occupied") Wall Street Journal reports that, according to the 2010 U.S. Census, about five of every one thousand households is a "same sex couple" household - which, apprently means not just "room mates" but sodomites and Lesbians living together as a kind of "family".

And so with "gay marriage" legal in many states, and with homosexual cohabitation legal in all states, only about point-five percent of households in this country are "same sex couples". Whence, then, comes this tremendous political push to cater to the whims of one half of one percent of the U.S. population?

The only conclusion that we can draw from this is that "gay marriage" is a contrived issue, politically speaking. It is the "One half of one percent" trying to bully the rest of us.

Philosophically speaking, however, it is an issue that has gripped the hearts of many - and I am tempted to say an issue that has gripped hearts but not minds, as it is an issue for which a rational case can not be made - but that's not exactly true. "Gay marriage" is rationally in-defensible only if you define marriage according to its nature; "gay marriage" is quite defensibe - and in fact, compelling - if you define marriage as having no nature, as being entirely man-made. "Gay marriage" quite logically follows from the way marriage has been viewed since Henry VIII and especially in modern times. Heterosexuals have been deconstructing marriage for years now, and our presumptions about marriage are finally bearing their rotten fruit.

For example, Rush Limbaugh rightly defends marriage on his radio show, but actions speak louder than words. Now on his fourth marriage, he has made a vow to live with a woman forever after breaking a vow to live with a woman forever after breaking a vow to live with a woman forever after breaking a vow to live with a woman forever. He has been, many times over, "sworn on one altar and forsworn on another" as Chesterton says. He has no more moral authority on this issue than the Kennedies.

In our culture, marriage has become, de facto, a sham - so why not acknowledge the de facto via de jure? It is not even a social custom any more. It has no purpose, apparently. So why not make of it what we will? - which is the way we approach man himself these days.

So in a way, the "gay marriage" boosters get it right. They simply apply what marriage has become (a purely arbitrary social construct) and extend the logic to what they want it to be - which is an even more arbitrary social construct, something completely severed from its true nature. But then again (they ask) what is nature and what is truth? When we, even we defenders of common sense and reason, live as if there were no nature and there were no truth, we can't really be surprised when our children, convinced of their moral superiority over us, condemn us for our hypocrisy, simply by applying the logic of our actions against us.

And when a debater on Facebook tells me that marriage has no purpose because sex has no purpose - that the only purpose of sex is selfish pleasure - how can you argue with him, when this is the way even most Catholics treat sex, in this era of Contraception?

When we remove purpose from anything, we kill its nature.

Contraception turns sex into something inherently pointless. Divorce and remarriage turns marriage into something just as pointless - a mere temporary convenience, a way of making sex (which is pointless) easier to get, since you don't have to drive home afterwards.

We must understand that this view of life - the view that nothing has a purpose, most especially our own existence - is what is fueling the Culture of Death all around us.

And we can't argue with the "gay marriage" boosters because - in one very important sense - they are too logical.

And their logic is the witness of our own moral failure.

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May 12th, 2012Little Words, Great Powerby Dena Hunt

There is a fatal lack of awareness that makes us easy targets for the deadliest weapon of our time—words. Not strange words, not “big” words, not words no one understands, but little words we all know and use every day, “nice” words like “love,” or “marriage,” or “Church.” Yesterday the news reported that the Catholic Church affirms the right of gay couples to marry. Huh? It turns out that three theologians (named) said the vast majority of Catholics believe gay couples should have a legal right to marry. What the news reported is called a “spin,” a new term for our time. Take anything anyone says—in whole or in part—apply your own interpretation, and report that interpretation as what was said. Given the “spin,” nothing in the statement is actually false, nothing can be argued with, nothing is libelous. Spin allows anybody to say virtually anything with impunity. There was once a code of ethics for journalism that would have condemned this practice, which has become so commonplace that even the most unsophisticated audience believes all reporters now lie. Everybody’s got an agenda and all news is subjected to the spin of that agenda.

But that’s the news. And what we don’t realize is that the language of that distrusted source has its affect even if we don’t believe what it says. We may well see the falseness of the statement, and seeing that falseness, believe we are protected from its power to deceive. Not so. The weapon was not in the statement, but in the words it used. The Church—what IS the Church? The “vast majority” of Catholics? Affirms—what does that mean, exactly? An election of some kind? The right—I’ve often wondered about that word, “right.” What does it mean? By whom is it granted? By God? Are we endowed with it from birth? How? If Natural Law no longer rules, by what code, what authority? And last, “marry”—a right to marry would seem to depend on what one thinks marriage is. Historically, it’s a public ceremony of record for the purpose of identifying offspring. But if there’s no offspring, what is it?

That’s just a look at a few words that one statement contains. The affect of unquestioned common little words is subtle, slow, and of enormous power. Words are the abstract representations of perceived concrete reality. If their meaning is changed, however slowly or subtly, the perception of reality is changed accordingly. Do we know what “the Church” is any more? What is a “marriage” now? And, most of all, what is “love”? Kevin O’Brien has written about that question both here and in the St. Austin Review, exploring the differences/unity of “eros” and “agape.” That’s one important area, but what is LOVE when it’s implied in such statements as the one spun by the reporter? Or when it’s exploited in our insatiable appetite for its expression (presence) in fiction, films—and even in the news?

Scripture says, “God is love.” We don’t argue with Scripture, but it’s as easy to spin as anything else we “interpret.” Scripture did not say “Love is God,” but that’s how it’s been spun. Why? Because to say “Love is God” allows us to do anything we like in the name of love (God). The word itself disarms. It mutes all opposition. It is that before which every knee shall bend and every tongue confess that it is Lord. You don’t question it, you don’t dare ask what it means—it’s shrouded in holy mystery on El Shaddai. But in its name, children are killed in the womb to “protect” them (from being unloved), elderly people and disabled people are put to death out of love (“mercy”), and sodomy receives God’s blessing, as a sacrament of “love.”

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May 12th, 2012Living Water from North of the Borderby Joseph Pearce

For the past few years, Living Water College has been integrating Faith, Reason and Art north of the border in Alberta. This summer's sacred choral program at the college has just been announced and I thought I'd share the announcement with visitors to this site. Here's the text:

Care to try something new in beautiful Lakeland Alberta this summer? Living Water College's Sacred Choral Program will not disappoint.

Enjoy the new April–June Edition of The Current and learn about the fine art instructor, Maestro Uwe Lieflander, the talents of our other staff, and the relevance of Pope Benedict XVI's thoughts to Living Water College.

View our most recent addition to our YouTube Channel, "The Sacred Choral Program" to get a taste of the program offerings.

And as always, please visit our website for more information: www.livingwatercollege.com

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May 10th, 2012My Country Right or Wrongby Joseph Pearce

I'd like to clarify the use in my post "Will the Real Uncle Sam Please Stand Up?" of Chesterton's quote about my country right or wrong being the same as my mother drunk or sober. Specifically I'd like to clarify my position in light of this comment, posted by "Jamie":

I'm OK with My Country Right or Wrong AND with My Mother Drunk or Sober. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't work to reform either. But I would certainly continue to defend them before their enemies and support them and work for their good. Loyalty is virtue too, and it imparts lovableness to it's object, enabling us to love the unloveable. However loyalty is different from enabling or being a doormat. Being a big Jackson fan, I'm sure he never had a hair splitting thought like this going through his cowboy hat, but I'm sure he'd agree with it.

First, I'd like to make it clear that I was not indicating that we should stop loving our country when she's wrong or our mother when she's drunk. Chesterton's point, and mine, is that we have the same duty to our mother that we have to our motherland, which is to correct them when they're wrong and not to endorse their wrong behaviour by saying nothing or, worse, by actively joining them in their destructive behaviour. We are not doing our mother or our motherland any favours by encouraging their drunkenness, their wantonness or their wrong-headedness. I think or hope that Jamie's reference to loyalty being "different from enabling or being a doormat" indicates his substantial agreement with GKC and me.

As for Alan Jackson never giving "a hair splitting thought" to these issues, I need hardly remind us that Jackson's otherwise moving song about the 911 attacks includes the confession that he doesn't know the difference between Iraq and Iran. The trouble is that the cowboys who run US foreign policy don't know the difference either. They clearly didn't seem to know that Iraq was Iran's greatest enemy and that the secular Saddam Hussein fought a bloody war against the Islamist Iran in the 1980s. Having destroyed Saddam's regime, which had served as a defensive buffer zone against the power of Iran, the know-nothings in Washington were then seemingly surprised when Iran began to flex its muscles as soon as its vigilant enemy was destroyed.

In similar naive fashion, those who shape US foreign policy forgot that Afghanistan was the one part of the British Empire that the British could never bring under control. They also forgot that the Soviet Union could not bring the Afghan Taliban under control or that the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were both backed by the Americans in their earlier wars. Such nonsense is the consequence of our motherland being drunk and wrong. It is the duty of all true patriots to sober her up and teach her what is right and wrong.

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May 10th, 2012Stupidity vs. Prideby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

Here's why it's impossible to debate so-called "gay marriage".

It's not that those who support it will not admit to metaphysics, to natural law, to purpose, to objective truth. It's not that marriage has been so degraded in our culture that it means nothing, and that "gay marriage" is just an extension of that nothing. It's not even that a false compassion gets in the way of clear thinking.

Yes, it's all those things, but it's one thing more.

Pride.

You now have the opportunity, if you're a secular fundamentalist with no higher purpose in life, to latch on to a big one. All you have to do is applaud those who are demanding that anal intercourse is a virtue and that the state reward them for indulging in it. All you have to do is claim that opposition to "gay marriage" is bigotry, and BAM! Magically you're a good person.

You can argue people past many misconceptions, but you can make no headway against a belief that serves as a handy substitute for virtue.

No amount of stupidity is ever as harmful to our souls as one ounce of Pride.

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May 10th, 2012Containing Multidudesby Sophia Mason | http://girlwhowassaturday.blogspot.com/

Since Dena and Joseph have taken the subject up ... due to our Fearless Leader's ...

... ahem, our Fearless Leader's insistence that he does support gay marriage (a fact which I think neither his supporters nor his opponents doubted for a moment), I interupt my research on TLMs and LNOs to bring us all back to a story that hit the news quietly a couple of months ago. Behold, the self-bride:

As Ancienct as Eden

We all know that after gay marriage, polygamy and pet-owner weddings will be next. Think that's an extreme statement? They are already happening. And it's not just about sister wives, shih tzus, and shar peis any more: apparently it's possible nowadays to marry oneself.

The 36-year-old divorced mom of three wore blue satin and clutched a bouquet of white roses as she walked down the aisle ... She vowed to "to enjoy inhabiting my own life and to relish a lifelong love affair with my beautiful self," ... After the ring was exchanged with the bride and her inner-groom, guests were encouraged to "blow kisses at the world," and later, eat cake. ... "I was waiting for someone to come along and make me happy," she told reporter Tammy Swift. "At some point, a friend said, 'Why do you need someone to marry you to be happy? Marry yourself.'"

Not everyone was in agreement. Some of Schweigert's friends ... thought she was going a little far with the single pride thing. Schweigert's 11-year-old son was her biggest critic: "He said, 'I love you, but I'm embarrassed for you right now.'"

Amen, Master Schweigert! Out of the mouths of babes ... But for how long? Because child-adult marriage will be next. After all, who are we to say that the children aren't asking for it?

Of course we are all shocked by this sort of thing, simultaneously shocked and fascinated by the novelness of the perversity. But neither the novel nature of the SelfWedding—which is not so novel, really; that kind of avant-gardism is older than Hatshepsut's beard—nor its perversity struck me. What struck me about the SelfWedding was how utterly and completely boring it must be to be married to oneself. It's bad enough when two people who've been married twenty years complete each other's sentences. SelfBride (can we call her the IBride?) was probably finishing her own sentences by the end of Day 1, provided she took it easy on the champagne. I wonder, when she fed herself cake, did she get it on her face by accident? Did she hop over the doorstep to avoid treading on it? When she kissed herself, what did she kiss? her knee? her elbow? I can only imagine how hard it must have been to gaze into her other half's eye.

This runs parallel to my claim that atheism must be, on the whole, rather a dull business (no pun intended). Sin is constitutionally dull because sin is at heart a solitary activity, and, as any kid can tell you, it's no fun to be alone.

It seems very liberating initially—to be able to do anything we want, not to be bound by existing relationships and obligations—yet it is precisely those relationships and obligations that make us who we are: John and Mary's son, Susan's husband, Fred's father; the town's dentist, a citizen of a certain country; ultimately, a child of God. We can reject the manifold definition of ourselves that reality places on our shoulders—we can betray our family, our friends, and Our Father—but then, when we have set ourselves up as a Law unto ourselves, and built for ourselves a country with unlimited freedom, what will we do there? to whom will we speak? with whom will we work and recreate ourselves?

It is not only that it is not good for man to be alone, but also that man alone ceases to be man, because it is part of the what-it-is-to-be of a human nature to be in relation to others.

I am aware that all of this is persuasive only if one already acknowledges the existence of natures, and of human nature in particular, to begin with. No one holding a Hegelian or Darwinian or progressive or Transhumanist view of Man would be swayed by this kind of reasoning. But I think it is important for us who do accept the natures of things to realize, or to remember, that the fact of our doing so does not make our lives empty, dull, or insipid. We may be reactionary or conservative; but there is nothing boring about conserving Otherness.

Tolstoy once wrote that all happy families were alike, while unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way. There is a sense in which the statement is true, and I will not bother to quarrel with it. But there are some truths which though true are nonetheless spoken inadvisedly; and this is one of them, because it makes sin sound unique. I am sorry, but there is nothing in the least unique about Anna and Alexei; unfaithfulness and seduction are as ancient as Eden.

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May 10th, 2012Is Marriage Going to the Dogs?by Joseph Pearce

I recommend Dena's seriously amusing post on President Obama's recent endorsement of same sex "marriage". See "The Honor of Your Presence is Requested ...". I couldn't resist posting a response to Sophia's comment to her post, nor could I resist reproducing my comment here. For a full explanation of the way in which the three of us are arguing about the best way for marriage to go to the dogs, I refer you to Dena's post.

Here' my comment:

I must protest the narrow-minded bigotry of Sophia Mason's post. While I wholeheartedly endorse the inclusiveness of marriage between humans and their pets, and applaud the way in which she has shunned the old-fashioned adherence to same species marriage, I cannot endorse her assumption that enlightened canines cannot overcome the differences imposed by size. I say no to the insistence on same-size marriage!

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May 10th, 2012Land of the Setting Sunby Joseph Pearce

It is sobering and yet gratifying to know that the culture of death is killing itself. Any culture that sells its soul to Mammon will sacrifice itself on the altar of its own destruction. A recent article about the impending death of Japan serves as a prophecy of the doom of Europe and even of the United States, should the latter continue to follow the same disastrous path that Japan and Europe have taken.

As the stark picture that emerges from the article illustrates, the culture of death does not bear fruit. It spills its seed through sodomy or contraception, or destroys the fruits that it brings forth by "accident' through abortion. There is no future for such a self-destructive culture. The future belongs to the children and to those who have them. As the sun sets on the culture of death, it will rise on those families who are prepared to go forth and multiply.

Here's the article:

The Asian Tiger ― Japan ― is in danger of extinction

by Brian Clowes, PhD

In HLIWorldWatch.org

Do you know any Japanese people? If you do, you had better look fast, because they’re an endangered species.

According to the United Nations, every hour of the day and night there are thirty less Japanese in the world. By the end of this year, there will be 200,000 less, and by the year 2050, Japan will have lost nearly a quarter of its population.

Such is the legacy of a country which has so eagerly embraced materialism and the Culture of Death.

Japan is invaluable as a demographic laboratory because it is practically a closed system, with almost no emigration or immigration. Its 99 percent ethnically homogenous population gives us a rare glimpse of what the future holds for the entire world.

The problem is simple: Japanese women have virtually stopped having babies.

The total fertility rate, or TFR, is the number of children each woman must have in order for a nation to have a stable population. For an advanced nation like Japan, this is 2.1 children per woman. However, Japan’s population was the first in the world to dip beneath replacement fertility fully half a century ago (in 1960), and its TFR has continued to plunge. It now stands at an astonishing 1.1 children per woman (half that required for replacement), and will continue to decline to 0.6 children per woman by 2050.

When women stop having babies, the result is unavoidable ― the nation’s population briefly peaks, then declines. Japan’s population reached a maximum of 126.5 million two years ago, and is now one million less. This trend will accelerate until the nation is losing a million people a year.

A declining native population is not in and of itself a critical problem if a steady stream of immigrants is helping to replace the younger age groups that are not being replenished. This is currently the case in Singapore. However, Japan has always been extremely reluctant to allow foreigners to live within its borders, and makes it nearly impossible for them to live and work there. Less than one percent of foreigners who wish to live in Japan pass the mandatory language proficiency exams.

The result is that Japan is being severely pinched at both ends of the age spectrum. The numbers are stark in their ominous simplicity:

1. The number of Japanese children under 15 has declined for thirty consecutive years, from 24% of the population to its current 13%. Japan now has less children than it did a century ago, in large part to the forty million abortions it has suffered since it legalized the practice under the Eugenic Protection Law in 1949. Due to the strong government push for women to enter the workforce in response to the economic downturn, fully 70 percent of single Japanese women now say they do not want to be married. The Japanese “business first” mentality sees having a child as a career-ending decision.
2. The number of people over 65 has increased for sixty consecutive years, from a mere five percent of the population in 1952 to its current 23%, and is projected to increase to 43% by 2050. Japan is currently the oldest nation in the world, with an average age of 45, and this will increase to an incredible 60 years old by 2050.
3. Thus, Japan has the greatest percentage of people over 65 of any nation in the world, and the lowest percentage of children under 15 of any nation in the world.

The combination of a shrinking young population and an exploding elderly population inevitably has profound economic implications.

To begin with, there are less and less workers supporting more and more retirees. In 1950, there were ten Japanese workers supporting each retired person. Now, there are just 2.5 workers supporting each retiree, compared to China’s 8:1 ratio. By 2050, each Japanese worker will have to support one retired person, the lowest worker:retiree support ratio in the world.

The inverted Japanese population pyramid (more elderly than young) also means far more pension and health care spending. Baby boomers are retiring now, and by 2025, 70% of government spending will be consumed by debt service and social security spending.

At the other end of the spectrum, less young people means less workers, which means less tax-derived income for the government. More spending plus less tax revenue means an increase in the public debt.

People concerned about the economy delay marriage and childbearing, and so a kind of demographic negative feedback loop, or “vicious cycle,” continues.

Since 1995, the Japanese government has tried everything to get women to have more babies, including greatly increased child care benefits, but without any result. In 2006, the “Year of the Dog,” former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said that “Dogs produce lots of puppies and, when they do, the pains of labor are easy.” The government even pays for so-called “speed dating.” But once you get people addicted to things and tell them for decades that babies are a burden, that they interfere with your wants and your needs, and they are bad for the environment, your nation is doomed. No nation in history has recovered from a total fertility rate as low as Japan’s.

The Lesson to be Learned

What may we learn from the ongoing slow-motion Japanese disaster?

Just as Japan is a closed system, so is the world. Just as Japan’s population leveled out and began to plunge, so will the world’s, and very soon. This will lead to gigantic economic consequences and human suffering on a scale never before known.

Yet the population control cartel continues to abort, sterilize and contracept the people of the world just as fast as they can.

Worldwide demographic trends have the momentum of a supertanker. The world’s total fertility rate will hit replacement in just two years. Its population will peak in only three decades and then begin to decline.

The time to end population control programs and promote larger families is now.

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May 10th, 2012Another Cockney Convertby Joseph Pearce

I have just discovered that one of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal in New York is a convert to the Faith who was brought up only about a mile from me in the East End of London. It's always encouraging to hear about other people's paths to Rome but especially gratifying for me to discover a fellow cockney convert from my own East End neighbourhood who became a member of the wonderful order of Franciscans of whom Father Benedict Groeschel is the most famous.

Father Francis Edkins' conversion story is certainly dramatic and was published some time ago in the UK's Catholic Herald. Here's a transcript:

I was given the name Troy Edkins and baptised in the Church of England. But I never went to church as a boy. From a very young age, I was fascinated by astronomy and the beauty of creation, but was never taught about religion.

We had RE classes at school, but the teacher was something of a battle-axe: she told us that religion was primitive and outdated, superseded by better ideas. The closest I came to discussing God was with my granny, who told me that "God is everywhere". That was confusing to me.

My parents divorced when I was two, so my upbringing was disjointed. As a teenager I was tall — 6ft 6ins by the time I was 16 — and depressed. I started stealing and drinking.

My father worked as a disc jockey in a strip club. The owner would let me sit with my father as the girls danced. I have no doubt that this experience damaged my relationships with the opposite sex. I had a series of disastrous relationships with girls. One of my first girlfriends became pregnant and, despite my protests, had an abortion. I opposed her decision because I wanted to be a father. I liked the idea of having children; I didn't like the idea of killing them.

Another particularly tempestuous romance fell apart when I was 18. I attempted suicide. I took an overdose of pills and had my stomach pumped in hospital. Life was particularly dark in those years.

After the suicide attempt, I began searching for meaning in my life. At first I explored New Age spiritualism, experimenting with the oriental philosophy and Val chi.

This did nothing to quench my spiritual thirst. Indeed, it had the opposite effect; I just focused more on myself and felt increasingly unhappy as a result. I remember once walking through a park, looking up to the heavens and shouting: "God, where are you?"

My appeal was first answered in a telephone booth in Ilford, Essex. I had just been released from a police station following a failed burglary. I walked into a booth and found a little picture of the Divine Mercy. It was such a beautiful image that it made me pause and think about Christianity. I kept the picture, but continued to live my aimless life. Then, aged 21, I walked into the Centre for Peace, a Catholic bookshop in Ilford. I felt calm as I looked around at the crucifixes and the depictions of the Mother of God. I asked for a Bible, but had no idea which version I was after. I spoke to the lady at the till about God and faith. She decided to give me the Gospel of St John.

I felt a tremendous sense of urgency and excitement. I rushed home and read the Gospel in one sitting. The next day I hurried back to the shop and struck up a great friendship with the lady at the till, Kathy Goble. She answered all my questions, explaining the faith clearly and sensibly. I began working voluntarily in the shop. I spent my dole money on crucifixes and holy icons.

One day I accompanied Kathy to Mass at the SS Peter and Paul church, which was opposite the shop. As soon as I saw the priest I knew that I wanted to devote my life to God. I started attending Mass every day. I was especially intrigued by the institution of the Eucharist. The idea of Jesus's true presence in Holy Communion mesmerised me. It made perfect sense that God would offer us his body to help our broken nature.

Another Sacrament that attracted me was Confession. During a retreat I asked the priest, Mgr John Armitage, if I could confess. He made it clear that he could not grant me absolution, but agreed to listen to my sins. I found the experience wonderfully healing. After that I started to yearn for communion with the Church, for the Eucharist and for absolution. I joined the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults programme and in Easter 1993 I was received into the Church, aged 22.

Some years later, at a Youth 2000 retreat, I met Fr Stan Fortuna, a Franciscan Friar of the Renewal. He was so charismatic and lively. I felt that I too wanted be part of the Franciscan order. The idea of leading a life of prayer, of being poor and helping the poor, appealed to me deeply. I flew to New York to visit the Friars. I asked the superior if I could join. He was reluctant because the order had never accepted a foreigner before. But the Friars eventually agreed and I began my novitiate in 1996. I took the name Brother Francis. I spent eight years in America before coming home to help the order in England. Today I live in the St Pio Friary in Bradford, helping the poor and homeless and praying for the conversion of England.

Brother Francis Edkins

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May 10th, 2012The Honor of Your Presence is Requested …by Dena Hunt

I thank the President for sharing with us on the news this evening his announcement that he supports legal marriage between persons of the same-sex, and for giving us his reasons for that support; his reasons were not only rational, but also very touching. I almost teared up, just listening—and he wore such a sincere expression. In fact, he was an inspiration for Yorkie and me. We’ve been together such a long time now, and just like those same-sex couples he mentioned who are members of his staff, Yorkie and I are in an “incredibly committed relationship.” And like them, we too are “raising kids together.” Two years ago, we adopted Bonnie Sue, a rescue from a puppy mill. And last, he cited those in the military forces who risk their lives “on [his] behalf.” Yes—quite right. All those canine heroes in the military who give their lives “on [my] behalf” and “yet, they’re constrained (sic) in their marital rights.”

It’s a sobering reflection. Right after the newscast, Yorkie and I discussed it (although he is somewhat verbally challenged) and I think we will marry. After all, the reasons he gave for granting same-sex couples that privilege are literally no different. If that’s all it takes to justify granting a marriage license, Yorkie and I will apply for our license tomorrow morning. Invitations are forthcoming ….

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May 8th, 2012The Proper Concept of Contraceptionby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

Well, the so-called Innocent Smith is proving to be, at the very least, a fine writer, who is engaging me for what he takes to be tribalism over at his blog Innocent Smith's Journal, particulary in his "A Response to Kevin O'Brien".

One thing I very much admire in him - he is assenting to Church teaching that he doesn't quite swallow intellectually.

Take, for example, contraception.

I struggled with Church teaching on contraception after I became Catholic - not because of the teaching itself but because the defenders of the teaching make such a poor case for it.

In particular you'll hear from every corner, "The Catholic Church is opposed to artificial contraception!" This is turned into an apology for "Natural Family Planning", which is "natural", even though it involves measuring daily basal temperature and analysing mucus. "Why on earth," I used to ask myself, "would we oppose artifical contraception but endorse natural contraception? Are we Christian Scientists? Forgive my tribalism, but are we tree hugging Gaia lovers?"

It took a lot of prayer and study for the truth to dawn on me.

And the truth is this. When people tell you the the Church is opposed to artificial contraception, don't believe them.

The Church is opposed to contraception. Period. "Artificial" or otherwise.

I won't go into why the Chruch is opposed to contraception here, other than to say that once you permit contraception, no logical case can be made against any sexual activity outside of "the marital act"; in fact once you permit contraception, no logical case can be made against "gay marriage" or divorce.

What I will say is what I've said before, but what apparently is not said enough, so that well-intentioned intelligent men like Innocent Smith wander about confused, admiring Andrew Sullivan.

The dichotomy between "natural contraception" and "artificial contraception" is entirely false and wrong. It is a false dichotomy. "Natural Family Planning" is simply "Periodic Continence" - in other words, if you don't want somebody getting pregnant, DON'T HAVE SEX. It's not "contraception" at all. It's refraining from the "marital act" during fertile periods - itself a questionable procedure, but one that is at least not typically material for mortal sin, as the use of a contraceptive agent always is.

If this were made more clear, then the consistency of Catholic teaching would appear, even to those who disagree with it.

For the consistency of Catholic teaching - the seamless garment - the fact that these are not disparate assertions of disconnected moral precepts, but elements of an organic whole - this is among the most astonishing bits of evidence of this all being much more than a merely human thing, a construct of man, a natural and fallible philosophy.

The more a man like "Innocent Smith" examines the ratio behind his fides, the more he will see that this is an encounter not with a series of teachings, but with a Man.

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May 8th, 2012Seeing Redby Sophia Mason | http://girlwhowassaturday.blogspot.com/

Repost from TGWWS. I will give a prize* to anyone who fully comprehends the Chasuble reference.

[*Not to be construed as meaning anything actually worth ... anything.]

This is going to be an angry post. If you’re already suffering from a tragical Tuesday, go read something uplifting instead. Trust me, you’ll feel much better than if you keep scrolling down. If you’re not Catholic, you’ll just be perplexed; if you’re Catholic and agree with me, you’ll be mad like I am; if you’re Catholic and disagree with me, you won’t like my characterization of your side’s arguments; if you’re Catholic and don’t have an opinion on the issue, you be miffed that I’m writing about a peripheral problem like this when Secretary Sebelius has been invited to speak at Georgetown. (I think that’s everyone. If I’ve left your group off the list, my sincerest apologies.)

I have been known to be irritated by the Enemy. (No, not that Enemy, you fools—these enemies. This is not a Wumpick missive. Sheesh.) But there comes a time in life when the mature Catholic learns to accept hostility and persecution (she says, sipping her coffee in a comfortable swivel chair in a perfectly acclimated room with gorgeous and simultaneously inexpensive prints of Renaissance masters—blest be the files that PIPA and SOPA would have prevented her from downloading!—hanging upon the walls). Yes, there comes a time when the mature Catholic accepts the fact that the world will hate her, and when opposing the violence of the world becomes less a matter of taking personal offense and more a question of standing on principle. But when it comes to internecine squabbles, I confess to remaining something of a Peter Pan. There is something exquisitely aggravating about reading those who are on one’s side exactly 99% of the time.

"No, no no! the Isagogue was written by Porphyry. Plotinus wrote the Enneads.

Yes, I'm sure. Just ask St. Jerome ..."

I’m thinking here of bloggers like Fr. Z. Fr. Z is fond of the Tridentine, aka the Traditional Latin Mass; and it is an affection which he shares with many of my own friends and other people whom I respect and admire. I must admit, however, that Fr. Z and my friends are eminently reasonable in expressing their preferences for the TLM; and my aggravation at them is consequently limited. But every now and then someone less reasonable than they will write something like this.

As I say, affection for and support of the TLM is a beautiful thing, even though it is an emotion which I do not share. What I cannot accept, and what I find obnoxious in the extreme, is the loathing displayed—occasionally, occasionally; and only by some—for the Novus Ordo, and the prophetic hints (veiled, as all proper prophecies ought to be) that we will all be going back to the TLM sooner or later.

Permit me to offer a prophecy of my own, in plain, unveiled English: Au contraire. (Pardon my French. As I said above, this is a subject upon which my emotions escape me.) The Novus Ordo is here to stay. I will admit that the Novus Ordo as it is generally said is going to go sooner or later (sooner, if this Catholic’s prayers are heard); but it will go the way a caterpillar goes: to reemerge as a thing of beauty and a joy … alright, well, its lifespan will be a little longer than a butterfly’s. (OK, hippy simile, I admit it. But I don’t really like butterflies. Not on me, and not on chasubles either.)

"Yes, my dear Edward—it really does make a very convenient container for chrysalises."

As I was … saying, the reformed Novus Ordo will be a thing of beauty and a joy forever, or at least until Judgment Day. Till the end of time. That is my prophecy.

“And you’re really OK with that? Are you joking? You’ve got to be joking. Haven’t you seen …” Um … hum. And where in the rubrics of the new Roman Missal do we get permission for clowns? Nowhere. Likewise, nowhere are we permitted female extraordinary ministers and lectors, altar girls, liturgical dancing, Communion in the hand, "hymns" by Michael Joncas, and children’s Masses. They’re not there. These are abuses of the NO Mass, just as they would be abuses of the TLM if, God forbid (and I mean that literally) anyone tried to introduce them there. Abusus non tollit uses.

“But no-one would ever try to say a TLM Clown Mass. It couldn’t be done! The inherent gravity of the liturgy is such that no one would dare.” Don’t kid yourselves, kids. The NO Mass was abused in the ’60’s and has been since then simply because it is by far the most common liturgy among the Catholics of the West. Trust me, the era that gave us flower power trousers would not have spared the TLM if the TLM had been in its way.

You know I could have picked much worse.

But I like to keep the blog looking somewhat human, even if it means a weaker argument.

“Well, OK then. So there might have been a few priests who acted up with the TLM. But the very fact that the Mass changed encouraged them to act up more.” Not disputed. Changing the Mass then was bad timing, bad strategy. They should have changed it—oh, back around 1880.

“What!!! You must be joking. Only the modern era could have produced the NO, because, as surely you realize, the TLM is a celebration of God, a vertical liturgy, whereas the NO is a celebration of the people, a horizontal liturgy, as the fact that the priest faces the people suggests.” News flash, my friends. Hold onto your hats, because this may hurt a bit. Remember that list of things people do with the NO that they're not supposed to do? Well, one of them is facing the people. Nowhere in the rubrics of the Roman Missal is the priest instructed to face the people. Oh, and in case you hadn’t heard, the NO can be said in Latin too.

“Can be said in Latin. Fine. But the fact of the matter is this pure sort of NO Mass that you’re describing has never existed. The NO just isn’t done that way—in Latin, with people kneeling to receive Communion, with honestly orthodox music, with …” In the immortal words of Elizabeth Lane ...

“Oh! That’s what you think …”

Never been done that way? I grew up on the NO done that way. I went to college for four years at a place where the NO is done that way. I admit it isn’t done that way often—but see point two above.

“I get it. You really like the NO. But the liturgy does not exist for your personal pleasure, or to meet your personal taste.” Tu quoque. I have never read a promotion of the TLM in which the promoter beat his breast and admitted he didn’t like the Mass’s style, but he felt obligated to acknowledge its superiority anyway.

“Fair enough. I do prefer the TLM’s style—because it helps me pray better. What’s wrong with you, don’t you want to pray?” Well actually, yes I do. Which is why—personal preference time!—I prefer the NO: because, in the NO, as long as the priest lets us hear only the black and see only the red (to paraphrase Fr. Z), I pray better than I pray at a TLM.

“There must be something wrong with you. You mustn’t have been to very many TLM Masses. You musn’t have tried it long enough.” Is a year long enough? Because I went to the TLM for a whole year at school. (Alright, two semesters. Nine months. Yes. My college offers one TLM and three LNOs every weekday. It is an amazing place.) I used a missal. I meditated. I even wore a chapel veil, if that makes a difference. But at the end of the year I was back at the LNO, even though it didn’t fit my schedule as well. I simply prayed better there.

“Yeah, well then there’s really something wrong with you.” Very probably. “So what exactly is your beef with the TLM?” Ah! Now we come to the real question.

To Be Continued.

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May 8th, 2012Whose Fault Is It that Liberals Don’t Like Chesterton?by Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

Note the things this anonymous blogger says about Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, and note the dialogue that ensues in the combox.

The only background you need is that this blogger likes Chesterton, but tries to square that with his admiration for and defense of Obama, contraception, Andrew Sullivan and Buddhism.

He's got his work cut out for him, but, you see, it's all Dale Ahlquist's fault.

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May 7th, 2012Irish Priests are Revoltingby Fr. Simon Henry

Today in Dublin the Association of Catholic Priests will meet, with a membership claiming to represent a quarter of priests in Ireland, according to Radio 4's "Today" programme this morning. They include among their objectives: allowing the divorced to remarry; the election of bishops; change in liturgical language and practice to be "inclusive and accessible to all"; married clergy and the ordination of women; and a general liberalisation of the Church's teaching on a variety of matters to fall into line with norms and mores of secular society. You can read their "Objectives" here couched in seemingly innocuous and polite terms but in fact calling for a revolution.

Some might think that a large group of priests calling for such a revolt has come out of nowhere quite suddenly but I think you would find many similar views long held by many priests in the UK as well. My own experience is that they are not uncommon views among many priests. Those of us who try to hold to the Church's official teaching have long been branded as "traditional", "conservative" and "reactionary" precisely because the centre "opinion" has long ago shifted to a stance far from what you will find actually written in the Code, the Catechism, the rubrics, or orthodox teaching.

These revolutionary views have been propagated at the seminaries and disseminated in parishes to the laity, quietly and unobtrusively for years without being challenged by the hierarchy - and in fact, often encouraged. Now in Ireland they are organising and banding together to formally lobby for these now entrenched revolutionary views. So prevalent that they now feel strong enough to come out fully into the open and make an outright challenge to Orthodoxy.

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May 7th, 2012The Germans Invade Missouriby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

He was a typical Mid-Western suburbanite, a nice guy, a baseball fan. He had a good sense of humor and a touch of common sense. I could picture him standing by the grill in his backyard drinking a beer and listening to the radio while his neighbors cut their lawns on a humid summer day.

But there he would sit every month in his office talking to me about Schelling and Goethe and Hegel and Kant, his American common sense compromised by a hefty dose of German idealism and Prussian paganism.

You see, I did not go straight from atheist to Catholic. I spent many years in a broad middle ground in which I was "spiritual" but not "religious" - like the vast majority of people today. What fed my hunger for the "spiritual" were the writings of Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung, whose 30-volume collected works I had read and studied. The Mid-Westerner I describe above was a "Jungian therapist" with whom I would meet occasionally and who would talk to me about my dreams - and about what I only later discovered was really really bad philosophy.

For Jung I knew well, and well enough that now, many years later, from a Catholic perspective, I can look back and say that he was at least an antidote to the worst of Freud and to the worst of materialism, that he was indeed "spiritual", but spiritual in a gnostic way, a man whose core teachings were either dangerous, such as the persistent counsel for men to integrate into their lives the dark side of human nature, or simply goofy, such as his bizarre fascination with UFOs as a symbol of "individuation" - a fancy sounding word that means "doing whatever you want and making a principle of it".

But I really never knew the philosophical foundations of Jung. I knew he was a Kantian who felt a kind of pagan admiration for Norse myths, for the Arian race (though he denied he was a Nazi supporter) and for the convoluted writings of the idealists - but it is only recently that I have seen what a strange juxtaposition it is to have an otherwise healthy guy from Missouri admire and quote men who were so twisted and sick in a way that might make sense for a pseudo-intellectual mystic who spoke German but that makes no sense for a suburban St. Louis Cardinals fan.

Think I'm being too tough?

In the first chapter of Stanley L. Jaki's brilliant book The Relevance of Physics, Jaki discusses the philosophical error that held back the development of exact science for over a millenium, the notion from the Greeks on that the world was an organism and that matter possessed some vague volitional nature. Jaki surveys this belief, a belief that was endemic in science from Aristotle to Newton and that lingered in pseudo-science and bad philosophy after Newton, and that is making a comeback in our own day.

He discusses at length Goethe and Schelling and Hegel, who to a man endorsed this really weird neo-paganistic belief in the world as living organism and of man as god which may have given their poetic sense some charm but that fatally corrupted their attempts at science.

This bad philosophy "had trapped the greatest of German poets in a labyrinth of errors that stands as perhaps the most pathetic case of stubborn blindness and self-deceit in scientific history," Jaki writes. Goethe, for example, believed that light could not be investigated physically, that mathematics must be kept out of physics and that Newton's discoveries were "mere twaddle". Schelling believed that man "is the most perfect cube" (whatever that means), that man need not experiment or test his hypotheses for man can undestand all of nature a priori, man being "the integrated being, man become God". Hegel asserted that "the time will come when these sciences will be governed by the constructs of the mind", and refused to acknowledge that there existed any more planets than he thought there ought to be.

Obviously such beliefs prevent the practice of science and even the investigation of truth.

But this prideful solipsism is the scaffolding that allowed C. G. Jung to construct the peculiar edifice he did. It is, I'm sorry to say, the philosophy of the age, and you find it in the most unusual places - including your own backyard, beside the grill, with the game playing on the radio.

Here we see a typical suburban St. Louis Cardinals fan, on his boat at the Lake of the Ozarks. This is not the guy I write about in my post. This guy (and his dog) both have more sense.

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May 7th, 2012On Patriotism and Nationalismby Joseph Pearce

I was intrigued by Dena's response to my post on Uncle Sam, particularly her assertion that patriotism is good but that nationalism is bad. I know this is largely a question of semantics, but I have always argued that nationalism is good but that imperialism is bad. I am defining "nationalism" as the political philosophy which believes that a world of diverse sovereign territories is preferable to a world in which such territories are subsumed within larger trans-national bodies. According to this definition, Scottish nationalism, which seeks independence for Scotland from the United Kingdom is genuinely nationalist, whereas British nationalism, which seeks to subsume Scotland within a transnational political body is not nationalist but imperialist.

The opposite of nationalism is imperialism. The European Union is an imperialist institution, as is the Federal Government, which systematically subsumes the rights of individual states and the rights of individual families.

Rejoicing in the smallness and beauty of his own nation, a nationalist respects the smallness and beauty of other nations. A true nationalist would never become an imperialist, seeking to destroy the freedom of other nations in order to glory in the supremacy of his own. Hitler was not a German nationalist but a German imperialist, who marched into neighbouring nations in the name of imperialist concepts, such as anschluss or lebensraum. More controversially, it could be argued that the Washington government was behaving as an imperialist nation between 1861 and 1865 when it forced its will militarily on the seceding states.

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May 7th, 2012Hey! I Found a Sensible Atheist!by Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

My YouTube videos that elicit the most comments are the ones that deal with atheism. Most of the comments from atheists are not even up to a level that resembles rational thought. For example, there's this one, which advocates not only genocide but Genocide for Peace: "religionists must be gassed and turned to petroleum immediately. Once we euthanize the 5 billion failed fallen subhuman religionists then Humans can get their planet back and We can finally progress peacefully." I am not making this up. Click on the link above and scroll down to read it.

Typically, then, responding to YouTube comments from atheists isn't worth the time. Even if they're right and there is no God, it isn't worth the time.

Today, however, I noticed a comment from someone calling himself or herself "Friend of Daishonin" - meaning, it seems Nichiren Daishonin, a 13th Century Buddhist monk. "Friend's" comment was actually sensible. I can't really reply to him at YouTube because you're not given much room there to post (his remarks below are actually three comments strung together), so I figured I'd try to move the discussion here, and hope "Friend" hops on over.

Friend of Daishonin writes ...

***

I became an Atheist DUE to reading a lot of material. I also read and studied the Bible as well as most other religions. The simple fact is that all of the apologeticist material I read to explain away the contradictions in the Bible was for the most part insulting to my intelligence. It all sounded like the cop outs and excuses? you would hear at an Amway seminar as to how it's not "really" a pyramid scheme-it only "looks" like one. I find it baffling how Christians actually buy into it.

I will go onto say how it baffles me that Christians give cop outs as to how the Levitical laws somehow are to guide us towards repentence leading us to Jesus and just flat out ignore or minimize the atrocities that they advocate. Never ceases to amaze me. I don't claim that as proof for the non existence of god, but if that? is why I believed in god and it is obviously inconsistent and immoral, why would I continue to keep believing in god? They don't have a problem with that which baffles me

Furthermore, if I call one story from a different religion than Christianity-myth, yet the story looks almost indistinguishable from the story I claim as fact, isn't that hypocritical of me? How can I? live with myself knowingly lying that I accept something as true that is indistinguishable from myth? Yet point these other stories out to Christians and they make excuses. That also baffles me because it really is not that hard to understand. I suppose they are grasping for straws so to speak.

***

My reply would be ...

First, thank you, Friend of Daishonin, for posting something that makes sense, that puts forth a rational argument, that has only a few spelling errors, and that does not advocating killing over half of the human population for "peace".

Second, if Christianity is no different from Amway, then bring some torches and I'll join you in burning down every single church we can find. If this whole "Christ is God Thing" really is a scam and a fraud, then it's much more offensive than Amway and other multi-level marketing gimmicks which I rightly criticize here.

So you and I agree on the most important thing: truth is what we're seeking. If God is a Delusion, then the whole system built around this Delusion is at best a mistake and at worst a lie; it is horrific and shameful and atheists should become anti-evangelizers, shouting from the rooftops that there is no God and Mohammed is not his prophet (that last bit might get you killed, but truth is truth and if Christians are in error because there is no God, so are all other theists).

As to the points you make, the apologetic material you read must have been pretty weak or sub-standard, since you seem to be a person who has enough sense to think about what you read. For good apologetics, try the compilation of C. S. Lewis' writings, God in the Dock, and if you can handle them, Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton.

You make an interesting point regarding the Levitical Laws, some of which advocate what you call "atrocities". Apparently you've been told that the Jewish Laws lead to repentance and ultimately to Jesus, which is correct in a way, but this isn't really an answer to your objection, which is a good one. My suggestion: read the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew chapters 5 through 7), in which Jesus confronts the whole question of what the Law is and what significance it holds for us. Ask yourself if you agree with what Jesus says about morality in the Sermon on the Mount. If you do, then the question becomes is Jesus focusing and fulfilling the Law as He claimed He was? Also, if Christ is the culmination of the Law, then why do Christ and His followers not follow the Law to the letter, something which infuriated His contemporaries? Why does Jesus say that the Law is really only two things - "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself"? If there is a God, would you agree with this statement? Even if there is no God, how on earth can Jesus present the modern Law of Love as the culmination of what you see as the Law of Atrocities?

So in the New Testament alone a thoughtful reader will see that the Jewish Law is more complex than he might have suspected from a quick reading of it in the Old Testament. For either of two things are possible ...

1. You are correct in your reading of the Jewish Law, that it advocates atrocities and is a horrendous thing, and Jesus was entirely deluded when he advocated Love and said that the Jewish Law was all about Love.

or

2. Jesus and His followers, who were, if nothing else, devout Jews, understood something about the Law that a cursive reading of it has not yet revealed to you.

For if the Law is nothing but hate-mongering, how do you explain Psalm 119?

As to the relation of myth to Scripture, it seems no one has told you that quite a bit of Scriptural material is indeed myth - or fiction. Unlike Protestants, Catholics have always taught that the creation account in Genesis, for example, is not to be taken literally. It is a creation myth, but a myth that conveys an essential truth. The book of Job is probably a work of fiction - it certainly reads like one - but it is a story that conveys the most profound truth of human existence. Many parts of Daniel in the Greek Old Testament sound much more like myth than history, as does the Greek Old Testament book of Tobit. The Bible makes use of every literary form imaginable - myth, poetry, history, lamentation, even modern internet-style essays, like Ecclesiastes. So, yes, a lot of it is myth, but myth can be more effective in conveying truth than other forms of literature (see my YouTube video about that here).

However, the life of Jesus is not a myth. Speaking from the point of view of Literary Criticism, nothing in the Gospels has the ring of myth. It all reads as if the writers were utterly surprised and baffled by what they are conveying. It sounds anything but contrived - as the apocryphal gospels often do (which is one reason the Church rejected them). You claim other myths are indistinguishable from the Christian narrative, which is a claim you would simply not make if you read the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles side-by-side with mythological literature. A Freshman in Literary Criticism 101 would see the difference.

And, anyway, if it's all just a myth, well then, you've got us. Very early on St. Paul said, "If Christ be not raised, then is our faith in vain" - and we of all men are most to be pitied.

Now, the books I recommended above deal with the claim that the Gospels are indistinguishable from myth. So, Friend of Daishonin, take the gifts you've been given and exercise them. I was an atheist because I was searching for truth - you seem to be the same kind of atheist. Most of your atheist compatriots today don't give a fig for truth, but you do. So use your generous and analytical mind and read. Learn how to read with heart and sensitivity. Read good apologetics. Read good atheists. Read the three books I recommended. Above all read the Scriptures, and ask yourself what you think of Jesus. It all comes down to that. I'll grant you that religion and "religionists" can often be a mess, but Who is this Jesus and does what He says speak to you? That is the question.

If He is speaking truth, then we cannot ignore what He says about God. If His life is a life of integrity, then we cannot write off the Jews as hate-mongers. If the book of Acts is historical (and nothing about Acts sounds legendary), then who were these apostles and what did they think they were doing?

Those are the questions that a mind like yours could indeed ask itself.

God bless your search.

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May 7th, 2012The End of Civilizationby Joseph Pearce

I've finally finished watching all thirteen parts of Sir Kenneth Clark's classic series, Civilisation, and am therefore sharing my final thoughts on the series as a whole and on Clark's strengths and weaknesses as an observer of the history of western civilization.

Visitors to the Ink Desk might recall that I was somewhat scathing of Clark's treatment of the Middle Ages, particularly in his woeful ignorance of scholastic philosophy and its axiomatic place in the unfolding of the Christian vision of civilization. Clark seemed to have no real knowledge of the works or teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas. I was also puzzled that his panoramic overview of western civilization began in the dark ages, not in its theological roots in Jerusalem or its philosophical roots in Athens. It strikes me as singularly odd that an overview of western civilization should ignore Homer, Aeschylus and Sophocles, and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. It's at least as odd that the Patriarchs and Prophets of the Old Testament, or the beauty of the Psalms and the Song of Songs, should be overlooked. And what of the majesty of the Gospels and the teaching of Christ. Surely the whole of western civilization is built on the wisdom of the Word of God and on the teaching and influence of the Church. To ignore the faith and philosophy that forms the foundation upon which everything else is built is a a fatal flaw in Clark's edifice.

Clark's idiosyncratic commencement in the dark ages also means that he skipped the Fathers of the Church, ignored the seminal place of St. Augustine, and failed to mention Boethius' Consolatio. This is all odd, to say the least.

Another problem is that Clark is primarily an aesthete who has not really clarified what he understands as the basis for aesthetics. He has little Latin and less Greek, i.e. little theology and less philosophy. Thus we are given St. Francis of Assisi but not St. Dominic, a reflection of Clark's seeming preference for the Franciscan "heart" of the Church over its Dominican head. Indeed, the Dominican ratio seems to be completely over Clark's head, leaving him puzzled. This is the reason for his almost embarrassed and embarrassing passing over of any real discussion of Thomism and the triteness and banality of his discussion of Dante. A similar triteness and banality characterises his regurgitation of postmodern nonsense in his treatment of Shakespeare.

Clark is much better when playing to his strengths, particularly in the discussion of painting, sculpture and architecture, though I wish that he'd made more of the theological underpinnings of gothic architecture. A highlight for me was the labelling of the philosophy of Rousseau as "I feel, therefore I am", a wonderfully witty encapsulation of Rousseau's anti-rational and irrational reductionism.

The series ends on a high note with Clark's lament of "our urge to destruction", reminding us that scientism had given us the horror of the nuclear bomb with its catastrophic and cataclysmic potential, and culminates in the insistence that civilization is the accumulation of the fruits of "God-given genius".

The final verdict on Clark's seminal celebration of civilization is that he is on the side of the angels without seeming to know it. He does not understand the end of civilization, i.e. its purpose, but is in love with its beauty and sees the virtues of its civilizing attributes. One can see the seeds of Clark's eventual conversion to Catholicism in his love of the beautiful edifice that Christendom has raised to the glory of man's indebtedness to God but one wishes that he understood that the beauty of faith is united to reason.

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May 5th, 2012Of Sex and Humor, Etc., . . .by Dena Hunt

Simcha Fisher asks “Is It Really Okay To Laugh About Sex?” at http://www.ncregister.com/blog/simcha-fisher/is-it-really-okay-to-laugh-about-sex1.

It’s an antidote to toxic sexual seriousness.

I’ve always believed that it isn’t just “some” people who are romantic. We all are. Some of us know it. A few of us admit it. It’s like alcoholism: If you don’t acknowledge it, it destroys you. Those who don’t are those whom it wakes at three a.m. on a dark and stormy night and never allows them to sleep again. Like alcoholism, it’s one of those things whose power increases in direct proportion to one’s denial of it.

And further, anyone who scoffs at another’s romanticism is just asking for it. One could almost believe that the scoffer deserves what he inevitably gets if it weren’t for the exorcism of fear and pity he provides us with. We end up saying, “There but for the grace of God [and a sense of humor] . . . .”

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May 5th, 2012Shakespeare and St. Jeromeby Robert Asch

There's a passage in the Vulgate I recently came across isolated from its usual context: 'Sicut nycticorax in domicilio' (Psalm 102, 7: "I am like a night raven in the house")—and I was struck by its resemblance to Caliban's mother's name, Sycorax.

I know Wikipedia is not the surest guide, but their summary of scholars' conjectures to date seems to me more far-fetched than this verbal echo of St Jerome's translation of the Psalms (found in the Divine Office, of course). Here's Wiki:

"Several competing linguistic theories have been put forth. Some scholars argue that her name may be a combination of the Greek sus ('pig') and korax ('crow'). Another rough translation produces the phrase 'the Scythian raven', an etymological description of Medea. (Batman upon Bartheme, a play which Shakespeare may have been aware of, contains a raven called Corax.) Also, psychorrhax ('heartbreaker'), may be a play on the Greek word psychoraggia ('death struggle'). One critic searched for a connection to Sycorax's North African heritage, and found a parallel in Shokereth שוקרת, a Hebrew word meaning 'deceiver'. Another recent idea suggests that, for thematic as well as historical reasons, the name is the reverberant combination of syllables in the name Corax of Syracuse—the oft acknowledged founder of rhetoric and worthy, fictionalized rival of Prospero".

It's perhaps significant that The Tempest is usually regarded as having the only plot invented by Shakespeare. Of course this might not amount to anything—but then again, it might.

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May 4th, 2012Filled with Desireby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

Andrew Lomas, regular Ink Desk reader, poses some intelligent questions here on issues of Eros and Agape.

First, he rightly notes that Eros presents a minefield for mankind and that many who have tried to navigate it have fallen. He mentions William Blake, D. H. Lawrence and Eric Gill. One could certainly add Oscar Wilde to that list, not to mention Sigmund Freud, whose primary task was the reduction of Eros - indeed of everything - to sex.

But it is crucial to point out that Eros is not merely sex. Eros includes sexual desire, but is not identical with it. The easiest way to see this is to substitute the word "Love" for Eros. Is love synonymous with sexual desire? Of course not; though sex can (potentially) be an expression of Love.

But Love has many faces or facets or aspects, and there is something about one aspect of Love that we call Eros, and that something is a hunger, a yearning, a desire to possess, a kind of howling for happiness, indeed a howling for heaven - and this aspect of Love is what makes Love dangerous, for this desire is a spiritual thing that cannot be satisfied by the flesh alone. By contrast, mere lust is a carnal thing and as such is as ridiculous as any other bodily desire or function.

The problem is that our bodies are not separate from our souls, and even something as merely physical as the sex act is infused with spiritual significance. This is why lechers who turn their lives entirely over to sex are never happy, for sex-for-sex's-sake ends up becoming more and more dehumanized, perverse and ultimately an expression of the demonic.

Thus, for our sake, God gives us strict guidelines in regard to sex. When sex becomes fornication, sodomy, masturbation, pornography or any of the other illicit expressions of it, it brings misery and pain and ultimately hell. When sex becomes the marital act - which is to say the expression of a Love that unifies between a husband and wife, open to the possibility of procreation - then this two-flesh become one-flesh in life-giving-love expresses the sacramentality of marriage and in a sense, as St. Paul points out, the union of Christ with His Church (Ephesians 5:32).

This is why I take umbrage with folks like Christopher West, who start out talking about Eros but end up talking about sex and who hardly ever discuss sex within the context that God provides for it - marriage and procreation; who go so far as to claim that the "spiritually mature" can forgo custody of the eyes and who tell us that a man sitting in front of a computer screen viewing pornography on the internet is "seeking God" - which is true, but in a very limited sense. Yes, a man who knocks on the door of a brothel is (ultimately) looking for God, but in that case we must not say, "Knock and it shall be answered".

So it's a minefield.

But Pope Benedict XVI charts a very bold course through this minefield. Read Deus Caritas Est and read my article about this in the next issue of the St. Austin Review (also see my post The Unity of Love). In the Pope's encyclical, he asserts that Love is One, that there is a unity to love as there is a unity to truth. Therefore, Agape (disinterested love of neighbor) and Eros (yearning and passionate love) must go together.

This brings me to the crux of Andrew Lomas' question, which is, in so many words, "If the Church demands from us Agape - that we love our neighbor disinterestedly - then where is there room for Eros?"

That's a great question, and the Holy Father answers it in his encyclical. I would only add this - why does Jesus tell us "blessed are they who mourn" and "blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness"? Mourning, you see, is an expression of Eros - a heart-breaking desire for someone who's absent. Hungering and thirsting for righteousness is likewise "Erotic" - it can be a flame that keeps you up nights, and we see it in the gleam behind the eyes of saints like Joan of Arc and poets like Hilaire Belloc.

For this is what Eros is. It's not "erotic" in the sense of strip clubs or porn sites. These are but the parodies of Eros. In fact, D. C. Schindler in an essay on Deus Caritas Est writes about "the boredom, the self-protectiveness, the banality, the absence of a sense of mystery and adventure, and the general disenchantment, that characterize a 'de-eroticized' world such as that of contemporary America."

That's right, our contemporary culture, steeped in a parody of the erotic, is actually lacking Eros. In fact, in my day one of the dangers of "sleeping around" was that you might fall in love with somebody, or she might fall in love with you. This appears to be a danger that the young folk of today's "hook up" culture seem to have avoided - but only through the emasculation of Eros.

Pope Benedict writes, "Desire is not truly desire unless it is also generous, and generosity is not truly generous unless it is also filled with desire."

And with this I can't help but think of the typical suburban Mass, where everything is contrived, everything seems artificial. The music expresses anything but desire, the homilies are usually about the vagueness of good intentions, the fellowship rarely goes beyond being nice. Yes, we might hear about Agape, about generous love - but we don't hear about desire, about mourning, about hungering for righteousness, about the Fear of God which is the Desire for God which is the first step, without which we cannot see His face.

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May 4th, 2012Will the Real Uncle Sam Please Stand Up?by Joseph Pearce

One of my favourite country songs of recent years is "Small Town Southern Man" by Alan Jackson, a song that forms part of that "Chesterton Country" that I've celebrated here on the Ink Desk. The only line in the lyrics of this otherwise entirely healthy song that leaves me feeling a little ambivalent is that referring to bowing his head to Jesus and standing for Uncle Sam. I have no ambivalence to bowing the head to Jesus, of course, but I can't help feeling a little uneasy about the standing for Uncle Sam. No, as one who became an American citizen about two years ago, I'm not being unpatriotic. Please hear me out.

I am happy, indeed honoured, to stand for my country. I am, however, reminded of the words of Chesterton who said that to say my country right or wrong is like saying my mother drunk or sober. If Uncle Sam is really a benevolent "uncle", all well and good. But who exactly is the Uncle Sam for whom we're being asked to stand? If he's the personification of small town America, standing on its own two feet, Christian, and raising a family in the traditional way, I'm all for Uncle Sam. But is Uncle Sam a Christian? Is he a small town American man? Is he a family man?

Or is Uncle Sam synonymous with the Federal Government? Is his favourite nephew a certain Mr. Obama? Is Uncle Sam more concerned with marching through Georgia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran than supporting his kinsfolk in the small towns of America?

As an English-American, I see ominous parallels between Uncle Sam and John Bull, the latter of whom is a personification of the might of the British Empire. Years ago, I ceased being a Great Britisher who idolized the Empire and became a Little Englander who simply loved the smallness and beauty of my country. I summed up the difference between a Great Britisher and a Little Englander in a short poem entitled "Sunset":

When Britain had an Empire
The sun would never set,
But the sun set over England
And Englishmen forget

That greater than the Empire
Are the rolling Yorkshire moors,
And more glorious the Dales
Than all the Empire's wars.

If Uncle Sam represents all that is truly good and small and noble in America, I will stand for Uncle Sam as willingly as the small town southern man in Alan Jackson's song. If, however, Uncle Sam is a bullying imperialist who believes in big government and in the crushing of religious freedom and destroying the very fabric of the traditional family, Uncle Sam can go to Hell!

Will the real Uncle Sam please stand up so that we can know whether we are to stand with him or against him?

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May 4th, 2012True Baring and Hard Knoxby Joseph Pearce

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
- The Merchant of Venice, 5.1.81-8

If music be the food of love, play on …
- Twelfth Night, 1.1.1.

I wonder what William Shakespeare would have thought of Ronald Knox. This odd thought was prompted by an anecdote about the two prominent converts Maurice Baring and Ronald Knox that I came across last night when browsing through Frank Sheed's The Church and I. It concerns their relative response to the beauties of music. Here's Sheed on Baring and Knox:

I have never found two converts alike .... Consider Maurice Baring - in love with melody, learning the violin almost before he could walk, as a small child leaning out of the window "the better to absorb the whole perfection of a lark's song". Now think of Ronald Knox, who could not carry a tune sufficiently to sing High Mass. Once he and I were walking to the railway station in Durham. We passed a brass band. He remarked, "Of course good music is better than bad music. But the best music is inferior to silence."

What are we to make of Ronald Knox's singular blindness or deafness to the beauty of music? Is he, as Shakespeare might suggest in his sideswipe against the killjoy Puritans, fit only for treasons, stratagems and spoils? Are his affections as dark as Hell? Can he be trusted?

Well, perhaps only an aesthetic purist would condemn Knox for his deafness to the beauty of music, and perhaps aesthetic purists are not much better than ascetic puritans. It is, however, odd that a man of Knox's ability should be so out of sympathy with an important part of the beauty of God's Creation. And is it really licit to believe that silence is better than the most beautiful music? Isn't a preference for the absence of music an acceptance of a negation that is almost akin to nihilism? Let's remember in this context that even monks do not seek the absence of music in the absolute sense of preferring silence. Cloisters are not made for silence but for birdsong.

In any event, I have no desire to say anything negative about the great convert, Ronald Knox, whose own singular contribution to the Catholic Revival provided its own linguistic and rational "music" to the convert-inspired symphony of praise which that Revival represented in the twentieth century. I would say, however, that Sheed's anecdote has made it easier for me to understand why I have always preferred the music of Maurice Baring's writing to the relative flatness of Knox's literary style. I would rather re-read the great novels of Baring, such as C, or Cat's Cradle, or Robert Peckham, than return to the various works of Knox that I have read in the past. If music be the food of love, play on ...

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May 4th, 2012Early Morning Mass for Breakfastby Tom Kallene

Living in Spain, and in my case the old center of Madrid, allows me to indulge in a personal spiritual pleasure: the early morning Mass. Since the day here tends to end later than in America, we get out of bed a little later too. Office hours in general start at nine am or later. Early morning Mass in my case is at 8:30 a.m., in a wonderful oratory a mere five-minute walk from my home.

What a wonderful way to start the day!

And if I can’t get there every morning, it’s never less than two or three times a week, and always on Fridays. There aren’t many of us, maybe six or eight, but you know that those present seek God in a personal way. Often it’s my good friend Father Napoleon who officiates. (His parents probably didn’t think their son would become a priest. An Argentinian Pater I know says he once came across a Father Lenin). His five-minute sermon always packs a punch and gives you something to think about in the day ahead.

Another regular, a young soldier, refers to the morning Mass as "Necessary Nutrition for the Soul and Spirit,” and I suppose he sums it up pretty well. I am grateful that my work schedule allows me this now important part of my daily spiritual discipline.

On Sunday, I have the full, old, sung Latin Mass as a centerpiece. But the quiet, low-key, humble little early morning Mass makes a great breakfast for a hungry soul on Friday morning.

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May 3rd, 2012From the Green Woodby Dena Hunt

Elizabeth Scalia over at The Anchoress website provides a clip of the movie “The Perfect Family” in which the Catholic Church is ridiculed and condemned. (one comedic line: “I don’t have to think—I’m Catholic!”) Some scenes are indeed funny—with that kind of self-deprecating humor that one expects to be allowed for “insiders”—but others are definitely not, because, judging from the trailer, the film is definitely not a mere vehicle for Catholics to make fun of themselves; it’s the opposite: a serious, very un-funny showcase for “liberal” anti-Catholics to display their self-perceived moral superiority. In fact, one imagines the mind-route of its writers: this priest character is so funny, Catholics will laugh, then Catholics will see that he’s not so funny, he’s prejudiced against gays, he’s a bigot, the Catholic Church is bigoted. This movie tells anti-Catholics to congratulate themselves and Catholics to re-think their affiliation with the Church—all in “harmless” fun. It’s comedic sheep’s clothing at its subtle best, intolerant hatefulness in its cleverest disguise, ignorance in the show-business costume of wisdom. And that’s just the trailer . . . .

One comment follows Elizabeth’s post, reminding viewers of the trailer that we’re meant “for a sign and a contradiction.” Okay—where’s the contradiction? Where are the contradictory films? True, there have been one or two in recent years (the old 1940s black-and-white sentimentals on EWTN don’t count.) that focus on Catholic values (think “Bella”), but not on Catholicism or the Church itself—as this film certainly does.

Evangelism doesn’t mean just going around improving cultural values. It doesn’t mean just telling the story of an unmarried girl having the courage to give birth to her child instead of aborting it. It means actually using hard words like “Christ,” like “redemption” and even, maybe, “the Church.” Catholic writers, publishers, and producers must find their courage, for, heaven help us—this is only the green wood, what will we do when the wood becomes dry?

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May 3rd, 2012Explaining My Absenceby Joseph Pearce

I think that a brief explanation of my protracted absence from the Ink Desk might be in order. First, however, I'd like to thank Kevin and Dena for holding the fort, so to speak, in my absence. Their posts are always so thought-provoking in the best sense of the word and we are so blessed to have them as stars in our constellation of bloggers.

My own absence over the past week or so has been due mainly to my efforts to deliver a manuscript to my publisher by an end of April deadline. In the event, I put the final period on the final sentence of the 70,000 word manuscript on May 1st, only one day late. I am currently reading it through before sending it off later today. For those who may be interested, it's entitled "Candles in the Dark: Father Ho Lung and the Missionaries of the Poor" and it should be published this autumn by St. Benedict Press.

I have two and possibly three other books due for publication this autumn. The first is entitled "Shakespeare On Love: Seeing the Catholic Presence in Romeo & Juliet", which I believe will be published by Ignatius Press this autumn. The second is entitled "Beauteous Truth: Faith, Reason, Literature & Culture" and will be published by St. Augustine's Press. The possible third book will be on the Catholic dimension of The Hobbit. This is not yet finalized with the publisher and I have not even started writing it. We'll see what happens.

Further afield, I understand that a Chinese edition of my biography of Solzhenitsyn is being planned, which is very exciting, and today I've heard from a Spanish publisher interested in publishing a Spanish language edition of Through Shakespeare's Eyes: Seeing the Catholic Presence in the Plays.

On other fronts, two new Tolkien specials for EWTN are being planned, the first will be filmed this November and the second probably next spring. I am planning two possible new courses for Catholic Courses, one on Chesterton and the other on The Hobbit, and I wait eagerly for the six new titles in the Ignatius Critical Editions series, in which I am involved.

That's the update on what's been happening in my life and what, God willing, should be unfolding in the months ahead. I hope, in the midst of it all, to be able to post to the Ink Desk regularly on this, that and whatever. Watch this space!

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May 2nd, 2012Love, Shakespeare and Everything In Betweenby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

What does love have to do with discipline? What does discipline have to do with purity? What does purity have to do with fruitfulness?

What does acting have to do with any of this?

Over the past few months, I have been writing about the connection between Eros and God, a connection that Pope Benedict XVI boldly details in his first encyclical , and which some theologians (in my opinion) misconstrue.

Lately, I've written about something else that gets misconstrued - acting. I've been writing about the tendency in acting circles to say it's all about emotion and not about what contains or directs the emotion; indeed it's all about feelings and not about purpose. This fashion becomes a disdain for technique or even discipline, which stems from the modern notion that content can exist without form or that anything that constrains or holds us back or shapes us is suspect.

And when it comes to Shakespeare you really see this in spades. As the photo here proves I have personal experience acting Shakespeare poorly. I've also had enough experience directing Shakespeare to know that actors approach the Bard the way they approach all acting - gin up those feelings, baby. Emote! Emote! If you don't feel it, it ain't real! Thus an actor can do a very emotional performance of a Shakespearian speech without realizing at all that there's a point to this speech and a direction for this emotion.

Shakespeare's characters do more than spout dialogue and gush sentiment - they use rhetoric. Most of the speeches in all of the plays are rhetorical, by which I mean intellectual and emotional arguments a particular character presents to builds a rational case for who he is and what he is doing. There's a ton of philosophy in Shakespeare, coming at us from as many points of view as there are personae in the dramatis. And one of the points of the drama is to see how the consequences of these conflicting philosophies play themselves out.

But not only do many actors overlook the rhetorical shape of the speeches they perform, they think it's wrong for anyone to suggest that these speeches - or this character - or the play that contains them - means anything other than the (usually narrow and self-serving) meaning they impose upon all of it arbitrarily and ahead of time - which is how they look at life: disconnected fragmentary bits of emotion and experience without a point to any of it beyond whatever subjective point a person may choose to impose as the mood strikes him.

This is all rather Forced or Contrived. But when you're taught to impose an interpretation on a character even while learning lines in the privacy of your bedroom, what else can be expected?

This all ties in to my latest post, Everything I Know about Theology and Economics I Learned from "Cracked", in which I touch upon the Cult of Sterility, or the modern devotion (sometimes unwilling devotion) to activities that bear no fruit.

In the same way that we tend to think the emotions in Shakespeare are for show and not for a purpose; in the same way we tend to think that art is for self-expression, and not for the expression of anything beyond self; in the same way that we expect sex to be barren; and in the same way that labor in an Economy of Usury becomes pointless, so all of life ends up serving the idol Priapus-Wearing-a-Condom - and through all of this we are witnessing the effects of cutting off Eros from its target.

***

By contrast ...

"Desire therefore my words; long for them and you shall be instructed," the Holy Spirit tells us in the Book of Wisdom (6:11) - which is to say, "Seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you." (Matthew 7:7).

Ontologically speaking, salvation begins with God's desire for us. But psychologically speaking, salvation begins with our desire for God. This desire, this longing, this seeking is Purpose - it is a desire, a longing, a seeking for Something Real - for Someone Real (despite what the modern world tells us).

"For the first step toward discipline is a very earnest desire for her," we are told (Wisdom 6:17), this "her" being Wisdom, or the chief gift of the Holy Spirit, and Wisdom being nothing less than intimacy with God Himself. "Then," the book of Wisdom continues, "care for discipline is love of her; love means the keeping of her laws; to observe her laws is the basis for incorruptibility; and incorruptibility makes one close to God; thus the desire for Wisdom leads up to a kingdom."

In other words,

the first step toward discipline is a very earnest desire for her

a longing, an earnest upward desire, an Eros starts our journey.

Then, care for discipline is love of her

"Then" (meaning "after this"), the journey makes progress via discipline. Our care for discipline (suffering is a form of discipline) is an expression of this love.

Love means the keeping of her laws

Realizing that love has laws and that by con-forming to the Law of Love is what metanoia is all about ("And be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind" - Romans 12:2)

to observe her laws is the basis for incorruptibility

Incorruptibility is purity, sanctification ("For this corruptible must put on incorruption" - 1 Cor. 15:53)

and incorruptibility makes one close to God; thus the desire for Wisdom leads up to a kingdom.

"The benefit that you receive is sanctification and its end is eternal life." (Romans 6:22)

This is how God has designed it to work: desire leads to discipline leads to holiness leads to Him.

Contrary to the modern world, then, Scripture tells us that

1. Eros has a point while "safe sex" does not;

2. consenting to Discipline is an expression of Eros - which is to say you can't become a virtuoso pianist if you don't honor the fact that music depends upon the metronome;

3. this Discipline teaches us to follow the objective Laws of Love, though the modern world tells us that nothing in creation obeys any fixed law, especially human nature and certainly not love; and

4. by conforming to these Laws our Love becomes pure or perfected (contrast this with the modern notion that love is just an itch you scratch);

5. and since "perfect love casts out fear" (1 John 4:18), we are lifted above our petty selves and brought to true happiness, which is heaven, the face of God, the purpose of our existence.

Got that?

Now I've got to get back to reading funny articles on Cracked.

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May 2nd, 2012Everything I Learned about Theology and Economics I Learned from “Cracked”by Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

We live in a world where the most insightful and mature politicital commentary is in Cracked.

Cracked was a humor magazine that premiered in the 1970's. It was a kind of a Mad Magazine for 14-year-old boys - which is what Mad Magazine was. But now Cracked seems to exist as a web site that publishes some very funny and perceptive social commentary - sort of like The Ink Desk for a secular audience with a hefty dose of vulgarity.

So be warned that vulgarity abounds, but if you can read between the language, Five Ways to Spot a B.S. Political Story in Under Ten Seconds is a very incisive look at the pathetic shortcomings of political journalism in the U.S.

The author of this piece, David Wong, writes a similarly funny article entitled How The Karate Kid Ruined the Modern World. This piece deals with the fact that doing things well requires much more work than we ever imagine - which Wong calls "Effort Shock", something akin to "Sticker Shock". But that's not what interests me in Wong's article. What interests me is that he's stumbled on to something. He writes ...

I really think Effort Shock has been one of the major drivers of world events. Think about the whole economic collapse and the bad credit bubble. You can imagine millions of working types saying, "All right, I have NO free time. I work every day, all day. I come home and take care of the kids. We live in a tiny house, with two [run down] cars. And we are still deeper in debt every single month." So they borrow and buy on credit because they have this unspoken assumption that, dammit, the universe will surely right itself at some point and the amount of money we should have been making all along (according to our level of effort) will come raining down.

Now, it is quite true that people think that effort alone should be productive, and that any expenditure of effort entitles a person to inflated success. My friend Timothy Jones writes, "Watch American Idol auditions and see that confirmed in spades. The ones I feel bad for are those who've taken voice lessons for years and simply don't know that they're awful and always will be. 'But I want this SO MUUUUUUCH!!!!'"

Which is to say that Effort Shock is real and says a lot about our own Sloth and Greed, both of which were certainly factors in the housing bubble.

But the illustration David Wong makes is quite common. There are many families with two working parents, each putting in considerably more than 40 hours a week, each on the brink of exhaustion, with the family as a whole getting not a positive result, but a negative result - the family falling deeper into a debt that can never be repaid - a debt with usurious interest rates, which will never be erased short of bankruptcy because the original loans (a mortgage on an overvalued house, credit card purchases) are unproductive; the loans are unproductive, no matter how productive the borrowers may struggle to be.

This is something even more dehumanizing than wage slavery. Wages at least should be something positive, the fruits of productivity. But when we're paid (in effect) with debits and not credits, things can only get worse.

This is all really profoundly theological.

All natural effort is pointless if the supernatural element is not present. You can break your back as a farmer, but if the gift of growth is not in the soil, your efforts will be unavailing. You can bust your buns learning to play a musical instrument, but if the God-given gift of talent is not there to begin with, your efforts won't get you very far.

So it's a tad cynical to see productivity and the fruits of labor as being forever out of our reach as we furiously spin that consuming hamster wheel of sterility. It is more right to say, "Effort-and-Productivity should go hand in hand, like Faith-and-Works or Sex-and-Babies - and when they don't, when we are robbed of the fruits of our labors, either through usury or our own lack of talent or the lack of responsiveness of the soil we're cultivating, then something is wrong."

In other words, Wong is Right, but Wong is Wrong.

It takes more work to bear fruit than we typically expect, but there is a natural connection between Effort and Result, which we see severed all around us, from contraception to usury to laziness.

Faith without works is dead, and works without anything to show for it is the hallmark of the modern age.

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May 1st, 2012We Are Now to be Protected Even From Our Freedom of Choiceby Dena Hunt

We are now to be protected even from our freedom of choice.

A new legislative push now aims to make it illegal for people to seek help in overcoming unwanted same-sex attraction. A “self-identified Catholic” in California has introduced legislation that would prohibit minors from seeking therapy even with parental consent, and would allow adults to do so only by signing an “informed consent” document stating that they “know” an attempt to change their homosexual orientation may result in depression and suicide, along with other dangerous side-effects. That there is NO evidence whatsoever of any such consequence makes no difference, because the “informed consent” says only that therapy “may” have such a consequence, thereby avoiding any legal responsibility to explain itself at all—much less, explain its language. A victory for utterly baseless innuendo.

I know how insane it all sounds, but here it is:

http://www.calcatholic.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?id=57a0362e-6af6-486b-89a6-05943730e206

The legislation would also open the door for civil lawsuits against such therapy.

What a strange world it is. A minor cannot get an aspirin from a school nurse without a parent’s written consent, but she can get an abortion even without a parent’s knowledge. A teen-ager who may be confused about his sexual “identity” cannot seek help, even with his parent’s consent, to overcome a same-sex attraction he doesn’t want, but he can get therapy in “accepting” his homosexuality—with mandated insurance coverage. It is even legal now to give children sex-change operations.

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April 30th, 2012Interview with a Vikingby Jef Murray

For those interested, a new interview with TheViking of Middle-earth News was just posted at the following website. Enjoy!

http://news.mymiddle-earth.net/2012/04/28/featured-website-mystical-realms/

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April 27th, 2012C.S. Lewis on the Rational and the Mysticalby Joseph Pearce

We must believe that there is no real conflict between the Rational and the Mystical: but in a given period now one, now the other, will be what the world actually needs to be reminded of - I mean the unbelieving world: and one or the other will usually be the bridge to faith. Thus you and I came to it chiefly by Reason (I don't mean, of course, that any one comes at all but by God's grace - I am talking about the route not the motive power) but dozens of other converts, beginning with St. Paul, did not.

- Letter to the Catholic convert Dom Bede Griffiths, April 24, 1936

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April 27th, 2012The Rights and Wrongs of Rantingby Joseph Pearce

There's been an interesting discussion arising from my post "Voice and Voices in Shakespeare". I'd like particularly to draw attention to Kevin O'Brien's eloquent contribution to that discussion. I am, however, posting my own shorter contribution to the discussion, hoping it will serve as an appetizer leading people to the full discussion. Here it is:

Perhaps I should not have employed the word "rant", though beautiful poetry can certainly be ranted, every bit as much as it can alliterate etc. The world is full of examples of the greatest rhetorical skills being employed to rant.

It is of course a matter for the director of each new production of Macbeth to decide how these lines are to be delivered, whether as angst-ridden words of introspective nihilistic despair (the delivery that you evidently prefer) or as an insane rant against the world and its meaninglessness.

In any event, and most importantly, we seem to agree that Macbeth's words are not Shakespeare's but are the consequence of the cautionary denouement of the plot. In short, Macbeth is wrong and Shakespeare is right to show us that he's wrong. This is clearly in harmony with what one would expect from a Catholic poet.

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April 26th, 2012The Jesuit Presence in Romeo and Julietby Joseph Pearce

I am currently teaching an on-line class on Romeo and Juliet for Homeschool Connections and received an e-mail from one of my students asking if there is a dialectical engagement with Elizabethan anti-Catholicism in the play. Here's my response to the student:

The play reflects in its moral theme some of the poetry and writing of the Jesuit priest and martyr, St. Robert Southwell, most notably in his poem, "Lewd Love is Loss". Southwell wrote of the difference between true love, i.e. caritas or charity, and the false love inspired by Venus or Eros, i.e. venereal or erotic "love". This is Shakespeare's primary theme in Romeo and Juliet, of course. In my book, "Shakespeare On Love: Seeing the Catholic Presence in Romeo and Juliet", which will be published by Ignatius Press this autumn, there is a long appendix section on "The Jesuit Connection" in which Shakespeare's creative debt to Southwell is explored.

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April 26th, 2012Strindbergby Tom Kallene

Being a Swede in "exile," the other day I visited the Swedish embassy to renew my passport.

I paid a rather significant amount of money to do so and they took my picture, one that, predictably, makes me look like a cross between Charles Manson and Breivik, the Norwegian murderer.

Beforehand, I had a cup of coffee with the nice lady that handle Press and Culture. And we spoke about August Strindberg.

This year marks the centenary of the death of Strindberg, Sweden’s most important author and playwright. The celebrations have been rather low key. When the goal is to project an image abroad of how progressive and modern Sweden is, the state does not hesitate to spend money. In contrast, not much effort has been made to honor its (arguably) most significant contribution to world culture. One reason may be because my fellow countrymen don’t know how to classify him. True, as a young man he proclaimed himself a nihilist, atheist, and socialist, endearing him to those similarly inclined. But we Catholics should take a closer look at Strindberg and his work, because his most radical act was to embrace, as a mature man, the Cross.

In fact, it is only a simple cross that marks his grave. Upon it is inscribed in Latin, "O Crux Ave Spes Unica” (“O Cross, be greeted, our only hope”).

Strindberg never formally joined the Church, but his writing in "Inferno" or "Ensam” (to name but two examples) is clearly Catholic, in that Faith is presented as the only hope for the tortured soul.

The love for the Catholic Church that he expresses in his writing is, of course, a bit of a stumbling block for his secularist admirers, ill at ease with a man of Faith. Nothing suggests that Strindberg was a particularly nice man; making enemies seemed like a favorite pastime. But when you try to define the man, as many pundits are doing this commemorative year, "You can’t ride around"—as Randolph Scott used to say in those wonderful westerns by Boetticher—the Cross on his grave.

O Crux Ave Spes Unica.

As a closing statement, it’s hard to beat.

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April 26th, 2012C.S. Lewis & Friendsby Joseph Pearce

Admirers of C. S. Lewis might like to check out the forthcoming C. S. Lewis and The Inklings Society Conference at Taylor University. I had a great time as the keynote speaker at this conference a couple of years ago and can thoroughly recommend it. Here are the details:
______________________________

Subject: only a few days left for CS Lewis & Friends/CSLIS Conference registration

Dear Friends,

Don’t miss this opportunity to attend a great Joint Meeting of CS Lewis & The Inklings Society Annual Conference and The C.S. Lewis & Friends Colloquium at Taylor University!

http://lewisconference.zondervanlibrary.org/

Special Presentations at the Conference:

Speakers:
Alan Jacobs, author of The Narnian, “Distinguo!”
David Downing, CS Lewis scholar, “Journey to Joy: C.S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress”
Ron Reed, director of Pacific Theater in Vancouver: “A Bright and Particular Star” a play about Lilia MacDonald

The release of the new book “Light: C.S. Lewis’s First and Only Short Story” by Charlie Starr

A new documentary on Lewis by Devin Brown: “CS Lewis: Why He Matters Today”

A Readers Theater production of the new play by Mark St. Germain that supposes that CS Lewis was the mysterious ‘Oxford don’ who was Freud’s last patient: “Freud’s Last Session”

45 Academic Papers will be presented.

All for only $350 – includes registration, room & board!

Come and join us!

Laura Constantine
Assistant, Center for the Study of C.S. Lewis and Friends
Taylor University
Upland, Indiana 46989
http://www.taylor.edu/cslewis

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April 25th, 2012Voice and Voices in Shakespeareby Joseph Pearce

I was intrigued to read the discussion in Kevin's post, "Winter's Tale to Fairy Tale", in which it was suggested that Shakespeare could not be a good Catholic because of his depiction of nihilism and despair in plays such as Macbeth and King Lear. Kevin's response to these suggestions is very good and I hope that people will take the time to visit this post to read what he he has to say.

The key point that Kevin makes, and that I have sought to make in Through Shakespeare's Eyes: Seeing the Catholic Presence in the Plays and in the soon-to-be-published Shakespeare On Love: Seeing the Catholic Presence in Romeo & Juliet, is that it is necessary to draw the vital and crucial distinction between the voice of the playwright and the voices of his characters. The nihilistic rant of Macbeth at the end of the Scottish Play is not the voice of Shakespeare but the voice of a character who has been led to despair by his practice of machiavellian relativism. Macbeth's descent from noble warrior to nihilistic desperado is Shakespeare's judgement of where such nihilistic nonsense leads. Lear's stripping of himself naked on the heath is the necessary "madness" that precedes the sanity of conversion. Hamlet's asking of the right questions at the beginning of the play leads to his coming to the right answer, quoting from the Gospel, at the play's end. Romeo's spurning of the foolishness of chastity at the beginning of the play lays the foundations for the tragedy that follows.

Macbeth is not Shakespeare; Lear is not Shakespeare; Hamlet is not Shakespeare; Romeo is not Shakespeare. Shakespeare shows us these characters and their follies to show us the character and folly of sin and its disastrous consequences.

The Bard of Avon lived in dark and treacherous times, in which priests were put to tortuous slow death. It is not surprising, therefore, that his plays are full of dark and treacherous characters. As a Catholic he is showing us the ugliness of a life without Christ.

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April 25th, 2012Shakespeare Lives!by Dena Hunt

Father Z has outdone himself in this opening scene from “A Most Tragikal History of Obama I.” (Can a sense of humor be a charism?)

http://wdtprs.com/blog/2012/04/a-most-tragikal-hystory-of-obama-i/

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April 24th, 2012Holiness and Kingshipby Joseph Pearce

Readers of The Lord of the Rings will be familiar with the combination of holiness and kingship in the characterization of Aragorn. Such characteristics are not, however, confined to the magical worlds of myth, legend and fairy tales. History is full of holy kings and queens. One thinks perhaps of St. Edward the Confessor or St. Elizabeth of Portugal, or "good King Wenceslaus" who famously "looked out on the feast of Stephen". Closer to our own time, we should remember Blessed Emperor Karl of Austria-Hungary. My friend, Brendan King, has just forwarded me this short video tribute to the "prince of peace" who was beatified by John Paul II in 2004:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTO31dkDQv8&list=PL2AD8FBB209B2382D&index=14&feature=plpp_video

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April 23rd, 2012For England, Shakespeare, and Saint George!by Joseph Pearce

On this feast day of the great St. George, I'd like to pay tribute to England's greatest writer. Isn't it astonishing that the great Bard of Avon was born and died on the feast day of England's patron saint? There was only one chance in 365 that he would be born on St. George's Day, and only one chance in 365 that he would die on St. George's Day. According to my calculations, the chances of anyone being born and dying on Saint George's Day are an astronomically unlikely 133,000 to one. If I was as credulous as Richard Dawkins, I'd call it a remarkable coincidence; as I'm not as credulous as Dawkins I consider it a great blessing that God has blessed England by giving her Shakespeare on the feast of her patron saint, and by taking him to His bosom on the same significant date. Deo gratias!

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April 23rd, 2012A Prayer to Saint George on His Feast Dayby Joseph Pearce

Today is the Feast of St. George, patron saint of England.

As an Englishman, this day is my national day, at least as significant to me as is the Fourth of July to Americans. As a Catholic, the day means much more to me than it did in the days when I was only an Englishman. In those days, St. George was venerable only insofar as he was traditionally associated with my homeland. He was only powerful as a memory and as a symbol. He was dead but the symbolism surrounding him could perhaps rouse the sleeping Englishman to life. Now, however, as a Catholic Englishmen, I actually have a living relationship with the saint, knowing that he can answer the prayers of all Englishmen who seek his intercession for the Motherland. I pray to him daily but especially on this festival day:

Saint George, please pray for England, a country, which, in its days of wisdom, dedicated itself to thee. I pray that the dragons that are laying England to waste are subdued in the name of Christ. I pray that through your most powerful intercession as a holy knight of Christendom that the dragon of secular fundamentalism may be slain. I pray also that through the same powerful intercession that the dragon of Islamic fundamentalism may be similarly slain. I pray that the dragon which has made its home in the hearts of so many Englishmen may be slain so that they may return to the Faith of their Fathers. Only when the dragon of sin has been vanquished will Englishmen not be slaves. In the name of faith and freedom, I ask you, fearless saint, to obtain these favours for my country. This I ask in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

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April 23rd, 2012St. George’s Dayby Sophia Mason | http://girlwhowassaturday.blogspot.com/

When I started blogging, I chose St. George as the sort of unofficial patron (after Chesterton) of my blog; it is his picture that appears on the blog's main page. It's the earlier, more dramatic of Raphael's two stabs (pardon the pun) at painting St. George and the Dragon. The latter one, the one that more commonly shows up on postcards and people's walls, looks like this:

I like this picture. (I have to say that, because what I'm about to say about it by comparison to the other St. George may not sound very flattering.) I do like this picture. The first thing that jumps out at the viewer is the horse. No "my little ponies" for Raphael; this horse is handsome but tough, a sort of Gregory Peck in the equine order. He's also looking right at the viewer—points for good eye contact. The expression is hard to pin down exactly—there's a subtle, Mona Lisa quality to it—but the horse is certainly smiling, and almost raising its eyebrows at the same time. Bemused, perhaps, would be the word. "Here we go again! Lizards for lunch." St. George's face is, by contrast, much less expressive; to the degree that its emotion can be made out, it seems contemplative, and even melancholy. The dragon is in its death-throws, groaning open-mouthed as the lance penetrates its chest. Meanwhile, the princess is kneeling at prayer in the background, hands sedately folded and head a little on one side, like a woman who trusts that everything is under control—as indeed it is. Everything about the quartet is very pretty, very finished, from the fine stitching on the horse's equipage to the plants growing outside the dragon's cave. Perfetto.

Then there's the other picture:

This is obviously a less polished effort—it was in fact probably painted a couple years earlier, which may in part account for that fact. The ground is simply a green spludge, an impressionistic fling at grass; and the rocks and trees in the background are likewise bland and incompletely worked. The dragon appears to be the same animal, at least anatomically, but what a difference in expression! Yeah, he's still on the small side, and there's no visible fire; but the punk has attitude. He's demolished St. George's candy-striped lance—yes, that's it lying on the ground (in contrast to the saint's more understated but obviously sturdier weapon of the latter painting)—and sent the princess running for her life.

St. George is still unconcerned and baby-faced, but he hasn't yet acquired the melting expression that comes over him later. He's cool as a cucumber and, like Yum-Yum and the moon, very wide awake. He is probably a bit of a swell, in fact, with the backsword, and those natty plumes on his helmet (the more mature St. George gets spikes instead), and the pink-and-red color scheme he's chosen for the horse's digs.

Oh, and that horse! My stars and daisies! WHAT has St. George been feeding the horse? This is not the same animal as in the later picture. If the later one is a Gregory Peck, this is Robert Mitchum—still handsome, perhaps, but not so well proportioned and a bit on the, um, beefy side. No coy, weary turn of the head for this beast. He looks straight ahead of him, panting but triumphant. The course of the battle in this picture, as in the previous one, is not in doubt.

In terms of the geometry of the pictures, it is interesting to note that the horse and the dragon share pretty much the same pose in this picture, and that their bodies again trace out parallel lines in the later one, whereas in both pictures St. George and the princess are leaning ever so slightly away from each other. Also, Raphael was clearly much more interested in the horse and dragon than he was in the humans. Typically male. Weapons, tanks, army stuff—Cool beans; soldiers' personalities—What do you think we are, lady novelists? Jane Austens? Mmph.

I think it should be clear why I chose the earlier picture for this blog. Yes, it's less finished than it could be—so are most of my blog posts. I like St. George to be, if not actually sweating, at least looking sort of determined; I like the princess running away (wouldn't you?!) and the dragon putting up a good fight—because in real life, dragons don't give up so easily either. As for the horse—well, I could take either specimen. The both share, with their rider, the most important quality of all: a confidence as to the ultimate outcome of the conflict between good and evil.

Happy feast of St. George!

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April 22nd, 2012The Syntax of Relationshipsby Dena Hunt

There are patterns in syntax that are like x-rays of perception. What we say, both aloud and silently, reveals us by revealing how we perceive reality. We are never so naked as when we open our mouths to speak. Only someone who is both illiterate and mute is truly anonymous.

I’m not a trained counselor, but in decades of teaching teen-agers, I became one by listening to their grammar, to the syntax of their thoughts, and not only hearing my students, but often their parents as well. If you listen to someone’s grammar, you can see a very clear outline—actually, a diagnostic x-ray—of an unhealthy relationship. A small example is a mother talking to me about the surly rebelliousness of her son, one of my students.

“His behavior is disgusting.”

“Disgusting to whom?”

“To anybody.”

At bottom, this mother didn’t like her son. Whether she loved him doesn’t matter; she was forced to live with someone who disgusted her. That’s a very uncomfortable situation, bound to cause her to rebel. Her son’s rebelliousness was only a healthy self-defensive response, even as he struggled futilely to please her. Being forced to live with someone you don’t like is not as bad, as destructive, as being forced to live with someone who doesn’t like you. But she thought the problem was the “disgusting” behavior of her son. Her syntax revealed the absence of the necessary pronoun object of “disgust.” By making the subject of her sentence “his behavior,” she was hiding her dislike of her son from herself. Why? Probably because she wouldn’t approve of it. It didn’t fit her emotional image of “mother.”

There were many instances like this one. “I can’t stand him” was impossible for her. Now, maybe if I’d been a counselor instead of just her son’s English teacher, I would have referred her to a professional setting wherein, possibly after years of self-examination, she might have been able to discover the pronoun I, but that would be too late for her son. I thought, this kid should move out of his mother’s house—immediately. I gave the mother sympathy (she wouldn’t have accepted anything else, anyway), but I told the boy I thought he should move out—never mind that he wasn’t even seventeen yet. I know that advice blasphemes against our sentimental perception of “family,” but he’s now a happily married man and a successful lawyer, and I don’t know what would have happened to him if he’d stayed with his mother.

When I was teaching, I met a lot of parents who despised their children. Every one of them had problems with personal pronouns, and every one of them used the phrase “our family” way too many times. Family, for all the emotional security that it can provide, is a context that is, of itself, neutral. When it’s used (as it so often is today) as a haven from maturity or differentiation, it can be incredibly destructive. Sometimes the best relationship one can have with one’s family may be a distant one—a very distant one. The best indicator is a look at how pronouns are used in syntax. I’ve met some people who can’t even think outside first-person plural. The mother in my example was stuck in third-person singular.

One might be tempted to blame this mother for disliking her son—or me, for being more interested in the welfare of her son than in his mother. But she was a Southern Lady, and that’s a place one should go only with an understanding of what that means. There is a real difference between southern women and—others. I won’t go into it, but it has connotations both very admirable and very destructive. The admirable is exemplified in the well-known character of Melanie Hamilton in “Gone With the Wind.” But the same thing that makes Melanie admirable can have other effects as well. I don’t know what the stats are now, but a generation or two ago, the suicide rate for women was higher in the South than anywhere else in the country. A lady, we all know, is defined as someone who never does anything to attract attention to herself, but a Southern Lady adds, “including her own.” There’s a reason this mother had trouble with the pronoun I, and one doesn’t just wantonly go around pointing some things out to people in the interest of “correcting” their relationships. My aunt was a Class A Southern Lady. In her old age, she accidentally discovered I and put a pistol to her temple.

A more generic and less specific example: The function of a preposition is to relate a noun or pronoun to the sentence in which it’s used. “He came TO the store” establishes a relationship between the location of “he” and “the store.” And “He came FROM the store” establishes a different relationship. However, if you listen, you can know something else: You can know the location of the speaker—even though he never tells you where he is.

It can be illuminating, too, to listen to the syntax of our thoughts as we think about ourselves, others, the world, God—but only if we bear in mind that the relationship is in the syntax, not in the thoughts themselves, and that the purpose of the exercise is not to judge ourselves, but simply to see how we relate ourselves and our world to each other. Even one hour—not sure anyone could take more than that—can be very surprising. But, again, one must look only at the syntax, not at the thoughts.

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April 21st, 2012Learning Lines and Drawing the Lineby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

(Above: Actor Mark Shea realizes while putting on make-up, "I forgot to learn my lines!")

My actress Maria Romine tells me she's really only learned about Acting since working with me, that the four years she spent at a small private liberal arts college majoring in Acting were a "complete waste of time".

One of the bad bits of learning Maria has had to unlearn since her college days has been the False Dichotomy of "Acting from the Inside" versus "Acting from the Outside". This came up when Maria and I were doing a "Line Speed" today for one of our shows. For those of you not in the business, a Speed is when you and your fellow cast members go through your lines as fast as you can, without Acting them, like a robot on 78-RPM. This makes sure that you not only know the dialogue, but that you know it well, automatically, at speed, under pressure.

But Maria has never been able to do a Speed without Acting her way through it.

I pointed out to Maria that she must not be learning her lines the way I was taught to learn them - neutrally; which is to say, learning the words only without any emphasis or interpretation attached. When you learn your lines neutrally and when you "over-learn" them, so that they become automatic and can be recited at Speed without thinking, as most of us know the Pledge of Allegiance or our favorite daily prayers, then and only then are you free as an actor to be spontaneous in rehearsal and performance without your Acting becoming contrived or forced.

And if you do this with blocking as well as dialogue, then you have the Form set and can provide the Matter that fills the Form more easily. Paradoxically, the constraint of strictly adhering to the Form (lines and blocking) allows greater creative freedom and leeway in the Matter (the per-form-ance) that fills it.

But, oddly, Maria's college instructors seem to have felt that honoring the Form by overlearning it so as to internalize it was working from the "Outside In", which is not as preferable as the Sensitive Actor's way of working, which is from the "Inside Out". Learning lines neutrally without struggling to Act even in your room while memorizing was, apparently, "technique". It seems anything that was not emotional was "technique", and was frowned upon as Acting from the Outside-In.

And yet all Acting - even sensitive emotional Inside-Out "Method" Acting - is largely technique.

I am reminded of a young man I once tutored. He loved music and wanted to learn to play piano. But he riled when I introduced the metronome. Way too much structure for his taste (but so was getting to class on time, for that matter).

Imagine music without meter - it would not be music. Acting without scripted dialogue (improv excepted) is not Acting. A drawing without lines is likewise not a drawing. It's more like nothing in particular.

There is no "Outside-In" or "Inside-Out", there is no art that is not dependent on technique, or Form. Now, if art is only technique, only formal, it is lifeless and contrived and leaves us cold. The Form and the Matter go together; there is no complete reality if one is without the other.

Seen in this way, all art is Incarnational.

As Chesterton said, "Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."

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April 21st, 2012Winter’s Tale to Fairy Taleby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

(Above: King Leontes at what he believes to be the statue of his dead wife, overwhelmed at the resemblance.)

It is generally a good idea for a drama critic to see a play before he critiques it.

However, I'm going to be bold enough to say a few things about a play I didn't see. Why? Read on.

***

Last Sunday I had planned to go see a production of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale produced by a small semi-professional theater company in St. Louis.

Let me begin by clarifying what I mean by "semi pro".

In show biz, we seem to have three types of companies that produce live theater outside of high school or college settings:

COMMUNITY THEATER, or groups of amateurs who don't get paid and who do shows either for the fun of it, or to hook up with folks other than their spouses. Their audiences are friends and family and members of the community and they usually rehearse every night for six weeks;

SEMI-PRO THEATER, or groups of actors who have more talent and experience than community theater folk, and who get paid, but whose pay amounts to perhaps $30 for a three weekend run (nine performances) of a show. I am not making this up. This is what most semi-pro companies pay their actors. Their audiences are friends and family almost exclusively, drawing hardly at all from the community in which they are located, and the troupe usually rehearses about half as much as a community troupe; and

PROFESSIONAL THEATER, or groups of actors who may or may not belong to the union, but whose non-union members get paid at least $100 per performance, whose audiences are general theater-goers, with no significant percentage of them being family and friends, the demands of production often requiring rehearsal time of as little as two weeks.

Now, the company that produced the show in question, The Winter's Tale, is the only other troupe in St. Louis that I know of that claims to be "faith based", but I am told they are rather vague about which faith upon which they are based. I am told (albeit third-hand) that this troupe is actively seeking Hindu and Muslim scripts. After all, we're called to "believe", and we all believe that "believe" is an intransitive verb, don't we?

Anyway, I was a tad curious about this production because my friend Tom Leith of Credo of the Catholic Laity had arranged a discussion afterwards led by a local professor on the topic "What are the Catholic Elements in The Winter's Tale?" Tom reports that the discussion went well, and that the professor, who is quite familiar with the scholarship of Joseph Pearce, is convinced that Shakespeare was in fact a Catholic and sees the obvious Catholic elements in this play, of which there are many. That's good to hear.

***

What is not good to hear is that the production was botched - at least in one crucial area. Again, I didn't see it, and I can not speak on the acting, the costuming, the direction, the overall production - but I can speak on this.

Somebody along the way decided to bring Mamillus back to life.

To know how wrong - and how anti-Christian and frankly anti-literary this choice is - you must understand at least the general outline of the plot. King Leontes gets a wild notion that his wife is cheating on him. His rage leads to the death of his little son (from stress and a wasting away over the uproar about his mother) and his rage leads also to what the king believes is the death of his wife. Leontes is pretty well raving mad, beyond even Othello, until he learns that the Divine Oracle has revealed him to be in error. Knowing that his jealousy and madness had led to the death of his son and to what he thinks is the death of his wife, Leontes embarks upon sixteen years of heartfelt penance. At the end of the play, we all learn that the queen is not dead, that she has in fact been hidden away all this time, and in a striking scene where she poses as a statue that comes to life (although older than when the king accused her and with wrinkles), she is restored to Leontes, who is fully sorry for his sin, and overcome with joy at this apparent resurrection.

But the boy remains dead.

And the queen has wrinkles.

This is because sin has consequences.

Our faith is not a fairy tale. Christ died a bloody and horrible death because of our sin. When Catholics receive absolution in the confessional, they are still required to perform penance because sin is real and has consequences, even when forgiven. The Resurrection has won us new life, but our old life - including our concupiscence and the effects of our former sins - still remains. Indeed, the Risen Christ still carried his wounds. He carries them to this day, in Heaven.

To insert a stage direction or bit of business like bringing Mamillus back to life in Act Five so that Leontes gets to go right back to one big happy family serves no good purpose. It subverts the intention of Shakespeare, undoes one of the main points of the play, and frankly confuses the audience. With no dialogue indicating that Mamillus has been squirrelled away with his mother, the audience is left wondering why he comes out - now fully grown - and embraces his daddy beside the newly restored living "statue" of his mother. At least one audience member told me as much.

Now I'm sure the production wasn't all bad. But this is a serious error and tells us - even those of us who didn't see the play - that the director (or whoever made this choice) just didn't get it.

God bless them all for trying, but I'm kind of glad I went to the Three Stooges movie instead.

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April 19th, 2012Roots and Rightsby Dena Hunt

Recently, I visited the website of a well-publicized authority on a certain subject. The subject happened to be the theme of a novel I was finishing, and since she has publicized herself as an authority, I knew she could provide a referential assistance I needed. This person posted her email address on her site and invited the visitor to contact her. I did. No response.

This doesn’t surprise most people, but it still surprises me. People who are younger than I am (that’s “most people”) believe this kind of behavior has always been the norm. No, it hasn’t. I’ve lived seven decades now, and it’s only in the last couple of them that such behavior would be considered unsurprising. Over the years it became increasingly prevalent until—maybe sometime around the end of the eighties?—it crossed the blurred gray line from “occasional” to “usual.”

It’s bad manners. Sounds so trivial, doesn’t it? Sounds like something a crotchety old English teacher might get stirred up about, but not important to anybody else.

It’s not trivial. It is important.

Consideration for other people is the root of virtue. If you don’t intend to keep an appointment, don’t make one. If you don’t intend to respond to emails, don’t invite them. If you don’t intend to reciprocate an invitation, don’t accept one.

As consideration for others is the root, responsibility is the stem. Response-ability. If you don’t have response-ability, don’t get married, don’t get a job, and for heaven’s sake, don’t have children—don’t even own a pet. Don’t involve yourself with others at all until you develop response-ability.

Character then is the fruit of responsibility. There’s a reason that applications for employment, for membership in some organization, even applications for credit or a mortgage—all require “character references” because they require trust.

And finally, there’s integrity, which, to continue the metaphor, is a healthy plant—from good roots to fruitful bloom. Integrity is the unity of one’s character—it doesn’t have an unhealthy root, or a weak stem, with an adopted appearance grafted on it, but is of one piece, from root to flower.

When I was teaching, I never “policed” my students during an exam. By the time I taught them, they were young adults, already formed. I told them: If you cheat on an exam, you’ll cheat on your taxes, you’ll cheat on your wife—because you’re a cheat. The object of your cheating does not determine whether you’re a cheat—your cheating does. If you plagiarize, you’re both a thief and a liar, not just here and now on this research paper, but everywhere and always—because lying and stealing is what you do. So, if you cheat, you have a far more serious problem than just getting an F on this exam. That’s the meaning of integrity.

Good manners isn’t just a “quaint” concept. It’s the outward sign of integrity. And bad manners is the outward sign of integrity’s absence. It is the visible measure we have for discernment of invisible traits. Excuses are red flags. The vague “I’m just so busy” is the reddest and most obvious of those flags.

But again, the issue here is not the existence of poor character and bad manners, but the fact that it’s no longer exceptional, hardly even noteworthy. I see a connection between a virulent demand for respect (“rights”) and lack of self-respect, which bears the rotten fruit of disrespect for others. The excuse-makers, also known as “victims,” believe that their lack of respect is someone else’s fault. But no matter how loudly other people’s respect is demanded, how successfully it’s legislated, the problem isn’t solved, the disease isn’t cured. What’s missing is self-respect. You don’t get that from other people. In only one way is it the same: it has to be earned. It isn’t a “right.”

I know someone who has so much responsibility it would make most of us tremble. Writer, editor, professor, speaker, husband, father—just to name a few I know of. There are likely others I don’t know, since I’m not a close friend. I’ve had occasion to email him a few times on unimportant matters, and I always receive a response within 24 hours. He’s never too “busy.”

“To him who has, more will be given, but to him who has not, even that which he has will be taken away.” That probably sounds unfair to those whose habit is excuse, those who have no response-ability, those who think respect is their right.

But if the root is poor, maybe we should take a look at the soil in which it’s planted.

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April 17th, 2012Britain’s Biggest Ever Traitorby Joseph Pearce

I must draw everyone's attention to a superb piece in yesterday's Daily Telegraph by Ed West, who will be familiar to visitors to this site as one of our constellation of bloggers. Apart from writing for StAR, Ed also writes regularly for the Telegraph and the Catholic Herald in the UK. In this piece he names and shames the person whom he believes is an enemy of Britain whose destructive legacy dwarfs the harm done to Britain by her more famous enemies. Read on and discover whom Ed believes is Britain's biggest ever enemy and why, me judice, the same person is one of the most shameful traitors and cowards that my country ever produced. Here's the link: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100151080/who-was-britains-greatest-foe/

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April 17th, 2012St. Cuthbert’s Coffinby Pavel Chichikov

I came across this item today about the sale of an original seventh century gospel of St. John to the British Museum, in partnership with Durham University and Durham Cathedral. It was buried with Saint Cuthbert in about 698.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17732310

Cuthbert, who evangelized much of what is now northern England and parts of southern Scotland, was very highly venerated, perhaps more so than any other saint before Thomas Becket.

Here is a photograph of the book in its actual size to the scale of a human hand.

http://www.dur.ac.uk/news/newsitem/?itemno=14360

I won’t write in detail here about the saint’s life. That is easy enough to look up on the Web.

What I will point out is that Cuthbert’s faith in God was so dynamic that the effects of his holy life are still apparent in the 21st century. They ripple out through the wastes of time and circumstance to be manifested even in this age of crippled fidelity.

From its appearance in photographs the book is astonishingly well preserved. And as Cuthbert’s body was seen to be incorruptible when it was exhumed, so does the living body of faith go on,

spreading about it the odor of sanctity in this corrupted and malodorous age. The evangelizer of a pagan Britain may have something to teach us these days.

By the way, Saint Cuthbert was known to be a lover of animals, perhaps in some way a British Saint Francis. This makes him especially endearing to me.

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April 17th, 2012Subjectivism and the Objectby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

In the same way that our pop culture tells us, in movies and songs, that we should "believe", while quite carefully avoiding the thorny question of "believe what?", so those who are "pro choice" but claim they are not "pro abortion" tell us that a person can "choose" without choosing anything in particular.

Thus, a friend of mine tells me that to be "pro choice" is not to endorse abortion, but simply to recognize a woman's right to decide for herself. "To decide what?" is left conveniently vague. This odd little semantic game is apparently all the rage among the "pro choice" crowd, at least those who are seeking to soothe a troubled conscience with half-hearted logic and bad grammar.

The typical man on the street will, in a similar way, tell you that he's all for faith, that having faith is a great thing. "Believe!" is a kind of bumper sticker slogan these days. But whether that belief should be in Allah, Obama or Jesus Christ the Son of God is left unmentioned.

Beyond that, each of us is constantly admonished to "believe in yourself".

Think about that for a moment - "believe in yourself". What kind of people believe in themselves? Well, I can think of one that did and one that didn't. Charles Manson believed in himself, but Mother Teresa never bothered to. She had someone much more important to believe in.

This is all a form of subjectivism, so much so that one can diagram the disease as one would a sentence. We love the Subject, we're crazy about the Verb, but we'd prefer to ignore the Object. In fact, we're not too crazy about the Verb if it's a Transitive Verb, as "to choose" always is.

For if we believe - in what? - in oursleves; and if we choose - choose what? - whatever; then we never have to face the reality of life, we never have to face the object of our choice, the object of our belief, and the objection this object may make.

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April 16th, 2012A True Education for Englandby Joseph Pearce

I am excited by the prospect of a tradition oriented Catholic liberal arts college in England. Such a college, if its launch is successful, will serve as an oasis of truth in the midst of a secular fundamentalist desert. Here are the details:

The first Benedictus Newsletter

The success of this initiative depends on your help and that of many individuals so please pass this on to any of your contacts to whom it may be of interest. We are hoping this newsletter will raise awareness of this project as well as raise funds.

Our website, recently re-designed, can be seen at www.benedictus.org.uk

Best wishes from the founders and trustees of Benedictus.

BENEDICTUS TRUST

Franz Forrester

Clare Hornsby

info@benedictus.org.uk

www.benedictus.org.uk

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April 16th, 2012An Anglican Bishop Comes Homeby Joseph Pearce

My good friend in Madrid, José Luis Orella, has just sent me the translation of an interview with an English Anglican bishop who has converted to the True Church. Here's the text of the translation:

Interview with Fr Edwin Barnes (http://ordinariateportal.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/infocatolica-interview-with-fr-edwin-barnes)

The Spanish-language site Infocatolica (http://infocatolica.com) carries an interview with Fr Edwin Barnes. A translation follows below:

- Fr. Barnes, when I interviewed you two years ago, you were an Anglican bishop. Now you are a Catholic priest. Are you happy with the change?

Yes, very happy indeed. No regrets.

- Has your relationship with God, with Our Lady, with the saints changed in any way?

I hope it has deepened, but that is not for me to judge

- Have you felt welcome in the Roman Catholic Church? Any bad experiences?

Thoroughly welcome; and no bad experiences at all.

- Have you received/are you receiving any training as a Catholic priest?

Yes, I attended an initial three-month course with weekly sessions at Allen Hall Seminary in Chelsea. Now, as a former Anglican bishop, I am not required to continue attending, but I do so on a monthly basis and intend to continue for the next two years. I am also receiving great help and support from local priests in developing a certain 'Romanitas'.

- What are your current tasks in the Ordinariate? Do the priests of the Ordinariate work only with their Anglo-Catholic parishioners or do you also help at diocesan parishes?

I have temporary responsibility for an Ordinariate Group which meets twice each week in Bournemouth, in a Catholic Parish Church. I also assist in our local Catholic parish - I have said Mass there three times this week, and have also heard confessions. Besides this I join with other priests in the Pastoral Area and in the last two weeks have been present at two liturgies of reconciliation, hearing confessions. I have also spoken to groups of priests about the Ordinariate and have joined CCC (the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy).

- Have you petitioned the Holy See to be able to use mitre and crozier, as is your privilege as a former Anglican bishop?

No, nor shall I. I am simply a priest of the Ordinariate and am happy to remain so.

- How many priests and laymen are there now in Our Lady of Walsingham's Ordinariate? Any religious men or women? And how many groups/parishes?

There are some hundred priests and around a thousand lay members, though this number is growing all the time. We have as yet no parishes established, but around fifty Groups either already formed or in formation. There are three women religious who are living in community in East London. Two male religious who came into the Church at the same time as us have joined an established Order. I understand there are likely to be others.

- I understand that the 'second wave' of the English Ordinariate will be received this Easter. Will it be as numerous as the first one?

There are, I think, about twenty men waiting to be ordained this summer. Many of them will bring groups of laity with them, though I do not know what numbers are involved. The Church of England is currently making decisions about attempting to ordain women as bishops. If and when this happens there are likely to be further Anglicans seeking to join the Ordinariate. Certainly there are more Anglican clergy considering their future.

- Has the English Ordinariate received or is it planning to receive any members from the TTAC or other continuing churches?

A Bishop of the Church of England who has led a TAC group is to be ordained later this month. I believe there may be four or five priests who are likely to be ordained after appropriate training. I know of one local TAC congregation most of whose members - about twenty - are to be received this year. They are receiving instruction from a Priest of the Ordinariate (among others).

- Are you planning to acquire your own churches, as the American Ordinariate, or will you continue to share the buildings with the dioceses?

At present we expect to continue sharing buildings, though in a few cases Ordinariate priests have been put in charge of existing parishes, and their Groups of Former Anglicans have joined them there.

- In your opinion, what are the main obstacles in the way of the English Ordinariate?

The English have a great attachment to buildings; the beautiful ancient parish churches, all in the hands of the Church of England since the Reformation, are the biggest single obstacle to the growth of the Ordinariate.

- Any special intention you would like our Spanish readers to pray for?

Pray, please, for the Church of England, many of whose members are in turmoil at present - not least because of Government decisions to undermine the sacramental nature of Marriage and extend it to those in same-sex partnerships; and that the members of the Ordinariate may be humble and welcoming towards those who feel rejected by the Church of England, but who are hesitant to commit themselves to the Catholic Church. Pray, too, that we may find the financial resources to train new priests, and support those, especially young priests with families, who have given up a great deal to join the Ordinariate.

Thank you for your interest in this great experiment which the Holy Father has enabled us to undertake.

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April 15th, 2012The Best Movie Ever Madeby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

Forget about October Baby, even though I was raving about it. Forget about It's a Wonderful Life, or Gone with the Wind.

The best movie ever made is without a doubt the new Three Stooges film.

OK, so maybe I'm exaggerating a bit.

But this movie could have been really good or really bad.

The fact that the film makers found three actors who are able to imitate the Stooges as well as they do is remarkable. They sound like them, they look like them, and they do their bits with an energy and finesse that has to be seen to be believed.

And while the bits the original Stooges and these guys do might seem as stupid and simple as they play, these routines are very hard to do. I say that as an actor. The talent and skill it takes to do this kind of fast-paced slapstick and make it funny without hurting each other is beyond my powers to explain. There is a kind of "acting" involved in selling this schtick, in making it play, and in pulling off a career of doing this, as the original Stooges did for fifty years or more.

Speaking of the original Stooges, I actually saw them live. Moe, Larry and what must have been Curly Joe (see above) appeared on stage at the Kiel Auditorium (?) in St. Louis circa 1966. They rode out in a golf cart, stood at three microphones, did some sort of dialogue bit, slapped, poked and punched each other to sound effects piped over the P.A. system. There were probably 10,000 kids in the audience screaming with laughter.

And now comes the new film, set in modern times, with a clever screenplay that pulls off the miraculous - it makes Moe a sympathetic figure early on, so that his bullying of the other two is seen in context as his tough guy persona, covering up a heart of gold. Quite an amazing accomplishment, especially since it actually works.

Well, now that I've proclaimed The Three Stooges 2012 the best movie ever made, my career as a critic - an unpaid blogging critic - is clearly washed up. So finally I'll be able to get a few things done.

Oh, and if you're down in the dumps (see my last post) and a spiritual solution eludes you: I have a list of names that will help - Moe, Larry, Curly, Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Stan and Ollie, Charlie and Buster, Bud and Lou and many more.

Thank you, Lord, on this Divine Mercy Sunday for your greatest Mercy of all - laughter.

(Above: yours truly as Groucho)

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April 15th, 2012A Panorama of Futilityby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

Below, Tom Kallene writes about God in the Sleepless Night, and all I can say is, I wish I could take such sleepless nights in stride as Tom apparently does.

This is my fifth in a row. It has been a harrowing week - interiorly, not exteriorly.

A panorama of futility has opened up to me - the selfishness of false friends, the hypocrisy of believers, the lack of love - so I wish I could say as Tom does that I lie awake with the warm presence of God beside me. I do not lie awake, I pace and fret, even in what passes for prayer. God may be present in this, but He's not quietly beside me. He's the hound of heaven and his baying is keeping me up.

The worst part of it all is that I'm complicit. I'm in the midst of all this sin that I see around me. My sin has been putting my faith in princes and in the sons of men, of allowing my love to be spent on fruitlessness, atomized like mist over this valley of emptiness.

It's one thing to be a fool for God, or even a fool for love. It's another thing to be a fool.

If there is solace, it is in repentance. For the days are sinful and the nights are sleepless and we chase our own tails like mad dogs, running in a circle.

Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.

But, thank you, Jesus, not all.

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April 13th, 2012Religious Freedomby Dena Hunt

Joseph’s post (Faith, Freedom, and the Future) included a link to a brief video directed at “cafeteria Catholics” about religious freedom. I saw the video just moments after reading two news items related to this topic. What they were doesn’t matter; I’m sure there were at least a dozen more. The number increases every day.

What matters most? All sorts of things matter. Economic times are hard; some people believe that economic improvement matters most. But unless you’re either starving or homeless or both, getting more money than you now have shouldn’t be at the top of your priority list. Health—now there’s a real concern for everybody. We’re supposed to be for or against Obama’s health care legislation even though we still don’t know what’s in it. But again, unless you or a loved one is critically ill and the legislation threatens loss of medical care, it shouldn’t be at the top of your list. Protection of creation (which some people call their “environment”) is terribly important, much more important than anyone’s profit-and-loss statement, but is it what matters most?

The answer to that question doesn’t identify what matters most; it identifies the one who answers the question. Each one of us has a string of identities, those genera that we claim as ours, and that claim us as one of their own. We belong to them, and we are accountable to them. Are you an American? A wife? A mother? A teacher? A Christian? A Democrat? A member of the Garden Club? We rank these in order of their importance to us. We are, all of us, many things, but each of us is more this than that.

If Obama were an economic wizard, the most patriotic American, the best protector of nature—whatever, make up your own criteria—if he were, in short, the best president in American history, I’d still vote against him, no matter who I had to vote for in order to do it. No president in U.S. history, no law, no proposed legislation, no Congress—nothing in U.S. history has ever forced me to choose between adherence to my faith and obedience to the law. Until Obama. Well, okay. I’ve chosen.

I am a Catholic.

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April 13th, 2012God in the Sleepless Nightby Tom Kallene

To my surprise, I have developed a sleeping disorder, a type of insomnia. I say “to my surprise” because there is no good reason why I shouldn’t sleep well. Never as an adult have I had so little to worry about, the usual explanation for such a thing. The last two years, in which I have slept progressively worse, have been full of blessings and a rewarding deepening of my spiritual life.

I would like to add that it comes and goes, and is actually much better now than a year ago. Not only that, but the sleepless night also has its positive side, in as much as those long hours can be put to good spiritual use.

They say that typically the insomniac feels a sense of desperation, as he wakes up and is unable to go back to sleep. It has not been my case, quite the opposite. Often a strange sense of peace comes over me that stimulates prayer and meditation. Alone awake in the night, I feel very close to God, a sense of complicity that is uncommon in daylight hours. It’s not so much a “dark night of the soul” thing; it’s closer to the long night of the Garden of Gethsemane. When I know that I won’t sleep, I offer my sleepless night in prayer to Christ as a small token of gratitude for what He suffered for me. I count my blessings: that I am in a warm bed in our home, a comfortable apartment in the center of Madrid, and that otherwise I am in excellent health. At dawn, I can sometimes hear the faint sound of bells at a nearby convent where I sometimes attend mass, calling to lauds.

I don’t wish to paint too rosy a picture. When you have to get out of bed, after a night with little sleep, when the legs buckle, and a rush of nausea comes over you, well, it is not a lot of fun. A night or two one can take in stride, but more than that and the mind goes to mush and the body turns rubbery. They say that depriving someone of sleep is the best form of torture.

But strangely, my occasional bouts with insomnia have become a part of my inner life. Like so many of us, I’ve come to find that Grace is everywhere and that God has special rewards for the sleepless too.

And when you go back to sleeping well, eight hours of sleep is something glorious indeed.

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April 12th, 2012Love and Boundariesby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

To love is to be vulnerable.

We see that not only when we look at the cross, we see it also in our daily lives. There is no "safe love" any more than there is "safe sex". To use psychological terms, you simply can not engage your libido in the world without getting hurt.

I use "libido" in the broader Jungian sense, psychic energy or affection. I'm also using love in the broad sense of Eros or ascending love or desire - in other words the impetus to get up in the morning and seek what we long for with an open heart - of which I've written a few things lately.

Now we all know that if you're foolish enough to love - which is to say foolish enough to live life and not play it safe - you're going to get hurt. Love is all about getting hurt.

The problem is it's easier to get hurt in the Church than in the world.

When we deal with the world - by which I mean all secular activities beyond the "domestic Church", which is our family - we all know that you've got to watch your backside. If you allow your employer to take advantage of you, he'll take advantage of you. If you date somebody who only wants to use you for sex, he or she will simply use you for sex. If you have a friend who sucks your time and energy from you and winds up borrowing money and sleeping on your couch, your friend will continue to do that until you say no or take him to Judge Judy.

So we all learn, fairly early on, that people will take advantage of us if we love "not wisely but too well", in Othello's words.

But when we deal with the Church, or even with any organizations that are para-church or overtly religious, we let down our guards, we take down our boundaries. We think, "Oh, everybody here is doing this for the love of God. Here is someplace where I can love fully and to the max. Here is a little haven where the rules of the outside world do not apply, where I can give my all as I long to do for God."

And then, eventually, we get burned.

We see examples of this most clearly in those who are victims of cults. Cults take the greatest thing in man, our religious desire, and abuse it - sometimes quite graphically. And sad to say, there are many victims of cults within the Church, such as Fr. Maciel's Legion and its affiliated organizations and the "legion" of harm they've done (just take a look at some of the websites devoted to helping former Regnum Christi members adjust to life outside the cult). Indeed, my friend Dawn Eden points out, and I think quite perceptively, that Christopher West's experience of being raised in the Mother of God cult has much to do with his twisted theology of sex (see this long article by the Washington Post in which West and his mother are both quite blunt about the damage the cult caused in their lives).

And, more recently, another good friend of mine is struggling mightily with his disappointing experiences with a group within the Church that has been developing some cult-like characteristics, a group that did what bad people in the Church will always do - take your love and devotion and suck you dry vampire-like, leaving nothing in return and making you feel guilty, making you feel as if you're abandoning God Himself if you decide to stop putting up with it and leave.

And lately I myself have been growing increasingly aware of both a Catholic friend who was "playing me" - taking advantage of my willingness to love, not reciprocating and using it for this person's selfish ends - as well as a Catholic organization's proclivity to do the same. It is so tempting to say when we give to the Church or a Church affiliated group, "Hey, this group is composed of super-Catholics, of individuals who one and all are devoted to God. There's no need to watch my backside or keep up my boundaries around them. I have finally found a place where it's safe to love!" And then next thing you know, you're, well to be blunt, see the cartoon below.

I also think it's our proclivity as sinners to invest our Eros in artificial places. Rather than being true to our vocations and loving our neighbors - which is to say those people we deal with day in and day out who are almost never "lovable" - and loving our families - and God knows our families are the most annoying of all! - instead we find Church groups or Facebook friends or trust-fall buddies where we feel we can invest our love without receiving pain and suffering in return.

But this, of course, is mistaken.

We must love those we are most immediately called to love - our spouses and our children - with a sacrificial love that gives all and seeks nothing. But our love that does seek, our Eros, our longing which is ultimately a longing for God and His love - this we need to steward, not setting what is sacred before dogs, not casting what are pearls before swine, which have a tendency to turn and trample us. For if we don't steward this Eros, if we don't channel it into the forms and boundaries God gives us, we will waste it, Onan like, and the pains we suffer - the pains we are bound to suffer any time we love - will be for nought.

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April 12th, 2012Faith, Freedom and the Futureby Joseph Pearce

With Big Government secular fundamentalism threatening to strip Americans of their freedom to practice their Christian faith, this no-nonsense video hammers home the key issues on which Catholics and other Christians must vote in the coming election. Cafeteria Catholics should be warned of the eternal consequences of their complicity in the destruction of religious freedom; real Catholics who vote according to the teaching of the Church will be spurning the cafeteria in favour of the promised Heavenly Banquet. The choice is simple. It is obvious. The culture of death or eternal life. Only a fool would choose the former.

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April 11th, 2012Celebrating Cajun Catholicismby Joseph Pearce

I have just learned that the wonderful Cajun band, L'Angelus are guests on EWTN's "Life on the Rock" this Thursday (tomorrow). If you have not heard or seen this wonderful band, now's your chance. They are solidly Catholic, solidly orthodox, and solidly great musicians. Here's a little taster:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=p6pJDPf294s

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April 10th, 2012Ponderingsby Jef Murray

It comes without warning, and at the most unexpected of times. I’ll be furiously focused on one task or another: painting, or writing, or preparing for some descending deadline or some travel plans I’m making. Then, as if Someone had gently disconnected the power to all of these troublesome tasks and tribulations, everything ceases. The hammering of schedules, emails, phone calls, and messages slows, and then stops; the silence is startling.

I am awash in great calm, as if the very air was incensed with thick, swirling mists of magic and mystery. And at such times, all that I can do is take a deep breath and radiate gratitude for this gift, this consolation that has come, unbidden, from the Hidden Realm.

Many of us have felt such consolations. They are moments, I believe, when we are touched by God and reminded that everything will be alright…that all our cares are like freshets from a spring shower, chilling us, perhaps, but also honing our hearts. They are reminders that the realm we inhabit harbours depths unplumbed and heightsunchallenged; and yet, even this Middle-earth in all its crystalline glory is only the threshold to other worlds and other adventures.

This month I embark on a new adventure. I will travel to the Yorkshire shores to tread the very spot where, as Bram Stoker tells us, a Transylvanian prince once terrorized the English countryside. At Whitby, tells the tale, a foreign schooner came through a terrible storm toward the harbour:

“The wind suddenly shifted to the northeast, and the remnant of the sea fog melted in the blast. And then, mirabile dictu, between the piers, leaping from wave to wave as it rushed at headlong speed, swept the strange schooner before the blast, with all sail set, and gained the safety of the harbour. The searchlight followed her, and a shudder

ran through all who saw her, for lashed to the helm was a corpse, with drooping head, which swung horribly to and fro at each motion of the ship. No other form could be seen on the deck at all.”

With this ominous advent, evil comes to Britain from afar. And the thing that I most admire about Bram Stoker is that he did not mince words. In his tale, the undead Szekely prince was cruel, hate-filled, and anything but romantic, unlike the post-modern vampires so popular in today’s culture. There was no ambivalence, no hand-wringing, no

remorse on the part of the heroes who ultimately confronted this monster and, thanks be to God, destroyed him.

Stoker did not glorify Count Dracula; it was more than a full century after the publication of his masterpiece that we as a society became so confused about the nature of good and evil that we would come to revere horror, death, violence, and cruelty, while demeaning hope, life, valour, chastity, charity, and honour. The many vampire novels

and films that are now standard fare worship the undead as gods, while scoffing at those who would destroy them as misguided religious-extremists who lack in compassion and sensitivity.ac

What strange and twisted worldview have we wrought for ourselves?

Is the Meneltarma, then, abandoned, and Eru Illuvatar forgotten? Do we now, in fact, worship Tash, the god of death, rather than Aslan, the son of the Emperor beyond the sea? Can we no longer discern good from evil, or truth from spin?

Flannery O’Connor once said that her strange and often horrifying tales focused on “the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.” And in a world that has come to idolize and sensualize the demonic, it becomes harder and harder to argue with Flannery about the nature of the cultural territory we now inhabit.

But it is at such times, and often after such thoughts, that I sometimes receive those moments of clarity, those gifts from the Perilous Realm: of peace, of consolation, of encouragement. Whatever may come to pass, we need not follow the cataclysmic cultural course of confusion; we need not invert the great mythologies handed down to us through the long centuries in order to feed a dwindling self-worth and in order to conciliate Morgoth and those who, often unknowingly, worship him: this at the expense of life, of love, and of goodness, truth, and beauty. We can cut away the cankerous, creeping tendrils of indifference, reminding ourselves that evil does exist and that our task is to battle that evil, not to offer it homage and tribute.

As I stand atop the cemetery overlooking Whitby harbor, I hope to be reminded, in that first week of Easter, that evil, true evil, can strike at any time. But, I also hope to be reminded, as with the gentle fragrance of Frankincense from the altar, that each of us can choose to fight despair, chaos, and spin in order to protect what is worth protecting, and in order to worship and to love that which is worth loving.

A glorious and light-filled Easter season to you all!

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April 10th, 2012Two Hundred Years of Euro-Imperialismby Joseph Pearce

Having just posted a condemnation of the follies of US imperialism, I thought I'd pair it with a sneer in the direction of the Euro-Imperialism of the European Union. It is interesting, for instance, that the Brussels eurocrats were preceded two centuries earlier by Napoleon in envisioning a "united Europe" imposed by force against the will of the European peoples. Writing in early 1812 to Joseph Fouché, Napoleon explained that his goal in attacking Russia was the dream of a "united Europe":

"Think of the war against Russia as a war of common sense, for our true interests and for the peace and security of all ... We need a European code, a European court of appeal, a single currency, the same weights and measures, the same laws. I must make one people out of all the peoples of Europe. That, Sir, is the only outcome which suits me."

Thankfully Napoleon's dream of forcing the peoples of Europe into an unwanted union was broken on the frosty teeth of the Russian winter, putting Euro-imperialism on ice for more than a century. Three years after the retreat from Moscow, Napoleon met his Waterloo, freeing the peoples of Europe from their would-be Emperor. Hitler, the new would be Emperor, followed in Napoleon's footsteps 130 years later, with the same tragi-comic outcome. No sooner had the ice melted on the corpse of the Third Reich than Euro-Imperialism was resurrected at the Treaty of Rome. With any luck, Russia will again play a role in the destruction of the latest manifestation of euro-madness.

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April 10th, 2012Wisdom on the Arrogance of Ignoranceby Joseph Pearce

I've been browsing through the latest issue of Chronicles, a magazine that is refreshingly sane in its response to the madness of the world. I particularly enjoyed this wonderful summary of the naivete of US foreign policy:

"To be plain, the masters of the universe simply don't know what they are doing. Despite their pretensions to intelligence and education, they tend to be hopelessly ignorant of the world outside the Beltway bubble; filled with hubris; arrogant, shallow, and irredeemably provincial - even naive - in their childlike, vulgar manner and in their unshakable belief not only that Iraqis, Afghans, and Libyans want to be like "us", but that the American Empire can achieve the dystopian goal of converting vastly alien peoples into soulless and banal yuppies."

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April 9th, 2012Flower of Scotlandby Joseph Pearce

Brendan King, a contributor to the St. Austin Review, shares my sympathy for the Jacobite cause. For those who don't know, the Jacobites owe their allegiance to the heirs of the true king of England and Scotland, James II, who was deposed by an unlawful "revolution" in 1688. The Jacobite uprising of 1745 sought to reinstate the true monarchy but was defeated by the army of the usurper at Culloden in 1746.

Here's Brendan's e-mail with a link to a great website:

I came across this site earlier today. Considering our shared Jacobite sympathies, I have decided to send this to you. The following link leads to the online digitized edition of "The Lyon in Mourning" by Bishop Robert Forbes, a Scottish Anglican "bishop" and staunch Jacobite. It consists of valuable firsthand accounts of the Jacobite Rising of 1745.

http://digital.nls.uk/print/transcriptions/index.html

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April 9th, 2012Cardinal Pell and Richard Dawkinsby Joseph Pearce

Colin Jory has just informed me of a debate on Australian TV between the no-nonsense Cardinal Pell and the all-nonsense Richard Dawkins. It seems that the masculine cardinal put Dawkins in his place. Here's the text of Colin's e-mail:

An hour long debate on ABC (Australia) TV between Cardinal George Pell (who was a big boy at St Pat's Ballarat when I was a small boy there in 1958) and Richard Dawkins has just ended.

By any impartial analysis, Cardinal Pell did Dawkins like a dinner. He was excellent without being perfect -- he dodged the question of Original Sin, and fogged the Catholic position on evolution & on damnation, but overwhelmingly he addressed the difficult questions directly and impressively, including those of the Real Presence, the Divinity of Christ, and (to a lesser extent) the problem of suffering. There were pre-arranged questions from the audience and by video link from remote views, and Pell was much the more impressive in his responses. He came across as being the more substantial thinker: Dawkins came across as pretty unsubstantial.

That said, Dawkins also came across as having jet-lag, which I suspect he did have; and Pell came across as having had a couple of sleepless nights as he swotted on the issues which would be raised and how to address them, and thus as being not quite as sharp as he could be.

Pell has the major advantage over most higher clergy of all denominations of being a man's man, as distinct from a wimp's wimp. He's a big, solid, fit-looking chap; he was the champion Australian Rules football player at St Pat's; and he was recruited for the Richmond AFL team before deciding to enter the priesthood. He subsequently did History at Oxford. He's combative by personality, and well and truly outdid Dawkins in polemical wit.

When the debate becomes available on-line I'll send you the link.

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April 9th, 2012Sex and Shakespeareby Joseph Pearce

I've just received an e-mail from a concerned parent whose children are being taught Shakespeare badly at high school. Here's the text of the relevant part of the e-mail. My reply follows.

Good morning Mr. Pearce. I am an avid listener of Catholic Answers, so I knew where to come for my question.

My niece is also a student at Ave Maria University, but I am unsure if she has taken your class, yet.

I am hoping you would be willing to answer some questions for me about Shakespeare.

My two children attend public school and I also work at the school as an Associate. Our school is very small, so occasionally I sit at lunch with one of our high school English teachers and we talk. Last week she caught my attention by talking about Shakespeare. I do think she is a good English teacher in the respects that she enjoys teaching and is interested in her students learning. My daughter will be entering college in the fall, majoring in English. She hopes to become a book editor and work for a publishing company She loves books and reading and so has read Shakespeare in her previous class with this teacher. My daughter is also helping out this teacher as a TA. This teacher is the 9th and 10th grade english teacher. This teacher made the comment that Shakespeare was trying to reach the "Common Citizen" of his time, and so his plays are geared to their mindset. She made the statement that he was very interested in sex and that whenever he makes a statement like "Unsheath thy sword", he is really making a bawdy attempt at connecting with the common people of the time. She said he meant that he was unsheating his genitals. So now, all the 9th graders are totatlly interested in Shakespeare because this teacher is presenting him with a sexual content.

I have not studied Shakespeare for a very long time, since high school, and my teacher certainly did not speak of these attributes of Shakespeare,

Can you answer my question and tell me if she is correct? Since my daughter is her TA, she is hearing this version of Shakespeare and I don't agree with the teacher. My son is currently in 8th grade and will be entering her class in the fall, so I'm very concerned about the way she is teaching Shakespeare.

Was he just trying to connect with the people of his time? I will probably direct her to your website and your discussions about Shakespeare, but I'm pretty sure after hearing her speak about other issues, that she is so mainstreamed and against religion that I won't get far. I will still try.

What other information do you have regarding Shakespeare that other educational professionals can look at?

Thank you for taking the time to read my email. I would GREATLY appreciate any comments you have.

Thank you ...

And here' my reply:

It is true that Shakespeare uses bawdy humour and that phrases such as "unsheathing thy sword" contain sexual doubles-entendres. It is, however, a serious misreading of Shakespeare to pay too much attention to the use of such humour as light relief to the exclusion of the deeper religious and moral content. I suggest that you buy my two books, The Quest for Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome and Through Shakespeare's Eyes: Seeing the Catholic Presence in the Plays in order understand the religious dimension at the heart of Shakespeare's work. You should also purchase the Ignatius Critical Editions of Shakespeare plays such as Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice and Julius Caesar. I particularly recommend that you buy the ICEs of the plays that your children will be studying with this teacher so that they can be forearmed against any nonsense that they might hear in the classroom.

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April 9th, 2012The Amazing Power of Ignoranceby Dena Hunt

On this Easter Sunday morning, our priest referred to the new issue of Newsweek, the one with “Forget the Church. Follow Jesus.” on its cover. He even had a copy of the magazine with him on the pulpit. It would not be accurate to say that he preached a sermon condemning the article. What he did was simply to defend, gently but pointedly, a few tenets of the Catholic faith, such as the sacraments and the Eucharist. It wouldn’t be possible to refute the article, anyway—not to an audience who hadn’t read it. But, curious about what might rouse him to the extent that it did, I went home and looked it up online.

As it turns out, the article by Andrew Sullivan, is actually entitled “Christianity in Crisis.” The cover, with its giant bold-face “Forget the Church….” is not atypical for sensation-loving media, but that’s not to say that Sullivan does not roundly condemn organized Christianity while promoting its founder.

He takes a political route, venerating Thomas Jefferson. He speaks reverently of a copy of a Bible that belonged to Jefferson currently on display at the National Museum of American History, from which the sayings of Jesus have been carefully removed from the text with a razor. Adopting what he believes was Jefferson’s point of view, Sullivan condemns “followers” of Christ (we call them Apostles) who, according to Jefferson, imposed their own superstitious beliefs on Christ, and copied copies of texts not written until decades after the Crucifixion—so, presumably, they’re not trustworthy—in order to gain political power. (How else would a political lens read their motivation?)

Okay, now wait. You revere the words of Christ, but deny the veracity of those who heard the words and wrote them down? Don’t you—if you believe a message—have to believe in the veracity of the messenger? Don’t you have to believe those who had the words in their possession—from the beginning—long before you ever heard or read them? How else do you think you even have those words you cut out?

Andrew Sullivan believes that organized Christianity is responsible for all manner of evil because he knows no history of the Church, and therefore, what he knows of secular history is fragmented. Because he himself sees everything from a political perspective (e.g., Jefferson’s beliefs) he sees the Church through the lenses of his political beliefs—which he thinks are apolitical. That is why he is able to praise St. Francis of Assisi for being apolitical even while he condemns the Church for being political—the same Church that made St. Francis a saint. The irrationality of that incongruity escapes him. He has no notion that it was secular states (politics) that caused nearly all the litany of griefs he cites. Beyond prohibition of “the pill” and the “international conspiracy to sexually abuse and rape countless youths and children,” he knows apparently nothing about the Church.

But it’s hard to believe the words of Christ and disbelieve their source—just as it’s hard to venerate St. Francis while you disbelieve those who told you about him. The intellectual conflict must be agonizing—somebody has to be blamed for that. Ignorance becomes amazingly powerful when it’s self-imposed because it must necessarily beget itself over and over. It has to, because truth is even more dangerous than reason.

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April 7th, 2012Touchback: A New Christian Movieby Joseph Pearce

In the wake of Kevin's recent post about October Baby and the discussion which ensued I'm almost feeling guilty in posting details of a new Christian film, which is opening in theatres next week. I haven't seen it and know nothing about it beyond the details in the movie poster below. It might have all the flaws to which Kevin refers. I have no idea. I'm posting it merely to let StAR-gazers know about it. Those who like Christian films, putting the ethics over the aesthetics, might want to check it out; purists might want to sneer. Either way, here are the details:

Touchback - The Movie

Touchback (in theaters April 13th), starring Kurt Russell and Brian Presley, is a heartwarming and inspirational film with a powerful message about accepting the challenges in our lives and recognizing their value.

Actor/Producer Brian Presley (Home of the Brave, Borderland) made this film after he was amazed to find parallels between the lead character's journey and his own life. Watch his inspiring testimony: http://bit.ly/touchbackyoutubetestimony

MOVIE TRAILER, CLIPS and Faith-Based STUDY GUIDE:
www.touchback-themovie.com
Opens in Theaters April 13, 2012

What People Are Saying About Touchback:

"Touchback is a powerful and inspirational movie made by a member of Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Brian Presley. I encourage everyone to support this movie when it opens April 13, 2012."
-Chris Kaiser, Director Northeast Oklahoma Fellowship of Christian Athletes

"A touching, inspirational movie. It's about life and the choices you make....it reminds me of the classic It's a Wonderful Life. Makes you appreciate what matters in life."
-Jay Swick, Absolute Sublime

"Touchback is two hours of high quality entertainment packed with great moral lessons without getting preachy...a mainstream film that also speaks to faith-based audiences who can read the Biblical values between the lines."
-Curtis Wallace, COO TDJ Enterprises (T.D. Jakes)

Facebook Logo Like us on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/touchbackfb
For more information about Touchback, contact:
tessas@motiveoutreach.com (310) 393-9102

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April 5th, 2012The Pope and the Priesthoodby Fr. Simon Henry

In his homily at the Chrism Mass, speaking to priests the Holy Father called for obedience to the Church's teaching - mentioning particularly those who push the issue of women's "ordination", speaking of this as disobedience in a matter that has been irrevocably forbidden.

He reminded priests to teach what the Church teaches and not "do their own thing". The "zeal for souls" that they are to foster is to be in obedient service to the Church's actual teaching - not their own version of it. I have myself heard and continue to hear about so many instances of priests and even higher clergy doing just the opposite of this. Let us pray that the Holy Father's call - at the Chrism Mass of all places - will not fall on deaf ears. I've never understood why priests want to belong to a Church with which they so vehemently disagree. There are plenty of Christian groups and ecclesial communities out there that reflect such opinions, if they feel that strongly, they could join them instead of trying to re-fashion the Church.

Recently a group of priests from a European country issued a summons to disobedience, and at the same time gave concrete examples of the forms this disobedience might take, even to the point of disregarding definitive decisions of the Church’s Magisterium, such as the question of women’s ordination, for which Blessed Pope John Paul II stated irrevocably that the Church has received no authority from the Lord. Is disobedience a path of renewal for the Church? We would like to believe that the authors of this summons are motivated by concern for the Church, that they are convinced that the slow pace of institutions has to be overcome by drastic measures, in order to open up new paths and to bring the Church up to date. But is disobedience really a way to do this? Do we sense here anything of that configuration to Christ which is the precondition for all true renewal, or do we merely sense a desperate push to do something to change the Church in accordance with one’s own preferences and ideas?

All our preaching must measure itself against the saying of Jesus Christ: "My teaching is not mine" (Jn 7:16). We preach not private theories and opinions, but the faith of the Church, whose servants we are.

The last keyword that I should like to consider is "zeal for souls": animarum zelus. It is an old-fashioned expression, not much used these days... A priest never belongs to himself. People must sense our zeal, through which we bear credible witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Let us ask the Lord to fill us with joy in his message, so that we may serve his truth and his love with joyful zeal. Amen.

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April 5th, 2012Preview of the Next Issueby Joseph Pearce

The next issue of the St. Austin Review will be winging its way to the printers in the next few days.

The theme of the May/June issue is "Poetry & Praise". Don't miss it. Susbcribe now on this site!

Here are the highlights of the forthcoming issue:

Louise Merrie examines the multi-faceted St. Robert Southwell, "Jesuit, Priest, Missionary, Poet, and Martyr".

Benjamin V. Beier invites us to dwell profitably on the poetry of Ben Jonson.

Sarah Branschbach compares the poetic muse of George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Erika Papp Faber offers a panoramic overview of the poetry of Hungary.

Joseph Pearce reveals the unlikely connection between Roy Campbell and St. John of the Cross.

Joseph Pearce admires the objectivity in the poetry of Charles Causley.

Susan Treacy looks at the influence of George Herbert on Vaughan Williams.

Kevin O'Brien waxes lyrical on "The Poet and the Unity of Love".

Robert and Paula Gallagher focus on the work of the Kolbe Film School.

James Bemis trips the light Fantasia in his discussion of the Disney classic.

Jef Murray revisits The Magic Ring.

Father Benedict Kiely enthuses about May: Mary's Month.

Thomas Howard reviews Schwartz's Understanding Abortion.

Brendan D. King exhorts us to read the gaelic poetry of Father Allan MacDonald.

Father Colum Power reviews Graham Gillespie, "a new voice in avant garde poetry".

Eleanor Bourg Nicholson reviews new books of verse by Longenecker, Chichikov and Milward.

Jennifer Pierce reviews Philip C. Kolin's Parable of Women.

Plus new poetry by Trevor Lipscombe and Micah Mattix.

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April 5th, 2012The Miracle of Lifeby Joseph Pearce

StAR's publisher, Bruce Fingerhut, just sent me this link. It's astonishing. It shows the development of a human baby from conception to birth using computer graphics. The images are beautiful in their own right, and well worth watching, but what I found most fascinating was the frank admission by this brilliant mathematician that the statistical odds against such a mechanism ever coming into being by accident were unthinkable, rationally speaking. He keeps using the word "magic" but once let slip the word "divinity". This nine minute video should be sufficient for any rational person to see through the nonsense of Dawkins and his superstitious and unscientific materialism.

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April 3rd, 2012Life in the Catholic Writers’ Ghettoby Lorraine V. Murray

It is somewhat perplexing to be a Catholic fiction writer today. Many Catholic publishing companies simply don’t want to handle fiction, and the few who do take it on don’t promote it with as much gusto as their nonfiction books.

My first mystery was published by a small, Catholic publishing house. I was thrilled because I had never written fiction before, and having it accepted was a great compliment.

Problem is, very small houses do little to market your work. They count largely on authors to buy books at a discount and then sell them however they can. This is all well and good, but just a step removed from self-publishing.

“And what’s wrong with that?” you may ask. Well, self-publishing means a lack of sharp editing, and it’s not just typos that slip by. With non-fiction, there are factual errors. And with fiction, there may be entire chapters that a good editor would have slashed.

Besides, publishing a book yourself is a bit like giving yourself an award for “best mother (or father) of the year” – or purchasing a bogus master’s degree on-line. Yes, you can brag about these accomplishments all you like, but you didn’t jump through the same hoops as everyone else.

My second mystery, “Death of a Liturgist,” was snapped up by a large Catholic publishing house. This was wonderful except this company mostly publishes books about the saints and the Church fathers - -and such works are marketed quite differently than mysteries. So my royalty checks are not exactly staggering. In truth, they allow me to treat my husband to lunch now and again.

I sent my third mystery, “Death of a Seminarian,” to an agent, hoping he might get it into the hands of a big, secular publishing house. He thought the writing was sparkling and enjoyed the characters, but didn’t think the book could compete with the many mysteries already out there.

He is probably right. You see, the book doesn’t have any steamy sex scenes, nor does it dwell on rotting corpses, entry wounds, or any of the gruesome forensics details that so many mysteries thrive on. The main character is a widow with a boyfriend, but she refuses to jump into bed with him. There are no vampires, witches, werewolves or zombies.

In time, the book may eventually find its way into the hands of some Catholic publishing house, but I know it won’t get the accolades that, say, Janet Evanovich’s mysteries do. She is quite a skilled writer, but she doesn’t flinch from having a lusty female protagonist who heads to the bedroom with various men. As for stomach-churning crime-scene events, Evanovich’s books are dripping with them.

The one thing in common with my books is that her protagonist, like mine, has a pet hamster. And perhaps if books with hamsters in them become as popular as zombie romances in the future, my royalty checks will skyrocket --and readers will be clamoring for my next book. Yes, I can dream!

Lorraine's latest books include "The Abbess of Andalusia," a biography of Flannery O'Connor, and two mysteries, "Death in the Choir" and "Death of a Liturgist." She lives in Decatur with her husband and a hamster named Ignatius.

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April 3rd, 2012Of All Things - A Good Christian Movie!by Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

Why watch a Christian movie? Why go to a Christian play? I mean, either one is going to be awful, right?

Well ... right. And that's the problem.

When our culture was Christian, our art was Christian. Shakespeare's plays are the best example of profound dramatic art written from a Christian (indeed a Catholic) perspective.

But our culture is no longer Christian. And so the dramatic art of our day that's interesting and engaging and well done usually has a secular point of view or one that is only accidentally Christian, or only marginally Christian, and most typically anti-Christian.

This means that Christian groups often produce dramatic art for the Christian Ghetto, my term for the self-consciously Christian among us, who entertain one another with movies, for instance, produced with bad actors on low budgets with horrendous writing and poor direction. The Ghetto is such a limited market that the producers do not have the resources to do better, and the consumers are so desperate that they don't complain. I have written about this at length.

This has a chilling effect on evangelization.

For example, I've been moderately pleased with the movies Facing the Giants and Fireproof, both of which were produced by a Protestant group from the South, and, although they contain amateur actors and a few "prosperity gospel" plot elements, are not all that bad for "Christian movies".

But that's the problem. "Christian movies" take the risk of being limited from their inception by the Ghetto's protective notion of what something "Christian" should and should not be about (a squeamishness not shared by Christ, who ate with prostitutes, blessed the smelly poor and died on a cross). Flannery O'Connor says somewhere something to the effect that a book written by a Catholic is a Catholic book, and certainly O'Connor's stories, which are profoundly Catholic, are also profoundly disturbing and difficult to read. And yet more real and honest than stuff like Facing the Giants and Fireproof. As any Christian knows, there is nothing that Christ cannot address, engage and redeem - but Christian film-makers and film-goers are a little afraid to admit that.

For, well-intentioned as movies like Facing the Giants and Fireproof are, it takes a special kind of desire to want to see them - knowing the artificiality of the genre. In fact, Sunday my wife Karen told me that she wanted to watch "on-demand" the latest movie from this production company, one called Courageous that's all about Faith helping guys through tough times.

Well, great.

But I talked her into The Muppets instead.

Then on Monday, which was Karen's birthday, she wanted to go see October Baby in the theater. This birthday thing means I couldn't say no. But I wanted to.

After all, October Baby is another "Christian movie". Yes, my friend and Theater of the Word actress Emily Lunsford had written a glowing review of the movie, which was filmed in Emily's home town of Birmingham, one of my favorite places; and yes, my friend Fr. Brian Harrison of the Oblates of Wisdom and St. Mary of Victories church in St. Louis had emailed all of his parishioners raving about the movie and strongly encouraging us to go see it; but this is not only a Christian movie, but a pro-life Christian movie.

I mean, if you remember all of the fuss over Bella, you recall much ado about a pretty good movie but not the sort of movie you'd really make much of an effort to see again. A few notches above Facing the Giants / Fireproof, but, frankly, not as good as The Muppets.

Now I know you can't compare a feel-good family comedy like The Muppets to Bella, except you really can. Wildly differing as their goals are as films, they are both simply movies - and as a movie, The Muppets is far more clever, entertaining, and well-made than Bella.

I say this with great admiration for the people behind Bella and the message they were struggling to convey.

But I say this with the reservation that Bella succeeded to the extent it did in the same way Facing the Giants / Fireproof succeeded, in the same way that the film Therese succeeded. All of these were pretty good movies that played to a very specific audience - all of these were moderately well-done works that pleased the denizens of the Ghetto. They were supported by film-goers who bought their tickets in order to support Christian cinematic art. Without that element of patronage, one wonders how successful these movies would have been.

Having said all of this, and being fully aware that everything I say applies as well to the stuff we produce here at the Theater of the Word Incorporated, I can affirm at least one thing:

October Baby is a spectacular movie. (For once I was glad I listened to my wife!)

This is a movie that is good even outside the Ghetto.

It is well acted, well directed, and above all well-written.

Perhaps nothing hurts a movie more than a bad screenplay, and frankly the most noticeable weakness shared by all of the films mentioned above (other than The Muppets) was lackluster writing - not particularly bad writing, but rather weak writing.

October Baby, on the other hand, has a story that holds your interest from the beginning. It has three-dimensional and believable characters, well crafted conflict and structure, and above all comedy. There are wonderful comic moments in this film, the sort of thing that self-consciously Christian films lack, moments that let the viewer know that this is a film with a heart, a story that sees humanity in all its foibles and flaws, and therefore a story that is not therefore preachy in any way.

But the thing that really destroys you in the theater is the witness of the actress who plays the birth mother, a real life witness that occurs at the end as the credits are about to run. This is the most effective meeting of fiction and reality that I have ever seen in a movie or in life.

Thank God for this film and thank God that the film-makers get it. Emily Lunsford points out that producer Jon Erwin told christiancinema.com, “I think that’s where we differ philosophically from other Christian filmmakers. We’ve been part of the secular industry for so long that I’ve grown to really love people who work in entertainment. They’re messed-up people who have a lot of needs, but I don’t want to isolate myself with Christian people making Christian movies. I’d rather engage the secular industry and not shy away from what I believe.”

With this kind of attitude there is hope.

And with a movie as beautiful as this, there is hope.

It is a movie that is true to man, to Christ, and to Protestants and Catholic alike. In short, it is true to life. It is a well-made film and the first of what I hope will be a true revolution in the culture of cinema.

And finally - the main character in this film (played beautifully by Rachel Hendrix) is the "October Baby" of the title, born October 7, 1991.

October 7 is the Feast of St. Mary of Victories.

Our Lady, under this title, was dear to St. Therese (subject of the film Therese), was the patroness of the Christian victory over Islam at Lepanto (immortalized in verse by G. K. Chesterton), is the patroness of the beautiful church housing the aforementioned Fr. Harrison and the Oblates of Wisdom, and is very dear to me for many reasons.

She is, unbeknownst to the film-makers, present in this movie in a very pervasive way. And it is the message of the Mother of Our Lord, who carried the unborn savior, and to whom all martyrs of the womb are precious - it is the message of this lady, whose heart was pierced by many pangs of sorrow - it is the message of the virgin whose unborn infant Jesus made the unborn infant John leap with joy in Elizabeth's womb - it is the message of this holy disciple of Christ - that even in the midst of a world that eats its young, a world that grinds and destroys the most innocent among us, a world that hates life and longs for death - it is the message that even in such a world, there is Victory, there is hope.

Go see October Baby. Not because it's pro-life, not because it's Christian, not because it's your wife's birthday and you have to.

Go see it because it's good.

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April 3rd, 2012A Poetic Meditation on the Passion of Christby Joseph Pearce

I really must draw the attention of visitors to this site to a superb article on the Crisis website by Christopher Blum. It focuses on the work of a little known French poet, a contemporary of Shakespeare, who wrote an epic sonnet sequence on the Passion of Christ. As I read it, I couldn't stifle a groan of lament that it does not form part of the forthcoming issue of StAR on the theme of poetry and praise. It would have been a perfect fit beside the articles on St. John of the Cross, St. Robert Southwell, Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Roy Campbell and Charles Causley that will be published in the next issue of StAR. In any event, every serious Catholic should know something of the work of the poet of whom Blum writes, a poet whose extraordinary achievement is truly monumental. The article also serves as good meditative reading on the Passion of Our Lord for Holy Week. Having read the article myself I can pay no better tribute to the scale of this poet's vision than to say that he seems to me to be the French Dante. Check it out. Here's the link:

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/a-poet-of-the-passion-of-christ

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April 1st, 2012Two Views of “Intelligence”by Dena Hunt

Joseph’s post A New Joke gives an example of how various academic disciplines react to a single emergency event. The joke lies in the fact that they’re all about equally useless. It reminded me of a little talk I used to give to high-school seniors about their prejudice against a vocational curriculum as opposed to the college prep curriculum. So many students mistakenly choose the latter because they think the former is for “dumb” students, for those not in the in-crowd. That prejudice, I told them, is why there are so many bad doctors who would have been good practical nurses; lousy lawyers, who would have been great mechanics, etc. Snobbery not only turns out poor professionals; it also downgrades standards in higher education.

I explained that “intelligence” can be concrete as well as abstract. The courses proper to university learning are mostly abstract; those proper to vocational college are more concrete. Further, the latter are generally higher paid than the former because they are more obviously useful to us. When I have a broken pipe in the kitchen and water is going everywhere, I don’t want someone with a degree in civil engineering; I want a good plumber—and I’m willing to pay!

No less important is the contribution that job satisfaction makes to personal happiness. How can you be happy if you work at some profession every day for which you are ill-suited? If your performance is, at very best, mediocre? If your colleagues have no respect for you? And what sorts of wrong directions might you not take in order to raise the low self-esteem that would be with you 24/7? How would you cope with the constant anxiety that professional insecurity would surely bring? Having made one huge mistake by a perverted view of human “worth,” what other, more tragic mistakes might you not also make? That kind of view causes utterly false values that destroy virtue—do you think you could have such a view in only one area of your life? Wouldn’t you, by necessity, extend it to other areas, to other people? Your own children, for example. And finally, doesn’t snobbery also cause that phenomenon of “inverse” snobbery as a necessary defense? People do not adopt the presumed moral superiority of false victimization unless they’ve been taught to believe that they’re somehow actually inferior to other, “better”-educated people.

“Intelligence” in the context of education and job preparation is of two kinds, not one. Try this: an imaginary man is having a heart attack in a restaurant. Without pausing to consider anything else, what is your response? Do you “wish” you were able to understand what causes heart attacks? Do you “wish” you were a qualified EMT so you could help him? Is one response any “better”—more valuable—than the other? And does this example tell you anything about yourself that might help you make a life-forming decision that could turn out to be irrevocable? With the exception of making a decision about marriage, no other choice will so affect both you, personally, and society, generally. It’s crucial to get past the illusions that your notions about “intelligence” and “self-image” have given you, and be honest with yourself.

We’re all intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and physical. How do you respond first?

Intellectual: What did he eat?

Emotional: Oh, that poor man!

Spiritual: God, please help this man.

Physical: Call 911

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March 30th, 2012Good News from Romeby Joseph Pearce

William Fahey, President of Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts in New Hampshire, has informed me of the joyous news that two TMC students have just been received into the Church in Rome by His Eminence, Cardinal Burke. The news story about the conversion of the two students is heart warming in itself but is worth reading also for the wonderful words of wisdom offered to the two new converts by that giant of the Faith, Cardinal Burke. Here's the link:

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/cardinal-burke-calls-young-converts-beautiful-image-of-gods-grace/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+catholicnewsagency%2Fdailynews+%28CNA+Daily+News%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo&utm_term=daily+news

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March 30th, 2012A Wee Bit More Arroganceby Sophia Mason | http://girlwhowassaturday.blogspot.com/

I hate to beat a dead horse, because I hate people who beat dead horses. (Yes, I realize that's a lot of hate for one sentence. Lent is almost over, right???) So I feel it is incumbent upon me to mention, before the jump, that for anyone who got tired of the Merits of Philosophy ... well, this post is more about the Merits of Philosophy. But it's also a link to a factual, statistical study by a real live philosopher, so you might want to check it out anyway ...

For it seems that Philosophy is not only a road to truth and wisdom, but also a path to becoming smarter. No kidding! Or maybe we Philosophy folks are just smarter to begin with? Read and consider.

In the interests of full disclosure, I must note, however, that while my undergrad is in Philosophy, I've always been an English major at heart. Which still makes me sound smart, apparently, as long as I don't have to balance the checkbook at the end of the month.

What was truly frightening about Law's graph, however, is the fact that Public Administration majors do so poorly (only Social Work led to a lower overall score). These are the people we hire to run our government? Oy vey and aye yai yai!

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March 28th, 2012A New Jokeby Joseph Pearce

A few weeks ago my post "The Joke's On You" caused an almighty controversy raging for many days and becoming increasingly irate. I note that Tom Leith has just posted a new comment to that post. Since the post is now old, if not dead, and will be revisited by very few people, I thought I'd post Tom Leith's new joke to the main site, as a post in its own right. I suspect that this is intended purely for light relief and should not be the cause of renewed controversy - unless there are some very over-sensitive stastisticians lacking a sense of humour visiting the site.

Here's Tom's comment and joke:

This exists in many forms, but to lighten the mood here:

Several faculty are called in to see their dean. Just as they arrive the dean is called out of his office, leaving the three professors there. They notice a small fire in the wastebasket.

The physicist says, "I know what to do! We must cool down the materials until their temperature is lower than the ignition temperature and then the fire will go out."

The chemist says, "No! No! I know what to do! We must cut off the supply of oxygen so that the fire will go out due to lack of one of the reactants."

"We can do both at the same time if we hit it with a big bucket of water." says the engineer.

While they debate what course to take, they are alarmed to see the statistician running around the room starting more fires. They both scream, "What are you doing!?!"

To which the statistician replies, "Trying to get an adequate sample size."

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March 28th, 2012Lucifer’s Letter on Gary Gutting and the New York Timesby Paul Adams | http://ethicsculture.blogspot.com/

I find it impossible these days to think of Gary Gutting, philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame, without being reminded of C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. I imagine a letter from Lucifer to his nephew Snipe, the agent in charge of undermining Catholic education, something like the following.

Paul Adams

My dear Snipe,

I have been watching with growing admiration your recent activities. Even though the media and comboxes, even a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, denigrate the Catholic Church daily to good effect, there is nothing like the sophisticated musings and pronouncements of a professor at a prestigious Catholic university to sow confusion among the faithful. It is very helpful to perpetuate - above all in centers of Catholic learning - the idea that orthodoxy is for simple folk, people like fishermen and tax collectors and much beneath the cultured elite. So your work in fostering dissent and cynicism in philosophy and theology departments at places like Notre Dame, Georgetown, and Boston College is greatly appreciated.

It is very good to see how one of my favorite professors, Gary Gutting of Notre Dame’s philosophy department, is writing regularly for the New York Times to undermine the teaching authority of the Catholic Church as well as the teachings themselves.

I was amused to see Gutting’s comment in the New York Times that “the immorality of birth control is no longer a teaching of the Catholic Church.” He based this astonishing but welcome news on the fact that so many Catholics ignore Church teaching on the matter. What I especially enjoyed was his response to those like EWTN and Professor William E. May of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America who pointed out that God’s Son gave the authority to speak in his name only to a designated body. “This was, and is,” said May, “Saint Peter, the Apostles and their successors.” They alone “have the authority to speak, in the name of Jesus Christ, the truths that are necessary for our salvation.”

Professor May even cited the teaching of Vatican II that Catholics “may not undertake methods of birth control which are found blameworthy by the teaching authority of the Church in its unfolding of the divine law.” He cites another document of Vatican II on the duty of Catholics to accept and submit to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff.” These are dangerous arguments, drawing as they do on the authority of Christ himself and Vatican II, a council to which dissidents like to appeal. No worries - we know that the NYT looks to my followers, not the bishops, to speak for the Catholic Church, and Gutting did a wonderful job of appealing to the “spirit” of Vatican II against what that Council’s documents actually say.

But here our dear Professor Gutting surpasses himself. He rejects the relativist view of the unsophisticated undergraduate that there is no objectively correct view, but asks how we can decide who’s right. “We can’t appeal to the bishops to decide the matter, since what’s in question is their authority. So obviously, Catholics have to answer this question on their own, by their own best lights. That’s what I mean by saying it’s up to individual Catholics.”

That is brilliant! He asserts as a matter of fact that the immorality of birth control is no longer a teaching of the Catholic Church. He admits that his assertion is contrary to the teaching of the Catholic Church as promulgated by the pope and bishops, but then says it’s up to individual Catholics to decide what authority those clerics have anyway. Be sure to have our dear professor explain to the New York Times that the Church no longer teaches the Real Presence either and use this same argument to justify his position if challenged. This is the way to go, a sure path to our ultimate goal, dissolution of the Church.

Now in a column in the esteemed NYT our friend goes further and questions God’s authority too, on the grounds that even if he exists he may be up to no good as far as humans are concerned and anyway it doesn’t matter what people believe. Doesn’t he do a good job of turning God’s answer to Job--about the limitations of human understanding in relation to the omniscience of God (Job 38)--into an argument against (or for the irrelevance of) belief in God at all? Mere mortals, as he says, have no idea what he is up to or whether it’s for the benefit of humans.

This is all very good. He not only undermines religious faith, but also attacks the very foundations of Christianity without firing a shot. In becoming one of them, God confronted humans with a Fact, an inescapable truth claim that becomes for them the most important and inescapable question imaginable. Either God became man or he didn’t. People accept or reject the claim. It is, as we know, absurd to say that it doesn’t matter. But this is exactly what Gutting does, with such sleight of hand that he appears sophisticated and intelligent while making those who think truth matters look ignorant and not too bright. Admirable!

I want to conclude with an admonition. Departments of philosophy and theology at major Catholic universities play a crucial role in undermining the faith. So many intelligent young people come to professors like Gutting as faithful Catholics and lose their faith in just a few years under their skillful instruction. That parents spend tens of thousands of dollars on the ruin of their children’s souls is an added bonus.

But there are challenges and we must maintain our vigilance. We have had two strong popes in a row determined to stop the rot we are trying to spread. Sadly, there is a new spirit of orthodoxy and enthusiasm among the young and the newer priests and religious. Old dissident orders and seminaries are dying out or being closed down. How to reverse these damaging trends?

First, it is necessary to criticize the Church and the bishops publicly whenever they come into conflict with the state. Fortunately, you can count on the mainstream media to turn to our people as if they had equal authority with the pope and bishops to speak for the Church. People like our dear professor must always be on hand to explain that the Church no longer teaches what she teaches.

But now many seminaries and religious orders are again admitting young men and women who are orthodox and devout. The work of keeping or driving them out as “rigid” is faltering. Pious, good men are once again becoming priests and joyful, holy women are joining new orders, all wearing their clerical clothes and habits openly with pride.

That is very bad and you must see that this sort of thing does not happen in the prestigious Catholic universities you oversee. You must make sure that orthodox, faithful Catholics are never hired as faculty in philosophy and theology departments and that students of that kind are given as hard a time as possible. They must come to see the error of their ways or suffer the consequences of their obduracy. Your people have only a few years to do their work with these impressionable young people. They know not to teach the self-refuting claim that all truth is relative but don’t forget Gutting’s excellent alternative - it may be objective but what that truth is and who has authority to decide is just a matter of opinion.

Remind our collaborators in the elite Catholic faculties of our slogan. In religion you can say anything you like as long as you don’t claim that it’s true. The only heresy is orthodoxy. Drum this into students and the battle is half won.

Your affectionate uncle,

Reficul

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March 28th, 2012Feser’s Reasonby Robert Asch

Allow me to try my hand at turning Richard Dawkins's sinister antics to good account by introducing StAR-gazers to the superb Catholic philosopher, polemicist, and Dawkins-baiter Edward Feser:

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.fr/2012/03/reason-rally-doubleplusgood-newspeak.html

I encourage you all to explore his website:

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.fr/

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March 28th, 2012Exterminating the Untermenschenby Joseph Pearce

Further to my recent post about atheist "rationalism" leading to the Guillotine, the Gulag and the Gas Chamber, we should not forget that today's atheist "rationalists" are promoting their own contemporay holocaust in the form of abortion. We should also remember that abortion especially targets the weak, the poor and the disabled. This article about the systematic exterminaiton of babies with Down's syndrome should be a wake-up call to the horrors of atheist "rationalism" and the secular fundamentalism that it advocates.

End the Down syndrome holocaust today

by Cassy Fiano

March 26, 2012 (LiveActionNews.org) - When you hear the word "holocaust," most people automatically think of Hitler and the Nazis, slaughtering the Jews. Many people don't know that there was another group that Hitler targeted first - a dress rehearsal of sorts for the horror that was to come later. The first group of people that Hitler went after was the disabled.

First, there was a law passed in 1933 which required the forced sterilization of people with disabilities, and over 400,000 people were sterilized. Then there was Aktion-T4, which authorized the murders of disabled people. Over 70,000 were killed. They would be placed in buses and taken to killing centers, where they were murdered as soon as they got there under the Nazi euthanasia program.

How many people will learn about that and be horrified? And how many of them know that right now, to this very day, we're still practicing eugenics against the disabled? This holocaust, though, is a silent one. It's one that many people won't hear about, and if they do, they excuse it. The holocaust I'm referring to is the systematic killing of babies with Down syndrome.

Click "like" if you want to end abortion!

Prenatal testing has allowed more and more parents to find out that their children have Down syndrome before the babies are born. Unfortunately, 90% of those parents choose to kill their children, simply because they have an extra chromosome. It's a horrifying notion, but one that stays, for the most part, under the radar. With the advent of a new test, MaterniT21, which is non-invasive and 99% accurate, there is a very good chance that it will only get worse. And now, the number of babies born with Down syndrome is dropping to a number low enough to have researchers and advocates worried. As more and more women choose to have babies later, the number of Down syndrome births should have risen about 35%. Instead, it has dropped 15%.

For every ten babies diagnosed prenatally with Down syndrome, only one will get to live. Only one will be lucky enough to have parents who love him enough to not murder him because he has an extra chromosome.

Why do so many parents feel they need to kill their baby once they find out that the baby is different? It's a disturbing question to have to ask, especially when the reality of living with a child who has Down syndrome is so different from what people often picture. One recent study showed what a blessing these children are, and that the diagnosis is not the end of the world. The study found that:

99% of parents say they truly love their son or daughter with Down syndrome; 88% of brothers and sisters say they are better people because of their sibling with Down syndrome. People with Down syndrome themselves spoke up, too: 99% are happy with their lives, and 97% like who they are.

Another study, conducted by the Children's Hospital in Boston, found that an overwhelming majority of parents of children with Down syndrome reported a more positive outlook on life.

These are not miserable, stupid people cursed with an extra chromosome and doomed to live empty, meaningless lives. These are not families who feel burdened because they have a child who is different. People who have Down syndrome go to school, make friends, work, get married. They are happy people with full lives. So why do parents get this diagnosis and almost immediately turn to abortion? What is it that makes them feel they have no other choice?

One troubling reason: the medical community encourages them to. Several studies have found that physicians often put a negative spin on the results and pressure the women to terminate the pregnancy. And that can weigh heavily on a woman who is confused and scared about what to do.

When I received the diagnosis that my unborn son has Down syndrome, it was an emotional roller coaster, to say the very least. I cried for just about three days straight. Every time I thought of my baby, I would just start crying again. It got better over time, but it was difficult. And I had a lot of fears. What if he isn't healthy? Will his heart be OK? What will his life be like? Is he going to be made fun of and teased? Will he have friends? Those thoughts went through my head over and over again. And while for me, abortion was never an option to begin with, I was - and am - extraordinarily lucky to have a specialist who is very positive about Down syndrome. He never encouraged me to abort the pregnancy; to the contrary, he actually reassured me that many of his patients don't. He recommended resources for me so I could educate myself. He mentioned local Down syndrome support groups. And while my mind had been made up the entire time, it was comforting to have such a positive experience.

How many mothers feel the same emotions that I felt, had the same fears that I did, only to have their doctors reinforce those fears? To encourage them to abort? It might sound like an exaggeration, but consider that the two largest advocacy groups for Down syndrome - the National Down Syndrome Society (NDSS) and the National Down Syndrome Congress (NDSC) - do not take a stance on abortion. They do not encourage parents who receive a prenatal diagnosis to keep the baby. If the decision is made to abort, then it is shrugged off as a personal decision and nothing more. And while both groups do phenomenal work on behalf of people with Down syndrome, it is disheartening, to say the least, that they do not advocate for the 90% of babies slaughtered.

There is an attitude, one perpetuated by the culture of death, that for some people, it's just "too much" to raise a child with Down syndrome. When a pregnant woman gets the diagnosis and expresses doubt that she can handle it, it is not uncommon for people to agree with her, to say that she's doing nothing wrong by aborting. They'll even say it's better for the child, because who would choose to live a life with a disability? Better dead than to have Down syndrome. What they won't do is point out to her that the vast majority of parents with Down syndrome children are happy and love their kids, that people who have Down syndrome are happy with their lives. They won't be told that children with Down syndrome are such a joy that there are very long waiting lists to adopt a child with Down syndrome.

Thankfully, there is at least one organization dedicated to fighting for the right of these people to live: the International Down Syndrome Coalition for Life. And in honor of today, World Down Syndrome Day, they made a video asking mothers of children with Down syndrome what they would tell themselves if they could go back to before they had children. The responses made me laugh and cry.

These are the things we should be spreading in those moments of fear and confusion. And even for those of us who don't have someone with Down syndrome in our lives, we still need to stand up and fight for the right of these people to live. To not be killed just because they are different. So today, whether you are personally affected or not, I ask you to take a stand. Take the time to learn about Down syndrome, and to educate others. Resolve to do all that you can to stand up for everyone's right to live - everyone's, no matter how many chromosomes he or she may have.

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March 28th, 2012Irrational “Reason” Leads to Madnessby Joseph Pearce

I was grimly amused and somewhat irritated by Richard Dawkins' call at the recent so-called atheist "Reason Rally" in DC for Catholics to be mocked and ridiculed in public, as reported by Dena in her recent post to this site. The grim amusement arose from the irony inherent in a demagogue at a so-called "reason rally" calling for his "rational" comrades to abandon rational dialogue with their opponents in favour of ridicule, hatred and contempt. There is, however, nothing surprising about the contradiction. It is par for the course for those who idolize "Reason" (as they conceive it) as a god. After the rationalists of the French Revolution erected the goddess Reason in Notre Dame Cathedral in mockery of Christ and the Blessed Virgin, they then proceeded to treat their enemies with the hatred and contempt that led to the guillotine and the Great Terror. The madness of the Great Terror would re-emerge whenever so-called "Reason" received enough power to vent its spleen. The atheist "reason" of Marx would lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people in the madness of the Gulag, not to mention the tens of millions of people killed by the madness of Marxist "reason" in China, Cambodia and other "enlightened" places. Whilst talking about manifestations of "rationalist" madness we should not forget that other form of socialism, i.e. the National Socialism of Hitler and the Nazis, which led to the slaughter of the gas chambers. Perhaps we should also remind ourselves that all of these manifestations of "rational" madness shared a common hatred for the Catholic Church. As the French would say, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The more things change, the more they remain the same. Make no mistake about it, the irrational "reason" of the atheists leads to the Gullotine, the Gulag and the Gas Chamber.

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March 28th, 2012Update on the Lewis & Tolkien Film Projectby Joseph Pearce

Further to my recent post about the new film project on the friendship between Tolkien and Lewis, I've just received an update from the film's script-writer, Louis Markos. Here's the latest news on the project:

This is a follow up email to the email I sent you last weekend about the movie I co-wrote on C. S. Lewis. I have bad news and good news. The bad news is that I and my fellow producers have decided to end the kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the film. The GOOD news is that the reason we decided to end it is that we are currently in negotiation with a major studio, and it seemed more prudent at this time to focus on issues of production. This film WILL be made and made in a way that is faithful to Lewis and Tolkien.

I would ask, though, that you visit our movie website to keep informed on the film as it moves into production, and that you share this website with others. We will keep the site updated with new information as it becomes available. When we make things official with the studio and when we attach actors, actresses, and a director to the film, that information will be posted on the website. Thanks and blessings, and please keep us and the film in your prayers,

Lou

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March 27th, 2012Mock Themby Dena Hunt

“Mock them [the Catholics[,” he told the crowd. “Ridicule them! In public!”

So Dawkins encouraged the crowd at the “Reason Rally,” a meeting of some 20,000 atheist activists in Washington, D.C.

Reactions to such carrying-on might range from horror to boredom. It’s almost tempting to say, “Oh, get a life.” That may or may not be the appropriate reaction, but I think it’s more fitting than horror.

If there’s to be open verbal persecution of the Church, it doesn’t happen without divine permission. As Christ said to Pilate, “You would have no power over me were it not given you from above.” History has shown repeatedly—without exception, in fact—that the Church not only outlives her persecutors, but grows and thrives, while the persecutors themselves are relegated to a region of pathos that history seems to reserve especially for those who were so sure they could wipe her out.

After all, look what happened as a result of Pilate’s “power”.

It could be—we don’t know—that Pilate was converted. It may well be that Dawkins will be converted. A reading of the rest of his remarks will sound familiar to many converts who once were atheists themselves:

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/dawkins-calls-for-mockery-of-catholics-at-reason-rally

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March 26th, 2012Screwtape and a Possible Theological Error by C.S. Lewisby Joseph Pearce

I've recently received a query from someone who is puzzled by a section in Letter Thirteen of The Screwtape Letters. I consider this particular section to be a theological faux pas on Lewis' part.

Here's the query:

In Letter 13, Screwtape writes:

"As you ought to have known, the asphyxiating cloud which prevented your attacking the patient on his walk back from the old mill, is a well-known phenomenon. It is the enemy's most barbarous weapon, and generally appears when He is directly present to the patient under certain modes not yet fully classified."

1) Do you think readers are supposed to be able to identify what Screwtape is describing here?

Is this God's presence in the Holy Spirit? Is this a great cloud of witnesses that may accompany God's presence?

Then Screwtape states:

"Some humans are permanently surrounded by it and therefore inaccessible to us.

2) Again does this sound to you like Lewis intends for us to recognize who these special humans were? Are these special humans certain Biblical figures? Were they special saints?

And here's my response:

I'm not sure that I can answer definitively but I'll offer my opinion, for what it's worth.

Clearly Lewis cannot mean the Elect, in a Calvinist sense, because such a reading would imply that everyone else is the non-elect and therefore doomed any way, in which case Screwtape and Wormwood would not need to bother with their "patient". The cloud must be the presence of grace, which being an outpouring of God's love would not be understood by the demons, and therefore not neatly "classified" within their graceless psychological framework.

Regarding your second point, I believe quite frankly that this is a little heterodox on Lewis' part, if I am understanding what he is saying correctly. No human being (with the possible exception of the Blessed Virgin) is free from demonic temptation. We are not only tempted to sin, we are all sinners. Even the saints were sinners, as all of them are always telling us!

This, at least, is my reading of the lines in question. Do with it what thou wilt!

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March 26th, 2012October Baby: A New Pro-Life Movieby Joseph Pearce

I haven't seen this new film yet but plan to do so this week. I've heard from a number of people that it's a film that deserves the support of all pro-lifers. Here's the e-mail about the film sent by Tony Ryan of Ignatius Press:

Friends,

Hopefully you have heard all the excitement about the acclaimed new movie with a deep pro-life message, OCTOBER BABY.
We need to promote this beautiful movie, and go see it this weekend, the opening weekend. You can go online at Fandango to find a theater closest to you. (For those in my area of Napa, it opens in Fairfield today.)

It is a movie that could change hearts and minds on the issue of life. I have seen many clips from October Baby and was blown away by both the incredibly touching story and the high quality of the film. This film will have a profound impact for Life on all who see it. You can see clips of the movie, the trailer, etc., on the movie website, which is at: www.octoberbabymovie.net

We can impact the culture with films like this that promote the Christian view of the sacredness of all human life. One sure way you can help us is to make this film a success at the box office on this opening weekend. Find the theater near you at: http://www.fandango.com/octoberbaby_148879/movieoverview
Tony Ryan

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March 26th, 2012From War Hero to Convertby Joseph Pearce

Pavel Chichikov sent me this wonderful and inspiring story about a hero from the Falklands War, who won the Military Cross for his bravery, and subsequently became a Catholic convert. It's remarkable:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/falklandislands/9164691/Falklands-War-hero-explains-why-he-entered-the-church-after-being-awarded-the-Military-Cross.html

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March 25th, 2012What Science Can and Can Not Doby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

You'll find here at the Ink Desk Sophia Mason's interesting summary of "philosophy versus science", a debate which has been raging at the Ink Desk since Joseph Pearce had the audacity to criticize a joke, something I would never do ("speaking as a comic in all seriousness," as Bobby Bitman used to say).

What I find interesting about this debate is that the defenders of science have the notion that the defenders of philosophy are somehow knocking science.

But science can not be defended without philosophy - for the purpose of science is something only a philosophical activity of the mind can define. "Purpose" is a metaphysical concept. And whether we call "purpose" "teleology" or "final cause", it is a thing beyond the purview of science.

Why this would be is best explained by Fr. Stanley Jaki, PhD Theology and PhD Physics, who points out over and over again in his hundred or more books on the subject that modern science grew and flourished and was empowered when it shed the teleology that Aristotle had burdened it with and confined itself to examining the quantitative aspects of reality - those things that can be counted, measured, demonstrated, and thereby predicted. This great limitation was a great blessing and made science what it is today.

Fr. Jaki writes ...

"That exact science stands or falls with quantitative operations has been noted countless times. After Heinrich Hertz discovered electromagnetic waves he had to admit that he had failed in his real pursuit, namely to find out what electromagnetism really was. ...

"What is true of electromagnetism applies to any other branch of physical theory. Newton's theory of gravitation does not reveal what gravitation is. It merely states that what is called gravitation operates along strictly specifiable quantitative lines, summed up in the idea of a central field of force. One of its implications is the inverse square law of gravitation, another is the times-squared law of the free fall of bodies. They are exact mathematically and therefore provide for exact predictions. ...

"Exact science [is] the study of the quantitative aspects of things in motion. Nothing more and nothing less. This notion of exact science gives competence to scientists whenever they deal with matter, but it does not enlighten them as to what matter is, let alone what scientific study is as an exercise of the intellect. Much less does that notion of science enlighten them about their purpose for doing science, and even less about the fact that they presumably do freely what they do."

This is why Jaki was quick to point out in the Evolution Debate that, "Darwinian theory gives the sole known hope for a scientific account of the great chain of living forms. All other accounts, from vitalism to Intelligent Design, are operating with factors that cannot be measured."

That is why, "those who try to save purpose through science - Newtonian, Einsteinian, Darwinian or non-Darwinian - are barking up the wrong tree ...

"The handling of quantitative relations and features, which is the chief power of exact science, limits it to the quantitative properties of things. Those properties may be likened to a CD disk which is practically infinite in its diameter, because it extends everywhere matter is, but at the same time is enormously thin. Quantitative properties are on the surface of things and of all their constituents, be they atoms or subnuclear particles. ... Anything beneath that surface is profoundly philosophical, where one has to work with analogous concepts that belong to any of the nine categories other than the categories of quantities as listed by Aristotle in his Categories. There he also noted the all important thing that it is through their quantitative magnitudes that things are recognized to exist. Still a set of quantities does not mean existence as such, nor can it mean purpose, not even design taken for a synonym of purpose, let alone free will and moral responsibility.

"Quantitative properties have no role in man's grasping of the fact that he acts for a purpose and that he is craving a lasting purpose. Quantitative properties cannot cope with one's self-awareness, with one's having free will and moral responsibility."

What the study of the quantitative aspects of things has done for us is given us modern technology and the ability to manipulate matter in unimagined ways, and it has given us a system for understanding crucial aspects of reality. The good of science is a great good, but exact science is a tool that does a very specific thing - and because of that, it does it very well.

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March 24th, 2012Exciting New Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Film Projectby Joseph Pearce

Visitors to this site will probably be well aware of the excellent work being done by Louis Markos. Now, however, I'm excited to announce that he has written a film script for a proposed movie focusing on the friendship between Tolkien and Lewis. Visit this website for more details about the film:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thelionawakes/the-lion-awakes

To hear Louis Markos discussing the spiritual aspects of the proposed movie, follow this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy41czilFq0&feature=youtu.be

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March 24th, 2012Why Catholics Don’t Buy Booksby Dena Hunt

Jennifer Fulwiler at the National Catholic Register examined the complaint of publishers that Catholics don’t buy books: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jennifer-fulwiler/the-mystery-of-the-catholic-book-buyer

Writers, or anyone else, might be interested in her findings, but particularly publishers. It shows how demographics are easily skewed, an interesting topic in itself*, but publishers may find that they’ve been relying on rather faulty perspectives in the way they’ve been targeting their market.

*During the recent liberal media hoopla about the contraception mandate, I think I heard half a dozen TV reporters say emphatically that 98% of all Catholics use contraception.

(Wait a minute. The mandate covered only Catholic women … 98% of ALL …?)

Then I heard: 98% of all Catholic women use …

(Well, wait. Some of us—a lot of us, actually—are over 50 … Many of us have had hysterectomies … Some of us are married to men who’ve had vasectomies …)

Can we just think for a moment here? 98% of all Catholics use contraception. Really? That can’t refer to members of a religion—we’d have to be members of a different species.

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March 23rd, 2012The Crucifix on the Spanish Wallby Tom Kallene

It might come as a surprise to people outside of Spain, but this once so Catholic country is having a problem with Crucifixes.

There has been debate for some time whether they should remain, as they sometimes are, hanging on walls in secular buildings, such as state schools.

I must admit that, when I first heard of it, I was surprised that some schools still have them, such has been the secularization in the last few years.

But in some schools they do remain, a fact which upsets secular activists and some politicians. Needless to say, I find it hard to understand how anyone get offended by an image of Christ or a Cross, bearing in mind the images that bombard us daily in the media. But then again, there’s a lot of things I don’t understand. Many have come to the defense of the Crucifix and have pointed out that it is impossible to separate the Cross from Spain, they are so tightly intertwined. This is of course true, but some fall into a trap when they defend the Crucifix, saying that, more than anything, it is a cultural symbol.

No, the Cross is not a neutral cultural expression. It is the maximum symbol of Faith in Christ. It’s that Faith that is missing in modern Spain, and that’s the real problem. The Crucifix on the wall as a traditional decoration is meaningless. It’s only when that Cross is carried inside of us that the Crucifix on the wall comes alive.

If we argue that it is just a cultural, traditional symbol, we admit defeat … or worse, we lie. Let’s keep the Crucifixes where they are, by all means, but the Cross of personal Faith needs even more urgent attention in Spain today.

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March 23rd, 2012Rally for Religious Freedom (Updated)by Sophia Mason | http://girlwhowassaturday.blogspot.com/

Has the HHS mandate got you upset? I hope so. I hope you haven't forgotten about it, just because the American mainstream media has. Today, Friday the 23rd, in Washington, D.C., between noon and one p.m., Catholics and people of goodwill are standing outside the HHS building to express our disagreement with the mandate requiring that Catholics and other people of faith must give their money in support of contraception, abortifacients, and sterilizations. Be there or be ... well, not there. But seriously, if you're in the city or nearby and can get away during your lunch hour, COME AND JOIN US.

There are two Facebook groups (of which I am aware) for the rally. They're public groups, so anyone who's on Facebook should be able to view and join.

http://www.facebook.com/events/199791130127272/

http://www.facebook.com/events/233531320075985/

I understand there are going to be other rallies going on in several US states today. If you're not near DC, you might want to do a quick google search to see if there's one near you.

Update: Here is a page that lists the locations of the other rallies: http://standupforreligiousfreedom.com/locations/

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March 22nd, 2012More on the Importance of Aquinas an Augustineby Joseph Pearce

I'm delighted that two of my colleagues at Ave Maria University, both philosophers, have added their voice to the ongoing debate about the role of true philosophy as a path to Truth.

Barry David responded thus:

Certainly Leo XIII's Aeterni Patris (a watershed document in asserting the value of Thomistic philosophy) and, in a less obvious way, John Paul II's Fides et Ratio make claims that Thomistic philosophy is, in key respects, normative and/or exemplary. The Church thinks much the same about elements of 'Augustinian' philosophy, but less so than of Thomistic philosophy.

I don't have the time right now to scroll through those documents (and there are other documents as well) to find relevant passages. However, those are places to look.

And here are the comments of Steven Long:

If it is a question of the Church's estimation of the thought of Augustine and Thomas, it is like asking how one knows the sun is hot: the macro phenomena are sufficient to make the case.

Of course, philosophically, the fellow needs to engage with these authors intellectually to benefit from them.

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May 10th, 2012Containing Multidudesby Sophia Mason | http://girlwhowassaturday.blogspot.com/

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May 10th, 2012Is Marriage Going to the Dogs?by Joseph Pearce

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May 10th, 2012Land of the Setting Sunby Joseph Pearce

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May 10th, 2012Another Cockney Convertby Joseph Pearce

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May 10th, 2012The Honor of Your Presence is Requested …by Dena Hunt

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May 8th, 2012The Proper Concept of Contraceptionby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

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May 8th, 2012Seeing Redby Sophia Mason | http://girlwhowassaturday.blogspot.com/

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May 8th, 2012Whose Fault Is It that Liberals Don’t Like Chesterton?by Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

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May 7th, 2012Irish Priests are Revoltingby Fr. Simon Henry

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May 7th, 2012The Germans Invade Missouriby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

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May 7th, 2012On Patriotism and Nationalismby Joseph Pearce

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May 7th, 2012Hey! I Found a Sensible Atheist!by Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

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May 7th, 2012The End of Civilizationby Joseph Pearce

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May 5th, 2012Of Sex and Humor, Etc., . . .by Dena Hunt

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May 5th, 2012Shakespeare and St. Jeromeby Robert Asch

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May 4th, 2012Filled with Desireby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

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May 4th, 2012Will the Real Uncle Sam Please Stand Up?by Joseph Pearce

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May 4th, 2012True Baring and Hard Knoxby Joseph Pearce

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May 4th, 2012Early Morning Mass for Breakfastby Tom Kallene

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May 3rd, 2012From the Green Woodby Dena Hunt

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May 3rd, 2012Explaining My Absenceby Joseph Pearce

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May 2nd, 2012Love, Shakespeare and Everything In Betweenby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

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May 2nd, 2012Everything I Learned about Theology and Economics I Learned from “Cracked”by Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org

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May 1st, 2012We Are Now to be Protected Even From Our Freedom of Choiceby Dena Hunt

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April 30th, 2012Interview with a Vikingby Jef Murray