Year: 2013

A Devoutly Catholic Heretic

Sam Tanenhaus profiles the Catholic essayist and historian Garry Wills, describing him as a “good Catholic who nonetheless has declared war not only on church elders but on the Vatican itself”:

When the sex abuse scandals erupted a decade ago, and others writhed in torments of apology or denial, Wills coolly explained that what seemed like desecrations of the faith were in reality outgrowths of its most hallowed rituals. “The very places where the molestation occurs are redolent of religion—the sacristy, the confessional, the rectory… The victim is disarmed by sophistication and the predator has a special arsenal of stun devices. He uses religion to sanction what he is up to, even calling sex part of his priestly ministry.”

To a non-Catholic like me, Wills was performing a heroic civic deed, prizing open the dank closet of alien experience. He had come not to condemn but to explain. But many believers were outraged, not least because Wills is “perhaps the most distinguished Catholic intellectual in America over the last 50 years,” as the National Catholic Reporter has put it. In his new book, Why Priests? A Failed Tradition, Wills is at it again, cataloguing church hypocrisies, false teachings, the litany of bloody crimes. “The great scandal of Christians is the way they have persecuted fellow Christians,” he writes, “driving out heretics, shunning them, burning their books, burning them.”

In a piece we linked to earlier this week, Wills hopes that Pope Francis will be “increasingly irrelevant, like the last two…a monarch in a time when monarchs are no longer believable”:

Catholics have had many bad popes whose teachings or acts they could or should ignore or defy. Orcagna painted one of them in hell; Dante assigned three to his Inferno; Lord Acton assured Prime Minister William Gladstone that Pius IX’s condemnation of democracy was not as bad as the papal massacres of Huguenots, which showed that “people could be very good Catholics and yet do without Rome”; and John Henry Newman hoped Pius IX would die during the first Vatican Council, before he could do more harm. Acton’s famous saying, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” was written to describe Renaissance popes.

God’s Plan In The Lesson Plan

British Education Secretary Michael Gove proposed for a “narrative of British progress” to be taught in history courses. Giles Fraser unpacks the submerged Christian assumptions behind such thinking:

What is at work here is secularised theology, technically a form of eschatology – the belief that history is the expression of God’s purpose for humanity, that it begins with the fall and works its way towards the salvation of the human race. Here, history is always working towards some final end or purpose. Forget the fact that Gove, Marx, Fukuyama et al present their history in the neutral trappings of social science; the very idea that history contains some teleology is, as John Gray has pointed out in his recent book The Silence of Animals, a hollowed-out version of Christian theology.

Not that all religious people accept this mythology. Even [Herbert] Butterfield, who was himself profoundly Christian, refused to see history as evidence for the hand of God guiding us towards some inevitable conclusion. On the other hand, we all love a story: one with a beginning, middle and end. And to see history as simply one damn thing after another seems to rob it of that larger meaning that many want to read into it.

Deciding between these competing views of history requires us to recognise that some of our secular ideas have a hidden theological substructure. “What presents itself as the ‘secularisation’ of theological concepts will have to be understood, in the last analysis, as an adaptation of traditional theology to the intellectual climate produced by modern philosophy or science,” was how the political philosopher Leo Strauss put it.

Faces Of The Day

fotdsunday2

Italian photographer Marina Rosso describes the project she shot between 2009-2011:

Licia and Ryan married 57 years ago in a small town next to Udine, Italy. They spent all their lives together and now at the age of 85, things start to be more difficult and the rhythms are slower. All the days look like the others, every movement is a repetitional loop. But this is what keeps them still alive: the idea of being self sufficient and helping each other.

Amanda Gorence found out Licia and Ryan are actually Marina’s grandparents:

Rosso says that through photography, she was able to foster a closer relationship with them. We don’t doubt that, as it is clear in her intimate portrait of partnership, aging, love, and committment—the latter two concepts melting into an undefined one; Rosso says, “It’s difficult, at a certain point, to say where one ends and the other begins.”

More images here.

Reading Tocqueville In Beijing

After being praised by Vice Premier Wang Qishan, Tocqueville’s classic analysis of the French Revolution, The Old Regime and the Revolution, has become a bestseller in China. The reason why:

The aspect of the book that most analysts have focused on is this threat of a brewing crisis, or what is sometimes called the Toqueville Paradox: that the most dangerous period faced by a governing regime is not when the people are most repressed, but when reforms are underway and life is getting better – as has been the case in China now for some years.

“It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed,” China Daily quotes Tocqueville, “but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances. The weight, although less heavy, seems then all the more unbearable.”

A Poem For Sunday

“A Glass of Beer” by James Stephens:

The lanky hank of a she in the inn over there
Nearly killed me for asking the loan of a glass of beer;
May the devil grip the whey-faced slut by the hair,
And beat bad manners out of her skin for a year.

That parboiled ape, with the toughest jaw you will see
On virtue’s path, and a voice that would rasp the dead,
Came roaring and raging the minute she looked at me,
And threw me out of the house on the back of my head!

If I asked her master he’d give me a cask a day;
But she, with the beer at hand, not a gill would arrange!
May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten, and may
The High King of Glory permit her to get the mange.”

(Adapted from the Irish of Daithi Ó Bruadair, c. 1625-98.)

An American Writer

Reviewing George Saunders’s short story collection, Tenth of December, Justin E.H. Smith praises the way Saunders channels a distinctly American idiom:

Saunders is an American writer in the same way that Chingiz Aitmatov is a Kyrgyz writer or Robert Service is a Yukon poet. He speaks for the place. He especially speaks for the lower-class white part of the place. And if, like me, that is a part of America you know well, but from which you have become estranged in later life, then it can be particularly gratifying to see Saunders describing it with such great power of observation. The encounters in “Puppy” and in “Home”, between the benighted, marginalized lower classes, on the one hand, and the equally benighted, but vastly more self-satisfied, so-called ‘middle class’ on the other, seem to tell the whole story of America, and a good part of my own life history in America. When the middle-class mom goes to pick up the puppy from the white-trash family, and sees “the dry aquarium holding the single encyclopedia volume, the pasta pot on the bookshelf with an inflatable candy cane inexplicably sticking out of it,” I swear I have known both sides of this encounter with equal intimacy, and love, and desire to get away.

Recent Dish coverage of Saunders’s work here and here.

The Lion, The Whip And The Wardrobe

Reviewing Alister McGrath’s new biography of C.S. Lewis, a hero to American evangelicals, A.N. Wilson drops this little parenthetical detail:

Where McGrath is so good is in sorting out the truth of this story. Lewis remembered, shortly after his conversation with Tolkien, being driven in the sidecar of his brother’s motorbike to an outdoor zoo—Whipsnade. In the course of this journey, he decided he believed in the Incarnation of Christ. He remembered his exultation as the two brothers walked together among bluebells. But, McGrath, points out, it was September—when bluebells are not in flower! McGrath cunningly shows us that the moment of epiphany must in fact have come two years later, when Lewis went to the zoo with his lover, or former lover Mrs. Moore and her daughter Maureen.

Mrs. Moore is the most understandable omission from Lewis’s autobiography. (Another being Lewis’s obsession with sadism; he nicknamed himself Philomastix, or Lover of the Whip).