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Post by hibernicus on Feb 1, 2022 23:00:37 GMT
Joel Coen's new film adaptation THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH. When I was a child I was somewhat obsessed by the Scottish Play and re-read it several times. I hadn't read it or thought of it for years, but as soon as the characters began to speak it all came back. Partly because of this echo effect, partly because having lived longer and had my own difficulties and disappointments, partly because of the nature of the adaptation, for the first time I felt the full eeriness of the play and got a sense of what it would be like to be BE Macbeth, with that depth of self-hatred and despair. Now it occurs to me that this is how a catechism is supposed to work - you are familiarised with the concepts before you fully understand them, so when you encounter them in later life you grasp their full implications. Certain modern teaching methods resemble saying that if you don't get it all first time you haven't learned anything at all, or even that the play should only be taught or even performed in a Cliff's Notes version to make it accessible, with the original strictly prohibited. It's almost as if the witches were in charge of catechesis.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Feb 1, 2022 23:51:52 GMT
Joel Coen's new film adaptation THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH. When I was a child I was somewhat obsessed by the Scottish Play and re-read it several times. I hadn't read it or thought of it for years, but as soon as the characters began to speak it all came back. Partly because of this echo effect, partly because having lived longer and had my own difficulties and disappointments, partly because of the nature of the adaptation, for the first time I felt the full eeriness of the play and got a sense of what it would be like to be BE Macbeth, with that depth of self-hatred and despair. Now it occurs to me that this is how a catechism is supposed to work - you are familiarised with the concepts before you fully understand them, so when you encounter them in later life you grasp their full implications. Certain modern teaching methods resemble saying that if you don't get it all first time you haven't learned anything at all, or even that the play should only be taught or even performed in a Cliff's Notes version to make it accessible, with the original strictly prohibited. It's almost as if the witches were in charge of catechesis. I have often, through literature, vicariously tasted life experiences that lay ahead of me-- and found, when I actually experienced them, that they very much resembled the literary versions.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 14, 2022 23:02:19 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 25, 2022 0:41:55 GMT
Another issue of THE EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE, much of which is devoted to lauding the new Spanish party Vox. Overall this strikes me as a strange mixtum-gatherum. It contains, for example, both an article praising Yoram Hazony's defence of nationalism (on the grounds that the only alternative is empire, which is inherently exploitative) and an article on the crown of the Holy Roman Empire which eulogises that empire; one praising Eric Zemmour, who advocates French laicite (particularly when directed against Muslims) and praising French legiimist monarchism (in an article which describes Chateaubriand as an ultra - he wasn't though he was a legitimist). Particularly sinister is a piece by a Serbian Orthodox cleric which declares Serbian identity inseparable from Orthodoxy and describes Slavs who converted to Islam as traitors, without mentioning where this mindset led in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Now I know that good magazines publish articles advocating different viewpoints, but they usually have some sort of editorial commentary to relate the different threads - this doesn't. I respect some of the contributors, such as Jonathan van Maren, but I can't help feeling that at best this is a expensively produced coffee table for those wishing to lose themselves in fantasies of Old Europe, and at worst... Let's say, Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 18, 2022 23:40:29 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 2, 2022 23:46:47 GMT
A 1959 history of the St Louis Nuns in Ireland. Some interesting details of Monaghan history, including that a prominent Orange landlord of the Land War era had a mother and grandmother who were patrons of the order, and a description of the saintly devotional life of a well-known patriot priest renowned in other contexts (as the author does not mention) for delivering particularly vituperative speeches (e.g. during the Parnell split). The book focuses very much on the original C19 French founders of the order and of the founding Mother Superior in Ireland (shortly after the first convent was established in Monaghan the Bishop of Clogher decreed that it should be answerable to him rather than under the French mother house). After the founding generation the book rapidly becomes a rather smug list of foundations. This I suspect reflects an assumption that the founders establish the Rule as a permanent template which must be followed unquestioningly thereafter, and that the questions of how it works in different contexts and whether it should be modified to reflect circumstances were dismissed out of hand - until after Vatican II things went to the other extreme and change was seen as desirable for its own sake. While Nuala O Faolain, who was a Monaghan St Louis boarder in the 1950s, is hardly their most edifying product, I suspect there is a good deal of truth in her complaint that with many good qualities it had too much of the mindset of a Victorian finishing school, snobbery included.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 12, 2023 17:42:55 GMT
Since Bulgakov's THE MASTER AND MARGARITA has come up on this thread, the linked article may be of interest: www.firstthings.com/article/2023/03/what-pilate-learnsIncidentally the Ukrainians are not helping their cause (and I do support them against the Russian aggression) by closing down the Bulgakov Birthplace/House Museum in Kyiv/Kiev because he wrote in Russian and was unsympathetic to Ukrainian nationalism. This is certainly understandable under present circumstances, but I can't help feeling Woland is playing one of his little tricks...
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 13, 2023 3:47:15 GMT
Henry Sire PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES (2014). This is useful in contextualising his criticisms of Pope Francis in THE DICTATOR POPE. I'll list some points that strike me as positive and some that are questionable: (a) Sire clearly thinks for himself and knows a lot about church history. Although he uses Michael Davies as a source he does not follow any of the more obvious party lines. For example, his favourite modern Popes are Leo XIII and Pius XI (he seems to regard effective governance as more important for a Pope than personal sanctity) whom some trad groups such as TFP regard with particular disfavour because of the ralliement and the condemnation of Action Francaise); he admits the limitations of the Thomist Revival and the flaws in official handling of the nouvelle theologie; he is quite critical of Pius XII without demonising him (though his passing remark that Pius XII's policy would have safeguarded the Church's position if the Axis had won is slanderous if it is meant to represent Pius's own attitude and hair-raising if it is Sire's own view); he points out that the condemnation of Galileo was juridically flawed and reflects the vindictiveness of pope Urban VIII, who thought Galileo had insulted him personally. (b) He has a very good sense of how exalting logical over-simplification at the expense of God's love can lead to monstrous heresies. (c) He is quite good on facile identification of Catholic social teaching with free-market capitalism, though he does not discuss such problems with his preferred alternatives as their limitation in supporting increasing populations. (For example, he endorses the Tawney-Weber thesis tracing capitalism to the Reformation and dismisses scholars who criticise it as failing to understand it, but he does not address such concrete points as the argument that capitalism is clearly identifiable in Renaissance Northern Italy and Burgundy.) (d) Sire has a very good sense of the bureaucratic politics of the Vatican during and after the Council, and how their workings were disguised by eulogies of the Spirit of Vatican II. He seems to know Italian well enough to pick up on literature about dodgy behaviour which doesn't make it into English. (e) He has quite a good sense of the limitations, cultural and otherwise, of C19 ultramontanism. There is a grand Dawsonian sweep to a lot of his analysis. (e) He is quite outspoken about the extent to which many conciliar and post-conciliar liberals were/are simply in bad faith, e.g. by refusing to admit any criticism of their own agendas, by sucking up to worldly and secular powers, by applying a legal/canonical double standard to friends and enemies.
(1) Sire is very far to the right politically in some respects - e.g. he argues that democracy is simply a form of oligarchy and that feudalism, because it assumes a natural hierarchy is the abiding model for a Christian society; his passing remarks about America show a facile and thinly-argued contempt (for example, he claims that between 1815 and 1890 the US was the only country that gained territory by waging aggressive war on its neighbours and displacing existing populations; this overlooks Tsarist Russia's behaviour in the Caucasus and Circassia for example - possibly because the victims were Muslims, the way in which French loyalists were expelled from Alsace-Lorraine by the Germans after 1871, with a similar process in reverse after 1918). He sneers at John Paul II "going round apologising for everything" as if there were not things in the Church's history which ought to be disowned - e.g. the Judensau, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which Sire himself points out encouraged irreligion by the sight of forcibly converted Huguenots being coerced to make sacrilegious Communions. (2) His arguments that the NO is Protestantising and encourages heresy, that a General Council such as Vatican II can lawfully be resisted and overruled, are carried to an extent which IMHO verges on heresy and certainly contradicts some of his own arguments (e.g. he argues that Arianising councils which clashed with Athanasius were legitimate General Councils although they have not been regarded as such and he argues elsewhere that prescription is what counts). At one point his views would seem to imply that divine guidance of the Church failed in 1629 (when the Thirty Years' War turned against the Hapsburgs). His denunciations of the Declaration on Religious Liberty noticeably fail to spell out how far he thinks persecution is justified. (3) He seems to have an excessively idealised view about how the forms of traditional catholic society he praises worked in practice. For example, he glosses over the similarities between early modern absolutism and C18 enlightened despotism; he sees the changes of the C20 largely in intellectual terms and neglects their sociological dimensions. HE seems to believe that clerical sexual abuse only emerged after the Council, neglecting such little details as St Peter Damien's BOOK OF GOMORRAH, descriptions of such abuse by C19 anti-clericals some of whom claimed to have experienced it themselves, the evidence of pre-conciliar abuse uncovered in Ireland etc. Another example is his emphasis on the P2/Mafia links of certain individuals who gained power and influence during/after the Council, but not the long record of clerical collaboration with the Mafia in Sicily - for example when Cardinal Ruffini, who was one of the leading Conservatives at Vat 2, declared there was no such thing as the Mafia while hobnobbing with Salvo Lima, the Christian Democrat politician who was the main link between the Sicilian mafia and the DC leadership, he was either corrupt or criminally naive.
A very interesting book but ultimately frustrating.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 13, 2023 5:07:26 GMT
One other point: some of Sire's individual opinions strike me as questionable. For example, he refers to van Gogh's paintings as facile primitivism and infantilism; he says the artistic potential of the cinema has never been fulfilled and film adaptations of literary works inevitably travesty them - what about Bresson's DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST? Is he simply judging by Hollywood?)
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Mar 22, 2023 13:39:30 GMT
During recent weeks, I have watched The Nun's Story and The Cardinal (here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-cce9QQIG0 ). It's interesting to see the way the Church was depicted at the time in those films
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Post by annie on Aug 31, 2023 20:07:34 GMT
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Post by assisi on Sept 1, 2023 22:00:46 GMT
I think this is part of a series of essays and maybe more detail will be provided, but two things stood out for me. First, what exactly does the author mean by 'apostolic age', or 'apostolicity'? And this quote "One reason for the rapid collapse [of former Catholic countries like Belgium, Spain] was that the overarching vision of the society had been changing over a course of time, but the change was not perceived and the institutions of the Church were not adjusting to it; they rather continued to be led under an attitude of “business as usual.” I'm never really sure how the Churches could ever have 'adjusted' to them. By what means could they have counteracted secularism/materialism. Most of the progress of secularism has been malicious and planned. What could the Churches have done in good faith to halt a movement that was undermining most institutions.
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Post by maguidhir on Sept 3, 2023 22:51:52 GMT
I think this is part of a series of essays and maybe more detail will be provided, but two things stood out for me. First, what exactly does the author mean by 'apostolic age', or 'apostolicity'? And this quote "One reason for the rapid collapse [of former Catholic countries like Belgium, Spain] was that the overarching vision of the society had been changing over a course of time, but the change was not perceived and the institutions of the Church were not adjusting to it; they rather continued to be led under an attitude of “business as usual.” I'm never really sure how the Churches could ever have 'adjusted' to them. By what means could they have counteracted secularism/materialism. Most of the progress of secularism has been malicious and planned. What could the Churches have done in good faith to halt a movement that was undermining most institutions. I think good catechesis would have gone a long way. Most Catholics in these countries (well, I can't speak to the case of Belgium but imagine the same applies) had never been properly formed in the Faith, so when the tsunami of secularism burst through, they were washed away instantly. I'm using the past tense, but I don't think anything has changed on the catechesis front. When my wife and I attended a "Catholic" marriage prep course in Ennis, we were told about the different forms of contraception we could use (this was after the instructors told us that, technically, the Church didn't approve -- if we felt so inclined to listen to the Church at our Catholic marriage prep course). And when I say catechesis, I mean it broadly -- Catholic formation. And I don't know of any better opportunity to form Catholics than through the liturgy, which, again, is where the Church failed. But I see your point. The trouble is that the average Catholic, no matter how earnest or devout, was not going to understand or remember the principle of double effect. Not every Catholic can be an apologist with ready answers to every question -- even if they are capable of learning the answers themselves. There are always going to be toddlers and cattle to mind. But maybe if they knew that someone in the parish, whether Father or the well-read farmer two miles down the road, would have had a compelling answer, that would have given them a foothold and the feeling of assurance. The Church could have certainly done much more than it did to prepare Catholics for what was to come. As for apostolicity, I'm not sure what the author means, other than the new evangelisation.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 9, 2023 21:24:10 GMT
I think another way of putting it might be "pre-Constantinian" for "apostolic" and "Constantinian" for "Christendom". The distinction is between a society which sees itself as Catholic/Christian and assumes most people are Catholic/Christian, or at least aspires to being Catholic/Christian, and one which implicitly or explicitly rejects Catholicism/Christianity and sees Christianity (or at least certain aspects of it) as alien, irrelevant or positively evil. One point the author misses is that in at least some of his examples there were long traditions of secularism/unbelief/anti-clericalism within the society which were occluded in the decades before the 60s but still survived (for example, in Belgium the Walloons were notably more secular than the Flemings; Franco Spain's official culture, at least in its first decades, rested on the assertion that Spanish liberalism and socialism had corrupted Spain since the late C18 and must be repressed as part of a drive to recover the glories of the Catholic Monarchs and their immediate successors; Duplessis' Quebec was to some extent a one-party state which combined rhetoric about cultural defence with pro-business and Tammany Hall policies.) It could be argued that what happened in the 60s/70s was the collapse of a number of regional Catholic cultures which had resisted the initial drive of secularisation but got swamped by a new wave, at least partly because much of their population/leadership came to see their existing cultures as backward and provincial. (This might be seen as a reverse of what happened in the evangelisation of northern Europe, which was partly driven by awareness that Christianity was linked to a more sophisticated culture and civilisation.)
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 22, 2023 20:40:52 GMT
A few observations on the new Martin Scorsese film KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON [Spoilers ahead] The film is set in the 1920s when the Osage Indians of Oklahoma. having previously been expelled from Kansas and Missouri and dumped on a rocky expanse of land that nobody else wanted because it seemed to have nothing worth stealing, became extremely wealthy when said rocky expanse turned out to have oil underneath it. Naturally this produced a flood of white thieves and opportunists to relieve them of the oil money, assisted by the US government which decided the Indians needed to be protected from themselves by handing over control of their financial affairs to white guardians, without considering who would protect them from the guardians. Numerous Osage were murdered for their money, sometimes by whites who had married them. The film deals with the most notorious of these cases, in which a powerful cattle rancher arranged for his nephew to marry an Indian woman and then set about killing off her relatives so she would inherit all their oil rights, after which she was to be killed so her husband and their children would get the lot (it is strongly suspected that the children and their father - who was in on the whole scam - would then be murdered for the benefit of his uncle.) The FBI got involved, the nephew cracked under interrogation and they both went to jail. I need only add that all this time the uncle was posing as a great friend and benefactor of the Osage, and that although his guilt was obvious he maintained the pretence even after conviction. The two villains are played by Robert de Niro and Leonardo di Caprio in a manner which makes your flesh crawl. A few details: (1) The Osage practised a mixture of Catholicism and traditional Amerindian religion, and the two sets of rites are shown being performed simultaneously e.g. at funerals and weddings. this may be the case now but it seems unlikely church authorities would have tolerated it in the 1920s outside Latino areas (I may be mistaken). (2) When the di Caprio character is wooing his intended he pretends to be a Catholic; in one scene he is shown attending Mass but inadvertently stands up when everyone else is kneeling for the Sanctus. Although the local priest (a minor but sympathetic character) is played by a real priest, it is very clear that he can't pronounce the Latin and the film-makers are unaware that the prayers before the Sanctus were usually said quietly by the priest and were not heard by the congregation. The idea may be that the audience, mostly unfamiliar with the later use, will be as bewildered as the di Caprio character. Given that the character's relatives live nearby and are clearly Protestant (the uncle was a 32nd degree Mason and loved to quote scripture like his role-model) it seems odd that he could present himself as a Catholic. A sacrilegious pretend conversion might be more plausible though the source book doesn't mention one. (3) When the FBI are interrogating di Caprio (who at this point is complicit in several murders and is slowly poisoning his wife) whether he is a good person he replies with evident sincerity that he is. Methinks this is another illustration of the shortcomings of that school of moral theology which maintains that a person may commit evil acts while remaining fundamentally oriented towards the good. I'm sure the Osage would be interested. More later, perhaps.
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