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Post by hibernicus on Dec 4, 2008 18:19:38 GMT
This thread refers to imaginative literature; I will try to add one title a week. Feel free to comment on this or suggest alternative titles for discussion. We start with MORTE D'URBAN by JF Powers Powers came from the Midwest and was well-known for a small output of rather bleak short stories many of which concerns the rather banal lives of priests struggling with self-importance and worldiness, implicitly contrasted with the importance of their sacramental lives and functions. It is important to realise that he actually believed in those sacramental lives and functions; he was not the sort of 'Catholic liberal' who is a functional atheist, and his stories should not be confused with something like FATHER TED where the whole point of the priests' petty intrigues is that nobody believes in what they are supposed ot be doing, or even takes it seriously. In later life he used regularly to complain about some of the post-Vatican II changes and was not amused when told he had contributed to them. He held left-of-centre views and spent some time in one of Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker communities as a young man. (This is pretty brief and simplistic - for a fuller account see this link) www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=461MORTE D'URBAN is an extension of the short story themes. Fr. Urban is the "star" preacher of a small and rather lacklustre order called the Clementines based in Chicago who are worried that unless they can find some means to liven themselves up they will be abolished or merged in the shakeup of religious life which everyone knew was coming. (Pius XII had been calling for it for some years.) The younger men in the order look to Fr. Urban to liven things up and the superior, who is growing weary of this, banishes Fr. Urban (who is rather fonder than he should be of displaying his talents and hobnobbing with wealthy businessmen in the course of fundraising) to take charge of a run-down retreat house in a remote part of Minnesota. The novel traces Fr. Urban's dealings with the staff of the retreat house which is mostly staffed by the order's weaker and less talented members, with the local bishops (the Clementines are trying to get a big-city parish assigned to them but instead get given some extremely poor and remote parishes on Indian reservations), and with some of his wealthy "friends" whom he gradually comes to realise are driven by a lust for power and for self-assertion; by drawing him into collusion with their arbitrary power they are endangering his soul. At the end of the novel Fr. Urban is called back to Chicago to be superior of the Clementines, but in coming to see the futility of his vanities he has lost his drive though saving his soul; at the end of the novel he is pining to return to the retreat house and the Clementines are faced with final extinction. Comments to follow
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 4, 2008 18:32:31 GMT
This novel is a comment on the self-confidence of American Catholicism in the 1950s - the era of Fulton J Sheen, Rosary Crusades et al, when American Catholics were entering higher education in unprecedented numbers, moving out from the old urban neighbourhoods to the wealthier suburbs, and appeared to be going up in the world while keeping their faith. It is odd to look back on the self-confidence and perceived "religious revival" of the 1950s in Europe as well as America, on a time when Catholicism had acquired remarkable cultural prestige and political clout and when the problem seemed to be too many vocations rather than too few, because in retrospect we can see how many hidden problems there were, how many rocks lay ahead, how hollow so much of it was. Its big interest for traditionalists lies in the fact that it presents the pre-Vatican II church on the very brink of the Council without the characters (or the author) seeming to grasp the full scale of the upheavals ahead. (There are even a couple of minor characters - two brothers who run an apologetics paper called THE HERD which is a thorn in the bishop's side - who appear to be based on the Matt brothers of the WANDERER.) Although the religious orders are facing a shakeup, there is no sense that there might ever be an overall shortage of vocations; new parishes are being opened and there is an expectation that the church's functions will continue to expand indefinitely and the everyday life of the faithful will go on in more or less the same way. Liturgical reformers appear as marginal and slightly cranky people whose main concern is dialogue masses and better Gregorian Chant, they are seen as marginal to the church and the most prominent one in the novel is the eccentric and rather irresponsible son of one of the wealthy patrons. (To be fair, this is describing a provincial section of the American Church which itself was somewhat provincial in relation to European developments, but it is the case, as James Hitchcock has charted, that many "liturgical enthusiasts" went from demanding better Gregorian chant in the 1950s to demanding the Mass be made indistinguishable from a Protestant service by the late 1960s - in part, Hitchcock suggests, because they were more concerned to signal discontent with Catholicism as it actually existed than with the liturgy per se.) Even irrespective of its considerable literary merits as the story of a soul, MORTE D'URBAN is useful as an antidote agaisnt either romanticisng or demonising the preconciliar church.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 20, 2008 0:59:00 GMT
My next title is an example of how not to write a Catholic novel. It is called THE RED HAT by Ralph McInerney. McInerney is a longstanding professor of philosophy at Notre Dame University in Indiana. He is a Thomist; his autobiography I ALONE ESCAPED TO TELL YOU is very interesting for (among much else) discussing the ups and downs (post-Vatican II mostly downs) of Thomist studies. He is a well-known, courageous, and generally orthodox defender and populariser of Catholic doctrines. He has written many novels and detective stories; a series set at Notre Dame has many interesting evocations of the campus and is meant to educate students and others in the glorious (and often overshadowed) Catholic traditions of their university. Certainly he means well. How is it, then, that reading one of his books is like eating cardboard? The central answer, I think, is that he treats his characters as illustrating intellectual positions, and does not give them room to breathe. The liberals and unbelievers of various stripes are always distinctly morally inferior to orthodox Catholic to an extent which does not occur in real life. Rarely are they allowed unexpected virtues. Just as liberals often caricature conservatives as mere power-hungry dictators, he portrays liberals as mere opportunists who are rationalising their own vices. There is some truth in both portrayals, but neither is the whole truth. For good or ill, we are talking about two different schools of thought with different interpretations of the nature of reality, of right and wrong. THE RED HAT embodies this problem. (Stop now if you want to read the novel without knowing the plot.) The novel centres on an ambitious American archbishop (he later becomes a Cardinal) who has passed his career in sucking up to the liberal media and undercutting more orthodox bishops. Through a series of crises he realises what he has become and returns to orthodoxy. One of these crises is personal. As a seminarian he slept with a promiscuous young woman; now the slimy boyfriend of the woman's daughter is trying to blackmail him by claiming his girlfriend is the bishop's child. (This is eventually proven not to be the case.) The second crisis derives from a wider upheaval in the Church. The Pope (who is clearly meant to be John Paul II, though he is not named) dies after naming a number of cardinals but before they are formally admitted to the College; this means they cannot vote in the conclave. When a conservative curial cardinal is elected, a liberal faction try to cast doubt on the validity of his election. The new pope is killed in an air-crash; the second conclave, at which the new cardinals do vote, produces an African Pope. Recognising this as a sign that control of the Church has passed to the inconveniently devout peoples of the South and East, the liberals secede and set up an anti-Pope (who for some odd reason calls himself Pius XIII). Talk of installing the anti-pope in the Vatican dies away when the newly regenerate cardinal archbishop rallies American support for the true pontiff; the antipope subsequently returns to obedience, while his followers merge with the Episcopalian (i.e. Anglican) Church. The problems with this book, in my opinion, stem from seeing the divisions within the church purely in political terms (i.e as a struggle between factions), a consequent refusal to enter imaginatively into the mindset of the liberal villains, and a strong dose of wishful thinking. To take the last first, we are told at one point that in the world of the novel AIDS has abruptly disappeared from Asia and Africa while continuing to ravage homosexuals in the West, and that this is a strong sign of divine providence; McInerney does not realise that this implies that the continuing spread of AIDS in the Third World in the world outside the novel is a sign of the non-existence of Divine Providence. The novel is clearly based upon the Great Western Schism of the C14 and C15; but that schism was characterised by genuine doubt about which was the legitimate Pope, with even canonised saints taking different sides, whereas McInerney goes to great lengths to ensure that his schismatics have no case at all. (To suggest a scenario equivalent to the real schism, let us suppose that an African or Latin American cardinal were to be elected Pope who, while personally pious and full of social concern had genuinely problematic views on certain matters - for instance, he might suggest in public that the American clerical abuse scandals were greatly exaggerated, and that this was because the media are excessively influenced by unbelieving Jews. Let us further suppose that within a short period of his election this Pope, while not personally corrupt, were to make numerous appointments of candidates whose suitability was questionable and which were seen to be inordinately influenced by family or national considerations, and to hand down decisions in certain matters which, while not involving doctrinal heterodoxy, were arbitrary and in some cases involved personal injustice. Under such circumstances - which anyone familiar with Papal history knows are by no means unprecedented - an even remotely plausible Antipope might prove highly persuasive, and it would take a certain amount of moral courage to side with the flawed but legitimate Pontiff against his more superficially attractive rival.) His two principal villains - the Antipope and an obnoxious American priest-commentator, are clearly meant to be Cardinal Martini and Fr. Andrew Greeley, though he makes a perfunctory attempt to conceal this. Both are presented as motivated primarily by vanity (at a late stage in the book we are also shown that the Greeley character keeps a mistress, and there are some distasteful, prurient remarks to the effect that liberal priests attach inordinate importance to sex while happily-married laymen know it is no big deal.) There is no real sense that the liberal characters actually believe their version of Catholicism is true - they are seen as simply going with the flow. At one point the central character and a schismatic liberal bishop whom he knew at seminary are both waiting for heart operations, and argue about their positions; the hero silences the liberal by reminding him that he still believes what they were taught at seminary. I would have thought the liberal's obvious response would be to say that everything they were taught at seminary was false and he sees that now - many liberal Catholics actually believe this, it would be dramatically plausible for him to say it, and McInerney's handling of the incident leaves a nasty sense that the liberal is not allowed to say it because the author fears if he did some readers might believe him. There is a sense of wishful thinking about McInerney's handling of the schism, a sense that it would be great if the liberals would all go away, which doesn't really face up to the scale of the disruption that would be involved and the sacrifices needed to uphold the faith. I would be a lot happier in literary terms if the book ended with an impostor enthroned in St. Peter's while the real Pope was reduced to hiring suburban meeting-halls, and with the revelation that the bishop's youthful misdeeds had indeed produced a scandalously inconvenient daughter. I am sure that if the crunch came McInerney would give up the splendours of Renaissance art and the glories of the Notre Dame football team for Christ; but I detect a certain complacent assumption that such sacrifices will never in fact be necessary.
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Dec 21, 2008 19:55:42 GMT
Both sound interesting and worth having a look at, in different ways.
Last year I read Malachi Martin's Vatican. I'm not sure that it is a novel of great quality but it is certainly fascinating. The division between Good Guys and Bad Guys is a bit schematic and the Protestant conspirators that crop up from time to time are a bunch of grotesques, but the day-to-day detail and the evocation of the atmosphere surrounding the Council are remarkably persuasive.
At present I am reading The Road to Cana, the second volume of Anne Rice's Christ the Lord series (which I presume will be a trilogy). Rice was a successful author of decidedly non-Christian novels about the supernatural, such as Interview with the Vampire, but returned to her Catholic faith some years ago and these books are clearly intended to make up for all and offer her talent to the service of God. So far I am undecided about their literary and creative merit, but I can find nothing to criticise in their content. Perhaps they will turn out to be powerful works of popular devotional art like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.
Finally, has anyone come across Wrestling with Christ by Luigi Santucci (Fontana 1972 — available used from Amazon USA and other sources)? It is a somewhat poetic treatment of the life of Our Lord which I found (in two readings) very powerful and redolent of a deep faith.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 24, 2008 17:28:39 GMT
Haven't come across Santucci but must have a go. I read VATICAN a year or two back - I think I will do a full post on it. There is a long-running dispute about whether Malachi Martin was a fraud or not; I think he was a fraud. Anne Rice's story seems very moving. (She has just written an account of her reversion to the Faith called OUT OF DARKNESS, which I would like to read sometime from what I have heard of it.) I remember hearing of her vampire novels some years ago and on the basis of plot summaries (I have never actually read any of them, though I saw the Neil Jordan film of INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE) she struck me as someone knowingly consumed by evil. (I should add that she also wrote sadomasochistic pornography under the pen-name AM Roquelaure; I have never read any of that either.) Perhaps this is a warning against hasty judgement; or perhaps somebody who knows they have gone to the darkness is more likely to return to the light than someone who has drifted through indifference. Her views are still heterodox on some issues (such as homosexuality - her son is gay - and women's ordination), and some questions have been raised about her Christology (she depicts Our Lord as only slowly realising Who He is as He gets older, though this may be a literary necessity) but she is trying to be right with God and the Church and that's what matters. Commend her to St. Paul, and all of us too.
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Jan 4, 2009 23:50:27 GMT
Perhpas this is a warning against hasty judgement; or perhaps somebody who knows they have gone to the darkness is more likely to return to the light than someone who has drifted through indifference. Yes, but (in my own experience) it is hard to shake off the traces of darkness. It seems to me, after more than twenty years of trying to leave the darkness behind (and I mean just agnosticism and hedonism, not any deliberate dallying with evil), that it is not possible to return to innocence.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 7, 2009 0:21:27 GMT
Yes, sin leaves its wounds on the soul - but surely the greatest sinners can stillbe made sons and daughters of God. I was thinking of the TWILIGHT series of girls' books which have been much discussed on the Web. I haven't read them but to judge from the plot summaries there is an odd overlap with INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE. THe TWILIGHT books are written by a devout Mormon who explicitly wishes to promote premarital chastity, yet they appear to share a creepy equation of vampirism with sex, i.e. implying that sex per se is sinful, and the theme of a human wishing to become a vampire - and the odd thing is that on the basis of my limited knowledge it is Rice's book, written by someone who at the time was a willing slave to darkness, who presents the desire to be a vampire as a hunger after something evil in itself and leading to damnation, while TWILIGHT has a prurient obsession with forbidden fruit though just stopping short of the act, and ends up by presenting willing vampirisation as a glorious romantic gesture. I have a nasty feeling that Stephanie Meyer, the author of TWILIGHT, may have got into deeper and darker water than the unredeemed Rice because (unlike Rice) she does not realise what sort of fire she is playing with. (Memo to readers - I know perfectly well that vampires don't exist. Try using them as a metaphor for, say, drug addiction - as in Abel Ferrara's film THE ADDICTION, the only one of his films that would be any good were it not for one or two grabbings out for cheap laughs - and you will get my point.)
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 3, 2009 11:34:21 GMT
A few points on Malachi Martin - He was a Jesuit, a brother of FX Martin the historian. The family came from Ballylongford in North Kerry and moved to Dublin. Martin trained as a biblical scholar and worked in the Vatican with Cardinal Bea. He was initially a liberal but shortly after Vatican II he moved to America and obtained some form of laicisation which he claimed allowed him to continue to celebrate Mass in private. He wrote for various "conservative" outlets, claiming to have been disillusioned by the effects of the changes and to still have contacts in the Vatican who fed him inside information. I first came across his writings in the late 70s/early 80s when I used to read Fr. Paul Crane's CHRISTIAN ORDER magazine. Crane was quite taken with Martin, perhaps because Martin's complaint that the Church had been too worldly reinforced Crane's oft-repeated point that the post-Vatican II upheavals reflected an earlier failure of the Church to move its social teachings out of the devotional "ghetto", creating a disjunction whereby people thought religion was for the school, the home, and the church but that out in the "real world" one had to live by the world's rules. Martin also was of interest because of his status as a "Vatican insider". I gave up reading him then because of his hostility towards Pius XII. My impression that something was not quite right about him deepened a few years later when I picked up Martin's HOSTAGE TO THE DEVIL (which claimed to be a fictionalised account of real-life exorcisms) and thought it displayed a prurient dwelling on sexual deviancy and the occult. I read some of Martin's books after his death (late 1990s) when my interest was reawakened by the claims of the liberal Catholic journalist Robert Blair Kaiser in a memoir that Martin had in fact left Rome because his sexual misbehaviour came to light - in particular, because Martin had persuaded Kaiser's first wife to leave Kaiser for him and then deserted her. My reading of Martin's works tends to support this view. I note, for example, that in HOSTAGE TO THE DEVIL (written when Paul VI was alive) Paul is presented as a great saint whose mere presence in NEw York strengthens the priests who are conducting an exorcism there; in VATICAN, on the other hand, he is portrayed as a manifest heretic who probably forfeited the Papacy by his heresies and who is almost certainly damned. THE JESUITS opens with a depiction of John Paul II meeting a group of bishops; it claims to give the Pope's minute-to-minute thoughts and reactions in such depth that only the Pope (if even he) could recount them. Much of his work seems designed to fill the reader with fear that the Church has finally apostatised while drawing back from saying so at the last minute (e.g. the regular suggestions by characters who are neither fully endorsed nor fully disowned that the Novus ORdo is invalid). His last novel WINDSWEPT HOUSE is a particularly strong example; it ends with the abdication of a pusillanimous John Paul II, the election of a Satanist as Pope or antipope and the apparent triumph of heresy. In interviews Martin claimed that a final chapter describing the defeat of this by divine intervention was left out because the publisher rushed him. What sort of author allows a novel to be published without its last chapter - especially given the stages of printing at which intervention is possible?) It is also noticeable that whereas Martin's Vatican writings from THE FINAL CONCLAVE of 1978 generally present a Vatican in which the strings are being pulled behind the scenes by secret financial and worldly manipulators - with reference to real-life scandals such as those involving Michele Sindona, Roberto Calvi and the Vatican bank - the tone gradually shifts. In the earlier versions of this, the manipulators are the villains who are defeated by the election of a new Pope who will drive the moneychangers from the Temple. In the later fiction the church leaders are treated with increasing contempt and it is the manipulators who are the heroes (cf WINDSWEPT HOUSE where the Vatican is being run by paedophiles and Satanists, John Paul II is a contemptible wimp, and the main supporter of the few decent clerics and teller of traditionalist home-truths is a woman whose family have been bankrolling the Vatican for decades and whose money gives her access to the Pope). I should add that Martin also had dealings with "strange phenomena" types who were not Catholics (he used to appear on the Art Bell show, which appeals to UFO nuts and similar Fox Mulder types). I will give some comments on VATICAN in a later post.
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Post by Noelfitz on Feb 3, 2009 12:24:39 GMT
Hibernicus, Your post about Malachi Martin is intriguing, as I never knew much about him, other than he was a bit odd. I had not realized he was F.X. Martin’s brother.
Thanks.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Feb 3, 2009 12:33:15 GMT
Four Martin brothers were priests and one of their sisters was a nun in Kylemore.
The clerical brothers were:
Monsignor Leo Martin (Archdiocese of Dublin) Rev Conor Martin (Archdiocese of Dublin and Professor of Metaphysics, UCD) Father Francis Xavier Martin OSA (Professor of Mediaeval History, UCD) Father Malachi B Martin SJ (Professor of Assyriology, Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome and Advisor to the Pontifical Biblical Commission).
The other three ended their careers in dignity, but I can't say the same about Malachi.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 3, 2009 18:21:53 GMT
VATICAN originally appeared in 1986. Basically, it depicts the career of an idealistic young priest who comes to Rome just after the Second World War, intertwined with a story of high-level Vatican intrigue centred on successive Popes and on a high-level banking dynasty who havve managed Vatican finances for generations. After going through the reigns of Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul I this priest leaves Rome in disillusion. however, he remains in touch with the Vatican and is secretly made a Cardinal. On John Paul II's death he is elected Pope (defeating a malevolant English liberal cardinal, based on Basil Hume, who is possibly presented as homosexual) and announces that he will no longer observe the secret bargain by which successive Popes have compromised with the world's financial power-holders. This marks not only the regeneration of the church but the release of the banking family from the burden which its members have borne. the book can be seen as a fantasy self-portrait of Martin himself (for example, at one point the priest is threatened with false accusations of conducting an affair with a journalist's wife.) Oddities in the book include the following: Annibale Bugnini and the future Paul VI are represented as having become Freemasons with the knowledge and consent of Pius XII as part of a pact to safeguard Vatican interests. Pius is presented as acquiring by dubious means gold held by Mussolini which is used for Vatican financial purposes. [There is also reference to what I believe was a real-life scandal in which nephews of Pius XII were accused of participating in an investment scheme involving the use of slave labour in Africa. Pius is presented as approving the investment in the mistaken belief that the labourers would be treated fairly.] All the papal conclaves since Pius IX are presented as having been staged; the popes are in fact nominated in advance by the banking family, who manipulate the conclave into believing that their candidate represents their own free choice. (This is of course in conflict with all papal legislation on real-life papal elections, and is barely reconcilable with the concept that the Holy Ghost watches over them.) Although the popes with the exception of Paul VI (for whom see below) are generally praised in the most glowing terms, their overall portrayal is decidedly more equivocal. the book can certainly be read as implying that Pius XII was a sanctimonious hypocrite complicit by neglect if not worse in the most appalling crimes, John XXIII was a naive idiot who unleashed chaos on the Church without knowing what he was doing, and John Paul II was a weakling who devoted himself to worldly politics with singular lack of success and at the expense of the church's spiritual mission. [The same accusation is implicitly levelled against Pius XII, who develops elaborate schemes for the benefit fo the church in Eastern Europe which are destroyed because he failed to realise that the man he placed in charge of them is a KGB agent.] Archbishop Lefebvre is presented as acting in collusion with John Paul II, who recognises the disastrous results of the Council but shrinks from disowning it publicly; John Paul arranges for Lefebvre to be secretly buried in the crypt of St. Peter's after he dies. John Paul I gets off fairly lightly because his reign was so short (he is presented as having been poisoned by a rival group of bankers seeking to take control of the Vatican). Paul VI, on the other hand, is pretty much demonised. He is presented as a heretic who attempts to turn the church into a Protestant denomination with no distinction between priests and laity, and to make the Novus Ordo a complete circus; his folly makes him the plaything of hosile masonic conspirators (whose activities are based on those of Sindona and the P2 masonic lodge). HUMANAE VITAE is presented not as his own action but as the work of these conspirators, who use it to make him even more unpopular and thus dependent on them. The Church is only preserved from complete destruction by the bankers and the young priest, who manage to defeat the conspirators and keep Paul under tight control for the remainder of his reign. It is explicitly stated that at some point in his pontificate, if not throughout it, Paul was a heretic and thus unable to be a legitimate Pope. It is strongly implied that he is damned, and Martin gloats over the prospect; the wind blowing across the pages of the Gospel laid on his coffin is described as looking for a passage which might hold out some hope for him but unable to find one. In contrast to the successive Popes, the head of the banking family is presented as a tragic figure. He wished to enter a monastery and did in fact spend some time at Mount Athos but was called back to the world to undetake his duties after his father's unexpected death. (Mount Athos is of course a Greek Orthodox institution, and its monks are perhaps the most anti-Roman section of the entire Orthodox Church; they would never admit a Catholic.) Despite various tragedies, including the murder of his grandson by terrorists, he stands firm under his terrible burden and protects the Church from the irresponsibilities of the Popes; he eventually dies of a stroke shortly before the hero's election as Pope. Overall I would say VATICAN illustrates the dark side of this sort of Vatican blockbuster; it panders to the reader's vanity by giving the illusion that he knows the inside story, in fact knows better than the Popes, and Martin also exploits the fears and concerns of the traditionalist reader to give a sense that all may be lost and the only safe guide is Malachi Martin. Large doses of Malachi Martin give the distinct impression that someone has been manipulating you. My own view is that he exemplifies the thesis that when Jesuits go abd they go very bad; he posed as an angel of light but was something else entirely. Incidentally, a recent book on Pius XII THE HOUND OF HITLER by th ediplomat gerard Noel thanks Malachi Martin who supplied him with accounts of Pius XII's failed attempts to exorcise Hitler and continual preoccupation with him in the alst years of his pontificate. I think anyone who knows the full story of Malachi Martin will be able to assess these accounts at their true worth.
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Feb 3, 2009 19:00:01 GMT
Thank you — that is fascinating. I have to confess that I read Vatican purely as entertainment and didn't notice its dark side which you have so clearly revealed.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 5, 2009 16:09:35 GMT
Since Anne Rice's novels about the life of Jesus have been mentioned on this thread, the following link to a sympathetic discussion of them may be of interest: www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1297
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Post by Harris on Feb 6, 2009 9:34:25 GMT
Since Anne Rice's novels about the life of Jesus have been mentioned on this thread, the following link to a sympathetic discussion of them may be of interest: www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1297Thanks for the link. I enjoyed looking at this info.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 29, 2009 10:46:41 GMT
This article by the British novelist Piers Paul Read on his experiences of marketing his new thriller with Ignatius Press and his impresssions of the US orthodox Catholic subculture with its strong and weak points may be of interest. www.standpointmag.co.uk/dispatches-july-09-piers-paul-read-catholic-book-tour-america I read most of Read's then-published novels about 10-12 years ago and I must say I disliked them, so much so that I actually sold them again (not something I usually do - I'm a book hoarder). They struck me as being hysterical and with a nasty streak of fanaticism looking for a cause. The major exceptions to this were MONK DAWSON about a Benedictine who loses his faith and leaves his monastery to explore worldly life, I suspect modelled on the brother of the actor John Hurt, and A MARRIED MAN about the slow corruption of a lawyer through apparently trivial misdeeds. He also wrote a thriller called THE THIRD DAY in which an Israeli archaeologist and the KGB conspire to plant a fake Jesus skeleton on the Temple Mount. I confess the concept struck me as somewhat iffy, though his reiteration of the fact that our faith does centrally depend on a physical Resurrection is very true and well worth stating (the number of theological liberals who imply or state outright that it would make no difference to their faith if it were proven tomorrow that the Resurrection of the Body of Jesus had never taken place is deeply disturbing. John Updike was a tremendously flawed man, but he was right about this:- Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall. It was not as the flowers, each soft Spring recurrent; it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles; it was as His Flesh: ours. The same hinged thumbs and toes, the same valved heart that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of enduring Might new strength to enclose. Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping transcendence; making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages: let us walk through the door. The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache, not a stone in a story, but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day. And if we will have an angel at the tomb, make it a real angel, weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen spun on a definite loom. Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance. John Updike, “Seven Stanzas at Easter” Read's HELL AND OTHER ESSAYS which came out a few years ago struck me as very insightful on matters of faith and on literary politics - he seems to like saying the unsayable. Perhaps now I am older and sadder I may look at his fiction again and try to see if I missed something.
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