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Post by hibernicus on Aug 3, 2010 17:23:38 GMT
In view of our previous discussions of Anne Rice in this thread, some of you may be interested in the sad news that instead of moving closer to orthodoxy over time she has been taken out of the Church again by her persistent hostility to Catholic teaching on sexual ethics and has now declared herself a sort of nondenominational Christian. Pray for her. Discussion here: insightscoop.typepad.com/2004/2010/07/st-thomas-aquinas-and-anne-rice.html
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Post by assisi on Sept 14, 2010 21:57:26 GMT
If you like Science Fiction with a Catholic slant then it is worth reading 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' by Walter M Miller.
John Waters is not an orthodox Catholic by any means but his 'Beyond Consolation' recognises the ongoing secular attack on Catholicism in Ireland and shows up some of the hopelessness of many Irish non-believers. He also rates the writings of Benedict highly.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 15, 2010 11:54:51 GMT
A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ is very good - sadly, Miller left the Church subsequently (over his wife being sterilised for health reasons, I believe). The image of monks copying blueprints after an atomic holocaust, even when generations have passed and they've forgotten what these are; the rediscovery of the blueprints by a Renaissance-type political bishop in the service of an expanding monarch who sounds to me a bit like Henry VIII, and the end centuries later as monks take a starship of children to another planet while a second nuclear holocaust begins are very moving. (Also very Early Cold War; we forget in hindsight how much the 50s were haunted by the memory of World War 2 and the expectation of World War 3.) One ironic point is that throughout the characters are saying the TLM and using Latin routinely - no-one foresaw the scale of liturgical change that took place just over a decade after the book's publication.
The sequel SAINT LEIBOWITZ AND WILD HORSE WOMAN was published posthumously and is I believe somewhat New Agey. There were/are quite a few Catholic sf writers. RA Lafferty I believe was a fairly serious traditional Catholic and has a lot of Chestertonian literary mannerisms, but I think a lot of his stuff is wordspinning for its own sake. PAST MASTER (St Thomas More is brought to another planet and ends up being martyred there too) is pretty intriguing.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 16, 2010 9:52:26 GMT
Here is a review of one of Lafferty's novels by a fan, John J Reilly. (Characteristically, the novel was supposed to be the first of four but Lafferty only published two though a third exists in unpublished form): www.johnreilly.info/tfig.htmThis quote from Reilly's review about Lafferty's views may be of interest: QUOTE What we have here is an assertion of the compatibility of political and technological progress with tradition, especially tradition in its Roman Catholic manifestation. This kind of progress, however, is teleological; historical change is going somewhere, and so is not open-ended. Lafferty was outraged during the second half of his long life by the use of the principle of “development of doctrine” to discard the substance of the faith and replace it with contemporary fashions. The internal problems of the Church during his lifetime, however, simply mirrored a general feature of history: END QUOTE Here is a link to a Lafferty fan website, with further links if you are interested: www.mulle-kybernetik.com/RAL/
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 14, 2010 11:16:11 GMT
A glimpse of JRR Tolkien, from a poster at RORATE CAELI (commenting on the memoirs of a Filipino "liturgist"):
Athelstane said... In the Church of Sant' Anselmo an elderly lady corrected me as I was offering her Holy Communion: "Non dicitur 'Il corpo di Cristo,' sed 'Corpus Christi'!" (In perfect Latin she bade me say "The Body of Christ" in Latin, not in Italian.)
I can't help but think of a recent anecdote related by J.R.R. Tolkien's grandson: "I vividly remember going to church with him [J.R.R.] in Bournemouth. He was a devout Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My grandfather obviously didn't agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but my grandfather was oblivious. He simply had to do what he believed to be right. He inherited his religion from his mother, who was ostracised by her family following her conversion and then died in poverty when my grandfather was just 12. I know that he played a big part in the decision to send me to Downside, a Roman Catholic school in Somerset."
Makes me a bigger fan than ever of Tolkien. And this sharp old Italian lady.
13 October, 2010 00:26
Sadly, the use of "Roman Catholic" suggests Tolkien's hopes for his grandson were not fulfilled (though I hope this deduction of mine may be mistaken).
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Oct 14, 2010 11:39:59 GMT
I don't know - many Catholics use the term Roman Catholic without noticing anything incongruous about it. Indeed some imagine it to be a correct term.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Oct 14, 2010 13:32:50 GMT
Correct there. Many Catholics assume 'Roman Catholic' is correct and do not see that it is at point of origin a term of insult. Some SSPX followers are more intent on the moniker 'Roman Catholic' in spite of the position they find themselves in (or maybe because of it). I have heard how easily 'Roman Catholic' rolls off the tongues of many people. But I agree with Hibernicus, Tolkien's grandson seems to imply distance between himself and the Church in use of the term 'Roman Catholic' in the quote above.
I am not at all surprised that Tolkien preferred Latin to the vernacular there. Has Melancholicus any observations?
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 21, 2010 9:38:27 GMT
In one sense it's mildly surprising, because Tolkien's cultural preferences were so heavily Germanic/Nordic rather than Latin/Mediterranean. As I may or may not have said on this thread before, one of the strongest arguments against the view that Catholic writers naturally have the same cultural sensibility is the difference between Chesterton and Belloc's view that Latin civilisation (which in practice they equate with French civilisation) is the only one worthy of the name and that the Battle of Hastings was one of the best things that ever happened to Britain (this is a reaction against the traditional Whig-Protestant equation of the Saxon/Germanic heritage with Protestantism and liberty and Latin Catholicism/the Normans with despotism, which you get in writers like Charles Kingsley and William Morris), and Tolkien's Francophobia (partly because he associated France with his memories of World War I) and his habit of talking of the Battle of Hastings with the same indignation and grief as if it had happened the previous week and he had personally fought for King Harold.
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Post by assisi on Oct 24, 2010 10:39:34 GMT
There is an article in the Irish Catholic (Oct 21st 2010) entitled 'The Catholic Novel' - which reviews Leo Tolstoys 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich'.
Although Tolstoy was not Catholic but Russian Orthodox his later books, such as this one were heavily influenced by his desire to live life according to the 'Sermon on the Mount' in his own individual way.
The reviewer of the novel states the novel's essential message as 'our lives determine to a large extent the type of death we will be faced with........Death exists for as long as there is nothing in our heart other than self absorbed thoughts'.
Tolstoy attempt to live out the Sermon on the Mount and his own tempestuous past and sensual nature led Malcolm Muggeridge to say that :
'And the harder he tried the less adequately he seemed to succeed. Yet, after all, it was the effort that counted - the effort and the vision'.
Certainly a flawed man but many consider him the greatest novelist ever.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 1, 2010 11:49:48 GMT
Tolstoi was not Russian Orthodox either - he was formally excommunicated by the Orthodox Church. He did not belong to any organised religious body, though he attracted disciples who saw him as a prophet. His rejection of the privileges of his own aristocratic caste and attempt to atone for the exploitation of the peasantry was admirable, and he spoke out against many injustices, but there was a great deal of pride in him and he treated his wife abominably. Muggeridge has it about right, though; he tried to tell the truth as he saw it, and everyone at some time in his life must confront the question asked in THE DEATH OF IVAN ILLYICH. (I would recommend a film by Akira Kurosawa called IKIRU (TO LIVE) based loosely on the book. Kurosawa offers a somewhat different answer from Tolstoi - his film is about a bureaucrat who discovers he is dying and devotes his remaining energies to getting a children's playground built in a slum. Kurosawa I understand was an atheist, but the message that we must reach out to one another or our lives will have been wasted is at the heart of the Christian message of communion and incarnation. Takashi Shimura gives a great performance as the Ivan Ilyich character.)
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Post by assisi on Nov 23, 2010 21:58:54 GMT
Shakespeare's plays replete with Catholic content. The concept of Purgatory in Hamlet (quotation below taken from a review of a book 'Hamlet in Purgatory' by Stephen Greenblatt): Nor must the reader ever forget that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around 1600, that is, at a time when the Catholic cause in England would by no means have seemed so forlorn as finally became obvious in John Milton's day. In a way, that uncertainty about Catholicism's fate was Hamlet's own tragedy too: born in the Lutheran country of Denmark and shipped off by his father to study in Luther's own university town of Wittenberg, the Prince of Denmark could no more rid himself of his Catholic worldview in Lutheran Elsinore than could Shakespeare in Elizabethan England. No wonder Hamlet's whole world seemed to him to have gone awry! Something was rotten in the state of Denmark; and that dry rot was being caused by the collapse of Catholic eschatology under the ferocious and relentless assault of Protestant divines. (Greenblatt makes clear that no Catholic doctrine--not the Real Presence, not the primacy of the pope, not Mariology--so roused the ire of Protestant polemicists as did the doctrine of purgatory.) Thus, Greenblatt disputes those interpretations that hold that the ghost is not Hamlet's father but a demon come to tempt the prince to a deed evil in itself. Instead, he insists that Shakespeare is clearly signaling both the genuineness of the ghost and its provenance when it admonishes Hamlet to "remember me," which is standard liturgical language for remembering the souls in purgatory. Thus when Hamlet says, "conscience doth make cowards of us all," he is not bravely refusing to violate the moral law against revenge and murder, but is violating the dictates of justice by yielding to the temptations of a Protestant conscience.Full article here: findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1252/is_9_128/ai_75445681/?tag=content;col1And another good article here entitled 'Assurances of Faith: How Catholic was Shakespeare? How Catholic are his Plays?' www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0147.html
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Nov 24, 2010 12:23:29 GMT
Very interesting. I'll await Hibernicus' comment, because he has studied English literature. I have heard a lot about Shakespeare's Catholicism, but I would say even if he was Protestant, he lived at a time when Catholicism was fresh in people's memory, so it is likely he was heavily influenced by Catholicism. On the other hand, if he was Catholic, would it really have mattered? His literary legacy didn't seem to have an effect of making England less Protestant than it became.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 30, 2010 12:16:09 GMT
It's a very disputed question. Shakespeare's mother's family certainly had recusant connections and his father was fined for not attending church (though it is possible this was to avoid arrest for debt rather than for religious reasons). In the eighteenth century a copy of a standard Catholic profession of faith (devised by St Charles Borromeo) is said to have been found under a roof in Stratford with John Shakespeare's name attached; unfortunately the original has been lost, this was the time the Shakespeare industry took off and wholesale manufacture of Shakespeare relics began (the forger William Henry Ireland included among his forgeries an impeccably Protestant confession of faith by Shakespeare, intended to offset the awful apprehensions produced by the John Shakespeare document) so its authenticity is still hotly debated. A "Mr Shakeshafte" spent some time with the Jesuit missionary and future martyr Edmund Campion at Houghton Tower in Yorkshire and some people have suggested that this was the young William Shakespeare (even if it was this would not mean Shakespeare was a Catholic in later life, any more than John Donne's youthful Catholicism means he was a Catholic in later life); some decades after Shakespeare's death a Rector of Stratford wrote that Shakespeare had died a Papist - again, even if true, this might just refer to a deathbed reconciliation.
The predominant view nowadays seems to be that most earlier accounts (and some later ones like Joseph Pearce's) assume a clearcut division between Catholic and Protestant allegiance which was not so visible at the time; a Puritan would be quite sure he was not a Papist and a hard-core recusant would be sure he was not a Protestant, but there was a significant body of "church Papists" and people who had grown up under the old dispensation and conformed to the new without necessarily regarding it as permanent, or simply for indifference or survival. There are also some elements in Shakespeare which suggest Protestant sympathies (the villainous Papal Legate in KING JOHN, the Porter's jokes about Jesuits in MACBETH - commissioned by James I & VI who had executed Jesuits as well as burning witches) and his hostility to Puritans was professional as well as religious since Puritans disapproved of theatre. We also know that he lodged with French Protestants for a time in London - he gave evidence in a court case in which his landlord's family were involved. Someone wrote a book a few years ago arguing that a great deal of Elizabethan literature including Shakespeare can be read as deploying various strategies to conceal Catholic sympathies from the Elizabethan censors, but unless there is independent evidence of the writer's intentions this runs the risk of reading one's own views onto those of the writer.
Stephen Greenblatt is a Marxist who sees all literature as oppositional, so the idea of Shakespeare having a secret allegiance encoded into the plays appeals to him. (For the same reason, I confess I have always found slightly moving the idea that writing in the 1930s Siegel and Schuster encoded in their portrayal of Superman hints that he is really a Jew.)
The Ghost's coming from Purgatory and Hamlet's education at Wittenberg are subject to various interpretations, and I suspect were open to different interpretations at the time. It certainly I think refers to a sense of a buried religious allegiance not so dead as wasthought, but whether for good or evil is another question (depending on whether you see Hamlet's revenge mission as inspired directly by God, or inspired by the Devil as God uses a lesser evil to combat the greater evil of Claudius - and I don't think either can be completely ruled out).
My own feeling would be that Shakespeare was a playwright not a theologian and has to be read on his own terms, that he was brought up with Catholic sympathies and may have returned to them at the last - but in between I think he was some sort of sceptic.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 6, 2010 15:23:08 GMT
Has anyone on this board seen the newly-released French film OF GODS AND MEN, about the Cistercian monks of Tibehrine in Algeria? It seems to have impressed even the usual secularist subjects among the film critics. I'll try to see it myself at some stage and post my impressions. Here's a link to the trailer cineuropa.org/video.aspx?lang=en&rdID=143041
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Post by assisi on Dec 18, 2010 15:19:59 GMT
Has anyone on this board seen the newly-released French film OF GODS AND MEN, about the Cistercian monks of Tibehrine in Algeria? It seems to have impressed even the usual secularist subjects among the film critics. I'll try to see it myself at some stage and post my impressions. Here's a link to the trailer cineuropa.org/video.aspx?lang=en&rdID=143041I've read six or seven online reviews and they have all been singing the praises of this movie including Mark Kermode on the BBC and some columnists in the Guardian. However watching Film 2010 on BBC recently for the first time in ages the main presenter Claudia Winkleman, talking about the movie 'The Voyage of the Dawn Treader' based on CS Lewis Chronicles of Narnia, said that viewers should be 'warned' that there are some religious symbols in the movie......as if this was a warning more worthy of note than earlier movie clips in the programme showing pretty violent scenes...
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