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Post by hibernicus on Dec 26, 2010 15:01:53 GMT
Here is a link to a seasonal clip from an early scene in OF GODS AND MEN - after talking down Islamic guerrillas who tried to kidnap one of the monks, the monks celebrate Christmas. Watch this film if you have a chance. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MKAimekUFc&feature=channel
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 26, 2010 15:05:32 GMT
Here is an interesting series discussing the "Catholic novel" and some recent examples. Follow the internal links. www.catholicculture.org/commentary/otc.cfm?id=738EXTRACT I began my series on recent Catholic novels with a question: Must the Catholic novel present the Christian message explicitly and more or less entirely so that the reader, through the characters in the book, is forced to acknowledge it and either accept it or reject it? In other words, is it the essence of the Catholic novel to deliberately preach the Gospel in a relatively thinly disguised fictional form? In reviewing the four books I had chosen for this series, I suggested throughout that, while piety might seem to demand this of a Catholic novel, such a viewpoint brings with it plenty of problems of its own. These problems center around the subversion of literary success by insisting that fiction must take a certain clearly-defined catechetical form. Once you grant this premise, all Catholic novels begin to look suspiciously alike, and there is a great danger that the stories will be artlessly contrived in order to serve the “Catholic” purpose of writing the book in the first place. In my opinion, this tendency arises from a triple misunderstanding—a misunderstanding of fiction, of human nature, and of Catholicism. May Not Must Before I elaborate, I want to emphasize that I do not side with those Catholic critics who believe, first, that a Catholic novelist must never attempt to recreate fictionally a full encounter with Christ or the Catholic Faith and, second, that in any case the very idea of setting out to write a “Catholic” novel is a grave literary mistake. In the first case, I firmly believe that anything is fair game for a novelist. It is a laudable thing to awaken readers to the Gospel through a fresh literary treatment. It is, of course, very difficult to do effectively, and a writer might very well fail, but what sets too many writers up for failure is not the idea that someone might try to do this but that a Catholic novelist must try to do it. In the second case, I do not believe it is a mistake to consciously invest a work with specific values. A good novel must appear natural and unforced to the reader, but that hardly means it has not been meticulously planned and crafted. Every author deliberately builds certain thematic elements into his work, and if a Catholic author ponders how he might effectively develop certain themes so that something of his Catholic vision can shine through his work, that is both perfectly normal and all to the good. Here the danger is no greater for the Catholic than for any other author who possesses deep and abiding insights and attitudes that bear upon his subject matter. Think, for a moment, of Charles Dickens writing his novels about subjects on which he had very strong feelings indeed, such as Hard Times or A Tale of Two Cities. Making a point was part and parcel of his literary effort. But the trick is to understand how novels work: There must first and foremost be a story to tell. The story must not be obviously contrived, much less contorted, to make a point; if there is a point, it must be left to emerge—naturally as it were—from the setting, the plot and the characters which already claim our interest and attention. Many a successful novel has been didactic to some degree, but in general the more a work tends deliberately to pontificate (if you’ll excuse the expression), the less it succeeds as a story. Just as reality imparts its lessons primarily through our own experience, so must the novel introduce the reader into an extended reality which may, in much the same way, impart its own values and lessons, or perhaps its own opportunities for vision and growth... END OF EXTRACT
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Post by assisi on Jan 10, 2011 22:48:20 GMT
Perhaps the easiest, quickest or most general way to describe Catholic literature would be to define it as literature which, in the end, portrays Catholicism (or a Catholic writer dealing with Christian ideals) in a sympathetic or favourable manner. This may be done in an openly Catholic way or in abstract.
For example, in abstract, Tolkein's Lord of the Rings deals with the themes of good versus evil and the corrupting influence of power (the Ring). When we learn that the author is a Catholic we can see more clearly the influences behind the themes of the story.
In a more open way in Graeme Greene's 'The Power and the Glory', for example, the theme of Catholicism is found on almost evey page. The 'whisky priest' fights his own weakness of pride and apparent failure in the hostile anti- clerical Mexico of the 1930s and redeems himself in the end.
There are many books that have a large Catholic content in the depiction of Catholic characters and Catholic references but which are not sympathetic to Catholicism and would not qualify for the description of Catholic literature. For example, Francis Stuart's 'Redemption' set in post 2nd world war Ireland features a sympathetic (but unrealistic and naive in my opinion) priest, pious Catholic characters and provincial Catholic images throughout the novel, but the Catholicism (and ordered society in general) is rejected by the main protagonist, the 'postmodern' (and unappealing) Ezra.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 11, 2011 17:53:41 GMT
Francis Stuart is a good/bad example of pseudo-Catholic literature because he makes very extensive use of Catholic imagery (he had a fascination with suffering girl-saints like St Bernadette and St Therese of Lisieux for reasons connected with his deep sadism; those familiar with the life of WB Yeats will know the abominable way in which Stuart tormented his first wife, Iseult Gonne) but essentially I think he was an antinomian. Greene is an interesting comparison because he had something of the same tendency to see conscious evildoers as spiritually superior to self-righteous mediocrities who are unaware of their own sins. There is of course a good deal of truth in this - we all need grace and it is fatal to think we don't need it, and great sinners who repent have often become great saints - the problem is that Greene often seems to think that even a totally unrepentant sinner who deliberately chooses to be damned is somehow superior (in BRIGHTON ROCK the reader is encouraged to see the satanic gang leader Pinkie as morally superior to the good-time girl Idaa who despite her own vices helps to track him down out of an unreflective belief that murderers ought to be punished - this contrast is blurred in the new film version, which noentheless I suspect is still worth seeing, because it gives Ida personal revenge as a motive). Nevertheless he has some remarkable treatments of grace - THE POWER AND THE GLORY of course being supreme - and even though A BURNED-OUT CASE is usually seen as the novel in which he deliberately distanced himself from being seen as a "Catholic" novelist, I remember how the late Fr Paul Crane was haunted by one of the minor characters - a nun who has spent her life looking after lepers, and when a new drug is discovered and the lepers are cured laments "what about me?" thereby revealing that unknown to herself she had been labouring all the years not for the sake of the lepers, but for her own self-glorification...
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Post by assisi on Jan 23, 2011 16:06:35 GMT
A book worth reading is 'Lord of the World' by Robert Hugh Benson.
Although a science fiction novel the futurist element is secondary to the central theme of the survival of Catholicism in a hostile secular/humanist 21st century world and how faith sinks or swims in such an environment and how the struggle between the two plays out to its final conclusion.
Some of the predicitive element, as with all futuristic books, is off target (for example most people communicate in Esperanto). But the portrayal of humanism/atheism versus Catholicism/Christianity is particularly prescient and has resonances of the current situation in Western culture (particularly as the novel was written in 1907).
After a slowish start I found the novel to be a 'page-turner', good entertainment and intelligent, particularly with the arrival of a particularly mysterious character Felsenburgh...
The author Robert Benson converted from the Church of England priesthood to become a Catholic priest in 1904, three years prior to writing Lord of the World.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 24, 2011 17:21:09 GMT
Benson is an interesting character and I get the impression he had an eidetic memory (certainly some of his descriptions are very vivid). He also is spot on the button about such matters as the rouitne resort to euthanasia The big problems I have with him are (a) his morbid streak - he tends to see death as a happy ending. On the Platonist/Aristotelean spectrum (e.g. do you see the material world as a sacramental creation of God or as an illusion veiling the real, spiritual world) he is way out on the Platonist end. This is not necessarily heterodox butit needs careful watching (b) His politics which are fantastically reactionary - check out the companion novel to LORD OF THE WORLD which is called THE DAWN OF ALL which describes a world which has returned to Catholicism and in which (for example) heresy is punished by death, the European states are ruled by pretty much absolute monarchs and democracy has been abolished, atheists are confined to ghettoes (etc), Ireland has become one vast monastery (conveniently disposing of the embarrassment a certain type of English Catholic Tory has always felt at the existence of Irish Catholicism, etc.) Traces of this are discernible in LORD OF THE WORLD - most notably when we are told that the Papacy has agreed to hand all the parish churches of Italy over to the state in return for the restoration of the papal temporal power over Rome - a view which is IMHO the very opposite of the appropriate pastoral attitude. We are also told that the deposed monarchs of the world (including the Chinese emperor) have all converted to Cahtolicism and gone to live in Rome. I might add that most contemporary reviewers saw the Antichrist character as a Jew even though this is nowhere specified in the text (he is American and his name might also indicate German or Dutch origin). His Religion of Humanity is directly modelleld on that of Auguste Comte, which was rather a damp squib; I think Benson overestimates the extent o which the devil would invite us to worshipthe Eternal Female explicitly (as distinct from the debased de facto worship of the beach, the underwear fashion parade, or certain parts of the Net. Some of his other characteristics, such as his debut as an international peacemaker and his indifference to women, are also based on longstanding traditions about Antichrist. These two pieces by john J Reilly discussing why Catholics have been less likely than Protestants to write novels about Antichrist and the millennium may be of interest. The second mentions LORD OF THE WORLD as a rare example of Catholic apocalyptic fiction in the context of a review of one of the novels in Michael O'Brien's Catholic-apocalypse series. www.johnreilly.info/catmil.htmwww.johnreilly.info/eots.htm
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 24, 2011 17:27:12 GMT
BTW Robert Hugh benson was the son of an Archbishop of Canterbury; the writers AC and EF Benson were his brothers. Both AC and EF were homosexuals (they had a dreadful home life) and I think RH may have been that way inclined by nature though not in practice (he was horrified when the writer Frederick Rolfe made advances to him). One of his short ghost stories has a villainous adversary character who is clearly supposed to be Oscar Wilde (a priest is granted prophetic powers to defeat him), and the Antichrist in LORD OF THE WORLD has a taste in epigrams which also seems to owe something to Wilde.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jan 25, 2011 15:02:29 GMT
To be honest I found 'The Dawn of All' more frightening than 'The Lord of the World'. In a way Benson answers this problem himself in one of his characters in 'The Dawn of All' - "You would have Christ to suffer, but not to reign". I take Hibernicus' point about Ireland becoming a great big monastery in 'The Dawn of All', but in 'The Lord of the World', it is the only remaining Catholic country outside Rome. But I agree with Hibernicus assessment about Benson.
Benson's father was Archbishop of Canterbury at the time Leo XIII released Apostolicae Curiae : I wondered if this fact had any influence on his son. I also think The Lord of the World anticipated some of the ideas seen in better known dsytopian novels such as 1984 and Brave New World.
I google Edward Benson and some of his other children on reading Hibernicus' contribution. Like he says, they do seem to have had a dreadful home life.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 31, 2011 12:41:50 GMT
One interesting point about Benson's historical novels is that they often oppose a Catholic hero who is naturally shy, retiring, contemplative and devout to a Protestant father or brother who is strong, ruthless, unscrupulous and extremely masculine. This may be read as reflecting Benson's own personality type and perhaps his relations with his own father, but it also takes up and responds to a certain type of Protestant polemic and historical fiction which contrasts Protestant masculinity and worldly success with Catholic mysticism and "effeminacy". (Charles Kingsley would be an example of this - remember it was Kingsley who sneered that Newman "shrank from the rough male world that marries and is given in marriage" - as would James Anthony Froude's history of seventeenth-century England with its glorification of Henry VIII, who features in one of Benson's novels.) The answer to Benson's question would be whether it is really Christ who reigns in a world like THE DAWN OF ALL; or at least He does not reign alone, and in such a world the temptation is very strong for the secular and ecclesiastical authorities eventually to usurp His place. Benson's fiction in DAWN OF ALL rests on the assumption that a lasting earthly paradise can be achieved, and that is very dangerous. Chesterton's THE BALL AND THE CROSS is underrated but I think it touches on this very strongly in the scene where the Catholic Jacobite hero MacIan is brought in a vision by an angel to see a London where "the king has returned" - where the ball above St Paul's dome is draped and the Cross alone is visible. After being brought through scenes of feudal pomp and display, he sees some shabbily-clad men being herded to work by a number of knights; one of the men stumbles and one of the knights strikes him. When MacIan expresses distaste, his guide sneers - and MacIan realises "You are not an angel. It is not the true king who has returned". Revelations about the recent history of some aspects of Irish Catholicism make this ring painfully true, and I am afraid that dreams of perfection on this earth a la Benson contributed to the debacle. I am not saying that Catholics should not try to transform this world for the better and have Jesus honoured everywhere - merely that we should beware the temptation of assuming that because we wish to do this we have actually achieved it, and silencing those who point out that we have not. That is the temptation of a certain type of bad catholic fiction, and it is also the temptation of Dostoyevsky's grand Inquisitor.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Feb 9, 2011 12:07:51 GMT
I thought the Franciscan theologian convicted and executed for heresy in the Dawn of All was an interesting contrast to Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 10, 2011 10:08:21 GMT
The portrayal of this theologian is a very good example of what is wrong with THE DAWN OF ALL. We are told that he denies an infallibly defined doctrine and he refuses to recant his view even when this would save his life; yet at the same time he continues to maintain that he is a faithful son of the Church (he even defends the church's right to execute him for heresy) and that he will eventually be shown to have correctly interpreted the Church's doctrine. This is utterly implausible; if the doctrine he controverts has really been infallibly defined (Benson clearly states that it has been) it is utterly impossible that it could ever be overturned. In such a situation the theologian must either accept that the church is right and submit to its authority, or question that infallibility (for example, when it was pointed out to Luther that some of his views had been condemned as heresy when advanced by Jan Hus, he chose to maintain that Hus had been wrongly condemned rather than reject his views). I find it incredible that he would continue to maintain the church's authority while being prepared to die rather than submit to it (and recall that in such a situation refusal to submit would imperil his soul as well as his body - a point which Benson does not enlarge on). If, on the other hand, the dispute concerned the proper interpretation of an infallibly declared doctrine (such as the dispute between maximalist and minimalist definitions of papal infallibility) this would leave open the possibility that the man was condemned and executed unjustly, and this is a possibility which Benson's whole narrative is anxious to exclude. In fact, Benson is trying to have it both ways; he wishes both to treat all the decrees of church authority as evidently just and at the same time to emphasise that integralism is so reasonable that even those it condemns to death accept it. I must say that passage is one of the nastiest in Benson's work; it really reminds me of the apologists for Stalin's show trials, or of O'Brien in George Orwell's 1984. (Incidentally, 1984 is an attack on Catholicism as well as Communism and Fascism; Orwell was a very Protestant atheist, and the quasi-celibate Inner party can be read as clerics as well as communist apparatchiks. Newspeak and Doublethink are partly modelled on the Chestertonian paradox, and Orwell briefly portrays a Chestertonian Party apologist called Syme - as in THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY -, who is destined to be purged because he takes intellectual delight in apologetic for its own sake rather than simply regurgitating the party line because it is the party line.)
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 10, 2011 10:11:55 GMT
Or, to put it another way, if Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor wrote novels they would be very like THE DAWN OF ALL, only sentimental where Benson is naive. Its problem is that it does not argue merely that a Catholic state would be good but that it would be perfect. The first might be plausible under certain circumstances (especially if the alternatives were worse) the second is certainly not.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Feb 10, 2011 12:23:29 GMT
I must say that passage is one of the nastiest in Benson's work; it really reminds me of the apologists for Stalin's show trials, or of O'Brien in George Orwell's 1984. (Incidentally, 1984 is an attack on Catholicism as well as Communism and Fascism; Orwell was a very Protestant atheist, and the quasi-celibate Inner party can be read as clerics as well as communist apparatchiks. Newspeak and Doublethink are partly modelled on the Chestertonian paradox, and Orwell briefly portrays a Chestertonian Party apologist called Syme - as in THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY -, who is destined to be purged because he takes intellectual delight in apologetic for its own sake rather than simply regurgitating the party line because it is the party line.) I like the reference to Orwell - I always wondered if he was influenced by Benson to any degree. If he read Chesterton, there is a chance he was. But given what Hibernicus has just said about Orwell, I recall a certain English suspended (formerly excommunicated) bishop who peppers his so-called sermons with references to Orwell. Said bishop is greatly admired by a misguided young fool whose blog is frequently extolled by Guillaume on this forum.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Feb 10, 2011 12:52:04 GMT
I recently read two novels in Irish - An Branar gan Cur and Néal Maidine agus Tine Oíche (Respectively 'The Unsown Field' and 'Morning Cloud and Night Fire'). The are the work of Monsignor Breandán Ó Doibhlin (Brendan Devlin), a Tyrone man who is a priest of the Derry Diocese and who served as Professor of Modern Languages at Maynooth and Rector of the Irish College in Paris.
The Irish in both books is exceptionally fine and presupposes an acquaintance with Old Irish - so reading the books is no easy task even for someone with an advanced level of literature. The themes employed are derived from modern European literature, especially from French literature. However, Monsignor Devlin rejected interpretations which suggest Antoine Saint-Euxperry is the sole or even the main influence.
Néal Maidine agus Tine Oíche was published in 1964. It was set in the heroic period and draws heavily from the Book of Exodus (hence the allusion in the title) and from Lebor Gabala (the Book of Invasions) which purports to give the primeval history of Ireland. The narrator is a distinctly priestly figure. However, it is clear he is not talking about Ireland in either mythical or pre-historic time, as he introduces themes of identity in a nation persecuted for religious and ethnic reasons.
An Branar gan Cur follows the same theme in a very different way. The action of this novel, published in 1979, are the thoughts in the mind of the narrator - a Northern Irish Catholic who is a former clerical student who has just landed a permanent job at the bottom of the university hierarchy in Dublin. He contrasts his experiences in the North with his reaction to the south which he saw as the promised land and with which he was gravely disappointed.
Though both books may be read in a political way, they represent a genuine effort to produce a Catholic literature in the Irish language.
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Post by shane on Feb 10, 2011 13:52:14 GMT
I like Bishop Williamson - not for his views on the holocaust, but he seems like a nice person. He has no more business being a bishop than I do but his sermons are highly entertaining (if perhaps unintentionally) and he's very eccentric, which is always fun. BTW, here's a brilliant piece on the protrayal of clergy in modern Irish literature by Fr Joseph O'Leary, with a very sad and moving conclusion: josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/06/the_irish_clerg.html
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