A prominent Irish academic, who often likes to set the cat among the pigeons, a former head of one of the country’s universities, Dr. Edward Walsh, has written a searing critique of the Republic’s political system and the mediocrity it has induced in the body politic. “The intense crisis that now engulfs us highlights the deficiencies of Ireland’s system of governance. Talent is the glaring deficit. The 15 people who currently serve as Government Ministers are well-intentioned, hard-working people but generally undistinguished in terms of expertise, experience or achievement. Not one of the many Irish people who have proven themselves internationally serves in government.” (The Irish Times, July 6).

Talent is important, but it is not the only thing that is important. A far more worrying issue affecting our civic life is the deficit in understanding of the ethical and anthropological principles which should be at the heart of our political culture. If this is not already wreaking havoc it is certainly sowing the seeds of disasters to come. Anyone who watched Irish Television’s political analysis forum, Frontline, recently (Monday, July5, http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0921/thefrontline.html ) would have been given an occasion to reflect on the consequences of this deficit. In both sections of the programme the speakers and the audience were essentially grappling with the question of the nature of family and the rights and duties of those who make up families. The issues being discussed were civil partnerships in the first segment and legislation for children’s rights in the other. In the context of both issues, only a handful showed any grasp of what family really is in terms of man’s and society’s fundamental nature. It was truly scary to hear talk of “new family forms”, “new family identities” and a complete refusal to address David Quinn’s questions about the fundamental identity of family based on natural motherhood, fatherhood and childhood and its crucial role as the essential bedrock of society. The political challenge which the majority of those taking part saw in front of them was how to regulate and legislate for any number essentially artificial arrangements at the expense of the one natural form of family that we know is at the heart of our civilization.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, preached at a service for the new British Parliament last May. He appealed for a deeper vision in politics and among the approaches which he saw would limit such vision was one where “we try to make sure that government controls all outcomes and averts all risks by law and regulation.”  This, he said, “produces a culture of obsessional legislation, paralysis of initiative and pervasive anxiety”.

Politics, not only in Ireland but almost everywhere, has surrendered itself to this search and has abandoned any grasp it had of the fundamental nature of man, his dignity and his destiny. All that, politicians now say, is none of our business. Life-style choices are now what is going to dictate legislation and what legislators must respond to. The State is relegating its role to that of “making arrangements” for any number of life-styles likely to be chosen by individuals regardless of any moral principles which might be involved. Morality is identified as an exclusively personal matter. The only moral responsibility which this kind of politics accepts is the simplistic and shallow Benthamite one of trying to ensure the greatest happiness of the greatest possible number, something very different from a politics based on the pursuit of the common good. For “the greatest possible number” please read “the greatest possible number of votes”.

But there are serious voices calling a halt to this myopic madness. The financial mess which the Western world has landed itself in – and landed almost the entire globe in by default – has some messages not only for financiers but for all those whose actions have a direct bearing on the common good. Niall Ferguson’s new book, High Financier: The Lives and Time of Sigmund Warburg, has just been published by Penguin.  In it he sets up Warburg, a financial giant of the mid twentieth century, as a contrast to the financial bandits who roamed Wall Street and other places over the past three or four decades.

“The real lesson of history”, Ferguson argued in a Daily Telegraph piece last week, “is that regulation alone is not the key to financial stability. Indeed, over-complicated regulation can be the disease it purports to cure, by encouraging a culture of box-ticking ‘compliance’ rather than individual moral judgement. The question that gets asked in highly regulated markets is not: ‘Are we doing the right thing?’ but ‘Can we get away with this?’

“What is more important is to instil in financial professionals the kind of ethical framework that was the basis of Siegmund Warburg’s life and work. ‘Success from the financial and from the prestige point of view… is not enough,’ Warburg told his fellow directors in 1959. ‘What matters even more is constructive achievement and adherence to high moral and aesthetic standards in the way in which we do our work.’”

This is the real crisis in our society and the moral ineptitude of the vast majority of our political representatives is at the heart of it. They have simply abandoned the moral ground. They defend their amorality on the basis of a confusion of morality with religion. They do this especially when they encounter moral arguments from opponents who also hold religious convictions. The most recent Irish example of this came from Justice Minister Dermot Ahern when he professed himself to be a Catholic but then declared that he leaves all that behind him when he walks into the legislature. This of course was the identical compromise deemed necessary by John F. Kennedy to help him secure his election as President of the United States back in 1959. “While we all have our beliefs and religions, I don’t think it should cloud our judgement”, Ahern said in an Irish Times interview. We might wonder not just what kind of faith is behind that remark but what kind of intellect produced it. It is as though these politicians are reading Christ’s stipulation, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesars and to God the things that are God’s” as “Forget about God when you render to Caesar what is his.” Any reading of Catholic teaching – which as a professing Catholic Mr. Ahern might be expected to know something about – particularly, for example, one of the great encyclicals of the last pontificate, Faith and Reason, will lead any thinking Christian to see that a religion which clouds his judgement is a false religion.

But Ahern is just one example. Cross the Irish Sea, cross the Atlantic and you will find many more. In an interesting article in the New York Times recently, columnist Charles Blow observed a shift in the Democratic Party toward a more religious profile. He wondered about its consequences for the party. He asks whether the growing religiosity on the left will push the Democrats toward the right.

“At the moment, that answer is both yes and no. On the one hand, unlike John Kerry before him, Barack Obama made a strong play for the religious vote on his march to the White House. It worked so well that it’s likely to continue, if not intensify, among Democratic candidates. On the other hand, the religious left is not the religious right. The left isn’t as organized or assertive. For the most part, it seems to have made its peace with the mishmash of morality under the Democratic umbrella, rallying instead around some core Democratic tenets: protection of, and equality for, the disenfranchised and providing greater opportunity and assistance for the poor.”

Most of this is of course little more than religious window-dressing. Recently the Obama Administration signalled a determination to defend the Day of National Prayer in appeals against a decision by a Wisconsin federal court judge that held the Day violated the First Amendment’s non-establishment of religion clause. It goes back to President Truman’s time. Yet plainly such religiousness, when covering anti-life agendas in other matters, implicitly re-defines religiousness as a mass subjectivism devoid of reasoned and justiciable content, a force which can swing almost in any direction.

The key phrase in Blow’s piece is “mishmash of morality”. Politicians there as elsewhere are moral followers, not leaders – with a few exceptions – and when this  “mishmash of morality” is what prevails in society, as it is increasingly doing, then this will be what you get in politics as well. The moral arbiter of our time, dictating the moral standards of our time, is what has come to be called “political correctness”. As a result – again an Irish example – you have a legislature working itself into a fever over the so-called morality of  stag hunting when it practically unanimously slides legislation through unopposed on an issue touching on and compromising the understanding of the morality of one the most intimate and sacred of human acts.

Perhaps we are dreaming impossible dreams when we look for moral leadership from our politicians. As a class have they ever given it? The shining examples of such leadership have been few and far between – Cicero, Thomas More, William Wilberforce, Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln and not too many more. Few statesmen have the sensitivity of conscience of Thomas More who spoke of those who shirk the responsibilities of political leadership as being “ like the cowardly ship’s captain who is so disheartened by the furious din of the storm that he deserts the helm, hides away cowering in some cranny, and abandons the ship to the waves—if a [leader] does this, I would certainly not hesitate to juxtapose and compare his sadness with the sadness that leads as [Paul] says, to hell….”

Many great political and moral reforms in democratic societies have been driven from the bottom. The movements which abolished slavery had to drag legislatures to the point where they conceded. So the battle for the good life, the moral life, has to be first fought elsewhere. As long as we neglect to fight it elsewhere we are in danger of our legislatures leading us further and further into the morass of mishmash morality. If the euthanasia movement can succeed in getting public opinion to be indifferent – and it is indifference which is the real destroyer – about whether you and I have a right to terminate our lives at will, or – as they have done in most Western societies – be indifferent to the rights of unborn children, then the politicians will follow and legislate for these horrors. For them, consciences do not enter it. Their business, as they see it, is to make the necessary arrangements to keep the traffic flowing smoothly – and the votes coming their way. As this happens the consequences will become visibly disturbing and result in serious social dysfunction. Edmund Burke foretold the consequences for his time when the observed the self-serving and egotistical architects of the French Revolution at work:

“When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, and the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.” And he added: “On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations or can spare to them from his own private interests.”

There are people in Ireland today who feel helplessly adrift in a society which is being slowly moulded in a very ugly way. These other words of Edmund Burke resonate poignantly with them: “There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-informed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely…” For them it is no longer so. Why it is not so will be perfectly obvious to anyone who revisits the debate in the Irish Senate on Thursday, July 8, (http://debates.oireachtas.ie/DDebate.aspx?F=SEN20100708.xml&Node=H2&Page=4)  where a truly shocking spectacle was laid before us of the majority in that house savaging a handful of public representatives who professed rational and conscientious objections to a very suspect piece of legislation which is now going to the Head of State to be passed into law.

Some people take a very dim view of those who spend any of their precious time reading fiction. In their view they are at best taking a little time off from the serious business of life and spending it on some harmless entertainment. At worst they are wasting their time in a pointless and trivial pursuit. At one end of this critical spectrum are those who don’t read anything other than the news media – which they do because they have to – and the documents of one kind or another which land on their desks. These are the hard-nosed practical men and women of our time. They are not what we might call “readers” at all. Their application of the precious gift of literacy is little more than functional.

At the other end of this critical spectrum are genuine “readers” but they still fail to see or appreciate the point of fiction and the depth of its value. These are the readers who feel that fiction is nothing more than fantasy and that the truth of the human condition can only be seen in the history or biography of real events and real people. The deny that the creative imagination can really show us much that is true or get beyond the role, useful they will admit, of giving us some harmless stimulation. In fact, if you mention the word truth to them in the context of fiction, or if you argue that truth is the essential mark of great fiction, they look at you in puzzlement as though you were employing contradictory terms.

Anthony Powell, one of the masters of twentieth century literature, repeatedly expressed the view that autobiography was different from fiction because the latter was true, whereas the former was all made up! In his great sequence of twelve novels, The Dance to the Music of Time, he explains this in detail at one point. Essentially, I think, his point was that the historian and the biographer have to piece together the picture from the scraps of evidence they collect. They select what they think completes the picture portraying a person or an event. The creative writers, on the other hand, who want to explore what it is to be human, what it is or was like to live in a particular human condition, are free to delve into their imaginations and personal experiences to create characters through which he or she will try to give a truly authentic picture of all the possible twists and turns which we human beings can make in our interaction with this world, with each other and with our Creator. Our judgement on what they achieve is ultimately based on whether or not what they give us “rings true”. If it does, and if it shows us something that we have not seen before about our life, our times, times past or present, then we truly have what we can call “revelation” – with a small “r”. Sometimes this happens even if the authors themselves have not seen what we see about their characters. These characters become real and, for example, a Christian reader will bring a Christiaqn sensibility to the interpretation of a character or situation in a great novel – and learn something from it. In a sense what is called fiction is not fiction at all but is truth masquerading as fiction. We have in fact what Pope John Paul II wrote of in the context of Revelation with a big “R” when he speaks of the biblical account of creation in his discourses on the theology of the body: “Following contemporary philosophy of religion and of language, one can say that we are dealing with mythical language. In this case in fact the term ‘myth’ does not refer to fictitious-fabulous content, but simply to an archaic way of expressing a deeper content. Without any difficulty, we discover that content under the stratum of the ancient narrative, truly marvellous in the quality and condensation of the truths contained there.”

Going back to Powell’s work, Christopher Hitchens quotes a Marxist critic – and there were few people more remote from Marxism than Anthony Powell – saying that “there is no other work in the annals of European fiction that attempts meticulously to recreate half a century of history, decade by decade, with anything like the emotional precision or details of [these] twelve volumes.” This is, again, all about truth being presented to us under the stratum of a fictional narrative. But this particular narrative does not just give us an account of a period, nor just a perfect feel for what it was like to live in such a period – the vivid recreation of the experience of living in Blitzkreig London is just one example. It puts us into the hearts and minds of people imagined on the basis of a writer’s real experience of living people, makes us feel the emotions of their loves and losses in a way that enriches us and can form us in our own capacity to respond to our own loves and losses. Our encounter with these lives provides each of us with an opportunity for the refinement of our own sensibilities and emotions. Indeed one might ask if the coarseness of our own age is partly the result of the failure – for one reason or another – to engage with and dwell reflectively on these lives and the panorama of pitfalls they encounter, their errors and weaknesses, right turns and wrong turns, the tragedies and comedies which mirror the whole gamut of human existence.

 Those loves and loses bothered some readers of Powell’s novel. They allege a streak of callousness in his depictions of the comings and goings of the vast array of characters who passed in and out of the life of the novel’s narrator, Nick Jenkins. The critic Brooke Allen defended Powell. “I first read Dance when I was in my twenties, and though I loved and treasured it, it now seems clear that I couldn’t have understood half of it. Though it is a book that appeals to the young, it is not a young person’s book. One has to be middle-aged to have experienced the almost arbitrary dissolution of love and friendship, the almost arbitrary apotheosis of some and dissolution of others, to understand that Powell was not being gratuitously cruel to his characters but simply realistic.”

 The critic William Pritchard, writing about Powell’s art in The Hudson Review, gives just one example of the kind of empathy which the author induces in us when he writes of Nick’s last encounter with his dying friend, Moreland, where they talk about a song he might have composed. “Nick is visiting the dying Moreland in a South London nursing home where Moreland, surrounded by books, remembers a song from a little-read Jacobean play by John Marston, The Dutch Courtesan. The song—which begins ‘The dark is my delight / So ’tis the nightingale’s’—brings to Moreland’s mind the predacious Pamela Flitton, now married to Widmerpool. He says that, if there had been time, he might have done a setting for the song, and he imagines how it would have made his friend, the music critic Gossage, sit up: He sighed, more exhaustedly than regretfully, I thought. That morning was the last time I saw Moreland. It was also the last time I had, with anyone, the sort of talk we used to have together. Things drawing to a close, even quite suddenly, was hardly a surprise. The look Moreland had was the one people take on when a stage has been reached quite different from being ill. “I’ll have to think about that song,” he said. The moment final; the prose absolutely transparent with resonant simplicity.”

 This is just a random sample of the vast wealth of human experience, vicarious but full of meaning, that can enrich us in literary fiction, drama, poetry and through that modern popular narrative form, film. Needles to say, within the vast treasury we are looking at, individual taste will determine what we might each feel is appealing or otherwise. The Dance to the Music of Time, which I have been so effusive about, is not, I have to admit, everyone’s favourite book. But entering these worlds is not a waste of time. Indeed it is a sad commentary on our education system, in which a considerable amount of time is devoted to trying to help young people experience these riches that so many people still feel that it is.

One final thought. One must suspect that the appeal of narrative fiction has some deep source in human sensibility given that it has been employed so extensively by the Holy Spirit to reveal so much to us of the very nature of God himself and our relationship with him, not to mention the use made of it by Jesus Christ to teach us how to love God and love each other in this world.

This post will appear in the August/September issue of Position Papers www.positionpapers.ie

Over the past few months I have had words echoing in my head from across the centuries: I have loved justice and hated iniquity – therefore I die in exile. They are the words of a dying pope and they just seem to resonate in my mind in the context of the sufferings of Pope Benedict and the recently revealed anguish of the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Dermot Martin.
Exile is of course a metaphor and there are many kinds of exile which human beings can suffer. Indeed exile is in some ways the condition of every soul in this world. Hence the word “therefore” in that haunting sentence means more than it might at first seem to mean. Exile is the condition of every Christian soul in the face of the incomprehension which envelops it in an unbelieving world. It is in fact no more than the founder of the Christian faith promised his followers – If the world hates you, you know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. But because you are not of the world, since I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. (John 15).
The pope in question was Gregory VII, more often known by the name derived from the Aldobrandi family, Hildebrand. To his friends he was “a bright flame”, which Hildebrand can be translated as, and to the Catholic Church was truly such. He was one of the great popes of the middle ages who fought the secularism of his day for the freedom of the Church to do its work for the salvation of souls. He was a great reforming pope and in his effort to reform the Church he came into direct conflict with the mightiest power of the age, the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV.
The essential reform around which his struggle with Henry revolved was the struggle for the right of the Church to choose its own bishops, the successors of the Apostles. The struggle was a roller-coaster ride in which Henry was twice excommunicated and in which at the high point of the drama fell on his knees before the Pope at Canossa to ask for forgiveness and absolution – only to later recant and eventually drive the pope into exile. Hildebrand died in Salerno in 1085 where his remains are venerated to this day. He was beatified by Gregory XIII in 1584, and canonized in 1728 by Benedict XIII.
Gregory VII began his great reforming work in 1074 and those reforms still provide the structure within which the Church today seeks to maintain the order which allows it to pursue its mission for the salvation of souls. Chief among them and focused on the priesthood were the following:
• That clerics who had obtained any grade or office of sacred orders by payment should cease to minister in the Church.
• That no one who had purchased any church should retain it, and that no one for the future should be permitted to buy or sell ecclesiastical rights.
• That all who were guilty of incontinence should cease to exercise their sacred ministry.
• That the people should reject the ministrations of clerics who failed to obey these injunctions.
It is sobering to realise that in every age the Church has had to clear itself of practices and abuses which thwart it in its divine mission and scandalise its faithful. But it is also sobering to be reminded that those who seek to do this clearing work will be misunderstood, resisted and persecuted – even by those who profess to serve the Church themselves. Henry IV’s last act of defiance was to have a cardinal of the time elected as pope in opposition to Gregory.
Parallels with today? Surely there are. Although the priestly-kingly office of the Pope in essence remains what it always was, the office of the Vicar of Christ, the forces on the opposing side are more diverse and more subtle in their manifestation than they were in Gregory’s day. The same love of justice, the same love of souls – all souls, – the same hatred of iniquity are patently evident in both the words and actions of Pope Benedict XVI and Archbishop Diarmuid Martin in their efforts to serve Christ in the world as they were in the words and actions of Gregory VII.
In the contemporary struggle of the Church in the modern secular world the great Manipulator of all evil was already pulling the puppet strings in this battle decades ago when he seduced the weak and licentious to betray their calling and indulge their lust on the innocent. Having done that he goes on to capitalise on his success by manipulating the Job’s comforters of this world who set themselves up to advise the Church on what it must do to change itself. Many of them of course secretly, or not so secretly, see the Church as a medieval anachronism which the world would be better rid of. All you have to do is to stray into the internet comments on articles in the mainstream media to see this not so hidden agenda.
The incomprehension of Christ and his Church by the World was nowhere more evident than in the reaction of elements of the media – indeed the only elements which touched my consciousness – in the 24 hours following the heartrending address by Archbishop Martin on the future of the Church in Ireland on May 10 last. A proper reading of what he said could only show a man, a priest, suffering under the weight of the injustice and iniquity which he had witnessed but who at the same time showed the faith, hope and love which told him that Christ has redeemed mankind and that the great Manipulator will not prevail. However, reading and listening to some of the commentary on the address led one to believe that here was a man, a priest, attacking his own Church, at odds with the Vicar of Christ and adrift in a hopeless sea of misery. The direction of the address was firm and resolute – while very honest and courageous in its laying out of what must be done.
Yes, the struggles of Hildebrand in the 11th century were the struggles of that time. Later there were to be other struggles and today we have our own struggles. All, however, have a common denominator – that incomprehension of the True Church. However, the victory then, as the victory will always be, was assured. But the peace will not be peace as the world gives it. It will be a peace which will always be compatible with the reality of exile.

The last great threat to the belief and practice of the Catholic Faith in Ireland was probably in the late 16^th and early 17^th century. The crisis of that time was unparalleled – until now. It seems unquestionable that as we look back over the past 50 years we can now see the unravelling of a Catholic community which for three centuries resisted the fire and sword of persecution and flourished throughout the English-speaking world.

There is a great deal of talk of our now being – in the context of the horror of multiple betrayals now scandalizing the world from these very shores – at a watershed in the history of Irish Catholicism. The nature of that watershed may mean different things to different people but many hope that it is a watershed from which will flow a reformed and regenerated Catholicism faithful to the teaching which defines Catholicism itself. There is every reason to hope that it will. The failures and triumphs of the 17^th century are grounds for nurturing that hope in our hearts.

Catholicism in Ireland in the 16^th century was in a truly sorry state – as indeed it was in much of Europe. The Protestant Reformation was a reaction to a range of abuses in the Church at large. Ireland was no freer of abuses than the next, catalogued in polemic terms by the Protestant reformers but catalogued in more accurate if no less lurid terms by the Catholic reformers of the early 17^th century.

In 1631 the reforming Catholic bishop of Waterford had to contend with a diocese in which, he reported “most of our clergy are idle, contenting themselves to say mass in the morning, and until midnight to continue either playing or drinking or vagabonding; and as most of them are unlearned, the make a trade of being ecclesiastical, thereby to live idle, sit among the best, go well clad, and if I would say it, swagger….and alas very few spend one hour a twelvemonth to teach Christian doctrine, or instruct young children.”

That is just a sample. The consequences for the laity of the time of a pastoral infrastructure served by that kind of pastor were of course inevitable: ignorance, superstition, devotional aberrations and utterly loose living. The Catholic reformers took up the challenge of dealing with these. S.J. Connolly, in his history of the period, Contested Island – Ireland 1460-1630, – from which the quotation above is taken – tells of some of the things that had to be tackled. There was “a particular concern with wakes, where the passage of the recently dead was marked by feasting, drinking and ritual games, all with the aim of reasserting bonds of kinship and community and perhaps of placating the spirit of the deceased. The explicitly sexual nature of some of the games played was another challenge to the new moral discipline. Marriage was a further area of difficulty. Communities for whom weddings were a means of creating and strengthening social bonds were not easily persuaded that the consent of two individuals given before witnesses was not adequate unless solemnized by the parish priest of one of the parties, that a close existing blood relationship could be an obstacle to union or that a marriage contract remained binding even when the family or other alliances it had been created to secure had ceased to exist.”

In the 16^th century a battle royal had commenced for the minds and hearts of the Irish people. The Tudor conquest of Gaelic Ireland had the dual objective of achieving political submission and religious reformation on Protestant terms. In the execution of the programme the duality of the aim was probably a major factor in the undoing of the latter. But in the end of the day the event celebrated in poetry by James Clarence Mangan two centuries later – leaving aside the political and nationalistic interpretations of the words – was what really made the difference.

  O my Dark Rosaleen,

   Do not sigh, do not weep!

The priests are on the ocean green,

   They march along the deep.

There ‘s wine from the royal Pope,

   Upon the ocean green… 

The combination of a muddled and often ruthless political strategy, combined with an incompetent religious persecution and a half-hearted apostolic zeal on behalf of the Protestant reform was no match in the end of the day – even when pursued over two centuries – for the resurgence of the Faith which flowed from the Council of Trent. The early 16^th century saw the laying of the foundations on which the practice of the Catholic Faith in Ireland was gradually reaffirmed and restored in the face of draconian persecution and half-hearted Protestant evangelization. It took time and it was often patchy – but then there was never to be a Kingdom of God on earth without weeds. The persecuted mustard seed which was nurtured by the Catholic reformers on the watershed that was 17^th century Ireland became the flourishing Catholic Church in the Anglophone world of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Are we back to square one? History may not repeat itself but it has an uncanny way of appearing to do so. We may have no wish to trace detailed parallels between the abuses of today with those of yester year but we do not need to. The moral degeneration, clerical or non-clerical, hidden or blatently evident in the behaviour of our age speaks for itself. It is hard not to conclude that if it is not square one we have reached we are somewhere in its vicinity.

In the 16^th century the Protestant reformers were aware of one thing but seemingly failed to capitalise on that awareness and lost the ground they might have gained. The neo-protestants of today are fully aware of the same thing and if the evidence before us is to be trusted they are doing their best to capitalise on it second time around. Check out Is This a Trojan Horse? in the Position Paper of November 2008 for more detail. Historian Aidan Clarke noted in his contribution to the third volume of the Oxford University Press New History of Ireland: “It had been recognised from the outset that the young were more likely to be susceptible to protestantism than the old, but the problems of creating a protestant monopoly of education were too large to be tackled.” The prospect of an anti-Catholic takeover of the system of education today is much less of a challenge. It is arguable that the takeover has been largely effected already in spirit if not in the letter. What is the Faith which is being taught in the majority of nominally Catholic schools today? Where are the minds and hearts of the majority of young Irish people today? We might shudder to think what a thorough investigation might reveal.

But hope is at hand. “Wine from the royal Pope” has already arrived in port. As it was then, so it is now. The Roman Catholic Church was then and is now the institution founded by Christ to provide for the needs of his flock. That betrayals should be experienced within it should dismay no one. Judas was among the first twelve and while he helped put the One who chose him to be such on the Cross to die, his action did not deflect the Church from its path. The Pope is the universal pastor and his care for his faithful on this island and beyond is palpable in every word of his letter to Irish Catholics. It has set an agenda for the spiritual life of this people. The practical help they will need to enable them to fulfil it is marching “along the deep” in the form of the promised Apostolic Visitation. What is now hoped for, what is needed, what is on offer is a new and Catholic Reformation of a greviously wounded Catholic culture. If these hopes are fulfilled then the outcome of the sad events of the late 20^th century might be as fruitful in the centuries ahead as was the outcome of those of the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries.

A version of this article will appear in the May edition of Position Paper www.positionpaper.ie .

I don’t know if The Lovely Bones is a lovely film or not. I haven’t seen it and this is not a review of it. It has however, an intriguing subject: a young girl is murdered; in the film she spends most of her time in “the In-Between” telling us what happened and watching the world go on without her. “The In-Between” is of course an imaginative reading of what many of us call Purgatory and in many ways a large part of the theme might be seen as being what Purgatory is all about. The film is based on a very popular novel by Alice Sebold.

But what is more intriguing than the film itself is the bewilderment of some of its critics. It has to be said that it has had a very mediocre critical reception at the higher end of its range and a very negative response from a few eminent critics. Most bewildered of all and very hostile was Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun Times. The film is probably fairly muddled and I think that it does not match a vision of Purgatory which most of us would find theologically credible. However, it does take for granted that such a state of being exists. What is intriguing about Ebert’s review is the vehemence with which he attacks the film, not so much on artistic grounds, but fundamentally on ideological grounds. The view that Purgatory – or Heaven and an afterlife for that matter – should even exist seems to be what offends him most. Reaction to the film seemed yet again to reveal that great divide – seen in other instances in the reaction to any number of other films in the recent past which seriously, either explicitly or implicitly, allegorically or otherwise, reveal a belief in the supernatural. We might think of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, the Narnia films, and even The Lord of the Rings – made by the same director who has made this film, Peter Jackson.

Undoubtedly the subject-matter of the film is tricky – a young girl brutally murdered by a pervert, narrating her story from beyond the grave, watching the anguish and near-disintegration of her family in the aftermath of her disappearance. The film accepts death as a reality and the afterlife as a reality as well. This is clearly what Ebert and others do not accept. “The Lovely Bones”, he says, “is a deplorable film with this message: If you’re a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped (in fact, while this is part of the novel is not part of the narrative in the film – my parenthesis) and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to. You can get together in heaven with the other teenage victims of the same killer, and gaze down in benevolence upon your family members as they mourn you and realize what a wonderful person you were. Sure, you miss your friends, but your fellow fatalities come dancing to greet you in a meadow of wildflowers, and how cool is that?” Alright, he might have a point if this was the extent of his problem. But it is not. It is not that the film has done a fairly mediocre job with its chosen theme. It seems to be the whole premise of the film itself.

The makers of this film, he complains, seem to have given “slight thought to the psychology of teenage girls”. Perhaps, but he does not elaborate on his own take on teenage girls, so we are not sure what his problem is here. He goes on to come closer to his main gripe: that the makers of the film do not address “the possibility that there is no heaven”.

“The murder of a young person is a tragedy,” he continues. Of course it is, but tragedy is an overused word and death is not the end of anyone’s world. “The murderer is a monster”, he states. Not true, in any real sense. Murderers are human beings, bad but still human like any of us, even Roger Ebert. He goes on to object that this movie sells the philosophy that “even evil things are God’s will, and their victims are happier now. Isn’t it nice to think so. I think it’s best if they don’t happen at all. But if they do, why pretend they don’t hurt? Those girls are dead.” Susie, the heroine was not the murderer’s only victim. Here he is seriously misreading the story and failing to understand the power of God to draw good from the violence human beings inflict on their fellow human beings. One senses that Ebert probably cannot make much sense of the sacrifices of the early Christian martyrs.

In judging whether or not Peter Jackson hits the nail on the head – or otherwise – in tackling the themes of this book in his film we will have to wait until we see The Lovely Bones when it comes out on DVD later this month (April). But regardless of its artistic merits as a movie, it seems to have touched that raw nerve in Roger Ebert which he shares with all those others in our culture who can no longer tolerate a vision of life after death and all the happiness which it will entail, we hope, regardless of the manner in which we leave this one.