The mostly negative reaction to Scorsese’s Silence among orthodox Christians in America was somehow for me diagnostic of what ails American Christian culture. We cannot surrender the triumphalist narrative. Nor do we know how to live with the humiliation of defeat. We have not yet summoned a creative minority capable of creating again anew.
Endo faced the same criticisms of Silence’s themes from Christians of his own time, particularly in Japan where formerly hidden Christians felt it tarnished their forefathers’ heroism. Endo has a response: “To such a comment, what I’d like to say is this: How can anyone who has never experienced the horrific tortures of the Christian persecution era have anything to say about the depth of the shallowness of the believers then?…It shows not the shallow faith of those who end up apostatizing, but it reveals the lack of compassion the ones making such a judgment. I cannot accept the faith of those who lack compassion.”
Fujimura’s extraordinary exhibit has been met mostly with silence. If you put “Fujimara exhibition Waterfall gallery” into Google news, no reviews come up.
But as Fujimura writes “Testament to a writer’s impact may not lie in how successfully a book sells or even in whether the author wins a Nobel Prize. The true testament is the generative impact the work has over time.”
“Future generations need to move beyond survival and live in generativity,” he reminds us.
Finding Home
Where do we find the faith and the love that make creativity and procreativity possible?
Watching Scorsese’s Silence, with tears running down my cheeks in the dark, I understood my own weakness not intellectually, not as an argument, but viscerally. I might, by the grace of God, be a martyr if they killed me real quick.
But if they tortured my children in front of me, I would fold like a deck of cards. We doubt. We fail. We lose. Where is God in our failures? How do we find our way Home?
Scorsese’s great theme is Endo’s great theme and it is the theme too of Fujimura’ s great art exhibit:
“Hidden, veiled, but still sacramental signs of a mysterious beauty and grace through the murk of sin and shame, piercing through.”
In Scorsese’s Silence, the martyr Mokichi dies singing Tantum Ergo:
In essence, Pope Francis is confronting what has sometimes been dubbed the “Marriage Strike”. That is, young people are refusing to marry because of a certain pessimism and lack of understanding toward the sacrament and institution–one that has taken root in the current culture.
In my experience both men and women have been affected by this pessimism toward marriage, although it often expresses itself differently between sexes. That is, I find women more often seek to delay marriage, while I find men simply refuse to commit. And it is not just about secularism, sowing wild oats, or establishing oneself financially. Quite often, the pessimism young people feel toward marriage and raising children is due to their own experience growing up in less-than-ideal family circumstances.
Pope Francis recognizes that given their experience growing up in today’s culture, young people have in large part tuned out when it comes to marriage and family life. They no longer approach relationships with the rose-coloured optimism of previous generations of young couples. To previous generations, spring meant that love was in the air. To today’s generation of young couple, having survived the winter of their own family life, spring is a foreshadowing of fall when the warmth of summer cools and everything else around you dies.
Vatican City, Jan 28, 2018 / 04:09 am (CNA/EWTN News).- At Mass in the Basilica of St. Mary Major Sunday, Pope Francis said that when we go through difficult times or have problems or worries, Mary is our shield, guarding our faith and protecting us from evil.
“Where the Madonna is at home the devil does not enter; where there is the Mother disturbance does not prevail, fear does not win,” the Pope said Jan. 28.
“Who of us does not need this, who of us is not sometimes upset or restless? How often the heart is a stormy sea, where the waves of problems overlap, and the winds of worry do not cease to blow! Mary is the sure ark in the midst of the flood.”
Pope Francis celebrated a special Mass at the Basilica of St. Mary Major for the Feast of the transfer of the icon of Salus Populi Romani.
Salus Populi Romani (Protectress of the Roman People) is the title of an ancient Byzantine icon of Mary and the Child Jesus, traditionally held to be painted by St. Luke the Evangelist and to have arrived in Rome in the 6th century.
It was first canonically crowned in 1838 by Pope Gregory XVI and a second time in 1954 by Pope Pius XII. It has a long history of devotion by the Roman people, as well as by popes. It resides in the Pauline, also called Borghese, Chapel in St. Mary Major.
Francis has a special devotion to the image. His first visit as pontiff was to the Basilica of St. Mary Major to pray before the image following his election.
The image has been undergoing extensive restoration in the Vatican Museums, and the Mass also served as the image’s official unveiling following the work.
In his homily, Pope Francis said that it is “a great danger to faith, to live without a mother, without protection, letting ourselves be carried away by life like leaves by the wind.”
Just like persecuted people once took refuge under the cloak of the noble, high-ranking women of their village, in “turbulent moments” we must take shelter under the mantle of Mary, “the highest woman of mankind,” for our own protection.
“Her coat is always open to welcome us and gather us,” he said. “The Mother guards faith, protects relationships, saves in bad weather and preserves from evil.”
As Christians, we cannot be neutral or detached from our Mother, he continued. “Because without a Mother we cannot be children. And we are, first of all, children, beloved children, who have God for a Father and the Madonna for a Mother.”
To illustrate his point, Francis recalled a story of a woman who sat beside the bed of her son in the hospital. He was in pain after an accident, and the mother remained by his bed day and night.
Once she complained to a visiting priest that God never allowed one thing to a mother, which is to suffer in place of her child.
“Here is the mother’s heart,” the Pope said. “She is not ashamed of the wounds, of the weaknesses of her children, but she wants (to take) them on herself.”
And this is how it happens every time, he said. Whether we lack hope, or joy, or our strength is exhausted; whatever our problem, our Mother intervenes.
“And she never, never despises our prayers; she does not let even one fall. She is a Mother, she is never ashamed of us, she only waits to be able to help her children.”
“Let’s make the Mother the guest of our daily life, the constant presence in our home, our safe haven,” he concluded. “Let’s entrust (ourselves) to her every day. Let’s invoke her in every turbulence. And let’s not forget to come back to her to thank her.”
It’s fitting that a great American orator, post-Daniel Webster and pre-Franklin Roosevelt, was Irish. So many born on the Emerald Isle master English and melodrama as first languages. Holding an audience in these pre-radio days required grandeur not intimacy, pathos more than humor, bombast rather than empathy. The Irish-American actor Barney Williams described Irish melodramas as “full of poetry and romance, for there never was an Irish play written where virtue was not rewarded, vice punished, and heroism, in some phase or other, exhibited.”
This formula turned William Bourke Cockran’s political speeches into morality plays, while Cockran’s charisma made every interaction with him epic. “When he entered a room, it was like someone turning on the electric light,” the Anglo-Irish politician, Sir Horace Plunkett, gushed.
The way major U.S. companies provide for retiring workers has been shifting for about three decades, with more dropping traditional pensions every year. The first full generation of workers to retire since this turn offers a sobering preview of a labor force more and more dependent on their own savings for retirement.
Years ago, Coomer and his co-workers at the Tulsa plant of McDonnell-Douglas, the famed airplane maker, were enrolled in the company pension, but in 1994, with an eye toward cutting retirement costs, the company closed the plant. Even though most of them found new jobs, they could never replace their lost pension benefits, and many are facing financial struggles in their old age. A review of those 998 workers found that 1 in 7 has in their retirement years filed for bankruptcy, faced liens for delinquent bills, or both, according to public records.
Those affected are buried by debts incurred for credit card payments, used cars, health care, and sometimes the college educations of their children. Some have lost their homes. And for many of them, even as they reach beyond 70, real retirement is elusive. Although they worked for decades at McDonnell-Douglas, many of the septuagenarians are still working, some full time.
As the doors of the funeral home opened for my dad’s wake, the first visitor shuffled in. He was bent over, a thin man in worn clothes, prematurely aged by life’s troubles. Somewhere on the bumpy road to redemption, he’d met my parents and become a friend. On this day—begging a ride and braving the snow—he came to console my mom and pray for my dad, whose kindness and constant counsel to “trust God,” no matter what, buoyed the man through difficult days. It was fitting: this man from “the peripheries,” as Pope Francis would say, was the first to pay respects to my dad in death. Dad would have felt honored.
Singularly unimpressed with status, power, or wealth, my dad, Professor Charlie Rice, treated everyone he met with kindness and respect. It was no surprise, then, that his wake and funeral drew an interesting mix: politicians, judges, lawyers, former students, and Notre Dame colleagues joined with local repairmen, shopkeepers, retirees, and daily Mass buddies from the parish.
In truth, Dad always had a heart for the underdog, and not just because he was a diehard Notre Dame football fan. By phone and email, he fielded requests for help from students, colleagues, pro-life volunteers, Catholic families, and friends of friends. We knew, but only after the fact, when those he helped shared their gratitude for jobs found, recommendations written, cases won, second-chances arranged, and prayers and mentoring freely given.
Then there is the question of whether or not Dreher really hews as close to the thinking of the famous moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, whose groundbreaking 1981 book After Virtue proposed that the moral ideas issuing from Enlightenment liberalism had been corrupt and incoherent to begin with, and were always doomed to degenerate into emotivism. It was MacIntyre who wrote, in After Virtue, that the world must look to “another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict,” which inspired the title of the whole optional enterprise. Yet it isn’t clear that an apolitical retreat is precisely what MacIntyre had in mind; quite to the contrary, he seems to have envisioned a revitalized Christian engagement marked by a Christian consciousness of our disputes with liberalism.
Even so, critics have argued estimably against the apolitical inklings present in MacIntyre’s work. As scholar Thomas Osborne argued in a 2008 conference paper on “MacIntyre, Thomism and the Contemporary Common Good,” the establishment of small, local communities of virtuous Christians still leaves open pressing questions of justice and right. “If two fishing crews are in conflict, they should both submit to the authority of the judge. Otherwise, justice would belong to the more ruthless and stronger fishing crew,” Osborne notes. The same can be said of any bowling league, tiny missional community, or family. We have civil authorities vested with the power to use force precisely because small platoons of virtuous persons do not themselves a just order make, and failure to grapple with the question of how to order these small societies is glaring neglect.
Further, it isn’t clear why Dreher, who envies Medieval man’s eye for enchantment, would identify politics as a realm closed to grace. Father John Hughes, the late Dean of Chapel at Jesus College, Cambridge, and a brilliant Christian socialist wrote that “the dynamic tension between Church and state is a distinctively Christian achievement…Without religious concern for ultimate ends, we will become a society dominated by instrumental utilitarian ‘understanding’ rather than reason and its ideas.” Perhaps Dreher feels society has slid as far as it can in that direction, but I rather doubt it; the wise tend to note things can always get worse. And it is the duty of Christians qua Christians to oppose the erosion of liberalism into wanton, inhumane technocracy, even when it means setting out into risky waters.
Because I believe all of nature does point to God, just as the Medievals did, I can’t seal myself away from society. Society is part of our nature; politics is part of our nature. Entering the fray is fraught just like walking into the surf is; you will be pulled and pushed and yet you know, because you love God, you will break above the waves with water in your eyes to see God’s glory bright as sunlight. His name is written on the wind. It’s inescapable. It’s inscribed into the hustle and jolt of democracy, if you look closely, and believe.
Pittsburgh is, politically speaking, an interesting place. It’s the only true major city in Appalachia, and, unlike many other major metro areas, it has been trending right for the past few decades. In 1988, the Pittsburgh metro area gave Michael Dukakis 60 percent of the two-party vote, and in 2016 it gave Hillary Clinton 47 percent. The 18th covers some of the red-trending parts of the area.
In its uncritical embrace of white normativity, the Benedict Option misses the opportunity to glean from the wisdom of marginalized people, especially African Americans. Absent from Dreher’s analysis is how Christian community might be formed in the midst of a culture wherein Christians never had power. This was, and in some senses continues to be, the reality for people of African descent in the United States. For centuries black people couldn’t build their own institutions—not schools, not banks, not businesses—the only option they had was the church.
The church in the African American community became a powerful symbol of perseverence amidst persecution. The black church represents the triumph of faith over fear. The black church dramatizes Christ’s words, “blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.” That is why physical church buildings so often became the targets of arson and bombings. By focusing on the church, racists tried to destroy the most important survival mechanism in the black community, and they used tactics much more existentially threatening than the possibility of losing tax-exempt status. But hate has not destroyed the black church. The black church is still here because the black church is part of the universal church that Christ is building and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.
