Saturday, May 24, 2008

If God is Dead

If God is Dead, His ghost keeps reappearing in some very unexpected places. I was watching a repeat of an interview with the late lamented director Antony Minghella, who directed "The English Patient", "The talented Mr Ripley" and other notable movies. He sadly died recently and unexpectedly at the age of 54. In his conversation with Mark Lawson (an arts-oriented journalist for the BBC, the Guardian and various publications), Minghella mentioned his practice of examining his conscience every night before retiring to bed. This is the first time I have heard that phrase used in years - I can't remember the last time I heard it used in church. As far as I know, Minghella was not a believing or practising Catholic in adult life, despite his Italian ancestry. But he was a very intelligent and thoughtful man who obviously still appreciated the value of this discipline. As an ex-Catholic himself, Mark Lawson must have understood this disclosure far more deeply than the majority of the British audience.

In the fascinating French movie "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", the firmly non-religious editor of "Elle" magazine is catastrophically paralysed by a stroke. He is so comprehensively immobilised that he cannot even move his tongue or his lips and thus cannot speak. Theodore Dalrymple, who moved to France to escape the barbarities of modern England, commented that France is the least Catholic of Catholic countries. But the editor cannot escape the residual religious influences in his country. One of his dedicated therapists prays fervently for him and takes him to Mass in his wheelchair. She and the priest air the idea of taking him to Lourdes on pilgrimage, which sparks off his hilarious reminiscence of a trip to Lourdes with one of his mistresses when he was able bodied. They ended up in one of the gloriously tacky souvenir shops, which give tawdry garbage a bad name.

Having been to Lourdes many times, I have fond memories of such emporia, some of which are skillfully targetted at the English speaking pilgrims and especially the Irish, though any of them speak enough English to relieve you of your money. My particular favourite piece of junk was the plastic holy water bottle in the shape of the Madonna, with the screw cap on her crowned head. However, the editor's mistress takes a fancy to a much more expensive souvenir, a huge illuminated Madonna ("blessed by the Cardinal", as the shopkeeper advises her). The editor pays 1,899 francs (around $300) for this monstrosity to keep her happy and they haul it back to the hotel. (For me, this was an extra happy reminder of pre-Euro France). With this flashing statue glowing and dominating the bedroom, he is too embarrassed to have sex with his mistress and they split up shortly afterwards.

To be fair, there are a few shops in Lourdes where you can buy beautiful religious artifacts at very reasonable prices, but religious megastores such as "Palais du Rosaire" are on the most prominent sites and attract the most attention. It was such a surprise seeing Lourdes in this movie; I had seen the shrine depicted only in two earlier films, "The Song of Bernadette" (1943), starring Jennifer Jones, and "Bernadette" (1988), starring Sydney Penney. Mind you, the very reverent "Song of Bernadette" has a truly bizarre background. As the noted American Catholic writer E Michael Jones commented, here you had a novel by a Jewish Anarchist author on the run from the Nazis being turned into a movie in an astonishingly short timescale by Hollywood Babylon. Not to mention the later letdown when Saint Jennifer Jones married her divorced producer.

As I noted in an earlier post, most American and European movies are grotesquely evasive and unrealistic in their treatment of religious attitudes. Even in the face of crises such as terminal illness or a ferocious battle, the characters are seldom driven to prayer or deeper reflection on their circumstances. So "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" was a refreshing exception. Also it was truthful enough to portray both the editor's suicidal desperation and the pain caused by his callousness in leaving his partner and children for a younger mistress. The abandoned children still loved him and one daughter prayed desperately every night for his recovery, while his abandoned partner visited and helped him. The utter verbal confusion in family relations which I noted in my previous post surfaces here also. When the doctor tells the paralysed and mute editor that his wife wants to see him, his irritated voiceover declares: "She's not my wife, she's the mother of my children!" (The partner/wife is played by

Emmanuelle Seigner, better known as Mrs Roman Polanski, so it looked extra odd, to my eyes at least, that the actor playing the editor is the spitting image of Mr Polanski. It was also wonderful to see that even provincial French hospitals recruit only the most gorgeous girls as therapists!)

Winston Churchill commented in a speech in June 1941, just after Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union: "There are times when all pray". His reference was to the supposedly atheist Russian women desperately praying for the safety of their men at the front. Desperate circumstances encourage spiritual seeking. I saw the fascinating little play "Women of Lockerbie" at our local Progress Theatre recently. The little town of Lockerbie in south-west Scotland was an obscure backwater until the terrible night just before Christmas 1988 when Pan Am flight 103 exploded above it, killing 259 passengers and crew and 11 people in the town. This peaceful little town and its surrounding countryside were strewn with wreckage, bodies and bits of bodies. This very moving play was unusual in that its characters, both Scottish and American, pondered the impact of this horrible disaster on their faith and understanding of God and His presence in human affairs. Their comments were desperate questions rather than any illuminating insights, but it is not often you hear such matters aired in the modern theatre. It seemed particularly incongruous hearing it in a place like the Progress Theatre, which was founded in 1935. At that time "Progress", always a cant word, would have been synonymous with the advance of socialism and the worship of Stalin.

At the Lectio Divina group at my church, another parishioner reminded us of ancient Catholic symbolism of the scallop shell, the emblem of St James, patron of our parish. As a child, one of my teachers told us that medieval pilgrims on the long and dangerous journey to the shrine of St James at Compostela in Spain would wear such a shell. This badge was allegedly a signal to brigands and highwaymen to give them a break. A few miles north-west of Reading, there is the ancient Catholic estate of Mapledurham. Its fine house boasts at least one priest hole, used to conceal priests from the English Government agents who would have arrested and executed them. As Mapledurham is on the River Thames, many of the priests came and left by boat to minimise the risk of arrest on their journeys. If a priest was in residence at Mapledurham, three shells would be displayed in a window to discretely indicate that Mass could be heard there. And at Reading University you see this triple shell emblem everywhere as part of the University's shield; on the information leaflets, on the sides of University vehicles, on wall plaques. The University's website explains:

"The arms of the University of Reading were granted on 7 August 1896 when the newly incorporated University Extension College, Reading was still part of Oxford University. This was thirty years before it was granted a Royal charter and became a university in its own right. The simple and effective coat is one of only six armorial bearings adopted or granted by English universities before the turn of the 20th Century.

The three scallop shells on the upper part of the shield had been the arms of Reading Abbey founded in 1121 and their presence serves as a reminder that the first college was once part of the Abbey.

Since at least 1130, the scallop had been the special badge of the pilgrims to the shrine of St James the Greater at Santiago de Compostela in Spain. By the end of the 12th century it had also become the emblem of James the Apostle. Reading Abbey acquired as its principal relic, the hand of St James and a cult, complete with miracle stories, rapidly developed and eventually the scallop shells appeared on the Abbey’s coat of arms.

It is also possible that the scallop shells might allude to the arms of the local family, the Palmers. Walter Palmer, son of the co-founder of the Huntley and Palmers biscuit firm that came to Reading in the 1840s, was the first President of Reading University Extension College and the family has been and remain benefactors of the University today.

On the lower portion of the shield is the Lancaster Rose set on an engrailed cross (indented along the edge with small curves) and is derived from the arms of Christ Church Oxford, to whose initiative the Extension College owed its foundation. The arms of Christ Church were those of Cardinal Wolsey who in 1525 founded Cardinal College, later renamed as Christ Church by Henry VIII in 1546."

Reading University is hardly noteworthy as a hotbed of piety or Christian learning nowadays, but there are still very unexpected shoots of hope. Apart from the valiant Chaplaincy team, you have David Oderberg in the Philosophy Department who produces wonderful coherent arguments defending the sanctity of life against abortion and embryonic stem cell research. The British Parliament took scant regard of such arguments in their latest outrageous decisions to continue allowing abortion up to 24 weeks gestation and giving the green light to producing human/animal hybrids, but the power of reason and truth is mercifully independent of the power of venality, stupidity and fashion.

Sunday, May 11, 2008

The Need for Christian Families

St Mary's Butts is the unlikely name of one of the major streets in the centre of Reading. It is more like an elongated square than a traditional high street and has been a focus of religious and commercial life for centuries. The ancient church of St Mary dominates the east side. Parts of it date back over 1,000 years. Its welcoming vicar, Canon Brian Shenton, explains that the name has nothing to do with Our Lady's backside. The Butts were archery targets; the usage still survives in expressions such as "the butt of a joke". In the Middle Ages, when archery practice was compulsory as part of the defense of the realm, the men would come out of Sunday Mass and practice their marksmanship in the meadow in front of St Mary's. It is a very long time since there was a green meadow or archery targets in front of St Mary's. Nowadays the weapons are guns and the targets are real humans.

On Friday 2nd May I was travelling on a bus towards St Mary's Butts. Most of the bus routes in town go through the Butts. But then I heard the radio controller instructing all drivers to detour round the west side of the town centre. Sure enough the bus went straight on instead of swinging right into the Butts as normal. I hopped off at the next stop and walked back round the north side of the Butts. The northern half of the Butts was screened off by police tape with officers guarding the north and south tape barriers. I asked one officer what had happened and he politely replied "I'm afraid I cannot tell you, sir". So I made a detour round the exclusion zone to the open air market where I buy my fruit and vegetables. One of the stallholders told me that there had been a fatal stabbing in the early hours. Police forensics teams in full-length white plastic suits were combing the excluded area for evidence.

The local rumour machine was of course working overtime. One of my colleagues has a friend who works at the police station, which is only 300 yards from the murder scene. His friend had told him it was a fight between two drugs gangs and that at least one shot had been fired. From the point of view of the local newspapers it could hardly have happened at a worse time. The weekly Reading Chronicle appears on Thursday morning, so would have to wait 6 days to deliver its version. The Reading Post is printed daily from Monday to Friday, so a murder on Friday would normally have to wait until Monday's edition. But Monday 5th May was a public holiday, when the Post does not appear. So the story finally ran across the Post's front page on Tuesday 6th, by which time it was pretty stale news.

But the delay meant that there was plenty of time to get quotes from all and sundry. Behind the usual smokescreen of politically corrected verbiage, you could do your own translation into English. The 17 year old murder victim (Robert Spence) had left Ryeish Green, a local high school, in 2007. The school is due to close in 2010 after an undistinguished academic history. The head teacher made the usual futile appeal for "No more knives" and explained how the deceased had successfully studied several topics in the vocational courses offered at the school (i.e. he was not academically inclined). His 15 year old sister lamented his demise. No one was so cruel as to emphasis that her surname was different from his, a pretty good hint at a disordered family background. But the distortions of language which are routine in the British media made me even more suspicious of the accuracy of the report. Was she a full sister, a half sister, a stepsister, a foster sister, an adopted sister or something else?

The ideological falsification of language which the British press now employ beggars belief. The most monstrous recent example concerned Shannon Matthews, a little girl in Yorkshire who was apparently kidnapped, but recovered alive. All the media referred to her "stepfather". Er, no, he was not. This poor little girl was only one of 7 children her mother had conceived by 5 different fathers and the "stepfather" in question was merely the latest of her mother's numerous paramours. "Stepfather" used to be a title confirmed by matrimony and characterised by a long-term stable relationship and commitment to looking after the stepchildren. No one could accuse Shannon's mother of committing matrimony at any time in her life. But she is now in prison accused of perverting the course of justice and the stepfather/paramour is facing charges of downloading child pornography. A superb article in the Christian "Touchstone" magazine argued that sexual liberation for adults inevitably leads to the sexual abuse of children and this sordid case provided yet more evidence, if more were needed, to support that argument.

But back to our equally sordid Reading killing. The police made the usual futile appeal for witnesses. Seeing that the murder happened at 4am, the only witnesses in the town centre would most likely be criminals and/or stoned on drink and/or drugs. Even by British standards of drunken debauchery, ordinary revellers would have dispersed by 2am. The police would have been conspicuous by their absence, as they are most of the time, day or night. The local hoodlums plainly had no fear of having a showdown only 300 yards from local police HQ. To compound the confusion, not all the newspaper appeals for information contained the most relevant information - the time
of the stabbing. I could not help wondering if this vital piece of information was deliberately suppressed to avoid the impression that the victim might have been the author of his own misfortune. Not a single media report has yet hinted at the drug gang circumstances reported by the rumour machine. The way the Post presented the story made him look like a lovely innocent young lad who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, 4am is certainly the wrong time for a 17 year old in any place but his own home.

Inevitably a carpet of flowers appeared in a corner of St Mary's churchyard. In the ever declining strength of real religious belief and practice, it is one unifying ritual which all can join in. Any murder or accidental death in Britain now attracts such a carpet. It was obviously not on the insane scale of Princess Diana's floral tributes. In 1997 around $40 million was squandered on a gigantic pile of flowers outside her palace in London; these were soon reduced to a foetid garbage heap. After a day or two in the spring sunshine, the plastic-wrapped bouquets in St Mary's were already wilting and fading when I checked them out. (Link to movie of flower carpet in front of St. Mary's.)

Plainly the horrible murder of Mary Ann Leneghan in May 2005 has had no long term impact on the local drug scene's viciousness and general depravity. Her disgusting torture, gang rape and killing provoked a frenzy of police and media activity which made even local drugs barons cautious for a few weeks. Martin Salter, one of our local Members of Parliament, appeared on TV to urgently warn youngsters that it was not just drugs that are dangerous -the people trafficking them are even deadlier. Mary Ann was a high school dropout and the child of divorced parents. She was hardly a sweet innocent victim either; she peddled drugs on a small scale and a local gangster believed that she had set him up for a robbery. But the media circus moves on to other priorities and sensations; the drugs gangs can bide their time and move back in when the coast is clear.

The only worthwhile moral you can draw from this sad episode is the usual blindingly obvious one: the vital importance of a stable loving family background in producing happy productive human beings. Without the Christian formation and culture to sustain marriage, there is no hope for a substantial section of the British population. Without a powerful religious basis, traditional stable marriage is not viable for a large percentage of the population. So much of British culture and public policy might have been cleverly designed to destroy marriage as thoroughly as possible. The catastrophic background of Shannon Matthews is inexplicable without the cooperation of two huge factors: public subsidy for serial polygamy and polyandry via the social security system and the cultural assumption, trumpeted from the majority of media outlets, that sexual morality is the individual's own business, no matter how much misery it heaps up for other people in the form of sexual abuse, abandonment, poor academic performance and resulting vulnerability to criminal recruitment and an early squalid death.

------- A few hours later---------

Dear Stan,

Many thanks for posting and illustrating my article on our latest sordid murder. Another bizarre omission from local media reports was any mention of the dead boy's parents. Usually the first thing the reporters do is find the parent(s) and get a quote about what a lovely lad he was, etc, etc. If the parents are too prostrate with grief, an uncle or other adult relation (or at least an adult family friend) will make a statement. Yet, despite having ample time to track down the family, they quoted only the 15 year old sister (if that was her true status). Part of the problem is that categories such as "sister", "half-sister", "stepsister", etc all depend on a presumed background of stable marriage and orderly relationships. With the utter chaos in relations between the sexes, language itself is degraded into near meaninglessness. We almost need new coinages such as "para-sibling" or "para-father" to denote someone who is in some sort of semi-familial relationship.

I attach below the excellent article to which I referred in the last post. It is from the April 2002 issue of Touchstone Magazine (www.touchstonemag.com). I cannot recommend the website too highly; it has a huge back catalog of thought provoking articles which would keep you busy for months. As the articles are nearly all on issues of long-term importance, not transitory sensation, they provide a priceless resource for lectures on religious topics.

Link to the article Bill refers to:
Dare We Get Real About Sex?
“Pedophilia Chic” & the Challenge to Conservatism
by Carson Holloway