Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children, one of his outpourings of black emotion painted on the walls of his Villa of a Deaf Man, is a heartbreaking reckoning with the march of time, power, and aging. A meditation on the lengths to which the mad gods – and following after them, humans seeking to imitate godlike power – will scapegoat and ravage the innocent to keep their demons at bay. Goya himself was furious with a filicidal Spain that was in the habit of sacrificing its sons to the whims of hapless and corrupt politicians, and his artistic response is devastating as he covers the interior of his dwelling with darkening ruminations.

The Greeks and Romans were always adept at sensing the limits and hidden costs to their desire for power. Hesiod writes of how the god Cronos – the Greek equivalent of the Roman Saturn – was warned that one of his children would overthrow him and chose to devour them even as they slipped from between their mothers legs covered with birth-dew: “These great Cronos swallowed as each came forth from the womb to his mother’s knees with this intent, that no other of the proud sons of Heaven should hold the kingly office amongst the deathless gods.”

See the cannibal god bent to his knees in a mockery of a father’s pious awe at nativity, his grasping corpse fingers clawing out to rend soft flesh. Hear the bones of his sons breaking on his teeth. Feel the wetness of the tears slipping from his horrified, enslaved eyes even as he continues time and again to press the flesh of his flesh to destruction. These regrets are the only reward for corrupt power, for the power itself long ago ceased to be a pleasure and took on the trappings of necessity. Empathize if you can, with the moral anguish that, even at his most compromised, the predator is convinced belongs to him alone. In all his anti-hero glory he is convinced that he is, in fact, the victim, that this is the cost of stability, civilization, and progress. It is a heavy burden he carries, heavier even than the weight of the stone that he has thrust down into his belly convinced it is his most recent progeny. It is a titanic nightmare of wounded power, the rawness of wanting more power, and the illusion of power in a god who is frightened of a child.

He vomits up the stone and his son returns to avenge his missing brothers.

There are a number of theories about what metaphor is most apt to explain the meaning of the painting – Spain’s interminable wars and political struggle, death, Goya’s worsening illnesses, his own relationship with his son. Here’s what I come back to, though. It’s about a father eating his son.

Musician Sufjan Stevens has a song called Saturn, in which he writes of Saturn bemoaning himself as a melancholy creature, a victim who is forced to, “consume the child that trails me.” The god’s quest for power has become an addiction and he has begun to imagine that he is the victim. Saturn makes an incision in the body of his son and holds it forth, saying, “Take this body, blood shed for you.

Fathers are meant to protect their sons. It’s the most natural instinct in the world. I can hardly believe that we must chastise segments of the clergy of the Catholic Church on this principle. A father does not leave bite marks on his children, and I imagine that the priest-predators know this. Perhaps they are sorry but are too inundated by the crippling addiction of sin to really care anymore, so their evil ever trails behind them like a shadow. They may say that they are conflicted in an attempt at a false penance. After all, they don’t want to be monsters.

But look, I don’t care. How is it possible that Saturn is still devouring his children?

The inhabitants of Canaan immolated their sons before Moloch. The Aztecs ripped the hearts out of the children of their enemies and built their cities on towers of skulls. Monarchs have frequently entombed their brothers and sisters into an early grave. Abortion clinics ease us into a carefree life of travel and a successful career path free of financial burdens.

We gaze upon Cronos as Goya paints him and we are horrified – but this is a nightmare that has become incarnate. It’s thinly disguised but we are living the actual, real-life reality of the most horrifying of myths. What Satan could only dream in his darkest fantasies we have appropriated as our dinner.

The Romans accused the early Christians of eating their children. Perhaps they were more prescient than we thought. Not that they actually understood Christianity, but they understood every other religion in the world quite well. They simply couldn’t believe there would be a difference, that Christianity would be about anything other than accessing the levers of power. In their minds, of course Christianity was involved in blood sacrifice and magical rituals because that’s what all the rituals they had ever known were about. How do we control the harvest? How do I force that stunning woman to fall in love with me? How do I influence those around me to my own advantage? This is the game. It is the sinew that scaffolds myth and cult. Goya does us the invaluable service of ripping away the flesh to reveal the bloody horror within.

Sufjan Stevens, wrung out from the personal cost of singing about the death of his mother during an earlier work, began to carry around his dog-eared book of Greek mythology. He noticed what others have noticed before him, that Cronos is an avatar of anti-Eucharist. This is what we’re left with when we empty religion of its defining virtue, the virtue by which we give God what we owe him with no thought of recompense. When the choice is made to use and abuse the Church as a means of consolidating power by manipulating the divine, we end up with spiritual fathers feasting on the flesh of their spiritual children.

The Church, however difficult it may be to believe right now, does have a true Father. As Gerard Manley Hopkins notes, the incarnate God pours his lifeblood like sweetness to our lenten lips, and although our scarce-sheathed bones are weary and bent, God shall strengthen and bring his children to fullness of stature.

Jesus Christ is everything that Cronos is not. He is sackcloth and ashes on the outside, smoldering with a sacrificial love on the inside – a true priest’s love. He is immolated and yet immortal. Broken open and yet ascended in clouds of angelic glory. He is bread. He is the food. We are the banquet-goers, but in this meal we do not meet as enemies vying for power but as lovers unfolding into each others souls.

 

As writers and artists, it may be many years before we find adequate words to express the grief and sorrow of all people of good will over the fresh wave of revelations about abuse and its cover-up in the Catholic Church. Yet as Catholics, we at Dappled Things recognize that it is impossible for us to remain silent in the face of these facts. At best, silence would neglect to do justice to the gifts God has given us. At worst, it would make us complicit in the failure to address crimes that have already been too long concealed.

In the practice of the art of writing, we have learned to value the telling of truth, even when — especially when — uncovering the full truth is not a simple matter. In an unwavering commitment to truth, the laity and clergy can model the honesty and transparency we hope to see from all levels of Church leadership, from Pope Francis and the College of Cardinals down to the local parish council. The pain of victims in this crisis has been unnecessarily made worse by a lack of honesty and transparency. Abusive obfuscation, like all other abuses, must end. It is time to seek the truth not in silence but in words: both the words that have already been spoken and the words that have yet to be heard.

Some of these words can be spoken by us. Some must be spoken by others. We join our brothers and sisters in Christ who have already called upon the bishops and cardinals in union with the Pope to cooperate with the full investigation of all allegations of abuse or indications of corruption. The truth must come to light, and we must welcome its revelation, no matter how painful. Those who have the knowledge of what has really happened have a duty to come forward in the name of truth. Those who have the care of souls bear this responsibility all the more heavily. Only in this way can there be full healing and reparation.

Let us never lose faith that the truth exists and can be discovered — not despite, but through, all the subjective and refracted accounts of experience. Let us have the patience to attend to these accounts, to sift through them, to hear all those whose voices must be heard, and in this way to let the full truth be known. Let it be known to the world, too, that the united, wounded, but still beautiful Body of Christ stands in total opposition to the abuses perpetrated by some of her members, even some of her leaders. We stand in opposition to the abuse of sexuality, in opposition to the abuse of power, and in opposition to the abuse of truth and of trust.

Catholic arts and letters are not meant merely to decorate the face of the Church. Our art may not and must not be a saccharine distraction from the stench of the “smoke of Satan” in the Church. Rather it will be, in the face of the ugliness and horror of sin, a song of the beauty and goodness of God: sung not in ignorance or denial of the reality of evil, but in defiance of evil’s desire to triumph over us, and in faith and hope that Christ’s victory over death is enough for us.

Words grounded in truth can both expose wounds and heal them. At Dappled Things, we welcome the Spirit of Truth into the words we write and speak. We call upon Him to work in us and through us, rededicating ourselves to His service. We pray that, on the other side of this storm, the Church may be purified and truer to her calling, that the souls of those whose faith is shaken may be comforted, and that there may be healing and justice. And we recommit ourselves to pursuing what our journal has always sought to provide: a place to find rest in beauty, to taste and see the goodness that so often seems distant or nonexistent in our world, and to answer the call to purify and restore Catholic culture from within.

Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross

September 14, 2018

Bernardo Aparicio
Founder & Publisher

Katherine Aparicio
Business Manager

Rosemary Callenberg
Associate Editor

Katy Carl
Editor in Chief

Kent Lasnoski
Associate Editor

Meredith McCann
Poetry Editor

Jonathan McDonald
Web Editor

Natalie Morrill
FIction Editor

Josh Nadeau
Associate Editor

Christopher Petter
Associate Editor

Meg Prom
Art Director

Michael Rennier
Associate Editor

Ellen Toner
Associate Editor

Karen Ullo
Managing Editor

Guest post by Geoffrey Smagacz.

I’m no Bertie Wooster when it comes to singing in the shower.  In fact I don’t sing, I mostly read poetry aloud, and I usually don’t shower; I bathe because the book would get wet.  The wall tiles in the bathroom make for theater-like surround sound.

I’ve read anthologies of sonnets, collected works of individual poets like Robert Herrick or Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson.   I’ve done Shakespeare in the tub.  For example, I did Macbeth in about 10 days.  Hamlet took longer.  Recently, I read Sophocles’s Antigone.

But I also do a few revivals, a couple of long poems that I read again and again: Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Keats’s On the Eve of St. Agnes, and one of my all-time favorite poems to read aloud, The Wreck of the Deutschland by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Reading Hopkins’s poem aloud is a revelation, and I’m convinced that it’s the only way that it should be read.  And being submersed up to your neck in water, upon reflection, adds to the understanding.  Not to be flippant, but Hopkins wrote the poem in memory of five Franciscan nuns who drowned in the wee hours of the morning of December 7, 1875.  They were passengers in a ship called the Deutschland that ran aground and broke up in a terrible storm at the mouth of the Thames River in England.

I tried to read the poem many times because I had to.  Right?  It’s his most famous, the pinnacle of his poetic achievement, the consummation of his sprung rhythm theories, the triumph of sound over sense.  And it’s a religious poem that even a secular could enjoy, bad things happening to good people, a theme that atheists use to deny the existence of God, and Christians ponder to understand the mystery of suffering.

My first introduction to Hopkins was in a college literature survey class.  I can’t remember why I chose the poem Spring and Fall or if it had been assigned, but my task was to read it aloud to the class, give a brief bio of the author and analyze it.

This was a secular college and I’d already disavowed my vaguely Christian upbringing and proclaimed myself an atheist.  Yet I learned that Hopkins had been a priest (which didn’t put me off), was a bit of an eccentric (like me) and was an original, developing his own unique metrical theories (much like Emily Dickinson, a poet I greatly admired).

And to top it off, reading Spring and Fall is a blast.  It’s lilting and lovely and sad and musical. It begs to be read aloud.  This poem led me to read some of his others, particularly his rule-breaking sonnets.

Spring and Fall

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

The next time I heard the name of Hopkins, I was watching an episode of The Waltons when John Boy reads The Windhover to his mother on her birthday.  I was glued to the TV set every Thursday (I know that dates me), so John Boy’s reading of it gave Hopkins for me some extra cache.

In retrospect I think John Boy should have been reading this to his girlfriend and not to his mother but that’s a different essay.  I also have to note that I had an Oldsmobile Achieva and I couldn’t say the name of that car without thinking, “the achieve of, the mastery of the thing,” despite the fact that it could barely make it up a hill at 30 miles an hour.

The Windhover

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
   dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
   Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
   As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
   Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
   Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

   No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
   Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

My first encounter with The Wreck of the Deutschland occurred in a modern poetry class.  I couldn’t penetrate it.  I tried, believe me.  It bored me to tears, until the day I broke it open in the tub.  I read it aloud and thoroughly enjoyed reading it.  It sings.  There’s so much sound, so much melody, words sliding into other words, alliterations, internal rhymes and strong rhythms.  And that’s how I took it at first, and maybe that’s where Hopkins wanted me to take it, where he excels or impresses or has influenced modern poetry.  In the delicate balance of sound and sense, Hopkins heavily tilted to sound.  But wow, the achieve of!  I’d finally read it from start to finish, and I enjoyed it, too.

And I read it aloud again and again over the years before, during and after my conversion to Catholicism, and one day it struck me.  In the same way that this ship gets stuck on the shoal and breaks apart in a gale-force storm and people begin to drown one by one, I too was drowning in a sea of words.  That’s it!  Hopkins wanted me to drown, to become overwhelmed.  When you read that poem, particularly the last half, it’s difficult to find a literal reality to cling to.  But every now and again, you’ll bubble up to the surface and see the “jay-blue heavens appearing” or the “moth-soft Milky Way.”  But then back down you’ll go, into the raging sea, and as you are ready to give up the ghost – as those five nuns and others did that night – Hopkins asks you to contemplate ultimate things, God, suffering and the Cross.

Wiseblood Books published a short collection of Geoffrey’s fiction, A Waste of Shame and Other Sad Tales of the Appalachian Foothills in 2013. The book won the 2014 Independent Publisher gold medal for Mid-Atlantic Best Regional Fiction. It was a nominee for the 2014 Book-of-the-Year fiction award from the Appalachian Writers Association. The first chapter of the novella was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize. Many of the stories and two of the chapters had been previously published in literary magazines. Geoffrey’s rhymed and metered poetry has also been published in various literary magazines and e-zines, particularly in Dappled Things.

The editors of Dappled Things are happy to announce that submissions for this year’s J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction are now open. Named after one of the greatest writers of the 20th century Catholic literary renaissance–often called a writer’s writer–the contest aims to honor his legacy by awarding stories that, like the priests he wrote about in his fiction, have “one foot in this world and one in the next.” The contest awards prizes of $500 to the winner, $250 to its runner up, and publication for any additional honorable mentions at the discretion of the editors. Submissions will close on November 30, 2018.

Send us your very best short stories here.

You can read the winners of our 2018 contest in our Pentecost 2018 issue.

It’s been a hard few weeks, you guys. I admit that I was a bit on edge last time I wrote. I’m still weary but a bit more calm. At least I was, until I saw this:

Backlash has been intense.

My first reaction was to write up a rough draft of all my feelings and thoughts. I then trashed it because it was just too much. I toned this draft down quite a bit, and I hope it isn’t too biting, but apologies ahead of time because I’m truly dismayed.

Not to draw an equivalence between a sexual scandal that has spanned decades and a matter of aesthetics, but this is also in its own way very important. It isn’t simply ugly vestments and hey that’s too bad but what can you do the Mass is still valid. This concerns the overall degradation of the sanctity and reverence of the Mass. This is like a thief who steals a pearl of great price and buries it in a field, leaving the faithful in the position of having been robbed by the shepherds who were supposed to be guarding them.

There are many Catholics who think this is no big deal. The vestments are creative and innovative and modern. First of all, they are not modern. They clearly arose from the ghost of 1970s past. And second, it is a big deal. Each time a priest is sloppy with the Mass, each time he steps out in public not in clerics, each time an ugly, convenient, “relatable”, conformist, lowest-common-denominator vestment sees the light of day, it is a grand statement that God is not transcendent. A priest at Mass is not meant to put his own personality and philosophical commitments on display. He is meant to subsume himself into the great high-priesthood of Christ and into that great collection of priests with whom he shares an intimate brotherhood by the fact that all are conformed together to the image of Christ. The priest, as an individual person, is not so important to the Mass – Any priest will do – As such, his vestments ought not call attention to himself. The look-at-me design of these vestments is boorish.

Afflict the faithful with ugliness and they will make the connection that God is ugly. That is, once they stop laughing.

This has to stop.

Ugliness is ugliness and this particular ugliness came about in unison with the overall collapse of the Church in the west. Empty seminaries and pews go hand in hand with the forced importation of banal elements to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. There is currently an entire generation who feel they have been robbed of the treasures of the Church and Christendom, who are desperate for authenticity and beauty where ever they can find it.

The faithful desire to march down the city street in procession with the Blessed Sacrament, waving incense and following priests in cope and biretta while triumphantly singing the Salve Regina. I have seen it. Why are we doing the opposite and starving them of their divinely guaranteed heritage? Why are we hiding Christ in the ugliest garment we can find?

Our art says a lot about us. And these vestments say that we are a Church in the midst of a massive crisis.

There are no visible Christian symbols whatsoever.

They are cheap.

They are undignified.

They are unacceptable as a design even for a doormat.

They are unacceptable for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

[Here I had to delete a hilarious but way too sarcastic and uncharitable play in one act that I wrote. Feel free to fill in]

Seriously, though, apologies I’m so worked up about this. I simply don’t know how to respond in a way that is both honest and constructively positive. Perhaps that’s a fault in me. Perhaps we’ve all had a difficult few weeks. This gets personal for me because I have seen good, faithful, holy priests draw severe disapproval from parishioners who have been malformed to think that cheap vestments are ideal and that dignified vestments are a sign of rigidity and pre-Vatican II monsters. Priests are sometimes told by parishioners to take off their cassock because it’s offensive. I’ve seen their vocations take serious damage and their ministries hampered. This isn’t right. I’ve known priests who have had to spend thousands of their own dollars to donate vestments to the parish because there was nothing of any quality in the sacristy.

I’ve been blessed enough to serve as a priest in a pretty great archdiocese and we don’t have to deal with this nonsense in any systemic way. Our Cathedral worship is dignified and our seminarians are receiving excellent formation, but even so, this issue affects us, because it forces us to have to reckon with the news that our parishioners are seeing and constantly justify the traditions of the Church. We are being forced to fight for a Catholic culture instead of being supported by that culture.

My only answer is to encourage our readers to support your priest. Pray for him. Offer him positive feedback about how the beauty of the Mass helps you pray better. Tell him how grateful you are when he dresses like a priest. The Church is strong, and her beauty cannot be effaced. Even if you are angry, remember that righteous anger is born of hope, and the hope that Jesus Christ offers us will not disappoint.

We’ll get through this together.

Guest post by Gayle Neusch.

Recently, the opportunity to travel to the Holy Land on a pilgrimage came to us through an anonymous benefactor working with our parish priest. Before the trip we met with “Bill,” who actually came with us to the Holy Land. Although I was unaware of it at the time, another gift that would change my life awaited me there.

On one of the first days of the pilgrimage we had mass at the Church of the Visitation in Ain Karem. Mary and Joseph traveled here to visit with Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth, and it is here that Mary proclaimed her “Magnificat.” Before mass started, a young man and his father walked into the church. The father asked Father Peter if his son, who had Down Syndrome, could be an altar server. During the Mass, I watched this young boy, his face so sweet and open. After mass the father asked if his son could play the viola for us. Still dressed in his cassock, the young man faced the altar. He placed the bow on the strings of the viola and a calm, a pure, “Ave Maria” filled the air. When he finished, he slowly raised his hand with the bow in it and pointed upward toward the heavens, and I thought, what a lovely tribute to Mary. The boy’s name was Emmanuel. Unknown to me at the time, I had just seen an angel pointing me toward Mary.

We made our way to the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem, one of the holiest shrines in Christendom. Just inside the entrance of this Church lies the Stone of Unction, the rock where Jesus was prepared for burial. Before going to Mass, we approached the dry stone and placed our hands upon it and prayed. After Mass, I placed my hands once again on the stone, and it was wet. I brought my hands to my face, and the light scent of myrrh rose from my palms. I felt as if my Lord was passing by, leading me somewhere.

I’d been searching for Mary for many years. In my youth, a priest had abused me. After the abuse, I’d go out to the statue of Mary, enclosed in a fenced grotto in the schoolyard and pray to her, to ask Jesus to make the abuse stop. But each day it continued. Eventually, in my child’s mind, I felt Mary wasn’t listening, and my relationship with her ended. But now, without knowing it, I was on the road to find her.

On the last day in Bethany, we visited the last church on our pilgrimage, the Church of St. Lazarus. Inside, bright lights shined down on the altar in front, casting shadows on the sides of the church. Painted on the rounded wall above the altar were the figures of Mary and Martha pleading with Jesus. I walked further in and sat down in a pew on the last row. Over in the shadows to the right of me, out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the silhouette of a man dressed in blue clothing. He’d knelt down on one knee, placed his left hand over his heart, and bowed his head, looking almost like a knight taking a knee out of respect and love in front of his Lady. I turned my head to get a better look. As my eyes adjusted to the shadows, I saw it was actually Bill kneeling and praying before that altar. The altar had a white cloth trimmed in the same deep winter blue I had noticed Bill wearing. In the center of the altar, a fresh arrangement of flowers with large waxed green leaves, framed a pink rose in perfect bloom. Behind the plant, on top of the altar attached to the original walls of the church, was a large glass case. Inside the case I saw the Mary I had been seeking for many years, the actual face of Mary sculpted in the lines of that five-foot tall statue.

Mary, simple but exquisite, looked as if the person who created her had as his model an ordinary woman just like me. Over her hands clasped together in prayer were more that fifty rosaries draped over them. I felt drawn to her as tears streamed down my face. In a land so far away from my own home, I found the Mother of my Lord. Just as Lazarus was coming back to life for Mary and Martha in the painting above this altar, the Blessed Mother had come back to life for me.

Through Bill, my quiet and prayerful knight, on the last day of our trip in the very last church we visited, Mary came to me. This gift I will cherish for the rest of my life. God, Jesus, and an angel had been leading me to our Blessed Mother. But Bill, through his love of this special Lady, showed her to me. I finally saw the face of Mary who was a mother like me, a wife like me, and a woman like me.

Gayle Neusch is a writer living and working in the Texas Panhandle. This essay is written in memory of Dr. Mary Vanek, her mentor, editor, and dearest friend. Her husband is in the Deacon Formation class of 2020.

[The elephant in the room] is making me sick. He’s also making me anxious. My newsfeed is flooded with Catholic fury. Very well-placed, extremely justified Catholic fury. The hierarchy may be imploding. I don’t know. I don’t think so, but it seems that way. As a Catholic priest, I feel besieged and helpless. I can protest and write up a social media post or homily that says the obvious along with everyone else, that my heart is broken, that this places the vast majority of faithful priests in a gethsemane not of their own making, that we condemn [the elephant] in the harshest possible terms. Or I could be more courageous and explain that we have a deeper problem, one that goes back to the 1960s and affects every aspect of the Church. I could air my grievance that, because we are willfully blind to the evils of homosexuality, its nature, and the way it operates on the basis of dominance and power, that we will never figure this out no matter how many committees and procedures we put in place.

Here’s the thing, though. I don’t want to know anything about it. I don’t read about it. I don’t scour the grand-jury reports or prurient excerpts. I simply can’t. Because of this, I don’t have a whole lot of information by which to feel that a public cri de couer is a prudent idea.

The question in my mind, though, is what are my responsibilities here? As a writer who has the ability to publish widely, as a priest with a pulpit, do people deserve an accounting of the decades of the dirt and the darkness? After which I shall make a distinction between the failures of the human beings in the Church and the immaculate, spotless Church herself? And I will solemnly explain this after I tell them what really happened in the confines of this selfsame institution, that the blessed Mother has been played for a harlot? I will tell them this and expect that they will nod their heads in understanding and return the next day as sheep to a shepherd?

The Catholic blogosphere is an artificial bubble of high-information folk. The average parishioner knows very little about it. Or do they know more than I think? If they know nothing, is it best to let the evil whimper away while we do the greater work of preaching the virtues, exploring the beauty of written and visual arts, and attending to matters that are more local and more under our control? Sometimes the evil is best left alone, or at least left to courtrooms and referred to whatever community of laborers it is whose job is to craft extraordinarily heavy millstones. In other words, the problem may best be left to the world of law and justice to be dealt with quietly and, hopefully, effectively. To those who are ignorant, perhaps it is better than way. After all, innocence and uncomplicated faith are not to be taken away from another person lightly.

My fear is that just enough information has filtered through for us all to be cynical and angry. None is quite innocent enough because too many people have already spoken up and even people who don’t pay much attention are aware that something rotten is surfacing. Maybe that’s not a bad thing that they’re aware and we should be grateful for those who alert us to the fact that there is, indeed, a massive [elephant in the room] that is sucking the air out of the living Body of Christ.

The point is, I’m confused. Should I write about this? Should we write about this? I don’t know what can be added at this point, or if this is the material of great art or introspective musing about beauty and culture. I have lots of other stuff to say on much more interesting, positive topics. But maybe this simply needs to be dealt with.

I really have nothing to say, though, and that’s the problem. I can say I love the Church. That I gave up everything to enter her mantle and I will cling to her until my fingers melt into dust. That perhaps we might want to rethink the post-Vatican II compromises we’ve all been quietly living with concerning marriage, contraception, etc…wherein we don’t change the teachings themselves but go on to steadfastly ignore them. Perhaps the [elephant] has stomped the Mass into a shambles because that’s part of [the elephant’s] modus operandi because it is ugly and it likes ugly things. Is that helpful for me to say?

Is all of this compelling subject matter for our fiction, our non-fiction, our social commentary, would I want to read a poem about this? Is it even something that ought to come up in everyday conversation? I have a lot of other things I want to talk about, I don’t want to waste my breath on this.

But here we are. What should we do?

Did you ever watch a movie made from a favorite book and feel let down because the filmmakers left out all the things you liked about the story and fecklessly added and changed many other things? That’s what I felt last Spring after seeing the movie “Paul the Apostle of Christ,” which became available this summer on DVD.

The filmmakers left out all my favorite parts of some of my favorite books of the New Testament.

The Scriptural story about how St. Paul converted from a persecutor of Christians to a lover of Christ is riveting. So is the story of how he walked thousands of miles and suffered beatings and deprivations to spread the good news that was revealed to him by Christ, of the remarkable letters he wrote to the local churches he helped found, how he ended up in Rome by shrewdly claiming his rights as a Roman citizen after he was brought to trial in Jerusalem, up to what little we know of how he met his death as a martyr.

But the movie—not so riveting. If I could have left without disturbing the woman to my right in her recliner seat, I would have walked out soon after the movie started. I was surprised that the few reviews I had read beforehand were positive and spoke of the solid acting and production values.

I agree that the actors in the major roles (Jim Cavaziel—who played Christ in “Passion of the Christ”—as St. Luke, along with previously unknown-to-me actors James Faulkner as St. Paul, and so-called Gallic heart throb Olivier Martinez as Mauritius, the Roman commander of the prison) acted well, but the minor actors all seemed to take a second at the start of each scene to adjust their facial expressions to the feelings they were supposed to be portraying. There was nothing otherwise jarringly wrong about the production, except that the scenes and the costumes were a bit too prettily color-coordinated in soft pastel shades when they weren’t disturbingly dark and oddly blurred.

As Luke walks through Rome, and we see Christians “burning like candles” to light the streets by Nero’s order, I began to suspect that the filmmakers were not-so-subtly interjecting violence to emulate the shock value of the “Passion of the Christ” movie.

Some say you won’t be able to follow the story unless you know the Acts of the Apostles, which isn’t going to be a good thing for most viewers. But then, I know the Acts account well, and I couldn’t follow their story either.

The scriptwriters didn’t quote the Scriptures in any coherent way, even though they claim in interviews to have started with the Scriptures. Part of a sentence of dialogue from Paul will be an authentic quote, and the rest of the sentence will be made up. The next sentence doesn’t follow from the first, so the true doctrine of Christ doesn’t ever get spoken.

Based on one verse in one of St. Paul’s letters saying “only Luke is with me,” in the movie Luke comes to Rome to find Paul in prison. By prearrangement, Luke connects with a group of Catholics led by Priscilla and Aquila who are living together in hiding.

In the New Testament account, Paul met the couple Priscilla and Aquila in Corinth and lived with them and made tents with them, after they had been expelled by Claudius from Rome because Aquila was a Jew. Paul was never in Rome while the couple lived there.

The scriptwriters portray Luke writing the Acts of the Apostles while visiting Paul. For some reason Luke is allowed free access to Paul after he is found sneaking into the prison and brought to the prison commander, although the movie doesn’t believably portray the commander’s motivation.

One other much-stressed dramatic point is that the Catholics in hiding are undecided about whether to flee Rome to avoid the fate of many others who are being captured and sent to die in the Coliseum. Priscilla wants to stay because she is helping people.

This reduces Christianity to be kindness and social work. The Christians who are hiding out together resemble a group of well-meaning hippies. In reality, the early Christians would have taken care of each other but wouldn’t have had “helping people” as their main focus. The movie doesn’t show them worshiping together or remembering Christ’s death as He told us to remember Him in the Mass.

An especially irritating line in the last meeting between St. Paul and the Roman jailer was “Love is the only Way.” Maybe John Lennon and Yoko Ono were channeling St. Paul?

But seriously, applying simplistic motives to the heroes of our Faith is just not good enough. That is not the message of Christ. He told us He is the Way, and the Truth, and the Life, and that no one comes to the Father except through Him. And even more importantly, He told us, to show that you belong to Me, keep My commandments.

There is a lot of complexity to the Catholic faith, with mysteries such as Baptism, the ordained priesthood, the papacy, and the Eucharist, but our minds are only opened to understanding it all when we realize who Christ is and respond with love to what He did for us.  And what He, and St. Paul, did for us was to live in great poverty and humility, and to travel and teach and suffer and die to save us.

Which is not reducible to a simplistic slogan.

Mathew Walther has a great piece up at The Week about Evelyn Waugh fanatics. It’s worth a read in full, but here is how he identifies the Waughian Set.

The Waughian wears tweed jackets, often if not always ill fitting. He smokes a pipe or one of the expensive additive-free brands of cigarette. He drinks gin and, partly out of spite for craft-beer nerds, Miller Lite. He is a Catholic but has vaguely romantic feelings about English church architecture and says “Holy Ghost” instead of “Holy Spirit.” He insists that the Church has been in a crisis since the Second Vatican Council and the introduction of the new liturgy. He rides a bicycle, or at least owns one, and rails against the iniquities of the automobile. He loathes democracy and longs for the restoration of the Stuarts to the English throne. Insofar as he has any opinions about contemporary American politics he loathes the GOP and has a a tendency to romanticize marginal quixotic figures in the Democratic Party

The description is prescient, but I have a few slight, alternative proposals. Here are some thoughts towards helping you identify a Waugh Fanatic in the wild.

• Politically, I suspect they’ve now moved well beyond any American categories into vaguely Rerum Novarum influenced reveries. They wax nostalgic about feudalism, village commons, and throw around the word solidarity with reckless abandon.

• They’re obsessed with Leo XIII but probably have more in common with Leo X.

• 

  Stillman’s Metropolitan

  Whit Stillman is easily their favorite movie director and they may talk to you at length about Metropolitan. Be prepared for this. They eschew primary sources and will talk to you about whether Stillman’s view of Jane Austen is accurate but probably have not actually read an Austen novel.

• They drink gin, yes, but be particularly wary of the Waugh fanatics who are so far gone as to actually prepare and consume Pink Gin on a regular basis. This is not a beverage fit for human consumption outside of certain older gentlemen within the confines of the Yale Club who have built up their tolerance to it over many years.

• Seeing modern art sends them into convulsions and they immediately demand to be taken outside to sit in the garden for some fresh air and a cigarette.

• They do have a propensity for tweed, but fit is actually more important than the physical condition of the jacket. The jacket itself may very well be in tatters.

• They have a horror of modern technology and pretend that it is intolerable.

• They proudly put forth that they have no morals, but in reality adhere strictly to the dogmas of the Catholic Church.

• Jeremy Irons is their favorite actor, but David Niven is a close second.

What say you? What other marks are there by which may identify a Waugh Fanatic?