EXCERPT:
The Oscars are coming, and as usual they provoke both banal celebrity-mongering and provocative public controversy. This year's controversy is discreetly hidden in plain sight in the nominations for "Best Picture in a Foreign Language." And beneath that controversy lurks a malicious misconception about the place of the Catholic Church in global society.
On January 23 New York Times "Awards Season Blog" ran a story headlined "French Fury Over Academy Short List" detailing public outrage that the Motion Picture Academy had failed to nominate France's "Of Gods And Men" while simultaneously selecting Algeria's (French-produced) "Outside The Law." Both films portray violent martyrdom in Algeria: The first is about Trappist monks beheaded by Islamic terrorists in 1996; the latter depicts the massacre of Algerian citizens by French colonial troops. The French are outraged that, while these films show two sides of France's history in Algeria, the Academy selected only one side -- the negative side -- and snubbed the other.
I have not seen "Outside The Law," but I know the director’s previous work; he might be considered France's Oliver Stone, a master of historical propaganda aimed at revising history (in his view, correcting its oversights). His earlier film about Muslim soldiers fighting for France in World War II (“Les Indigenes”) won wide praise, and I expect his new film’s comparison of anti-colonial Algerian terrorists to World War II resistance fighters is as powerful as it is provocative.
But I have seen of “Of Gods and Men," and I fervently recommend it to my readers. Its Oscars exclusion is both disappointing and curious: the film has already received the Grand Prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival and the "Best Foreign-Language Film" award by the National Board Of Review. The Oscars snub leaves one wondering if there is anti-religious bias at work.
This notion came to me when Stephen Erlanger (in a January 5 New York Times article) called "Of Gods And Men" "idyllic and bizarrely apolitical." Oddly, he did not mean that the film is neutral about the struggle between extremist Islam terrorists and Algeria's secular rulers. Nor is he referring to France's recent troubles, being targeted by terrorists for supporting Algeria's government. Instead by "apolitical" Erlanger means the film fails to pass judgment on the missionary role of the Catholic Church:
It [the film] seems strangely ignorant of the colonial implantation that the monastery represents, so many years after Algeria won its independence, and that a proselytizing Roman Catholicism itself represents. It is an odd obliviousness in a poor, divided country where jihad is on the rise as the political response of the very peasantry among whom the monks live so blissfully, and apparently blindly.
If Erlanger is right, we Catholics have a big problem. First, we belong to a Church which sprung from the Middle East but flourished especially in Mediterranean Europe (including North Africa and Spain before Islam arrived). Second, our Church does have strong historic links with European colonialism (in this case, French colonialism), since colonizers generally brought missionaries with them. Third, the Church has been accused (and often been guilty) of cultural imperialism, employing missionary zeal to impose Western European culture and a European faith. If this is still true, our presence may do more harm than good.
But Erlanger is not right. The truth is our missionary presence is different from our past...
What we do see in this remarkable film is something entirely different. We see a young girl asking a monk advice about her love life, and the monk offering empathetic and prudent council rooted in common sense rather than Catholic doctrine. We see the monks joining the villagers to celebrate a young boy’s coming of age, acting as full and joyful participants in an event that is African and Muslim, not European and Christian. We see monks sitting with local elders discussing the terror threat to the village, where they are clearly regarded as peers and neighbors, not as foreign intruders. We see monks who have made themselves at home with the local population, live in solidarity with them, and refuse to abandon them.
We see in short, no strings attached. No "proselytizing Catholicism" at all. If the terrorists see them as such a threat, it is because they (unlike the villagers) cling to an outmoded notion of the Church's presence in their land.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Monday, January 24, 2011
#316: Communities of Remembrance
EXCERPT:
We like to think that faith illumines life, but sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes a life experience teaches a lesson that illuminates the nature of our faith.
Just over two years ago I began searching for classmates for a reunion. I am not actually a "reunion person": I’d never been to a single high school, college, or grad school reunion despite annual invitations dating back to 1966.
But this was different. I was looking for the five dozen people who had spent their junior year of college with me in Paris.
Understand, we came from three dozen colleges from 20 states, we had never met before and we split up at year's end. Some classmates fell in love, some got married, some even stayed married, but our class only existed for about 10 months, with little back-story and even less aftermath. We had nothing else in common, before or since.
To this day I am not sure why I started my search. Partly, it was curiosity about the rest of people's lives. Partly I hoped I would get another chance to return to Paris. Mostly I wanted to find out how our time together was remembered by others.
I had long assumed my experience was unique. I had lived alone in a neighborhood far from other students; I had lacked the funds to travel with them or join them at restaurants, theater, or concerts. Much of the time I found myself "stuck in Paris”(!)--alone, cold, and more or less penniless. To survive I had to learn French faster than I had learned anything before, and sink roots in the city by cultivating any French person I could meet. Compared to my classmates, I spent less time sightseeing and traveling and more time hanging out with locals.
Over the years I tended to think that difference was a key to the impact that year had on my life. People will tell you that my obsession with all things Parisian (and most things French) is chronic and possibly incurable. The truth is I never got over the year, but I assumed the others had moved on, just as most tourists do once they return home and start thinking of new destinations. The others had stayed and studied for a year, but I had lived in Paris—I had made myself at home—and so I knew firsthand that Hemingway was right:
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
The others, I told myself, had been more like long-term tourists than short-term Parisians. Their time there, I assumed, could not have had the same lasting impact.
I was dead wrong.
As a result, my search became a series of surprises...
We were strangers before and after: all we had in common was Paris at the age of 20. But that is turned out to be enough, even after 40 years of separation, to turn us into something else.
We longtime strangers have been made a community by sharing our common need to remember. Despite our separate lives and varied histories, one shared moment from the past bonds us. And that sense of one-ness is palpable and real—we have become what I think of as a "community of remembrance."
The lesson in this: When you stop to think of it, is this not very much like what being Church means? Are we not also a “community of remembrance”? Is not our own solidarity rooted in a shared memory—the memory of a man whose disciples we are? Is not our central act a ritual where we gather to celebrate precisely because he said: “Do this in memory of me?
We like to think that faith illumines life, but sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes a life experience teaches a lesson that illuminates the nature of our faith.
Just over two years ago I began searching for classmates for a reunion. I am not actually a "reunion person": I’d never been to a single high school, college, or grad school reunion despite annual invitations dating back to 1966.
But this was different. I was looking for the five dozen people who had spent their junior year of college with me in Paris.
Understand, we came from three dozen colleges from 20 states, we had never met before and we split up at year's end. Some classmates fell in love, some got married, some even stayed married, but our class only existed for about 10 months, with little back-story and even less aftermath. We had nothing else in common, before or since.
To this day I am not sure why I started my search. Partly, it was curiosity about the rest of people's lives. Partly I hoped I would get another chance to return to Paris. Mostly I wanted to find out how our time together was remembered by others.
I had long assumed my experience was unique. I had lived alone in a neighborhood far from other students; I had lacked the funds to travel with them or join them at restaurants, theater, or concerts. Much of the time I found myself "stuck in Paris”(!)--alone, cold, and more or less penniless. To survive I had to learn French faster than I had learned anything before, and sink roots in the city by cultivating any French person I could meet. Compared to my classmates, I spent less time sightseeing and traveling and more time hanging out with locals.
Over the years I tended to think that difference was a key to the impact that year had on my life. People will tell you that my obsession with all things Parisian (and most things French) is chronic and possibly incurable. The truth is I never got over the year, but I assumed the others had moved on, just as most tourists do once they return home and start thinking of new destinations. The others had stayed and studied for a year, but I had lived in Paris—I had made myself at home—and so I knew firsthand that Hemingway was right:
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
The others, I told myself, had been more like long-term tourists than short-term Parisians. Their time there, I assumed, could not have had the same lasting impact.
I was dead wrong.
As a result, my search became a series of surprises...
We were strangers before and after: all we had in common was Paris at the age of 20. But that is turned out to be enough, even after 40 years of separation, to turn us into something else.
We longtime strangers have been made a community by sharing our common need to remember. Despite our separate lives and varied histories, one shared moment from the past bonds us. And that sense of one-ness is palpable and real—we have become what I think of as a "community of remembrance."
The lesson in this: When you stop to think of it, is this not very much like what being Church means? Are we not also a “community of remembrance”? Is not our own solidarity rooted in a shared memory—the memory of a man whose disciples we are? Is not our central act a ritual where we gather to celebrate precisely because he said: “Do this in memory of me?
Sunday, January 16, 2011
#315: What's Missing?
EXCERPT:
The Tucson tragedy has triggered a succession of supposedly sage commentaries concerning "cause and effect" in American life and politics. Was the shooter incited by the high-octane vitriol of contemporary political "discourse"? Was he enabled, by the ease of legal gun and ammunition sales in Arizona, to arm himself despite his record of instability? Was he merely and totally deranged?
Behind "cause and effect," of course, is the question of blame. Are easy guns to blame for what happened? Are talk show and cable TV propagandists to blame? Is Sarah Palin to blame? Are those who attack her to blame?
The answers depend, of course, on who gets asked. Gun-control advocates blame guns. People on the left blame vitriol on the right. Commentators on the right blame blamers on the left, saying vitriol has nothing to do with it and that only the criminal is to blame for his crime. And Palin ends up blaming the shooting’s Jewish victim for acting like an anti-Semite by committing "blood libel."
Barack Obama attempted to rise above the nastiness by calling for an end to the blame game and a new discourse that promotes healing rather than further wounds. But I fear that we Americans currently lack a fundamental ingredient necessary to make such a healing discourse possible. True, politicians may "scale back" their rhetoric in the wake of this tragedy, but that may mean simply that they avoid speaking their mind and heart until a decent interval has passed and some new controversy arrives.
Genuinely healing discourse -- the kind capable of uniting a deeply divided nation -- requires more than simply softening our rhetoric. It requires something that will enable us all to speak our minds and hearts without rancor, bitterness, or mean-spirited attacks on others. And that "something" seems to be missing.
This goes, I believe, to the notion of "civic virtues" -- the public values that anchor our life together as Americans. The Pledge of Allegiance promises a nation "with liberty and justice for all," but I get frustrated and even worried whenever Americans speak or act as though those two civic virtues are all we need. In fact, they may be precisely what divides us, with liberals calling for action to promote "social justice" while conservatives tout "individual freedom" as the absolute value. In such a climate, liberty and justice, left by themselves, end up pitted against one another.
What is missing here?
The Tucson tragedy has triggered a succession of supposedly sage commentaries concerning "cause and effect" in American life and politics. Was the shooter incited by the high-octane vitriol of contemporary political "discourse"? Was he enabled, by the ease of legal gun and ammunition sales in Arizona, to arm himself despite his record of instability? Was he merely and totally deranged?
Behind "cause and effect," of course, is the question of blame. Are easy guns to blame for what happened? Are talk show and cable TV propagandists to blame? Is Sarah Palin to blame? Are those who attack her to blame?
The answers depend, of course, on who gets asked. Gun-control advocates blame guns. People on the left blame vitriol on the right. Commentators on the right blame blamers on the left, saying vitriol has nothing to do with it and that only the criminal is to blame for his crime. And Palin ends up blaming the shooting’s Jewish victim for acting like an anti-Semite by committing "blood libel."
Barack Obama attempted to rise above the nastiness by calling for an end to the blame game and a new discourse that promotes healing rather than further wounds. But I fear that we Americans currently lack a fundamental ingredient necessary to make such a healing discourse possible. True, politicians may "scale back" their rhetoric in the wake of this tragedy, but that may mean simply that they avoid speaking their mind and heart until a decent interval has passed and some new controversy arrives.
Genuinely healing discourse -- the kind capable of uniting a deeply divided nation -- requires more than simply softening our rhetoric. It requires something that will enable us all to speak our minds and hearts without rancor, bitterness, or mean-spirited attacks on others. And that "something" seems to be missing.
This goes, I believe, to the notion of "civic virtues" -- the public values that anchor our life together as Americans. The Pledge of Allegiance promises a nation "with liberty and justice for all," but I get frustrated and even worried whenever Americans speak or act as though those two civic virtues are all we need. In fact, they may be precisely what divides us, with liberals calling for action to promote "social justice" while conservatives tout "individual freedom" as the absolute value. In such a climate, liberty and justice, left by themselves, end up pitted against one another.
What is missing here?
Saturday, January 8, 2011
#314: An “Encore!” for Renewal
EXCERPT:
The New Year 2011 marks the beginning of a new phase for my generation.
…That's because 2011 is the year when the first “Baby Boomers” (born between 1946 and 1964) turn 65. The “60s Generation” is in its 60s, and it figures that retirement, like everything else we touched, will never be the same.
…. Boomers were the largest generation in US history; now they will become the largest post-employment workforce ever: the population of retired Americans is expected to reach 66 million by 2025.
It's been called the "longevity revolution," the "third wave," and even "gerontocracy"--the idea that elder baby boomers will be the most powerful shapers of American life, and the first elder generation to dominate a society.
All of which makes me wonder: how is the Church affected by this?
Catholic baby boomers, after all, occupy a unique place in recent Church history. Their parents grew up, got married, and started families in a Catholic Church largely shaped by the immigrant experience, the Council of Trent, and the First Vatican Council. That Church spoke only Latin and commanded compliance to a complex set of strict rules and regulations; it offered sure advancement for those who entered seminaries and convents, but consigned everyone else to the passive roles “Pray, Pay, and Obey.” It enjoyed an abundance of clergy and religious communities and the massive support of its members, who took their passive role for granted in an age when Church was more about authority than faith and authority was the monopoly of the ordained.
Baby Boomers were born into that Church. All of them were baptized in Latin, and most boomers (those born 1946- 1958) received their First Holy Communion in Latin. But then the work of Vatican II (1962-1965) began to take hold, and the boomers came to maturity in a changing Church. By the time they settled down to marriage and family, the face of the Church--its liturgy, its sacraments, its devotional life, its public image, its relations with other religions and with the world at large--had all been transformed into something their grandparents could not have recognized and their parents often struggled to embrace.
Not all boomers embraced that transformed Church either, but most did, and they raised a new generation who (ironically, like their great-grandparents) knew no Church but the one they were born in.
This made the boomers the threshold generation, with one foot in pre-conciliar Catholicism and another in post-conciliar Catholicism. By default, they became the custodians of a Church renewal they never chose but only inherited. That custodianship was radically new in one major respect, compared to previous generations: there were never enough ordained boomers to do the job alone. So following through on renewal has eventually passed from a generation (the "greatest generation") of aging clergy and religious women and men to a new generation of laypeople.
And now those laypeople, the boomer custodians of renewal, are themselves feeling their age. It raises the question: what will happen now to the Church's ongoing renewal?
The New Year 2011 marks the beginning of a new phase for my generation.
…That's because 2011 is the year when the first “Baby Boomers” (born between 1946 and 1964) turn 65. The “60s Generation” is in its 60s, and it figures that retirement, like everything else we touched, will never be the same.
…. Boomers were the largest generation in US history; now they will become the largest post-employment workforce ever: the population of retired Americans is expected to reach 66 million by 2025.
It's been called the "longevity revolution," the "third wave," and even "gerontocracy"--the idea that elder baby boomers will be the most powerful shapers of American life, and the first elder generation to dominate a society.
All of which makes me wonder: how is the Church affected by this?
Catholic baby boomers, after all, occupy a unique place in recent Church history. Their parents grew up, got married, and started families in a Catholic Church largely shaped by the immigrant experience, the Council of Trent, and the First Vatican Council. That Church spoke only Latin and commanded compliance to a complex set of strict rules and regulations; it offered sure advancement for those who entered seminaries and convents, but consigned everyone else to the passive roles “Pray, Pay, and Obey.” It enjoyed an abundance of clergy and religious communities and the massive support of its members, who took their passive role for granted in an age when Church was more about authority than faith and authority was the monopoly of the ordained.
Baby Boomers were born into that Church. All of them were baptized in Latin, and most boomers (those born 1946- 1958) received their First Holy Communion in Latin. But then the work of Vatican II (1962-1965) began to take hold, and the boomers came to maturity in a changing Church. By the time they settled down to marriage and family, the face of the Church--its liturgy, its sacraments, its devotional life, its public image, its relations with other religions and with the world at large--had all been transformed into something their grandparents could not have recognized and their parents often struggled to embrace.
Not all boomers embraced that transformed Church either, but most did, and they raised a new generation who (ironically, like their great-grandparents) knew no Church but the one they were born in.
This made the boomers the threshold generation, with one foot in pre-conciliar Catholicism and another in post-conciliar Catholicism. By default, they became the custodians of a Church renewal they never chose but only inherited. That custodianship was radically new in one major respect, compared to previous generations: there were never enough ordained boomers to do the job alone. So following through on renewal has eventually passed from a generation (the "greatest generation") of aging clergy and religious women and men to a new generation of laypeople.
And now those laypeople, the boomer custodians of renewal, are themselves feeling their age. It raises the question: what will happen now to the Church's ongoing renewal?
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