We start this month’s issue of PP with a heartfelt In Passing column from Michael Kirke who, taking his cue from a recent New York Times article on the American experience of “powerlessness” reflects the sense of disenfranchisement which strikes him each morning, with a sense “of fear and loathing every morning as I make my way to work past the Irish parliament buildings”. Certainly he must speak for those Irishmen and women who are awake to last year’s Machivellian machinations which inveigled the electorate here to vote for same-sex marriage; the same machine is cranking up once more, this time to ensure we vote to repeal the constitutional protection of the unborn and so abandon their tiny lives to its mercy.
In her reflections on the Irish Easter Rising of 1916 Brenda McGann strikes a similar note and asks “how those men who sacrificed their lives would see the Republic of Ireland now and what they might have to say to our political leaders and us the populace who seem to have sold out on so much of what our ancestors held dear i.e. the Christian principles and convictions that sustained and informed them through the centuries.” Certainly our centenary commemoration of the Easter Rising should provide the nation with an opportunity for a kind of stock-taking: what have we Irish made of the national project which began on the steps of the GPO in April 1916?
Since almost the entire month of March falls within Lent, we are carrying two Lenten pieces this month: the first from Bishop Robert Barron who encourages us not to hide from the fact that in this life we engage in a battle – as Christ did in the wilderness – in combat with the personification of evil: the devil himself. We would he says, be foolish to neglect the weapons which Christ himself has given us to conquer in this fight: “Jesus has entrusted to his Church the means to apply this victory, the weapons, if you will, to win the spiritual warfare. These are the sacraments (especially the Eucharist and Confession), the Mass, the Bible, personal prayer, the rosary, etc.”
Rev. Eugene O’Neill provides us with our second piece on Lent, in which he looks at the Lenten season as a propitious time to see through the “consumer-driven myth” which promises happiness through possessions: “Now, none of us can escape that consumer-driven myth. It’s the consumer culture of which we are all part. But we are Christians, so we must name this lie, recognise its effects and critique its claims. It will not bring the true happiness and deeper peace which it purports to bear. And, as Christians, we can act in a way that cuts across this comfortable and addictive lie – the lie that really is our ‘temptation in the desert’.”
We also carry two articles related to the liturgy: in the first Philip Kosloski makes a very strong case for the place of Latin in the liturgy, showing how Latin helps to bring us into the mystery and transcendence of God in the Mass. The second piece relates to the place of silence in the liturgy; Cardinal Robert Sarah, the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments invites us to rediscover the asceticism of silence, for prayer in general and for the Mass in particular. He makes a wonderful case in favour of silence, drawing from scripture, the tradition of the Church and its liturgical guidelines.
Finally in our reviews we look at the recently translated book by Gabriele Kuby, The Global Sexual Revolution: the Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom and the film Spotlight. I have been looking forward to the arrival of the translation of Gabriele Kuby’s book; it is imperative for Catholics to be well-informed about the origins and nature of a perverse ideology which is set to dominate the twenty-first century: gender ideology. While many of us have long felt that we had reached saturation levels regarding clerical abuse scandals, it is important for us to be aware of the recent Hollywood production dealing with clerical sex-abuse in the diocese of Boston. This review looks frankly at the strengths and weaknesses of how Spotlight deals with such a sensitive theme.