Editorial – February 2021

This month marks the first anniversary of the arrival of Covid-19 to Ireland. On February 29, 2020 the first case was reported in the Republic, a week after the first case was confirmed in Northern Ireland. While no champagne will be popped to celebrate this anniversary, we should not let it slip by without some reflection on its significance. Out of curiosity, I searched the principal stories reported by the Irish Times on the first day of February, March and April of 2020. On February 1, Covid-19 merits only a passing mention in the Asia-Pacific section of the paper, which informs us that: “Countries restrict travel from China as coronavirus spreads” while the main stories that day included the general election due to take place in Ireland the following week, and Brexit. On March 1 our one confirmed case from the previous day is reported on, but by April 1 the pandemic completely dominates the headlines. Covid-19 is everywhere, but nobody foresees that a lockdown would be in force almost a year later. Hindsight may be 20-20 vision, but foresight is certainly on the myopic side. Despite all the forecasting and modelling resources at our disposal, there are times in which we are blissfully unaware of what is coming around the next corner. And this is as true in February 2021 as it was in February 2020. 

More or less the same point was made by Pope Francis during the extraordinary Urbi et Orbi blessing in St Peter’s Square on that dark, wet evening in late March last year. It might be timely for us to recall the Holy Father’s commentary on St Mark’s description of the storm on the Sea of Galilee which threatened to sink the little boat tossed about on the waves. Pope Francis drew a parallel with our situation at the outset of the pandemic: 

The storm exposes our vulnerability and uncovers those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and priorities. It shows us how we have allowed to become dull and feeble the very things that nourish, sustain and strengthen our lives and our communities. The tempest lays bare all our pre-packaged ideas and forgetfulness of what nourishes our people’s souls; all those attempts that anaesthetize us with ways of thinking and acting that supposedly “save” us, but instead prove incapable of putting us in touch with our roots and keeping alive the memory of those who have gone before us. We deprive ourselves of the antibodies we need to confront adversity.

This is a lesson worth remembering. It is not man who is the Lord of history but Jesus Christ. We can never know for certain when looking at the events unfolding around us which ones are truly important and which are ephemeral. Who, bar a few very prescient epidemiologists perhaps, could foresee the importance of that small Asia-Pacific section story in the Irish Times of February 1, 2020. Our general election, and even Brexit, pales in comparison beside the world wide pandemic which was brewing in China. Only with a year’s hindsight are we able to state that categorically. 

The opening days of 2021 began with a fresh storm: the “storming of the Capitol” in Washington, soon followed here in Ireland with the storm around the publication of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Final Report. Both events were marked – as we have come to consider as normal – with media (including social-media) firestorms. But such significant events require a calm consideration that is not helped by firestorms. The January events on Capitol Hill should serve as a cautionary tale: how easily politicians – even ones who have supported many good causes as Trump certainly did – can inflame a crowd and turn it into a wild mob. Similarly, the Mother and Baby Homes Report requires careful reflection here in Ireland. But nothing was gained by knee-jerk criticisms of the Report for failing to lay all the blame for its bleak findings at the feet of the Catholic Church. One thing was very clear – nobody commenting on the Report in the days following its publication had read the 2,865 page document, unless they had received a leaked copy previously. 

Calm and profound consideration of the issues of the day is what we are trying to promote in Position Papers with our increased emphasis on book reviews. I came across something in a book which will be reviewed in the March Position Papers (Benedict XVI: A Life by Peter Seewald) which confirmed for me the danger of overly simplistic thinking. Seewald describes the profound influence of the great French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac on Joseph Ratzinger’s intellectual development. De Lubac considered that heresies often stemmed from a tendency to over-simplify the great paradoxes of our Faith: e.g. that people are free but can do nothing without grace, that the Church is a visible community but also invisible, that Mary is both virgin and mother, that Christ is both wholly God and wholly man, etc. The problem identified by de Lubac is that the human mind tries “to resolve the polarity in the paradoxical statements by means of a one-sided simplification. That was the background to every heresy, namely a reduction of the complex form of the mystery into something easier for humans to grasp” (p.236). The typical thinking of the great heresiarchs has been to try to reduce very complex questions (indeed mysteries) to simple “either … or” solutions (whereas the preference of the orthodox faithful has always been for “both … and” solutions). The heretic’s fatal flaw lies in the refusal to engage with the complexity of the questions at hand, and to keep in tension the two poles of the issue at hand (grace and nature, divinity and humanity, maternity and virginity, etc.) What applies in theological questions has a counterpart in social and political questions. As I heard someone say recently, the history of the intellectual growth of Western civilisation is a history of “tension”, meaning the ability to work to find an adequate balance between the tensions that will inevitably be at work in a society of human beings: freedom and control, creativity and conservation, individuals and society, etc. Exploring both poles of the tension is much more difficult than a simplistic lumping for one extreme or the other – in this the terrible ideologues of the twentieth century have something of the heretic about them: they delight in destroying the delicate tension between both sides of the equation. This is something we Catholics must bear in mind, especially in an age which reduces complex questions to a tweet on Twitter or a short bombastic video on Facebook. We must not allow ourselves to be drawn into echo chambers on social media which make dubious ideas look self-evident because “everyone” is of the same opinion. 

Very few socio-political questions admit of simple answers (let alone dogmatic ones for dogma, as St Josemaría Escrivá used to remind people, belongs solely in the religious domain). Here Catholics should be true to our “both… and” intellectual tradition, and avoid the radicalism of the simplistic “either … or”. “Both … and” requires more work, and probably more humility too. We cannot, in words ascribed to St Teresa of Avila, “canonise our thoughts in our minds”. In other words we cannot be so opinionated as to think that we have dominated (with precious little study) complex political or social questions. If only life were so simple!

Here a pearl of wisdom from Pope Benedict XVI might help. In Seewald’s biography Benedict XVI: A Life which I mentioned above, the Irish theologian and one-time student of Ratzinger, Fr Vincent Twomey, gives as a key to Ratzinger’s character and to his theology “his acceptance of the fact that everything that people did was imperfect. All knowledge was limited, however brilliant and well-read you might be. Ratzinger knew that only God was perfect” (p.301). I think this insight could help us all in the times when people’s opinions are often as intransigent as they are shallow. 

Two of the five books which we review this month look at the phenomenon of secularisation – a theme that is of particular relevance to us here in Ireland because of the fact that Ireland’s slide into secularism, while coming later than that of other Western countries, has been far more dramatic. I think that if we want to understand what is going on in the Western world, and in our country in particular, we need to have a deeper understanding of secularisation. It strikes me that secularisation is like an invisible, virulent and deadly virus which has swept through the West since the 1960s in particular. Covid-19 has nothing on it for the deep, tragic impact it has on the lives of individuals and whole societies.   

The two books related to secularism which we review this month come at it from very different angles: one sociological and the other philosophical. But both approaches are very helpful in their own ways. The sociological study – Ronald Inglehart’s soon to be released Religion’s Sudden Decline: What’s Causing it, and What Comes Next? – is reviewed by James Bradshaw. Inglehart argues for a correlation between wealth and social security on the one hand, and loss of religion on the other. The more philosophical approach comes in Anthony Esolen’s Sex and the Unreal City (which I review), in which the author looks at the loss of belief in God as the greatest existential crisis of our times. It is very sobering to read a blunt,  no-holes-barred account of modernity’s loss of God, and with it loss of reason –  essentially a descent into madness. Of course there is much more to be said about this matter, and we will return to review useful books on the question regularly. Next month for instance we look at the fascinating recent book by Stephen Bullivant: Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II. 

And I suppose one could look on Cardinal Pell’s Prison Journal (Vol. 1) as an example of the kind of things that happen when society loses God and sanity – holy men become scapegoats. Tim O’Sullivan reviews the first volume of a prison journal which will I’m sure take its place beside prison journals of other great princes of the Church such as Cardinal Josef Mindszenty’s harrowing Memoirs in which he recounts his seven years in Hungarian prisons under the post-war communist regime, and Cardinal Nguyễn Văn Thuận’s The Road of Hope describing thirteen years of imprisonment in communist Vietnamese prison camps (nine of them in solitary confinement). Sadly what is unique in Cardinal Pell’s case is that his imprisonment took place in the “free world”. 

On a happier note, Pat Hanratty’s review of Tyler Rowley’s Because of Our Fathers shows us one sure antidote to the spectre of secularisation: a faithful father. Statistics appear to show that the religiosity of a father plays a much greater role in the religiosity of the children than we might have imagined. In this book, twenty-three notable American Catholics (including Anthony Esolen whose own book we review in this issue) describe the impact of their own father’s Catholicism on theirs. 

Finally we include Francis Philips’ interesting review of the late Clive James’ Fire of Joy in which he discusses his favourite works of poetry. The Australian writer and critic Clive James had an incredible breath of knowledge of the arts, and if anyone’s list of favourite poems is worth taking seriously, it is his. 

Returning to that idea that we never really know what is coming around the corner, I should add a little proviso. While we never know what is coming around the corner, one thing we do know for sure is that God allows it – it forms part of his infinitely wise and loving plan. As a result we should not live in fear but in trusting anticipation of what the future holds in store for us.