One of the themes which pops up in several of our reviews this month is the importance of the intellectual dimension of the Faith. For example, in James Bradshaw review of Derek Scally’s chronicle of the decline of Catholicism in Ireland, The Best Catholics in the World: The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship, this theme is central. Scally reflects that his own Irish Catholic childhood had left him with the impression that “Catholicism was a mental prison to be endured.” The feather-weight religious education he’d received being well illustrated by his religion class books, complete with their ridiculous pictures of Jesus greeting spacemen. Only later in his adulthood did he discover that intellectual Catholicism had formed the vanguard of the resistance to Marxism in Poland, had inspired great writers like Flannery O’Connor, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene and produced world-class thinkers like Joseph Ratzinger. This leads Bradshaw – correctly in my view – to question the now well established narrative of Irish secularisation: that Ireland was devoutly Catholic right up until the scandals broke, at which point Irish Catholics abandoned the Church in their droves.
Anyone who grew up in the Ireland of the earlier decades, certainly back at least to the 70s and 80s, knows that the crisis was already stirring at that point. Nearly twenty years ago D. Vincent Twomey SVD, in his The End of Catholic Ireland? (Veritas, 2003), pointed out how the malaise of the Church here should properly be traced to the intellectually suffocating atmosphere which pre-dated the abuse scandals. This fact is crucial to a correct understanding of what went wrong in Ireland, but more importantly, to putting it right in the future. It appears to me that any attempt to revive the practice of the Faith here without taking into account experiences such as Scally describes are simply doomed to failure.
This theme appears again in Rev. Conor Donnelly’s review of Patrick Allitt’s Catholic Converts. The great English and American converts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were intellectuals; men and women like St. John Henry Newman, Arnold Lunn, Cornelia Connelly, Dorothy Day, Christopher Dawson and Evelyn Waugh. These converts were very much the match for their contemporary formidable opponents of religion in general and Catholicism in particular: the likes of Comte, Marx and Nietzsche. The intellectual self-confidence of these converts is admirably expressed in the words of the famous Canadian convert, Marshall McLuhan: “It seems obvious that we must confront the secular in its most confident manifestations and, with its own terms and postulates, to shock it into awareness of its confusion, its illiteracy, and the terrifying drift of its logic.” One of the missions that these converts set themselves was to try to pull their fellow cradle Catholics into a greater intellectual engagement with the world around them. This strikes me as no less important in our own country in the twenty-first century.
We also carry this month a review of the account of the remarkable conversion from Islam to Catholicism of Joseph Fadelle. His conversion started with his having to share a room in an army base with a Christian man, Massoud. Fadelle set out to convert Massoud to Islam, challenging him to read the Koran. Instead Fadelle found himself being the one challenged to read the Koran – though he read it each year during Ramadan – but now challenged to read it engaging his intelligence for once, something he was embarrassed to admit he’d never done. The sincere engagement of his intelligence was what lead him to Christianity.
Our concluding book review this month looks at the most recent book dealing with the Shroud: A Catholic Scientist Champions the Shroud of Turin by Gerard Verschuuren. I’ve always found it fascinating that the creation of the image on the cloth seems to have required something like an intense explosion of light. Ten years ago, Luigi Garlaschelli, a professor of chemistry at Pavia University who formed part of team tasked with examining the image on the Shroud of Turin, concluded that “… the image was formed by a burst of UV energy so intense it could only have been supernatural.”
This powerful but inexplicable light seems to be a very fitting emblem for the power of Christ throughout the course of history. Again and again this light appears to be extinguished, or in terminal fade out. The grim darkness of Stalin’s Soviet Union as described in Arthur Koestler’s 1940 classic Darkness at Noon and revisited this month by Michael Kirke is a case in point. Koestler portrays the apparent inescapability and invincibility of the horrors of the Soviet system from the viewpoint of one of its torture chambers. And yet now, eighty years later when the Soviet system is just the stuff of history books, and its gangster leaders are all now dust, Russian Christianity thrives. That brings to my mind the words of Christ during the Last Supper: “In the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer: I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33).
About the Author: Rev Gavan Jennings
Rev Gavan Jennings is a priest of the Opus Dei Prelature working in Dublin. He is editor of Position Papers.