Ratzinger: Pray
Speaking at the close of the Jubilee for catechists in December, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger cautioned against expecting “immediate great success” in the “new evangelization,” observing “that is not God’s way.” The prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said that the goal of the new evangelization is personal conversion. That conversion means that the individual will examine his own life from the perspective of his relationship with God, rather than being guided by popular opinion. The natural consequence of personal conversion, he noted, will be “a search for a new way of life,” as well as action to benefit others. “A purely individual conversion does not have staying power,” he said.
At the same time, the cardinal said that it is a mistake to “reduce Christianity to morality,” and thus to slip into the error of thinking that catechesis consists only in encouraging people to live a moral life. Christian life is not a question of morality alone; it is a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ.
Cardinal Ratzinger also said that Catholic liturgical practices today are sometimes “too rationalistic” and discourage the sense of mystery that should help believers intensify their personal prayer. This approach to liturgy, he said, is “an error that is not only theological but also pastoral and psychological. . . . Especially in today’s world, we need silence, mystery, and beauty that takes the individual beyond himself.”
Cardinal Ratzinger concluded his remarks by saying that catechists—and, he might have added, apologists—should have an “intense prayer life.” That, he said, is the basis for every successful campaign of evangelization, which even the power of modern means of communication cannot replace.
—Rosalind Moss
A New Dawn for Mexico?
Vicente Fox, Mexico’s first president elected in seventy years from outside the former ruling PRI party, began his new administration with a visit to Mexico City’s Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Fox spent several minutes in prayer at the altar.
It was an act that would have been unthinkable for almost a hundred years. Every Mexican president since the nineteenth century has shunned public religious displays, a result of anti-clerical and anti-Catholic prejudices and laws that have only recently been relaxed. Fox’s own political party, PAN, began seventy years ago as a pro-Church movement in reaction to the repression.
Fox, who is strongly pro-life, as his first act of government sent to Congress an Indian rights bill drafted in peace talks with Zapatista rebels in the southern state of Chiapas. His predecessor had rejected the legislation. Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos had wary hope for Fox, writing in a communique, “The nightmare ends today. Another could follow, or it could be a new dawn.”
Fox answered him in a speech, assuring him, “Today a new dawn begins for Chiapas.” And, one might pray, for all of Mexico.
—Brian Kelleher
Worth Leaving Behind
Left Behind: The Movie, based on the best-selling books by Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, is hitting theaters this month after being released on video last November. Boasting a budget of $17 million and former Growing Pains star Kirk Cameron in the leading role, Left Behind is moviemaking of the most mediocre sort. It packs all the suspense of unwrapping a candy bar. The stilted dialogue and wooden acting are straight from a daytime soap opera.
The movie’s purpose is to propagate belief in the so-called “Rapture”—the secret snatching away of “true believers” prior to seven years of Tribulation (see “No Rapture For Rome,” November 2000). It is a view of “Bible prophecy” contrary to both Catholic doctrine and—as this movie proves—to common sense.
Cameron plays Buck Williams, a prominent television reporter who possesses the power to walk into any situation and immediately be embraced as a long-lost friend. In the course of the movie’s first ten minutes, Williams covers a top story in an Israeli wheat field, dodges bombs from a Star Wars–size flotilla of fighter planes, waltzes into a secret Israeli military command bunker, meets a mysterious Old Testament–style prophet—and manages to capture it all on camera with the ease of a schoolgirl chewing bubble gum.
The incoherent plot has Williams trying to discover why millions of people have vanished worldwide. To accomplish this, he wanders in and out of confidential U.N. meetings and the homes of ordinary folks with a casualness that stretches credulity beyond repair.
Lousy writing and casting aside, the main problems with Left Behind: The Movie—indeed, with the whole Left Behind industry of books, T-shirts, and “prophecy Bibles”––is paranoia and bad theology. Not content to focus on a single evil institution, a whole host of “one-world” architects are selected: the CIA, the Massad, the NSA, and the U.N. Meanwhile, the Rapture, a two-hundred-year-young fabrication based on pseudo-exegesis and a third-rate ecclesiology, is the engine that propels this vehicle, fueled by fear of massive conspiracies and of life in general in the twenty-first century.
The makers of the film boast that “[n]ot since the Bible itself has a collection of books sparked such great interest as the Left Behind Book Series. . . . [W]e want to bring this dynamic and dramatic story to the big screen on a level never before achieved for a Christian film” (from www.leftbehindfilmproject.com). Clearly they have failed.
If you’re tempted to watch Left Behind, do yourself a favor and instead rent a great movie like Ben Hur or A Man For All Seasons. Sure, they don’t have any explosions or reveal any Antichrists—but they do contain exceptional acting, fine writing, and artistic grace, qualities missing from the universe of this Rapture flick.
—Carl E. Olson
Saved by the Vatican
While the secular press readily reports on anti-Pope Pius XII theories, it ignores the overwhelming historical testimony as to his wisdom in taking the course he did vis-à-vis Nazism during World War II. The latest comes from a former German army officer who said that the concrete efforts by Pope Pius XII to save the lives of Jews from the Holocaust were more effective than any public condemnation of the Nazi regime would have been.
In an interview published last December by the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, the officer, Nikolaus Kunkel, observed that most of the Jews living in Rome during World War II escaped the Nazi death camps. Kunkel, who is now eighty years old, was working in Rome in 1943 as a lieutenant in the German occupation force. He recalls that in October 1943, the German troops received the order to round up the Jews of Rome. But of the eight thousand to nine thousand Jews living in the city at that time, only one thousand were actually arrested, he reported. Over seven thousand people took refuge in the Vatican where German soldiers were not free to pursue them.
If Pope Pius XII had made any public protest about the treatment of Jews, said Kunkel, it would have had disastrous consequences. Hitler would not have been moved by public pressure to change his policies, but he might have chosen to take new steps against the Church. In fact, Kunkel claimed the German army had been ordered to draw up plans for the forcible occupation of the Vatican and the arrest of Pope Pius XII. Those plans might have been carried out if the pontiff had issued any further public condemnation of the Nazis, he said.
The report on Kunkel was carried by the Catholic news agencies Zenit and Catholic World News but appeared in none of the so-called “mainstream” press.
—James Akin
The Reverend Picked a Bad Example
Only eight percent of Britain’s children associate Christmas with the story of the birth of Jesus, according to a new survey by the British media-buying agency MediaCom TMB. Almost seventy percent of eight- to sixteen-year-olds questioned said they associated the festive period primarily with presents. Next came family and school holidays. Religion only just beat television, which garnered seven percent of the vote.
The Rev. Jonathan Jennings, a spokesman for the Church of England, told The Guardian newspaper he thought the picture was much more positive than the survey suggested. “Our experience through school curriculum and community groups is that most children are aware of the Nativity story and the importance of that to the Christian faith,” he said. “The fact that a film like [Dr. Seuss’s] The Grinch [Who Stole Christmas] , with its important underlying counter-commercial message, is so successful indicates that children are more sophisticated than this survey suggests.”
Huh? Has the Rev. Jennings seen the Grinch movie? Okay, I haven’t either (and neither have my children—the 1960s cartoon of the story is just fine). But someone I trust, reviewer Steven D. Greydanus, has an online review in Seussian form (at www.decentfilms.com/reviews/grinch.html) that says in part:
“Who cares if I think the film doesn’t preserve
The quality of Seuss’s whimsy and verve?
Who cares if the Whos of this Whoville all say
That Christmas means presents and dizzy display?
Who cares if they think Christmas comes from a mall,
And their hearts—not the Grinch’s—are two sizes too small? . . .
“Now, let’s be quite honest. The real meaning and glory
Of Christmas was never the point of this story.
Dr. Seuss’s short tale never talked about why
There’s a song in the air or a star in the sky.
And the Chuck Jones cartoon had Whos gathered to sing,
But not of the manger that cradled a King.
“But one thing, at least, The Grinch always made clear
Was that money can never buy holiday cheer.
Now that message is buried in big showy show.
The medium’s the message, and it says: Dough! Dough! Dough!
The Grinch is big bucks! He’s bigger! He’s badder!
And once more we’re all being told: ‘Size does matter!’”
Greydanus’s entire review is worth reading. He gives the film a grade of D. And makes one think that Rev. Jennings’ example of hope is evidence of just the opposite.
—Tim Ryland
Truth, Justice, and the Vatican Way
In Italy late last year, newsstands carried a new comic book depicting a new kind of superhero: Pope John Paul II. The Vatican-approved serialized series depicts the real life of “Karol Wojtyla: Pope of the Third Millennium.”
The Little Paper, an illustrated magazine for Italian young people by the publisher of the Catholic magazine Famiglia Christiana, tells the story in four parts, opening with the Pontiff’s 1978 election. “Our commitment is rather grandiose, dear children: Telling the life of no one less than the Pope,” says the introduction to the first installment. “It is an adventurous life, full of change, of interest, of tragedy, of missions, of travel.”
The comic shows both the fun side of the Pope’s childhood—sledding with friends, acting, dancing—and the serious side, including the deaths of his mother when he was nine and his brother two years later. The story also includes moral lessons for children, pointing out that young Karol never felt the need to fit in by smoking, drinking, or staying out late.
The publishers said initial sales were strong, and they were considering versions in other languages. “We have to preach the Gospel to all the people . . . so we have to use all the media,” Vatican spokesman Father Ciro Benedettini said. “The comics are a good medium for the children.”
—Brian Kelleher
As My Father Once Said . . .
In his December 13 concession speech, former vice president Al Gore said, “As my father once said, ‘No matter how hard the loss, defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.’” Afterward, e-mail flew around the Internet pointing out that American poet Edwin Markham (1852–1940), around the year 1898, wrote, “Defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.”
A web search showed it was not the first time Gore had quoted these words from his father, Al Gore Sr., a U.S. senator from 1953 to 1971. In a profile of the former vice president dated May 2, 1999, and posted on Cox News’s web site (www.coxnews.com/2000/profiles/gore.html), Palm Beach Post reporter Paul Reid wrote, “In December [1998], Gore went home to bury his father. In his eulogy, he said: ‘The night he lost in 1970, he made me prouder still. He said defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out. Then he turned the old Southern segregationist slogan on its head and declared, “The truth shall rise again.”’” (Gore’s use of the word segregationist is inaccurate—the slogan was a Southern patriotic expression that had nothing to do with slavery.)
To give Gore credit, it appears that his father had quoted Markham to his son, who took the words to be his father’s own. But it’s a cautionary tale, for apologists and others, to check your sources lest you look disingenuous or—perhaps worse still—ignorant.
—Tim Ryland