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October 2012

October 31

The cult of personality can come with blinders

October 31, 2012

Sir Jimmy Savile (1926-2011) was an institution, one of Britain’s most beloved celebrities. He began his career in British media in 1964 as a radio DJ with the BBC, then as a television personality. He was the star of a children’s TV show called Jim’ll Fix It, in which he made the dreams of children come true, and a presenter on Top of the Pops, which featured the performances of the most popular rock bands. My Scottish husband watched Jim’ll Fix It as a child. We watch reruns of Top of the Pops together. A self-described devout Catholic, Savile had a reputation for piety, charity and lovably zany behaviour. Kids and teenage girls flocked to him. He visited the sick and even had his own office at the famous, high-security psychiatric institution Broadmoor Hospital. He frequently visited a school for troubled girls and a childrens’ home. He was pals with princes, princesses and prime ministers. He raised £40 million for charities. He was knighted in 1990. When Savile died, a columnist in England’s Catholic Herald complained that the media accolades hadn’t mentioned that the nation’s treasure was a Catholic. They also neglected to mention that Savile was a sex abuser. There had been rumours at the BBC for decades that Savile was bedding underage girls, but the one time he was asked about them officially, he denied the allegations and the matter was dropped. Soon after his death, a team of BBC journalists followed up the rumours and interviewed people who claimed to have been molested by Savile in the 1960s and 1970s. Their boss shelved the documentary and the BBC ran a Boxing Day tribute to its late star. Rival station ITV broadcast its own expose on Savile’s alleged crimes last month. The UK is in an uproar, and watching the BBC report on itself is surreal. Only now are people asking why Savile had so much access to vulnerable young people in the BBC studios, on the road, in children’s homes, in special schools and in hospitals. Authorities are insisting that they didn’t know about the abuse. Fellow DJs are muttering that they knew, but they didn’t think they would be believed, or that sex with underage girls was part of the culture of the 1970s. And, amazingly, it turns out that Savile hinted in his own autobiographies of his sexual misdeeds. Joking about his lustfulness was part of his zany routine. Savile had been hiding in plain sight. People don’t want to believe that their heroes — people who make dreams come true, people who raise millions for charity, people who bring in the highest ratings, people who sell the most tickets — are capable of the sexual abuse of vulnerable people. But the sad fact is that some people who appear to be very good, who care very much about the sick and the young, use their personae as zany, funny, generous people to get access to vulnerable people. They wriggle their way into trusted institutions and use the reflected glory to attract victims. And in return, the trusted institutions do what they can to preserve their reputation — either ignore or deny a problem, or cover it up. What the Savile scandal illustrates, as did the Penn State scandal in the United States, is that sexual abuse and the reluctance of an institution to appropriately deal with the problem is not merely the problem of religious communities but of institutions in general. Institutions have to recognize that it is in the nature of an institution — whether it is a family, a university department, a television station, a national icon — to preserve itself at any cost. They must transform that nature so that it puts the good of vulnerable people first. It also illustrates that the trust people put in celebrities can be unwise and misplaced. We must resist being so beglamoured by someone’s celebrity or position in a community that we allow them to break rules or to behave in an eccentric way, when their eccentricities include being unkind or abusive to vulnerable people. We must not excuse the hurtful behaviour of friends with a sigh and “That’s just Jim.” Everyone is responsible for the protection of the vulnerable. And, finally, it illustrates that among the pious and devout are people who use their piety and devotion as a disguise or even to make deals with God. When decades ago someone asked Savile how he, a devout Catholic layman, could have sex with teenage girls, Savile said he had a deal with God. The deal was that because Jimmy did so much for charity, God would overlook his sexual behaviour. There is absolutely no excuse for a Catholic to think this way, and priests and schools are duty-bound to make sure we don’t.

Rewarding courage

October 31, 2012

The values Canadians most cherish include democracy, peace, equality and freedom. So if the purpose of awarding Diamond Jubilee Medals is to honour significant contributions to Canada, then Linda Gibbons and Mary Wagner have every right to wear their medals proudly. The pro-life crusaders are among 60,000 Canadians being honoured under a program to mark the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Their names were submitted by Saskatchewan MP Maurice Vellacott and approved by the Chancellery of Honours in the Governor General’s office. As Governor General David Johnston said last February in announcing the program, nominees were sought who “have dedicated themselves to the well-being of family, community and country.” By that definition, Wagner and Gibbons are worthy winners. Canada currently lacks both an abortion law of any kind and a mainstream political party willing to discuss drafting one even though polls show that most Canadians support some type of legislation. Gibbons and Wagner, despite court orders and injunctions against them, and despite much public vilification, have been relentless in their peaceful, prayerful protest against what Pope Benedict has called a crime against society. For this, both women have been repeatedly jailed. Gibbons has spent almost 10 of the past 20 years behind bars for maintaining her sidewalk vigils. Wagner has spent less time imprisoned but is currently jailed for trespassing after taking her cause inside a private clinic. The two women are serial dissenters and, due to their criminal convictions for what amounts to civil disobedience, their inclusion on the honours list was widely criticized. The objections, mainly from those intent on silencing pro-life voices, ignore the long and important history of civil disobedience and peaceful protest in Canada. Equality rights for racial and religious minorities, women and the disabled all have roots in peaceful protest. Gibbons and Wagner are pro-life crusaders first but they are also unwitting defenders of the fundamental Canadian rights of lawful assembly, peaceful protest and religious freedom. For that, they have been repeatedly imprisoned when their courage and resilience should warrant gratitude from not only pro-life advocates but from all Canadians. When someone like Gibbons asserts a democratic right to pray and protest peacefully for the unborn, and then is arrested for it, all of society should be indignant. Canadians are guaranteed the freedom of conscience and religion, and freedom of expression and peaceful assembly. When one person confronts authority to peaceably express those rights, regardless of their particular cause, they’re advancing a fundamental right important to all Canadians. Bravely, Gibbons and Wagner have been doing exactly that for years, and that’s why they’ve earned a Diamond Jubilee Medal.

Sistine Chapel turns 500, and its beauty is timeless

October 31, 2012

A Protestant colleague sent a playful e-mail from Rome a few weeks back, asking, “Don’t you think the Sistine Chapel is a little over the top?” To which Kara Johnson, a colleague at our magazine, Convivium, gave the perfect response: “Totally over the top. Over the lip of the vault and into… heaven!” Michelangelo’s vault of the Sistine Chapel is the greatest painted work in history, and contemplating the masterpiece from below, one beholds heaven from Earth, even as Adam gazes into the face of God at the moment of his creation. The ceiling is 500 years old, completed in 1512 after four years of painstaking work, unsurpassed artistic brilliance and a collaborative clash of titanic personalities — Michelangelo on one hand, and Pope Julius II on the other. Thanks to the 1965 film The Agony and the Ecstasy we have a cinematic portrayal in which we glimpse the enormity of the task. Rex Harrison, playing Julius II, repeatedly demands of Michelangelo: “When will you make an end?” “When I am finished!” Michelangelo, played by Charlton Heston, replies repeatedly and heatedly. Michelangelo did eventually finish, and on the vigil of All Saints 1512, Julius II celebrated solemn vespers to bless the new work. Pope Benedict returned on Oct. 31 to mark a half millennium of magnificence. On the 1,100 square metres of the ceiling, Michelangelo tells the story of creation and, with a boldness born of Christian theology and artistic genius, paints the very face of God. To see the face of God is the desire of every heart, but beyond the capacity of our vision. We therefore need the eyes of faith (theology) or an experience of beauty (art) in order to see past the limitations of the natural world. The Sistine Chapel is the great synthesis of faith and art. It is a rare instance of perfection in human achievement — as in, for example, Bach’s Mass in B Minor — which is naturally unsurpassable precisely because it is animated by the supernatural. Grace builds on nature, and Michelangelo’s ceiling is a work of grace as well as human genius. A great work of art is akin to a sacrament. It makes visible and tangible that which is invisible and intangible. One might even say that it renders comprehensible that which lies always beyond our comprehension. Julius II, for whatever other failings he had, knew well that the Christian faith needs art to help man encounter the divine. “We need you,” said Pope Paul VI in 1964, at a meeting with artists held in the Sistine Chapel. “We need your collaboration in order to carry out our ministry, which consists, as you know, in preaching and rendering accessible and comprehensible to the minds and hearts of our people the things of the spirit, the invisible, the ineffable, the things of God Himself. And in this activity … you are masters. Your task, your mission and your art consist in grasping treasures from the heavenly realm of the spirit and clothing them in words, colours, forms — making them accessible. “If we were deprived of your assistance our ministry would become faltering and uncertain, and a special effort would be needed, one might say, to make it artistic, even prophetic. In order to scale the heights of lyrical expression of intuitive beauty, priesthood would have to coincide with art,” Pope Paul added. Pope Benedict XVI, at another meeting of artists in 2009, held again in the Sistine Chapel, called it a “sanctuary of faith and human creativity.” Benedict frequently returns to the importance of beauty for the faith. In a sceptical world no longer sure of the truth, and in a degraded culture reluctant to judge anything good, it is beauty that alone which might raise the horizon to transcendent things. “An essential function of genuine beauty, as emphasized by Plato, is that it gives man a healthy ‘shock,’ it draws him out of himself, wrenches him away from resignation and from being content with the humdrum — it even makes him suffer, piercing him like a dart, but in so doing it ‘reawakens’ him, opening afresh the eyes of his heart and mind, giving him wings, carrying him aloft,” Benedict said in that Sistine Chapel address. Tens of thousands pass through the Sistine Chapel each week. The chapel demands that they turn their head upward and strain their eyes to behold the glory of the ceiling, the glory of Michelangelo’s work, the glory indeed of the Lord. Five-hundred years on and Michelangelo’s ceiling is still at work. When will it end? In heaven.

Church and Christ over Baum and pride

October 31, 2012

I seldom pay much attention to letters written to newspapers. After 30 years’ experience in journalism, I have realized that the vast majority of them are written by the vast minority of readers. Or to put it another way, a hard core of activists write a disproportionate number of letters to editors, sometimes even under fictitious names so as to have a greater chance of being published. They simply do not represent anything like the genuine readership of the newspaper in question. I noticed this recently with the number of critical letters about my fellow columnist Fr. Raymond de Souza, some of them extremely nasty about the man because he dares to take a strong stand against people who have tried to introduce ideas and theology into the Church bordering on the heretical. Let me make it clear that de Souza doesn’t know I’m writing this column, and I have no idea what his response will be. He is, however, one of the finest priests we have in Canada, a man of terrifying energy and talents who has combined his vocation as a priest with being one of the most impressive and important Catholic voices in North American media. Speak to young Catholics at Queen’s University, for example, and you will realize his achievements. Ask genuinely Catholic readers of The Register, the National Post or Convivium and you will appreciate how they no longer feel alone. But let’s get to the primary point here. There are people out there, albeit a declining group, who have never forgiven the Church for returning to its Catholic orthodoxy. They yearn for a time when they marched in solidarity with various leftist groups, sat around in circles to collectively condemn the intransigence of that “Polish peasant” in the Vatican, and thought it clever to tell their students — extraordinary how many of them were teachers — that the New Democrats were more important than the new catechism. Those days are over. Nobody read the Catholic New Times so it folded. No young men of vacuously liberal opinions want to be priests, so the new clergy are all orthodox. Students want the Church and Christ, not Baum and pride. Enormous damage was done by the abuse of Vatican II, and the detritus is still with us, but almost every move, every change, every appointment, is positive and delightfully, sparklingly, encouragingly Catholic. Pictures tell long stories. Have a look at photographs of conferences calling for female ordination or shouts for “reform.” It’s like a pre-application photo from a Grecian Formula hair colouring commercial! The poor old souls can’t even liturgical dance any more because their artificial hips are acting up. “Dear Sir, Michael Coren does not exhibit the spirit of the council or of Jesus the social democrat when he says such nasty things about his opponents, blah, blah.” Oh please write those letters, please throw me into the unacceptable legions of truth along with Fr. de Souza and the rest. First, they implode on their own illogicality. They’re angry and critical because someone has been angry and critical. Second, they come not from a Catholic heart and a Christian consciousness. We’re not playing games here, not talking about which party wins some irrelevant election. This is about where you spend eternity, where your soul will exist after death. There were Catholic priests and authors — and there are still a few left — who led people astray, who broke the family formed and Church-formed faith of vulnerable young and gullible older people, untied the divine rope that bound them to the Church founded by Christ and set them swimming and then drowning in a sea of ambivalence and finally rejection. It is difficult not to use strong language about people who caused so much damage, usually because they thought more of their own opinions and needs than the historic truth of Roman Catholicism. If you are more offended (and I’m sick and tired of the professionally offended) by a hard if fair criticism than you are by the corruption of a generation of Catholics, fall to your knees and pray forgiveness.