Thursday, March 28, 2024

Holy Thursday

Let us prepare for the Last Supper with Our Lord. Dom Gueranger writes of the Mass of the Lord's Supper in The Liturgical Year, Vol. VI:
The Mass of Maundy Thursday is one of the most solemn of the year; and although the feast of Corpus Christi is the day for solemnly honouring the mystery of the holy Eucharist, still, the Church would have the anniversary of the last Supper to be celebrated with all possible splendour. The colour of the vestments is white, as it is for Christmas day and Easter Sunday; the decorations of the altar and sanctuary all bespeak joy, and yet, there are several ceremonies during this Mass; which show that the holy bride of Christ has not forgotten the Passion of her Jesus, and that this joy is but transient. The priest entones the angelic hymn, Glory be to God in the highest! and the bells ring forth a joyous peal, which continues during the whole of the heavenly canticle: but from that moment they remain silent, and their long silence produces, in every heart, a sentiment of holy mournfulness. But why does the Church deprive us, for so many hours of the grand melody of these sweet bells, whose voices cheer us during the rest of the year? It is to show us that this world lost all its melody and joy when its Saviour suffered and was crucified. Moreover, she would hereby remind us, how the apostles (who were the heralds of Christ, and are figured by the bells, whose ringing summons the faithful to the house of God), fled from their divine Master and left Him a prey to His enemies.


"And there appeared to Him an angel from Heaven, strengthening Him. And being in an agony, he prayed the longer." Luke 22:43
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Now, Voyager (1942)


 From The Easton Gazette:

The untold want by life and land ne'er granted, 

Now, voyager, sail thou forth to seek and find.

~"The Untold Want" from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass

It is perhaps one of Bette Davis' best films, one in which she reputedly became quite caught up in the role, playing an active part in the production decisions. Perhaps that is why the sets, costumes, and screenplay, as well as the flawless acting, raise Now, Voyager above the soap operatic level to a serious drama exploring the psychological implications of certain moral decisions. Although Bette could be convincing as a Southern Belle, playing New England spinster Charlotte Vale, a Daughter of the Pilgrims, suited her mannerisms and natural accent impeccably. However, it is Bette's ability to depict Charlotte's transformation from a weepy neurotic into a vibrant and enthusiastic life participant that makes the film so engaging.

Now, Voyager, based on the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, shows the fascination with psychiatry that would come to consume America, beginning in the 1920's, so that in some circles it became a pseudo-religion. When used in the proper context, as a tool for healing, not as a substitute for Divine grace, psychiatry can certainly help people with emotional and mental problems. Charlotte Vale, the heroine of Now, Voyager, is certainly put back on course by the compassionate Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains), whose firmness, wisdom and tough love counteract the emotional abuse leveled upon her by her mother. The film is, overall, a study in bad parenting and good parenting. Charlotte's healing is completed not by psychotherapy but by nurturing a disturbed child. (Read more.)

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The Baltimore Bridge Collapse

 From The Western Journal:

By now, most people have seen the shocking images of the devastating collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, that happened on Tuesday morning. Indeed, it would be hard to forget the sight of the cargo ship hitting the 1.6 mile bridge, with the bridge almost instantly crumbling on impact into the Patapsco River.

What caused the cargo ship to ram into the bridge or what was faulty in the construction of the bridge to make it collapse so readily has not yet been discovered. However, as many users on the social media platform X have noted, the ramifications of this disaster will be devastating for Baltimore’s infrastructure.

User Matt Bracken was among the first to point this out. Sharing a map of the port of Baltimore, circling the location of the bridge, as well as the other main highways, Bracken noted, “All of the shipping north of the bridge is now trapped in place. No other shipping can get in. The tunnel shown has height and hazardous cargo restrictions, it can’t take the heavy trucking traffic that used the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which took YEARS to build back in the 1970s.”

Considering that the Port of Baltimore is the main port for both Baltimore and Washington, D.C., this accident, as Bracken said, was a “MAJOR infrastructure hit.” (Read more.)
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Franz Joseph Washing the Feet of the Poor

In accord with the ancient custom.
In 1850, Franz Joseph participated for the first time as emperor in the second of the traditional Habsburg expressions of dynastic piety: the Holy Thursday foot-washing ceremony, part of the four-day court observance of Easter. The master of the staff and the court prelates chose twelve poor elderly men, transported them to the Hofburg, and positioned them in the ceremonial hall on a raised dais. There, before an invited audience observing the scene from tribunes, the emperor served the men a symbolic meal and archdukes cleared the dishes. As a priest read aloud in Latin the words of the New Testament (John 3:15), “And he began to wash the feet of the disciples,” Franz Joseph knelt and, without rising from his knees, washed the feet of the twelve old men in imitation of Christ. Finally, the emperor placed a bag of twenty silver coins around the necks of each before the men were led away and returned to their homes in imperial coaches.(Read more.)
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Wednesday, March 27, 2024

A Necessary Horror


 From The Dispatch:

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Mel Gibson’s earth-shaking film The Passion of the Christ. To be sure, this movie is earth-shaking in the sense that a serious film (in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin with subtitles, no less) about the torture and death of Jesus Christ could even appear in theaters across the country. The conventional wisdom in modern times is that box-office Christianity simply does not pay. But The Passion of the Christ would defy the odds and become an international theater smash, raising $612 million after a mere $30 million was spent in production.

But The Passion of the Christ did more than upend conventional market expectations. The world was rocked by the film’s very nature. For 127 grueling minutes, we are witness to the peak drama of the Christian narrative—the tumultuous last 12 hours of Jesus Christ’s life. From Christ’s Agony in the Garden to his betrayal by Judas Iscariot, from his scourging at the pillar to his crowning with thorns, from his relentless trudge down the Way of the Cross to his nailed, sword-pierced, last gasp on the cross. The bludgeoning and whipping, the pounding and stabbing, the mocking and spitting afflict this defiant-in-submission God-man amid the shame-filled silence of his petrified disciples and the heaving sobs of his despairing followers. 

The endured violence was bad enough, but the film’s personification of evil lent the Devil his day. The hooded, deathly pale Lucifer in the garden chillingly whispered to the agonizing Christ what I know I would have been whispering to myself: “No man can carry this weight alone. It is far too heavy. Saving men’s souls is too costly. No one ever … ” Then the Devil breaks, as if listening to Jesus’ inner rebuttal, and then continues in terse response, “No, not ever.” Even the scene where a smiling centurion is whipping Jesus, we are further jarred as the black-hooded Lucifer walks silently amid Roman soldiers while cradling a baby in its arms. At the far limits of torture, Christ’s gaze fixes momentarily on the Devil whose infant turns to reveal itself as a sneering grotesque. Some have conjectured this monstrosity symbolized the Devil’s prized victory against God’s creation—dignified man—which was the loss of innocence, original sin. 

It was brutal. A horror. But it was a necessary horror. 

In the Christian faith, we believe in a perfect God. A God of both perfect mercy and perfect justice. We also believe that we are dignified children of God imbued with glorious value quite simply for being. But to understand our Christian story is to understand that, though we are dignified, we are fallen, and in need of redemption. The cost of our fall, the price of our sin, is too great for any one of us to pay. And so, to pay an insurmountable debt (justice), we must rely on inextinguishable grace (mercy). In the Passion and Crucifixion of the fully human, fully divine Jesus Christ, the debt of the world’s sins is paid and the debtors are set free (that is, if we are willing to accept the payment on our behalf). This is the Christian narrative of enormity: enormous dignity, enormous fall, enormous redemption. 

But did The Passion of the Christ have to be so awful bloody and so bloody awful? In a word, yes. (Read more.)


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Joe Biden's EV Mandate

 From The Last Refuge:

The issue that should concern everyone is not the Joe Biden administration and their ideology around climate change, or the EPA, or even the viability of EVs themselves.  The issue that should draw the biggest concern is how the regulation originates; what is the impetus; who are the beneficiaries? The regulation itself did not originate in the EPA, nor was it created from an origination process amid climate ideologues in the administration.  Everything starts with BlackRock positioning their assets.  From that empirical point, all political activity then takes place, which includes the regulations to support the BlackRock objective.

A massive, multinational investment firm is in control of political outcomes in the USA.  That should be the emphasis, not necessarily the regulation that flows as an outcome of that control, and certainly not the debate over whether EVs are a viable alternative to combustion engines. BlackRock, and the control agents of finance, banking and investment, would like nothing more than to see Congress have debates about climate change, the viability of EVs as an alternative to combustion engines, the nuances of power grid generation from alternative energy sources, the scale of energy need as estimated and debated for the next two decades, etc.

All these points of debate become useful political policy issues that divide and contrast.  Sure, Congress would love to hold hearings about EV viability, U.S. grid compliance, the need for subsidized charging stations, etcetera, etcetera.  Because what is not discussed in this debate is where the subject matter comes from. BlackRock positions their money to benefit from policy.  BlackRock, like others, then manipulate the policymakers to support their position.  We The People end up in a debate over EVs, while the BlackRock executives dance merrily into cocktail hour, discuss the latest climb in their value, and debate which politician should get a cut of the proceeds.

Nowhere in the political process on Capitol Hill does anyone ask, “How did the BlackRock investment group know to support Chinese EV plants in Mexico?”

The obvious fire of corporatism/fascism is ignored while the politicians, and us, debate the ramifications of the smoke, EVs. Democrats would love to debate EVs and say the Republicans are planet killers.  Republicans would love to debate EVs and say the Democrats are taking away your freedom. (Read more.)


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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—Or Not

 From Modern Age:

The year 2023 was a good one for movies, the best in several years at a minimum. All of Us StrangersAmerican FictionAnatomy of a FallMay DecemberPerfect DaysThe Boy and the Heron, and The Zone of Interest are all films that are going to stay with me for a long time and will merit re-watching. Numerous other high-profile films from last year took notable artistic risks and deserve serious attention, from mega-hits such as Barbie (which I discussed in the last issue) to commercial disasters such as Beau Is Afraid.

Notwithstanding Scarpa’s declaration, however, not a few high-profile films of 2023 tackled “great man” stories, his own obviously included. Napoleon was among the most audacious of these, daring to encompass the entire life of one of the most significant individuals in the last thousand years of history. It also fell the furthest short of its ambitions—but that was not an unusual failure among last year’s films. With one crucial exception, when filmmakers in 2023 contemplated greatness, they didn’t merely try to temper the audience’s enthusiasm by exposing its limits or its dark side. They left audiences fundamentally perplexed about why the story was being told at all.

It’s probably foolish to draw too many conclusions from a single year’s filmic output. But the casual certitude with which Scarpa made his comment—of course one couldn’t make a movie of a great man’s story these days; everyone knows that—in the context of writing a film about Napoleon of all people, suggested to me that there was something deeper at work than mere coincidence. Filmmakers clearly still relish the opportunity to tell stories on an epic scale, stories about real people, not cartoon superheroes. Have they forgotten how to draw real characters that can fill the frame?

In Scarpa’s interview, he notes that his and Scott’s original plan was for a smaller frame rather than a larger-than-life man.

They wanted to make a film focused on the relationship between Napoleon Bonaparte and the Empress Josephine, and I could see the residue of that concept in the finished film. When Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon first sees Josephine (played by Vanessa Kirby), he’s immediately love-struck. It’s an adolescent-feeling moment, and Bonaparte’s love for Josephine has a consistently juvenile quality (he even begs for sex at one point by flapping his gums in a mutely infantile manner). But that childlike quality is not limited to the love plot; this Napoleon seems juvenile throughout the film. I was put in mind of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, a man who had been at war since boyhood, who fled to the battlefield to escape the emotionally treacherous world of politics, and who was easily brought to defeat by his mother’s tears. But Coriolanus was never loved by the people. Napoleon was. Yet Phoenix’s Napoleon only once or twice manifests even a hint of the charisma necessary to move a mass of men to risk their lives for his cause. This absence is generally a disaster for the story, but never more so than upon Bonaparte’s return from Elba, when his mere appearance is supposed to be enough for the soldiers charged with apprehending him to switch sides, enlist under Napoleon’s banner, and face terrifying odds in his last stand at Waterloo.

These personal oddities are not the worst problem with the film, though. Napoleon was a world-shaking figure, and as he cut his swathe through history he shattered the civilization around him in ways that are still echoing. Yet there is no sense in the film that there was anything particularly significant about Bonaparte as an individual—as depicted, his extraordinary rise is mostly masterminded by others, with opportunities falling into his lap, and even his military genius seems to consist mostly of recognizing the importance of artillery. Nor does the film suggest anything significant about what he stood for. We don’t learn that he established a new legal structure in Europe, or emancipated the Jews, or prompted the first stirrings of German nationalism, or even that his rise from Corsican commoner to the seat of empire struck a fatal blow to the feudal belief in the natural order of rank. If one leaves all this out, why tell his story at all?

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with telling the story of the private life of a great man, showing how that private life more fully explains the public narrative we presumably know better, or even just serving as a counterpoint to the commonly accepted version. But the private Napoleon of this film doesn’t explain the public Napoleon, not even by means of the love story. While Josephine may say that he is nothing without her, there’s no evidence shown on screen that this is the case. All we see is that she is capable of getting him to believe it because of his own immaturity. He still divorces her for reasons of state, of course, because he needs an heir, but that is a motive rooted in the social system that Bonaparte himself did so much to dismantle, an irony in which the film is completely uninterested. (Read more.)


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Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Zone of Interest (2023)


 From The Easton Gazette:

Zone of Interest (2023) film poster, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Rudolf Höss: I wasn't really paying attention... I was too busy thinking how I would gas everyone in the room. ~Zone of Interest (2023)

Winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, Zone of Interest (2023) is perhaps one of the most placid films ever made yet it leaves the viewer with the feeling best expressed by Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness: “The horror! The horror!” At the center of the apocalyptic upheavals of World War II is Hitler’s “Final Solution” in which he and his henchman methodically planned the extermination of European Jewry, leading to the deaths of 2/3 of the Jews of Europe. While there have been other holocausts in history, such as the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840’s; the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks from 1915 to 1923; the mass starvation of the Ukrainians in the 1930’s; the ethnic cleansing of the Poles by the Soviets in the 1940’s; Stalin’s purges of his own people at various times throughout his thirty-five year reign of terror; Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the mid-20th century and the mass murders of the Pol Pot regime in the 1980’s, as well as others, none compares to the vast extent of the systematic murders of the Jews by the Nazis. While the aforementioned genocides numbered in the tens of thousands to the millions, none surpasses the Shoah and its six million victims, with the possible exception of the deaths due to Chinese Communism, for which there are no reliable statistics. While Holocaust deniers try to claim that six million deaths is an exaggeration, anyone who has studied the topic, such as Father Patrick Desbois in his book Holocaust by Bullets (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009) knows that even into the 21st century mass graves of Jews have continued to be discovered throughout Eastern Europe. After so much death, the world could never be the same again.

However, we Americans often wonder at the compliance of the Germans and other nationalities with the Nazi policies at rounding up and handing over their friends and neighbors who happened to be Jewish. We know there were active underground movements of brave citizens, usually persons of faith, who risked their lives to save Jews from the gas chambers, such as the Ten Boom family in Holland, as told in Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place. Yet when we see films on the Holocaust or even documentaries on The History Channel we are stunned that a crime of such magnitude was allowed to happen in the sight of all the world. (Read more.)

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