Hollywood growing darker

 

Todd Terry, the actor from Breaking Bad, notes how Hollywood is growing ever darker.  See here.

It was Professor Duncan Williams, in his book Trousered Apes, who wrote, "What shocks an audience today will be acceptable tomorrow and thus the contemporary dramatist is constantly impelled to seek further excesses to gratify a warped taste which he has himself implanted in the public mind....The whole modern cult of violence and animalism is in essence an admission of defeat. Since we cannot be men to any idealistic extent, let us lapse into barbaric animalism but, still clinging to vestiges of a past which we hate but cannot escape, let us clothe our defeat in high-sounding terms: 'alienation,' 'cult of unpleasure,' 'realism,' and similar jargon. Yet all this fashionable phraseology cannot conceal the fact that the Emperor has no clothes. The literature of today lacks certain essential qualities. It no longer satisfies man's need for beauty, order and elevation, and to this extent it is incomplete and stunted. It contains, as Trilling has observed, an anti-civilizing trend, and to this is closely linked a cult of ugliness, a morbid concentration on the baser elements of life, a clinical obsession with the bizarre and with the grossly sensual and degrading aspects of human nature...The contemporary playwright or producer might well take as his motto, Apres moi, la secheresse (After me, the drought), and congratulate himself that he is writing before a morbid public appetite demands scenes of such repellent realism that actors and actresses will have to be killed on stage in order to satisfy it."

In his book, Professor Williams argues (quite effectively) that because we have banished God from our society, "..the Western world and its culture is saturated with violence and animalism...We are teaching savagery and are naively appalled at the success of our instruction." He then proceeds to demonstrate how the literature of our times is a reflection of this savagery and provokes an escalating barbarism and defeatism which is creating a satanic society which will then be prepared to enthusiastically welcome the Antichrist.

The Twilight film series is aptly titled. For our troubled society is indeed in twilight. It was Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas who once commented on the way that oppression can subtly arise in our midst: "As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."

Witness how far our culture has fallen. Remember films like Citizen Kane, It's a Wonderful Life, Lillies of the Field, and The Quiet Man? What did these films have in common? Each celebrated truth, goodness and beauty. And now we have films celebrating vampirism and the occult.

Darkened minds. Troubled minds.

Meditation: Matthew 12: 35.

Pope Francis: Avoid polarization and be on fire for this world

On fire to build man's world.

Malachi Martin, in his book “The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church,” says that, “Those who..know the history of Liberation Theology..may point out that Gutierrez’s work [Father Gustavo Gutierrez, author of A Theology of Liberation] was inspired by a 1968 Conference of Latin American bishops at Medellin, near Bogota, in Colombia, where the delegates highlighted the plight of the poor, and the needy to remedy their awful conditions…

Essentially, Liberation Theology is the answer to that summons to the Church codified so many years before by Maritain – to identify itself with the revolutionary hopes of the masses. The difference, perhaps, insofar as there is one, is that while Maritain adopted a theology of history built on a misapprehension of Marxist philosophy, Liberation Theologians adopted a theology of politics built on Soviet tactics. In essence, the propagators of Liberation Theology took the current of theological thought developed in Europe and applied it to the very concrete situations in Latin America. Suddenly, theological and philosophical theory became the pragmatic proposals and actual programs for changing the face of all social and political institutions in Latin America….

Liberation Theology turned its back on the entire scope of Scholastic Theology, including what was sound in Maritain. It did not base its reasoning on papal teaching, or on the ancient theological tradition of the Church, or on the Decrees of the Church’s Ecumenical Councils. In fact, Liberation Theology refused to start where Councils and Popes had always started: with God as Supreme Being, as Creator, as Redeemer, as Founder of the Church, as the One Who had placed among men a Vicar who was called the Pope, as Ultimate Rewarder of the Good and Punisher of the Evil. Rather, Liberation Theology’s basic presumption was ‘the people,’ sometimes indeed ‘the people of God.’ ‘The people’ were the source of spiritual revelation and religious authority. What mattered in theology was how ‘the people’ fared here and now, in the social, political, and economic realities of the evolving material world. The ‘experience of the people was the womb of theology,’ was the consecrated phrase.

At one stroke, therefore, Liberation Theology unburdened prepared and restless minds from an entire panoply of ancient concepts, dogmas, and mental processes governed by the fixed rules of Thomistic reasoning, and from the directives of the authoritative voice of Rome…Liberation Theology was no theology in the Roman Catholic sense of the word. It was not primarily about God, about God’s law, about God’s redemption, about God’s promises. Liberation Theology was interested in God as revealed today through the oppressed people. In God for himself, practically speaking, no genuine Liberation Theology was interested.

The second promise of Liberation Theology was even more exciting than freedom from Rome’s theology..” (The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church, pp. 308-309).

Under the banner of “liberation,” many in the Church’s hierarchy began to enlist the Church’s resources to advance the Marxist plan of revolution. Having abandoned the Church’s supernatural mission – building the Kingdom of God, these confused clerics began to turn exclusively toward a new goal: that of building a new world centered on man, a City of Man.

Fr. Martin explains how the Jesuits succumbed to this apostasy: “Classical Jesuitism, based on the spiritual teaching of Ignatius, saw the Jesuit mission in very clear outline. There was a perpetual state of war on earth between Christ and Lucifer. Those who fought on Christ’s side, the truly choice fighters, served the Roman Pontiff diligently, were at his complete disposal, were ‘Pope’s Men.’ The ‘Kingdom’ being fought over was the Heaven of God’s glory. The enemy, the archenemy, the only enemy, was Lucifer. The weapons Jesuits used were supernatural: the Sacraments, preaching, writing, suffering. The objective was spiritual, supernatural, and otherworldly. It was simply this: that as many individuals as possible would die in a state of supernatural grace and friendship with their Savior so that they would spend eternity with God, their Creator…

The renewed Jesuit mission debased this Ignatian ideal of the Jesuits. The ‘Kingdom’ being fought over was the ‘Kingdom’ everyone fights over and always has: material well-being. The enemy was now economic, political, and social: the secular system called democratic and economic capitalism. The objective was material: to uproot poverty and injustice, which were caused by capitalism, and the betterment of the millions who suffered want and injustice from that capitalism. The weapons to be used now were those of social agitation, labor relations, sociopolitical movements, government offices…” (The Jesuits, p. 478).

In this light, we can better understand Pope Francis' speech before Congress. The Pope called on Americans to open themselves to the world and not to see things in terms of good and evil, the righteous and unrighteous.  This, of course, is unscriptural. (See 2 Corinthians 6: 14, 15 and Ephesians 5: 11 for example).

As Fr. Vincent Miceli, S.J., explained in his essay on Call to Action entitled “Detroit: A Call to Revolution in the Church”: “The following are some of the demands the Church simply cannot fulfill for such is not her mission: 1. Wipe out poverty, ignorance, prejudice and war. 2. Democratize the whole world. 3. Stop the sale of arms everywhere. 4. Back the E.R.A. as a constitutional amendment. Like her Saviour, the Church will not turn stones into bread, thereby becoming the Mother of Socialism or a millennium of this world..’


"..the 'theologies of liberation', which reserve credit for restoring to a place of honor the great texts of the prophets and of the Gospel in defense of the poor, go on to a disastrous confusion between the 'poor' of the Scripture and the 'proletariat' of Marx. In this way they pervert the Christian meaning of the poor, and they transform the fight for the rights of the poor into a class fight within the ideological perspective of the class struggle. For them the 'Church of the poor' signifies the Church of the class which has become aware of the requirements of the revolutionary struggle as a step toward liberation and which celebrates this liberation in its liturgy." (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, "Instruction on Certain Aspects of the 'Theology of Liberation,'" No. 10).

The supernatural faith of Catholicism is being watered down for the sake of a new humanitarian religion.  Dialogue is key for this new religion which has abandoned the notion that we must, "Let love be without dissimulation. Hating that which is evil, cleaving to that which is good." (Romans 12: 29).

We must offer women who have had an abortion hope and encouragement and avoid judging their internal guilt

It was St. Augustine, Father and Doctor of the Church, who said, "Interficere errorem, diligere errantem" - Kill the error, love the one who errs.  I have actually taken that as the motto for this Blog.  Gaudium et Spes of the Second Vatican Council put it this way: "..it is necessary to distinguish between error, which always merits repudiation, and the person in error, who never loses the dignity of being a person even when he is flawed by false or inadequate religious notions. God alone is the judge and searcher of hearts, for that reason He forbids us to make judgments about the internal guilt of anyone." (No. 28).

This teaching isn't always understood by some.  In an article on abortion which may be found at LifeSiteNews, Stacy Trasancos, who writes a column for The Catholic Free Press, writes, "It's a faulty question to ask whether or not a woman suffers mental anguish after she kills her own child.  Of course she does, a woman with her sanity and dignity intact doesn't do that in the first place....a woman  who kills her child in the womb is suffering mentally and will suffer mentally afterwards.  Something is terribly wrong in her soul and in her life." See here.

But here we encounter an immediate problem.  To say that there is something "terribly wrong" in the soul of a woman who has had an abortion and that her sanity and dignity are not intact is to make a judgment about her internal guilt and her motives.  The very thing which the teaching of the Church forbids.


Pope John Paul II, in his wonderful Encyclical Letter Evangelium Vitae, explains that many factors influence the decision which a woman makes when she is burdened with an untimely pregnancy.  He writes, "As well as the mother, there are often other people too who decide upon the death of the child in the womb. In the first place, the father of the child may be to blame, not only when he directly pressures the woman to have an abortion, but also when he indirectly encourages such a decision on her part by leaving her alone to face the problems of pregnancy...Nor can one overlook the pressures which sometimes come from the wider family circle and from friends. Sometimes the woman is subjected to such strong pressure that she feels psychologically forced to have an abortion: certainly in this case the moral responsibility lies particularly with those who have directly or indirectly obliged her to have an abortion. (EV, No. 59)

The Holy Father also places responsibility for the tragedy of abortion on, "doctors and nurses...when they place at the service of death skills which were acquired for promotion of life," and on "legislators who have promoted and approved abortion laws," and, "to the extent that they have a say in the matter, on the administrators of the health-care centers were abortions are performed” (EV, No. 59).

It is always a tragedy when a woman makes the decision to have an abortion.  But this decision to have an abortion is made in the context of multiple personal and societal pressures in what Pope John Paul II so aptly termed the "culture of death." Although the responsibility for the abortion decision is not entirely, nor perhaps even primarily hers, she must bear its burdensome consequences almost entirely alone for the rest of her life. So perhaps it's best to avoid questioning her sanity and dignity?

Perhaps instead, we should follow the lead of Pope John Paul II, whose pastoral outreach to women who have had an abortion is a model of tenderness and compassion [rightly understood] as well as being hopeful:

"I would like to say a special word to women who have had an abortion. The Church is aware of the many factors which may have influenced your decision, and she does not doubt that in many cases I was a painful and even shattering decision. The wound in your heart may not yet have healed. Certainly what happened was and remains terribly wrong. But do not give in to discouragement and do not lose hope. Try rather to understand what happened and face it honestly. If you have not already done so, give yourselves over with humility and trust to repentance. The Father of mercies is ready to give you his forgiveness and his peace in the Sacrament of Reconciliation." (EV, No. 99).

Notice how the Holy Father does not condone sin or error?  He rightly stresses that an abortion is, objectively speaking, a grave wrong even as he offers hope and encouragement by reminding women who have had an abortion that forgiveness and peace may be theirs in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. 

One would think that Stacy Trasancos would understand this better than most.  For she has herself admitted, at the website Catholic Online, that she got pregnant in college, has had an abortion, that she's taken drugs and worked as a stripper, that she's been divorced, and that her seven children are from three different men.

The same Good God Who forgave Stacy her sins offers His Mercy to every woman who has had an abortion.  Perhaps instead of questioning the souls of such women or their dignity and sanity, Stacy could follow Pope John Paul II's lead?  As should we all.

Kill the error, love the one who errs.  Hate the sin, love the sinner.