The trailer for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has finally appeared. I’ve been waiting for a long time to see what the adaption of my favorite of the Narnia books would be like. It looks exciting but one big mystery: Where are Eustace and the dragon?
If you read the book (and I’ll try to avoid spoiling it if you haven’t), the character of Eustace and his adventures with a monstrous dragon form one of the story’s major (almost) explicit Christian threads. But Eustace barely appears in the trailer. He has a line or two at the beginning, and — I think — a voice-over line later on, but more important there is no CGI dragon in sight. So are the book’s Christian themes once again being censored or dumbed-down for secular audiences? I think Prince Caspian was hurt by this, especially by its muddling the theme of following Aslan even when you can’t see him.
Of course, the trailer might not mean much; after all the movie is six months or so away, and this is the teaser; the advertising is bound to focus on the familiar characters; and the CGI dragon work might not be completed yet.
Also, there are some teasing dragon-hints right at the trailer’s very close. I was tipped off to this by an observant viewer who commented on the American Papist blog (second comment down as of this posting).
Life Site News has an excellent – but very disturbing – series of articles on the ironically named “Women Deliver” conference held this past week in Washington D.C. The conference, supposedly intended to promote maternal health and reduce maternal mortality throughout the world, turned out to actually be all about pushing the abortion agenda. The fact that women deliver babies and that they have babies in the womb was virtually ignored, in spite of pro-lifers’ attempts to call attention to this fact.
Among the conference attendees were many of the world’s ministers and parliamentarians, including: Thoraya Obaid, Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund; Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services; Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization; Gill Greer, Director-General of the International Planned Parenthood Federation; and Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, who gave the keynote address.
Conference sponsors included several UN agencies, government departments from the UK, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the U.S. (USAID), and Canada, as well as fortune-1000 companies such as Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals, and Merck & Co.
The speakers at the conference put forward strategies for how to get past laws banning abortion in countries where it is illegal, how to legalize abortion where it is illegal, and of course, to expand contraception everywhere. The claimed that the best way to reduce maternal mortality rates throughout the world was to promote abortion. They also constantly trashed religion and “fetus fundamentalism.”
Pro-life leaders who attended the conference, however, point to a Lancet study published in April that showed, contrary to what the UN and the international pro-abortion lobby have long claimed, that maternal mortality around the world has dropped drastically in recent years. In addition, the study nowhere mentioned legal abortion as a significant causal factor in the reduced death rate.
“This is a classic case of their ideologies trumping the science,” said conference attendee Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women of America. Even when the science contradicts their goal, they don’t change their ideology.”
The science of fetal development was also completely unwelcome at the conference.
Volunteers from the National Right to Life Committee were handing out pink “Celebrate Motherhood bags outside the conference. They contained a small plastic fetal model of a 12-week-old unborn child, a small replication of an unborn child’s feet at 10 weeks gestation, a brochure on prenatal development, and a brochure containing information on proven means of reducing maternal mortality rates worldwide (the supposed focus of the conference).
Many attendees took them – only to have them confiscated by conference staff once they got to the door of the convention center, by staffers who told them they were “anti-life” and “anti-woman.”
One attendee who received a bag told LifeSiteNews.com that she was interrogated in an intimidating manner by an organizer who said that “you need to throw away” any pink bag handed out by the “anti-woman” demonstrators, because “they’re trying to ruin our conference.”
However, one pro-life volunteer said that the aggressive approach taken by conference staff may have been for the better: when attendees, including UN delegates, asked about the confiscated material in clear plastic bags, they were told by pro-lifers that the materials could not be handed out because “they don’t want you to have this information.”
“It was great for what we’re getting across,” said the volunteer.
The pro-lifers were later able to collect the confiscated bags.
Jeanne Head, NRLC Vice President for International Affairs and UN Representative for National Right to Life, and a registered nurse, said she was frustrated at how the conference hijacked the issue of maternal mortality to push an agenda harmful to women.
“We’ve known how to save lives in the developing world for over 70 years, and women are still dying in the developing world,” Head told LifeSiteNews.com (LSN). “It’s aggravating to me that they’re spending all this money and all this talk about how to save women’s lives and it’s very simple.”
“Good health care, prenatal care, emergency obststetric care, antibiotics, clean blood, clean water, good nutrition. And they’re talking about all this garbage instead of doing the job.”
Concerned Women for America president Wendy Wright, who was present at the conference, said the treatment of the pro-life materials illustrated the conference’s hypocritical message.
“Here they are the whole conference saying: information, give women information and they’ll have power,” Wright told LSN, “and then they take that information away so that they’ll be powerless to argue against the indoctrination they’re getting.”
Wright further noted that the conference revealed how the pro-abortion movement’s “zeitgeist” is “all about power.” “They think that we’re driven by the same things that they’re driven by. They’re driven by rage and power. It’s just the opposite for us - we’re driven by love to serve others,” she said.
I am finding more and more people out there devoted to Pope John Paul I - including permanent deacon Bob Yerhot, who actually had the privilege of serving his inaugural Mass and who has named him as patron saint of his own blog, Catholic Faith and Reflections.
I hope to learn some more about this story soon. But do check out the reflections on his blog and the translations of the Pope’s writings he has posted there.
Update: June 16
Bob has started writing his memories of Papa Luciani in Rome almost 32 years ago. Here’s the link to Part One and I will put up links to the rest as well. Thanks, Bob!
This is the first of a new series inspired again largely by Pope John Paul I, but also by my interest in the writings of his successors about the vital subject of the imagery we use for God. I hope to finish it by this August for the 32nd anniversary of his election as Pope.
In his 1995 book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope John Paul II wrote an in-depth analysis of the modern approach to God. This passage is especially telling:
Hegel’s paradigm of the master and the servant is more present in people’s consciousness today than is wisdom, whose origin lies in the filial fear of God. The philosophy of arrogance is born of the Hegelian paradigm. The only force capable of effectively counteracting this philosophy is found in the Gospel of Christ, in which the paradigm of master-slave is radically transformed into the paradigm of father-son.
The father-son paradigm is ageless. It is older than human history. The “rays of fatherhood” contained in this formulation belong to the Trinitarian Mystery of God Himself, which shines forth from Him, illuminating man and his history.
This notwithstanding, as we know from Revelation, in human history the “rays of fatherhood” meet a first resistance in the obscure but real fact of original sin. Original sin attempts, then, to abolish fatherhood, destroying its rays which permeate the created world, placing in doubt the truth about God who is Love and leaving man only with a sense of the master-slave relationship. As a result, the Lord appears jealous of His power over the world and over man; and consequently, man feels goaded to do battle against God. No differently than in any epoch of history, the enslaved man is driven to take sides against the master who kept him enslaved. leaving man only with a sense of the master/slave relationship.” (1)
This is a profound statement of the origins of modern humanity’s alienation from God, and the source of so much atheism.
The Pope was not alone in this view. In his book Faith of the Fatherless, Paul Vitz posits that the rejection of the idea of God by many prominent atheists, including Freud, Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre, can be traced to their anger at dead, abusive or emotionally distant fathers. (2)
On the other hand, trying to fill in the gap, we have the pop culture feminist view of God as the “goddess within,” the life-affirming, fun loving earth mother Gaia. One of the most prominent examples of this is the idea of the “Sacred Feminine,” popularized by Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code, which counters the teaching of the Church with a sex goddess (I wrote about this here). Not all goddess worship is this silly. But it is often very tied to the rejection of the father. Comments I have heard from those who believe in a goddess indicate that they fundamentally reject the idea of God as an authority figure. A goddess, they reason is non-judgmental, and doesn’t have all the “rules” of the patriarchal male God. Here are more signs of a dysfunctional relationship with the father, as well as the Father.
This trend toward “feminization” of God baffles and upsets many Catholics. Of course, it is hurtful to see God the Father as understood in Scripture and Church tradition rejected by so many people. Not surprisingly, these Catholics particularly resist the idea of God as Mother when people try to bring it into the Church.
Once, maybe four or five years ago, we had a guest speaker come to our Secular Franciscan fraternity meeting in the Bronx. He wanted to give a talk about spirituality, but hardly got beyond the first paragraph where he encouraged us to think of God as mother. He met with fierce resistance to this idea from the membership of our fraternity – which, by the way is 100% female, most of them older women. I, who was the youngest in the group, was the only one not opposed, but I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. The women in the group said to the speaker: “God is our Father; this is traditional, why are you changing it?”
People very frequently say to me when subject comes up: “Replacing God as Father with God as Mother feminizes the Church, and it’s already too feminized!” Or “It doesn’t help the spirituality of men in the church to replace God the Father with God the Mother. Men no longer have a real sense of masculinity because of this.” Or “Jesus told us how to speak of God as our Father, and that’s that. We don’t need any more than that.”
Yet our last three Popes have thought differently.
It all began in September 1978, when John Paul I startled a great many people during his very short papacy by proclaiming, “God is a father, but even more a mother.” (3) Yet this memorable remark doesn’t begin to exhaust what he had to say on this subject both before and after he became Pope. John Paul II continued this trend by speaking about God as mother in his encyclicals and letters, in his audience talks, and even in his lovely proclamation of the Our Father. In turn, his successor, Benedict XVI, has used some of the same imagery, and introduced theological clarifications to it.
Yet the idea of God as mother as taught by the most recent popes has penetrated very little into the mind or life of the Church. Many people continue to identify this feminine and maternal imagery for God with dissent in the Church, or at least with something suspiciously trendy, completely unaware that it is papal teaching.
But why have recent popes spoken about God this way?
It is true that we are almost a fatherless society. We are rapidly becoming a national of single mothers, with hardly a father in sight. Perpetual male adolescence is celebrated as the norm, and the responsibility of fatherhood is something people hardly expect anymore. Many people have no relationship with their fathers. In the past, literally or emotionally fatherless Catholics have often turned to priests as father figures. And yet this relationship has so often been betrayed because of the clerical sex abuse scandal.
Yet this emotional distance isn’t connected with just one parent. Radical feminism, and the prevalence of abortion has wounded many women precisely in their maternal instinct.
Some radical feminist pro-abortion women with whom I have had discussions have shown an amazing disgust for motherhood; they are unable to see pregnancy and childbirth, particularly of an unlooked-for child, as anything but “rape for nine months,” “slavery of the uterus,” and “forced motherhood.” Becoming pregnant makes you no more than a “breeder” or “incubator,” and Christianity, by its praise for motherhood, perpetuates this “dehumanizing” view of women. Some of these feminists have even denied that women have a biological maternal instinct, because this “naturalizes” the idea of women as mother – which is an contradiction of their ideal of woman as a career-driven, independent person; above all, motherhood is a slap in the face to the dream of being able to have sexual pleasure any time they like without unpleasant consequences like children.
What is most frightening of all is that women with this deficient maternal sense sometimes do end up becoming mothers. I feel certain their children must suffer for it. Other women who have had and regretted abortions have also admitted great difficulty in parenting when they do have “wanted” children because of their unresolved guilty feelings. So yes, motherhood in our society is in as much trouble as fatherhood is.
Some who have had both parents who were distant have found they were unable to relate to God as Father or Mary as Mother. One recent commenter on an internet post said:
I think there is definitely a correlation. In my own case, my father was rather distant (spent his energies in various get-rich-quick schemes) and my mother is an alcoholic. I became an atheist, quietly (they never knew) in my teens.
I’m now back Home, but I have a hard time with God as Father — oh, not intellectually (I’m solid there) but in terms of any emotional attachment — the heart just isn’t involved. Nor do I have any idea how to regard Mary as my Mother — again, I accept the concept intellectually, but there simply is no attachment. I have no idea how to change this at all — I just trust that God will forgive me my lack of love, as I truly do want to love Him and His Mother. I just don’t know how. (4)
This suggests that negative reactions to emotionally abusive or absent mothers also influence us spiritually.
But — presuming we can actually form an attachment to a spiritual mother- don’t Catholics have a sufficient mother figure in Mary? Why do we need to speak of God as mother?
Mary is a wonderful spiritual mother to us. Yet Mary is not God nor any part of God. In fact Catholics know that it is blasphemous to call Mary God. So she is not a divine mother; a divine mother is different.
If Mary really were sufficient as a spiritual mother, we wouldn’t expect to see John Paul II put forward the maternal image of God as he did. For it is just about impossible to imagine a more ardent or devoted lover of Mary than he was!
It’s well known that Karol Wojtyla lost his mother at a very early age. Soon afterward he asked the Blessed Virgin to become his mother. He put Totus Tuus (All Yours) on his episcopal coat of arms out of devotion to her. After the assassination attempt against him in 1981, he credited her with deflecting the deadly bullet from his heart. We can find a similar robust devotion to Mary in the other two Popes I have mentioned. So we can’t say that it was a lack of devotion to the motherhood of Mary that led them to speak of God as mother. Evidently, sometimes only a divine Mother will do.
Still, many have as much difficulty with the idea of God as Mother as they do with God as Father. Given that our sense of the motherhood as well as fatherhood of God may need healing, I hope we can learn something of what divine motherhood is like and how it differs from the neo-pagan conception of Gaia and the Sacred Feminine.
So I plan to make “God as Father and mother” the subject of my next few posts. We will learn something of what John Paul I, John Paul II and Benedict XVI have thought on this subject.
I think it’s important to stress that I am not striving to “replace God the Father with God the Mother” as some good Catholics fear – and some feminists are actually trying to do. I want to explore the maternal images of God that exist in the Bible that have come to be an important though unacknowledged part of the papal Magisterium and how they can affect our spiritual lives.
So next time I will start with the teaching of John Paul I.
NOTES
(1) John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, paperback ed., (New York: Knopf, 1995, 2003), pp. 225-26.
(2) Paul C. Vitz, Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism; Dallas: Spence Publishing Co, 2009).
(3) Angelus address, September 10, 1978; L’Osservatore Romano [Italian ed], 11-12 September 1978.
Well, maybe it wasn’t quite a world premiere, since it isn’t even finished, but the screening of the rough cut of my film A Woman for Our Time: St. Elizabeth of Hungary last Tuesday night was a great success, with some 80 people in attendance and enormous applause afterward.
I haven’t been able to put up anything about it until now, since I’ve had to do some 60 hours of work this past week — and I’m not yet done — to make up for time lost last week. Not to mention the fact that our little early heat wave this past week in New York has really been dragging me down. (Happily it got cooler last night and is now quite comfortable). I do plan to keep everyone updated on possible future screenings this summer, as the film is readied for DVD.
Don’t forget, if you would like to receive further updates on the film via e-mail, please write to me at editor@taucrossbooks.com, and you will be put on the list. You can also donate to completion of the film here:
Pausing to look at all the sights on our way to Jerusalem. . . Mainly about faith, the Church, film, writing, famous Christian authors, and anything else I'm interested in at the moment.
The photo above was taken at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in March 2007.
Quote of the Month
"The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and to rob it of its completeness. The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome – from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law. This three-way encounter has shaped the inner identity of Europe. In the awareness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgment of the inviolable dignity of every single human person, it has established criteria of law: it is these criteria that we are called to defend at this moment in our history."
Pope Benedict XVI to the German Parliament, Sept 22, 2011.
