A sacrament that signifies its symbol

Let me finish with my bookmarks of Signs and Mysteries by quoting a couple of passages that suggest why symbolic art is such a valuable dimension of Christianity.

While explaining the purpose of the book in the first chapter, Mike Aquilina writes:

...there is no shortage of books that treat the interpretation of symbols like a sort of algebra: the fish = Jesus Christ; the ship = the Church; and so on. Such books are extremely valuable. But the meaning of symbols is rarely so simple. Sometimes a lone symbol stands for a multitude of realities: either the fish or the lamb can represent Jesus, or the individual believer, or the Eucharist that binds the Christian to Christ -- or, most likely, it can represent all three at once....

Each symbol reflects a different aspect of some reality that many symbols hold in common. The Eucharist as mother's milk elicits a different response in the beholder than, say, the Eucharist as the Passover Lamb or the ubiquitous fish.

In the chapter on the banquet -- a once-common image (usually featuring seven diners, one of them a woman) whose meaning is much debated -- he writes:

Early Christian art rarely presents anything in a merely realistic manner. It is beyond symbolic. It is symbolist -- or, better, sacramental. It depicts common material things and ordinary events as signs of deeper spiritual realities.

To use Christian symbols is to suggest that the whole created order is a language that can glorify God, without ever plumbing the depths of the mystery of His life and His love for us.

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More on signs

To me, three of the most interesting symbols discussed in Mike Aquilina's Signs and Mysteries are the fish, the orant, and the cross. The fish I discussed a little in my earlier post, and I think a very revealing essay could be written comparing and contrasting how Christians of the first few centuries used it to how Christians of today use it.

The orant posture -- standing with outstretched and upturned hands -- is well known to anyone who goes to Mass. I'd heard it a traditional posture for ancient Christian prayer, but I didn't know till I read it in this book that it was the standard posture for prayer for Christians and pagans alike, nor did I know that depictions of figures, usually female, in this posture were very common in Christian catacombs. Signs and Mysteries quotes the Catechism:

In the catacombs the Church is often represented as a woman in prayer, arms outstretched in the praying position. Like Christ who stretched out his arms on the cross, through him, with him, and in him, she offers herself and intercedes for all men.

Thus the orant recalls the Cross and is a priestly gesture, once used by the whole Church. (The female figures in the catacombs may also represent the souls of the dead, praying for the living or simply worshipping God in heaven (female because souls were always regarded as female).)

The cross is a fascinating symbol, both because the Cross is what our Faith is all about and we can meditate on it for a lifetime, and because it took so many centuries before Christians began using it commonly and openly. Signs and Mysteries touches on the ongoing scholarly debates over which if any of the intersecting line segments found in very early Christian art should be understood to be crosses, hidden or not.

But even at a time when Christians were not using crosses in their artwork, they were seeing crosses all around them, in the masts of ships and in farmers' plows, in nature and in pagan religions. We might speak, then, of two sorts of "crypto-crosses": those Christians hid in their art; and those God hid in His art.

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Signifying everything

Signs and Mysteries: Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols -- a review copy of which I received from The Catholic Company -- is a wonderful collection of illustrated essays on twenty-five Christian symbols used -- in churches, on sarcophagi, as decoration, as graffiti -- in the first few centuries of the Church.

Blogger Mike Aquilina wrote the text. As he explains in the introduction:

This is not a work of scholarship, but an act of devotion -- an act of piety toward our ancestors, so that we might learn to see the world one again with their eyes, and to pray and live as they once prayed and lived.

We're all familiar with some of the symbols he describes -- the cross, certainly, and the fish, and I'd guess we've all seen the Chi-Rho or labarum even if we don't know what's up with it -- but I suspect few of us see them in quite the way our ancestors did.

Today, for example, a fish symbolizes a Christian (perhaps it even connotes a certain type of Christian), and it's no sign of great scholarship to know that "ιχθυς" is both a Greek word meaning "fish" and a Greek acronym meaning "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior."

But do we also understand that "the fish is also the individual believer," as Mike points out? That, just as fish die when they are taken from the water, so die outside the waters of baptism (i.e., the Church)? Surely most of us don't recognize

the original and the deepest meaning of the fish. The fish is the primal symbol of the Holy Eucharist.... Erwin Goodenough, an agnostic scholar at Yale University, wrote that the Gospel According to John... gives us "the earliest explicit acceptance of the fish as a eucharistic symbol and as a symbol of the Savior who was eaten in the Eucharist."

An understanding of and appreciation for the symbol of the "Eucharistic fish" certainly puts the Darwin fish wars in a different light.

That light, or perspective, is one I very much think Christians would do well to recover. In Mike's words:

But the art of nascent Christianity intended to "incorporate the events of history into the sacrament"... by participating in the rites of the Church, each and every Christian was stepping into the stream of salvation history.... God's saving action was not a matter of the long-ago past or a vague and distant future, but a reality of the most immediate present -- it was really present, and experienced in the baptismal water, the oil of anointing, and in the bread and wine of the liturgy.

Hence the fish and the ship, the lamp and the oil flask, the vine and the wheat sheaves were all symbols used by the early Christians and discussed in this book. (More obscure symbols include the philosopher, the peacock, milk, and the ankh).

A book about symbols relies heavily on the illustrations, and Lea Marie Ravotti does a marvelous job. Nearly every page has a drawing of an ancient fresco, statue, coin, carving, or mosaic; the styles are as varied as the sources. From the wall scratchings of a pilgrim to the sculpting of an artistic genius, they make plain the rich symbolic heritage Christians may, and ought to, claim in our own age of imagery.

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Fenelon for today

Winn Collier is a Christian pastor and a devotee of Francois Fenelon, the 17th Century French bishop and writer. He is particularly keen on Fenelon as spiritual guide, a side of the bishop that comes out in letters he wrote to the many young French aristocrats who turned to him for advice.

Collier has selected and paraphrased forty-some of Fenelon's letters in his recent book Let God: The Transforming Wisdom of Francois Fenelon. The letters are arranged in eight "conversations," each of which begins with a brief essay by Collier. The conversations are on these questions:

• Why is God so peculiar?
• How do I pursue spiritual maturity?
• How do I hear God?
• What do I do when I'm broken down?
• How do I cultivate a quiet soul?
• How can I live in community?
• What do I do when life is dark and bleak?
• What do I need to change?

These are just the sorts of questions disciples of Christ ask -- although that first one could stand some context. In a letter Collier titles "To a Delightfully Impoverished Friend," Fenelon writes:

God's romance is peculiar, requiring us to go against our instincts. We give everything we are and have to God; we give way to complete poverty. Yet, even as we do what seems foolish, we find God being amazingly generous, filling us back up.

God is "peculiar," then, in the same sort of way it's peculiar to die in order to live.

Fenelon is squarely in the "Abandonment" tradition, best known today, perhaps, from de Caussade's Abandonment to Divine Providence. The letters in Let God constantly sound the theme of dying to self and letting God cut everything sinful out of our lives. "God's stab goes deep," as Fenelon puts it, "and it leaves nothing untouched that needs his knife."

This is good, traditional spiritual direction, expressed in a stern but pastoral tone made more casual and contemporary by Collier's paraphrasing. He occasionally veers away from casual and into trendy -- "Tone down your feverish pace and your uber-activity" may be the worst example -- but most of today's Catholic bishops do, too, I suppose, so those missed notes can be forgiven.

In his framing material, Collier stresses the point that Fenelon is writing, not as a spiritual friend, but as a spiritual guide, and that Christians nowadays greatly need such guidance.

This is true, but I wonder whether, in a sort of subtle irony, Fenelon's guidance itself requires a guide. Consider this, from a letter "To a Weak Christian":

I am asking you to fully abandon yourself to God. I know that we tend to think that humility and weakness somehow interfere with this kind of absolute abandonment to God. We thing of abandonment as a heroic act of epic love that makes stunning, courageous, grand sacrifices to God. It's actually a lot simpler than that. True abandonment just gives itself over, just rests in God's care and love, like a baby in its mothers arms. Here's the tricky thing: true abandonment has to abandon even its abandonment. We have to give up our self-inflated sense of what a big sacrifice we are making. We need to give up on ourselves without even thinking much of it.

As a weak Christian, I think this sounds true and wise. But I can also see all sorts of ways that acting upon this can lead a weak Christian into big trouble. A few sentences later, Fenelon writes:

Abandonment is peaceful. If we are anxious about whatever it is we have abandoned, then we can't really call it abandonment, can we?

Again, true -- but isn't it sure to make people anxious about following the prior advice?

I think the way to read this book -- and I do recommend reading it; I'll probably transcribe some nuggets in a future post -- is as matter for meditation and prayer, rather than as immediate guidance. These are letters, after all, written to specific persons in specific circumstances. Then the fruits of reading can be shared, with a guide if you happen to have one, but at least with friends who can help you integrate Fenelon's wisdom, which is really one stream of the Holy Spirit's wisdom, into your life.

(I don't mean to suggest, by the way, that Collier would disagree with this.)

(I should also mention, by way of full disclosure, that mine is a review copy. So yes, I'm recommending you buy a book that I didn't.)

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Can anything good come from novelizing Nazareth?

It's weird, I think, to see it in black and white:
ALSO BY ANNE RICE

Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt
Interview with the Vampire
Etc.

When news broke a while back that Anne Rice had re-engaged with the Faith and even written a novel featuring a seven-year-old Jesus as narrator, I thought it was great for Anne Rice but probably not the finest moment for American literature. I'd read some of her vampire books, but The Queen of the Damned was too pagan for my blood. Writing in the voice of the Son of God seemed like a case of trying too hard, and I gave Out of Egypt a miss.

And I would have given the sequel -- Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, to be published on March 4 -- a miss as well, if a review copy hadn't come in the mail during a Lent when I'm only reading books with a religious theme.

It starts on a discouraging note, with the stoning of two young men who spent too much time alone together. Criminy, I thought, is her 1st Century Nazareth going to be just like her 19th Century New Orleans?

And I may have rolled my eyes as Jesus moons over the beautiful young girl who lives across the street. (Not to worry, though; Rice's Jesus knows that the personal problems of a Messiah don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.)

Still, you (by which I mean "I") don't read a novelization of the life of Christ for the plot. You read it to find out what insights, if any, the novelist has into the mystery of the Incarnation.

Rice gives us a thirty-year-old Jesus who knows he's the Son of God, but is somehow able to not know things he knows he could know. He's a bit of a doormat; as he waits for whatever it is that he's waiting for, he's regularly pecked at by those around him who are getting on with their lives. And one old man, one of the scribes who questioned the twelve-year-old Jesus in Jerusalem, tells him scornfully,

"The world swallowed you.... You left the Temple and the world simply swallowed you. That's what the world does. It swallows everything."

Despite all this, Jesus does at times rouse himself to command those around him. He can speak with authority, but it is vested in the evident wisdom of his words rather than in his own person.

What finally stirs him to action is the news that his cousin John is preaching and baptizing in the wilderness. Jesus announces that he is going to John, and his whole family say they will join him.

From there, we're in familiar territory: the Baptism, the 40-day fast, the temptations, the calling of the first disciples, the miracle at Cana. And here, I think, the book really comes into its own, when Rice can use her Catholic novelist's imagination to flesh out the Gospel stories.

The curing of Simon's mother-in-law is particularly sharp:

I took her hand. She turned and looked at me, annoyed at first that someone would disturb her in this way. Then she sat up.

"Who said that I was sick? Who said that I should be in this bed?" she asked.

And immediately she rose and scurried around the little house, heaping pottage into bowls for us, and clapping her hands for her maidservant to bring us fresh water. "Look at you, how thin you are," she said to me... She glared at her son-in-law. "Did you tell me I was sick?"

Little wonder Simon left everything he had to follow Jesus.

My favorite chapter is the temptation in the desert, in which Satan appears as Jesus would look if he accepted the offer of all the nations on earth in exchange for homage. Jesus quite simply pwns him:

"It is the Lord God who rules," I said, "and He always has. You are nothing, and you have nothing and rule nothing. Not even your minions share with you in your emptiness and in your rage."

That's satisfying, emotionally and theologically, but their whole conversation is well-imagined and believable.

Finally, I have to say Rice does a commendable job with the characters of Mary and Joseph (yes, he's still alive). Call it filial piety, but I'll cut a novelist a lot more slack with what they make of Jesus than of His parents. The Mary and Joseph of The Road to Cana make a good case for devotion to the Mary and Joseph of history.

Which leaves us where?

The Road to Cana is easily the best -- the best written, the most Catholic -- of the handful of novelizations of Jesus's life that I've read. Rice's enthusiasm and talent keep pace with each other, her imagination and her faithfulness to Revelation work together. It may be a little too contemporary to be timeless, but if you can read it, not as an assertion of Gospel truth but as one writer's meditations on the beginning of Jesus' public ministry, you might find it worthwhile.

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In extremis

I did not want to read The Greatest Gift: The Courageous Life and Martyrdom of Sister Dorothy Stang, by Binka Le Breton. I figured any story about struggles for justice in the Brazilian rainforest was bound to be depressing, and I knew this one culminated with Sr. Dorothy's cold-blooded murder on a muddy road in the Amazon. (She was murdered three years ago this Tuesday, on February 12, 2005.)

But when a review copy showed up in the mail, I somehow felt I owed it to her memory, and to the poor people for whom she lived and died, to listen to her story. Having read the book, I think I've learned a few things.

For one thing, I've learned a little about the history, politics, economics, and ecology of the Brazilian Amazon, and what I've learned confirms my prior impression that they're all badly messed up. Le Breton is herself the director of the Iracambi Research Center, dedicated to conserving the Atlantic Rainforest, and seems more confident in telling the story once Sr. Dorothy arrives in the jungle frontier.

More importantly, I think I've learned a little about the appeal liberation theology in the 1960s, and even Creation Spirituality in the 1990s, had for the North American-born missionaries in Latin America.

In a society with too few priests and religious, what choice is there but to form groups of layfolk -- call them "base communities" -- to confirm their brothers and sisters in the Faith? And if this society is class-based, with the lowest class having essentially no rights or power, how can merely teaching the lowest class that they are each beloved of God not come off sounding, to those in the upper classes, close enough to communism as makes no difference?

My guess is that, when you're trying to preach the Gospel to people who have next to nothing, without drawing the ire of a military dictatorship, the theological distinctions drawn, for example, in the Instruction on Certain Aspects of the 'Theology of Liberation' are not your real concern. Your real concern is getting a stove for the family that came to you this morning in need; whoever helps you do that is your friend, whoever hinders you is your opponent.

Similarly for Creation Spirituality. The sandy soil of the Amazon is great for rainforests, but lousy for slash-and-burn agriculture. If you're in a society that treats nature as something to be consumed without regard for tomorrow, then even someone as nutty as Matthew Fox will say things about man's relationship to creation that sound wise and profound (as happened to Sr. Dorothy when she attended a Creation Spirituality workshop in California in the early 1990s).

If you're in a society in which women are often literally ignored, then even a radical Western feminism will be welcome as a correction. The counter-correction against feminist excesses is a luxury best left to journals and to theologians who can do their jobs without risk of contracting malaria.

Now let me get very speculative: If being a missionary in Latin America over the last forty years is a radicalizing experience, that experience has in turn fed the radicalization of religious life in the United States. The missionary sisters are the ones who go into hiding from death squads, the ones who have to make a handful of beans feed two people for three days, the ones who literally build new churches.

What I think should happen is that their congregational sisters who stay in the U.S., who don't have these extreme experiences, should give balance to their lives, add a conservative tension to the radicalizing pressure of the missionary field.

Instead (due to envy? solidarity? a coincident change in U.S. culture?), the stay-at-home sisters went just as radical as the missionaries. As a result, we have whole religious congregations who speak of the United States in 2008 as though it were Brazil in 1968.

And since, whatever its actual faults, the United States in 2008 doesn't have a military dictatorship that routinely rounds up troublemakers, these congregations are free to continue to become more and more radicalized without interference. This, in turn, drives a wedge between them and other parts of the Church, and we find ourselves (not, of course, only due to what U.S.-based religious sisters did or didn't do since 1960) in a position where some Catholics actually sneer at the idea that "peace and justice" is a concern of Christians, while others actually sneer at the idea that "personal morality" is also a concern.

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On judging a book by its cover

I was excited to receive a review copy of Thomas J. Craughwell's Lent and Easter with Mary. Who better, after all, to walk with in following Jesus through His sorrows and into His glory?



The book, though, was altogether different from the series of meditative essays on the Marian dimensions of the Gospel I was expecting. Instead, it is a collection of ninety-six brief vignettes (two or three pages each) in the life of the Church, in which Mary figures more or less prominently.

On reflection, I shouldn't have been surprised, given Craughwell's earlier and delightful Saints Behaving Badly, which also gives an episodic view of the Church through the lives of the saints.

In Lent and Easter with Mary, Craughwell uses a wide range of source material: lives of the saints (e.g., St. Catherine of Bologna and St. Thomas More), Marian devotions (Ireland's Industrial Rosary Crusade, St. Louis de Montfort's total consecration to Mary), famous non-canonized Catholics with devotions to Mary (Palestrina, Knute Rockne), shrines (Our Lady of Altagracia, Our Lady of Guadalupe of Estremadura), Marian titles (Our Lady of the Thorn, Our Lady of Africa), Marian apparitions (Lourdes, Banneux), miracles attributed to Mary (a rescue of three merchants in 1212, conversion of a bandit in 1040), and more (the wedding at Cana, the revival of Mary Gardens).

What I like best are the brief prayers that accompany each day's sketch. Some are from Scripture, others from the Liturgy or various litanies from East and West or from the writings of the saints. Ash Wednesday, for example, has the Sum Tuum Praesidium, perhaps the oldest known Marian invocation. Holy Saturday has this novena prayer, attributed to Bl. Junipero Serra:

Most holy and immaculate Mary, since Almighty God has preserved you from all stain of sin in order that you might be a worthy Mother for your only Son, who took on human flesh and became man in your womb, I beseech you, most pure and blessed of all women, to obtain for me complete pardon for all my sins so that I may merit in this life the eternity which I seek. This I ask through your Son who lives and reigns through all ages, world without end. Amen.

These prayers, poems, and passages add a meditative depth to Craughwell's light and conversational tone in telling his stories.

Generally speaking, I don't like page-a-day books, laid out to be read bit by bit according to a fixed calendar. I've got enough daily obligations without my reading material adding to the list. Despite its layout, with each selection appearing under a liturgical (e.g., "Third Sunday of Lent") or an ordinal ("Day Nineteen [of Easter]") heading, Lent and Easter with Mary doesn't read like an imposition, for two reasons.

First, the stories are brief and engaging enough to read several at one go, so it's hard to fall behind and easy to catch up. (So don't feel like you have to wait till next year if you don't have a copy in hand by tomorrow.)

Second, for the most part the sketches aren't tied to any particular moment in the liturgical calendar. Yes, a story about Pope St. Sixtus III appears under "Day Six" of Easter, which this year coincides with St. Sixtus's feast. But the story will lose nothing next year, when the Sixth Day of Easter is Pope St. Anicetus Day. (The entries for the Triduum, the Ascension, and Pentecost are exceptions, being more explicitly about what we commemorate on those days.)

The "Lent and Easter" angle, then, is more of a structure upon which to hang these eight dozen vignettes than an underlying and unifying theme of the book. As with Saints Behaving Badly, Craughwell here gives us the building blocks from which we can construct our own take on Christian life. With the former book, the topic was the relationship between fallen human nature and sanctity; with Lent and Easter with Mary, it's the relationship between the Church and her Mother.

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Ceci n'est pas un review

You can't exactly review a memoir of a concentration camp. (To add, "It reviews you," would be too precious, though maybe not that far from the truth.)

But you can very briefly describe Priestblock 25487 as a matter-of-fact window into the insanity Fr. Jean Bernard experienced during his fifteen-month imprisonment at Dachau.

It's different from Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and Corrie Ten Boom's The Hiding Place, to name the two other concentration camp memoirs I've read, in that there's no attempt to contextualize the experience, no lessons drawn, no afterwords of wisdom.

It's just the raw record of what happened, from the day Fr. Bernard was arrested in Luxembourg to the day after he was released. With a few changes -- replace the last two pages of Priestblock 25487 with the last two pages of The Trial, say -- it could pass as a Kafka novel. Intentional or not, it is an artistic choice that tells a truth a more polished or contextualized telling of the story couldn't.

In Robert Royal's introduction to the new Zaccheus Press edition, mention is made of Fr. Bernard's "strict regard for truth." He reports what he and his fellow priest-inmates did, which was chiefly trying to survive. This isn't hagiography; there are no hymns arising from a starvation cell; there are no jokes at the torturers' expense. There is heroic virtue, but there is also pettiness and craftiness and hopelessness. This is a story about men of God, with all that the word "men" entails.

I will say that I was irritated by the introduction, which seemed to me to overplay the "Catholics suffered under the Nazis too, you know" card. In fact, that's a card that you almost can't play without overplaying.

As I read the book, though, I saw Royal's point. Fr. Bernard's story is one of odium fidei, an explicit and taunting hatred of the Faith. The clergymen in Dachau were not all assigned to the same barracks because prisoners were sorted alphabetically by occupation, but so that they could be punished as Christian clergy.

Circumstances today are such that any attempt to tell the story of Nazi persecution of the Church will carry at least an intrinsic request to divert attention from Nazi persecution of the Jews. Written in 1945, when there was more than enough attention to go around, Priestblock 25487 has no such baggage. In particular, Fr. Bernard could refer to the mistreatment of priests in response to criticism from the Vatican as a matter of personal experience, without even a hint of anti-"Hitler's Pope" apologetics.

I should point out that Fr. Bernard had served as general secretary of the International Catholic Cinema Office before the war, so we shouldn't think he was unaware of how his account might be received in the post-war context. But his context was not ours, and whatever agenda he may have had that went beyond the dual message of "never forget" and "forgive" he expresses in his foreword is not in play today.

Which leaves us with this dual message: Never forget. And forgive.

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"Our God will come to save us"

I received a review copy of Zaccheus Press's new reprint, Priestblock 25487: A Memoir of Dachau, on Saturday. My first thought^† was, "Nothing gets you in the mood for Christmas like reading about concentration camps."

Then it occurred to me that nothing gets you to see the need for Christmas like reading about concentration camps.

When, through familiarity or thoughtlessness, we think of the Incarnation of the Son of God as nice, as a very thoughtful thing for God to have gone to all that trouble to do -- then, I think, we aren't really getting the point. We aren't getting the seriousness of sin, or the wrongness of the way things are, or the magnitude of God's love for us.

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† Okay, my first thought was, "Yay! A book!" I'm writing about my first relevant thought.

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A poor mention of an interesting book

Somewhere I've got a review copy of Jon M. Sweeney's Light in the Dark Ages: The Friendship of Francis and Clare of Assisi filled with bookmarks, just waiting to be used in the production of some real crackerjack posts.

But the liturgical calendar waits for no man, so I thought I'd make do on this Feast of our Holy Father Francis (that's on the Dominican calendar; the General Roman Calendar marks it as the Memorial of Francis of Assisi, Religious) by simply mentioning it.

Two points of note:

First, the subtitle is misleading. The book isn't about the friendship of the two saints, although it's certainly mentioned. The book is about St. Francis's personal vision of religious life, and St. Clare plays a supporting role.

Second, the main title is exactly right. Jon Sweeney sees the Thirteenth Century as a Dark Age of the Church and St. Francis as the light that saved the Church from that darkness. Moreover, if I'm reading him right, he sees St. Francis as the light that can save the Church from her present, persistent darkness, if only we go back to his original ideal.

I've read a few books on St. Francis, but this is the only one whose author is himself a Spiritual. It does make for a fresh take on the Poverello.

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The work on the Work

Okay, so this isn't the most timely review, seeing as John Allen's Opus Dei: An Objective Look Behind the Myths and Reality of the Most Controversial Force in the Catholic Church first came out two years ago and the paperback reprint three months ago. But I do what I can, when I can, to keep the insect overlords wise and dedicated professionals with a great sense of humor who send me review copies happy.

Between the 2005 hardcover publication and the 2007 trade paperback, the DaVinci Code movie came and went. Allen took advantage of this to frame the preface he wrote for the paperback edition, in which he makes this perhaps surprising claim:

With the possible exception of Pope John Paul II, Opus Dei never had a better friend than Dan Brown.

Brown's absurd caricature of Opus Dei led to "Operation Lemonade," the strategy of using the attention the book brought as an opportunity for the prelature to inform the curious (and the doubtful) about what Opus Dei is really all about.

And if Brown is the Work's second-best friend, John Allen comes in third. From now on, anyone who wants to bring a charge against Opus Dei or its founder will first have to check whether the charge has been investigated and answered by Allen in his book.

He begins with a look at St. Josemaria Escriva, whom some have charged with vanity, Masonry, and fascism, and at the new association he founded, upon the spirituality of divine filiation and sanctification of secular work. Then he looks at eight "Question Marks About Opus Dei": secrecy; mortification; women; money; Opus Dei in the Church; Opus Dei and politics; blind obedience; and recruiting.

Among Allen's conclusions, which may disappoint the anti-Opus Dei folks:

• "Many of the charges leveled against... Saint Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer... are open to interpretation, and in any event do not seem to disqualify in terms of personal sanctity."
• "Opus Dei is not especially 'secretive.'"
• "Practices of corporal mortification... have a long pedigree and accepted theological rational, and do not generally seem to be taken to extremes."
• Opus Dei is not rich, at least by the standards of other organizations in the Catholic Church...."
• "The profile of Opus Dei as 'elitist' has some historical validity.... Yet Opus Dei is not 'elitist' in the sense in which people often invoke the term, meaning an exclusively white-collar phenomenon."
• "Opus Dei's is not an exclusively vertical spirituality; it does have a social conscience."
• "Opus Dei is not 'taking over' the Catholic Church."
• "Opus Dei is not the voracious recruiting machine of myth, given the snail's pace of recent grown, averaging 650 new members per year worldwide the last four years."
• "There's little evidence... that unwilling people are being subjected to this regime [of numerary life] through 'mind control.'"

Even granting that:

• "A substantial number of ex-members... report feeling damaged by their experience... These reports suggest the need for care in vocational discernment, especially among the young."

Allen follows up with:

• "Some of the critical testimony of ex-members comed down to the failure of certain officials of Opus Dei to use good judgment. As time goes on and Opus Dei matures, these episodes seem less frequent, and the internal climate seems more open."

Bottom line, and slightly simplifying: Much of the controversy is ill-founded (if often exacerbated by Opus Dei's tone-deaf reactions), and much of the rest is due to Opus Dei's learning curve as it grows from a personal vision of its founder to a self-sustaining, worldwide association of the faithful (i.e., the boneheadedness of iindividual members). I had the sense in reading this book that Allen himself was surprised to come to such a benign impression of the Work.

Still, he offers three suggestions that might help Opus Dei "to thrive, assuaging the anxieties people sometimes have and thus opening new apostolic horizons": increased transparency; increased collaboration with other Church organizations; and increased institutional self-criticism. (Note: All very American suggestions. Even Allen doesn't seem sure they'd have much appeal within Opus Dei. Collaboration in particular is viewed as against "the spirit of the Work," which is directed ad extra.)

In any case, anyone looking for a thorough (in spots thorough to the point of dullness) examination of the controversies surrounding Opus Dei really should start here. Not only because Operation Lemonade and other changes on the prelature's part have made a lot of the criticism anachronistic, but because Allen seems to make a real effort to present both sides of the still-disputed questions surrounding Opus Dei.

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My struggle with Girzone

A fan of the writer Fr. Joseph F. Girzone once gave me a copy of his bestselling book Joshua. I made it through four or five chapters before I had to stop.

The title character (there are at least seven books in the series) is Jesus Himself, living an ordinary life in contemporary America. Based on the first few chapters of the first book, Jesus has returned to preach a Gospel of Nondenominational Niceness.

Not for me.

In fact, most fictionalized accounts of Jesus aren't for me. He was surprising enough to those who knew Him best in the true accounts we have of Him that I just don't trust people who claim to know what He'd do here and now (or even in Narnia, whenever). One exception: In the Don Camillo stories I've read, Christ is believable (perhaps because He's crucified and risen).

So I was not excited to see a review copy of Fr. Girzone's My Struggle with Faith arrive in the mail. (As Julie Davis suggested, I'm not sure Doubleday did him any favors by publishing the trade paperback edition on practically the same day the book of Mother Teresa's writings came out.)

Nevertheless, I thought I'd take the broad and flexible outlook and give it a shot, just to see what the fellow had to say, fully prepared to give it up as soon as it became unbearable. (Also, I'd misplaced my copy of the Mother Teresa book.)

My Struggle With Faith never did become unbearable, though, so I wound up finishing it. It's a quick and light read, the theme of which is, "Find a reason for your faith." And as it happens, Fr. Girzone's is (essentially) the Catholic Faith, and his reasons are (for the most part) the traditional Catholic ones. He particularly stresses the early Church Fathers, who as the immediate spiritual descendants of the Apostles ought to know best what it is to believe in Jesus.

This isn't to say Fr. Girzone isn't a typically liberal Catholic. He doesn't like the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (or the Vatican generally), he's for optional celibacy for Roman Catholic priests, he thinks maybe laypeople ought to be able to annul their own marriages, he regrets the temporal power Constantine and St. Gregory the Great gave the Church, he's for opening Communion to those Christians who believe in the Real Presence, he's worried about a possible fundamentalist theocracy, he speaks more of the therapeutic benefits of Confession than of its spiritual benefits, and so forth. I'm not sure I much agree with his take on Jesus (he doesn't go too deeply into this -- or anything else, really -- in this book).

For the most part, though (and reserving especially his opinions on marriage and annulment), these are matters of doctrine and practice rather than dogma. I see nothing wrong with favoring optional celibacy, for example, as long as those who lack the authority don't act on their opinion. And as far as I could tell, in this book at least, Fr. Girzone accepts the authority of the Church.

He does, though, suggest that the Roman Curia has no business ordering the Bishops of the Church about. But I happen to agree with him there.

Overall, I think his idea of Jesus is too fluffy and his take on the institutional Church is too downbeat. Both encourage indifferentism among Christians, although he stresses his faith in the Eucharist, the papacy, and the importance of Mamma Mary, among other distinctly Catholic doctrines. Still, the overall effect is, "I believe the Catholic Church is the one founded by Jesus, but you don't have to, since what matters is Jesus, not doctrine." That strikes me as too either-or.

As the title suggests, the book is mostly about the questions Fr. Girzone has had about the Faith, but the autobiographical context is so sketchy it's hard to tell exactly when he was asking himself many of these questions. In many instances, both the question and the answer that ultimately satisfies him are extremely basic. Is he just thorough in recording what he learned as a young seminary student, or did he really not figure these things out for decades? It's not always clear.

What is clear is that, in his writing and ministry, Fr. Girzone has focused on Jesus as he finds Him in the Gospels. Not all priests do, of course; he writes:

Only in my later years did I come to the shocking realization that Jesus can be quite irrelevant in the life of the churches.... This was first driven home to me one day when an old priest, who had been a friend all my life, said to me, "How can you talk about Jesus for an hour and a half?"

I was stunned. I asked him what he meant by that. His response was, "We were not taught about Jesus in the seminary. We had good scripture courses, and excellent courses in moral and dogmatic theology and in Christology... but we weren't taught anything about the personal aspect of Jesus' life. I don't think I could talk about Him for more than five minutes."

Fr. Girzone, of course, thinks seminarians should be taught about the personal aspect of Jesus' life. I think seminarians ought to be taught to know Jesus Himself, and that priests can hardly blame their seminary syllabus if they grow old without ever knowing Him. Still:

As an elderly lady in Elyria, Ohio, said to me one night, "Father, the way I size up Christianity is like this: The Catholics worship the Church, the Protestants worship the Bible, and there are darn few who ever get to know Jesus Christ." She was right, and it is tragic.

He is right, and it is tragic.

I came away from this book with the impression that Fr. Girzone may have a mission to those who, for whatever reason, cannot be reached by more traditional Catholic preaching. I'm more doubtful his influence on those who simply choose not to be reached by more traditional Catholic teaching is for the good.

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What has Cooperstown to do with Jerusalem?

Granted, athletes talking about their religion is better than politicians talking about their religion. But really, can they say much beyond the stock, "I give God all the glory"? And doesn't that always imply (as countless columnists have suggested) that the guy they beat should give God all the blame?

With these and similar thoughts, I wasn't all that enthusiastic when I first heard about "Champions of Faith," a movie in which "baseball's biggest stars reveal how their faith guides and sustains their spectacular Major League careers." It's a production of Catholic Exchange, so I figured it was done with good intent, but on the whole, I'd be more interested in a movie about how faith guides and sustains mediocre scrub leaguers.

Still, when I was offered a review copy, I figured I could always take a quick look, then pass it on to someone I know who uses sports in his work with Catholic youth.

Well, as Rich Donnelly says in the movie, "There are two kinds of people in this world: those who are humble, and those who are about to be." As I started the DVD, I was about to be humbled by the humble, honest, and forthright expressions of faith it contained.

It wasn't just all the baseball players who said, "All the success, fame, and money in the world doesn't matter. What matters is living right with God." That's good to hear -- particularly good for kids -- but it's not really too hard for successful, famous, and rich men to say.

The greater lesson, I think, was that living right with God was necessary for them to succeed (with fame and money following success). It's not sufficient, of course -- I doubt Bl. Hyacinth Cormier would have won many batting titles -- a fact overlooked by those countless columnists who make fun of athletes who thank God for their victory.

The point isn't that an active faith makes one ballplayer better than another. It's that it makes him better than he would be otherwise. And that's true of everyone, regardless of what they do for a living.

On top of that, "Champions of Faith: Baseball Edition" is a genuinely well-made movie. The narrator occasionally oversells his words, but I was impressed by the film's professionalism and quality. (As with athletics, some people think living right with God suffices to make them good movie-makers; the people involved in this have talent as well.)

So while I'd still be interested in a movie about how faith guides and sustains mediocre scrub leaguers, I really enjoyed "Champions of Faith," and I think it would be ideal for Catholic youth groups or high school sports teams. (There's even a companion guide with discussion questions included.)

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It's not a good idea, it's just the law

On the one hand, I have an undergraduate degree in physics and a baptismal certificate in Christianity. I certainly value and accept the truths of both.

On the other hand, I stand by Spong's Law of Theophysical Asininity, which states:

Whenever a person appeals to quantum physics as the basis for a theological or religious principle, he is making an ass of himself.

So what am I to make of a book, sent to me by its publisher, titled The Physics of Christianity, in which Frank J. Tipler argues inter alia that

Jesus could have risen from the dead by making use of the baryon-annihilation process... We must gain control of this process in order to prevent the violation of unitarity in the far future, a violation that would destroy the universe if it occurred. By dying and rising again, Jesus not only paid the price for our sins but also gave us the knowledge to save the entire universe from destruction.

In one sentence: Spong's Law still holds.

Without getting into details, let me propose that there are two major problems with the book: its humorlessness and its intended audience.

I think the problem with most crackpot theories -- and make no mistake, that's what we're dealing with here -- is that they are proposed with too little humor. (I should mention that no one yet has managed to explain modern physics without appealing to a crackpot theory, and of course Christianity is itself based on the absurdity that God loves us enough to die for us, so the problem with this book isn't the mere presence of crackpottedness.)

It's not that Professor Tipler doesn't realize his are fringe ideas, it's that he doesn't account for that fact. Instead of writing, "I will continue to believe in the fundamental laws of physics even if doing so results in my professional death as a physicist," as he does in his conclusion, I think he should write something like, "I know these are some crazy ideas, but what if the universe is crazy?" Instead of a martyrly "here I stand" pose, a jesterly "join me in the fool's corner for a moment" might win a more sympathetic reading.

But then, who is it to whom he would be saying, "Join me for a moment"? His presentation of the physics is too tendentious and dogmatic to be accepted by people who know enough physics, and people who don't know enough physics can't critically evaluate his claims. Those who accept his claims uncritically are likely to wind up thinking they understand quantum mechanics better than professional physicists, when in fact all they understand is that most professional physicists disagree with Professor Tipler. (As for me, I'm in the position of knowing enough not to accept his claims uncritically, but not enough to pronounce definitively on each of them.)

Modern physics tells us the universe is a lot weirder than it appears. Christianity tell us that modern physics doesn't know the half of it. I think a great book could be written about the relationship between them, but The Physics of Christianity isn't it.

[Full disclosure: I only read up to page 27, then the concluding section, and a few bits here and there in between. This post isn't so much a book review as a comment on a book that didn't make it through my reading triage process.]

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Commonplace wisdom

EWTN isn't my thing. I doubt the time I've spent watching that TV channel adds up to two hours since it went on the air. Almost everything I know about Mother Angelica I learned second or third hand, and almost all of that has been in the context of the Great Catholic Culture Wars, a context I find makes almost everyone involved pettier.

So I was not thrilled to find Mother Angelica's smiling face gracing the cover of a review book I was sent. The title -- Mother Angelica's Little Book of Life Lessons and Everyday Spirituality -- is about as close as they could come without actually asking me for the name of a book I would never want to read.

All that said, it's a pretty good book.

Raymond Arroyo, who published a biography of Mother Angelica in 2005, has drawn short passages (ranging from a few words to a few pages) from her interviews, conversations, and broadcasts over several decades, arranging them by theme. The result is a kind of commonplace book of commonplace wisdom.

[Disclosure: As a thematically sorted collection of thoughts, it's not the sort of thing you sit down and read all the way through. And I didn't. I've read bits here and there, maybe half of it altogether.]

The value in a book of commonplace wisdom is that many or most of us live commonplace lives. We could stand to be reminded again and again of things we know, and to be told things we should know. Mother Angelica's Little Book does this, in bite-size samples, on topics ranging from "Living in the Present Moment" to "Saints and Angels" and "The Last Things."

Her style is plain and straightforward, with an occasional elegance like

The world is not starving from a lack of money. It's starving from a want of love.

There are also some insightful distinctions, such as the one between recalling the past (necessary for prudence in the present) and reliving the past (always imprudent). And her "everyday spirituality" of being present to God and accepting the call to become a saint is presented in very clear and practical terms.

Now, I don't regard this book as an instant classic of spirituality. Mother Angelica's ideas aren't particularly original -- and I should make clear that she doesn't claim they are, and that Raymond Arroyo calls attention to the sources, such as Brother Lawrence and Jean Pierre de Caussade, who have influenced her.

Neither are her words particularly deep. As I said above, most of us aren't particularly deep, either, so that's fine as far as it goes. Just don't expect to find much on the depths of the spiritual life available to the Christian, even the commonplace Christian, in this life.

I could quibble over some of the selections included, starting with the opening epigraph (Luke 10:21, "Thou has hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to little ones. Yea, Father, for so it hath seemed good in Thy sight."), which strikes the "just a simple nun" chord her fans are fond of a bit too hard. A fair amount of the material seems to have been chosen to play up Mother Angelica's personality, rather than her wisdom or counsel -- and, for that matter, not all of her wisdom and counsel is beyond criticism.

Overall, though, the book delivers what its title advertises, and if the editor is somewhat indulgent toward the author, chances are most of the readers will be, too. Those for whom EWTN isn't their thing may not be bowled over by the book, but it does give a flavor of the sound and simple spirituality that drives Mother Angelica and inspires her fans.

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Non-transfigured nonviolence

When I started reading Transfiguration: A Meditation on Transforming Ourselves and Our World, by Fr. John Dear, SJ, I was curious. As I read, I became puzzled. Then I came up with what I think is the key to the puzzle. After I finished the book, I settled on what I'd say is its major fault.

I began in curiosity, because all I really knew about the author was that he is something of a big name in the Peace & Justice Catholic movement. Being given a review copy seemed like a good opportunity to find out what he had to say.

The book is an extended reflection on the Transfiguration of Jesus and what it means for Christians today. It's divided into five parts: following Jesus before the Transfiguration; going up the mountain; on the mountaintop; going down the mountain; following Jesus to Jerusalem.

There's some good stuff here, chiefly in Fr. Dear's call to develop a relationship with Jesus through contemplative prayer and reading the Gospels. Some of his insights on the Gospel accounts of the Transfiguration are helpful, as is his recognition of the value of seeking a mountaintop encounter with God in our own lives. There's a good line that, "In this age of pop stars and movie celebrities, we are, at best, fans of Jesus, not followers."

But here's the puzzle: How can a Catholic priest who recommends a schedule of prayer and reflection like that have such a peculiar idea about Jesus' life and ministry? If he's reading the same Gospels and praying the same prayers as generations of Catholics did before, and as his own and subsequent generations are, then why does he reach such different conclusions about what the Gospels say?

In Fr. Dear's mind, Jesus is a "nonviolent revolutionary" Who has come into the world to oppose the Roman Empire and its toadies within Jewish religious circles. Following the Transfiguration, Jesus has "one goal in mind: to challenge corruption in the Jerusalem Temple." Even the demon who possesses the boy whom Jesus meets at the foot of the mountain symbolizes "the imperial forces of violence, which kill the poor around the world."

For Fr. Dear, it is simply axiomatic that "creative nonviolence" against the Empire sums up the Gospel. That axiom colors the entire book: his reading of the Transfiguration story; his selection of "quintessential sayings of Jesus"; his opinion of the Church in which he serves as a priest; his choice of religious heroes. On this last point, like many Catholic pacifists, he relies heavily on Martin Luther King and Gandhi, and attributes the relative lack of Catholic pacifists to a defect of the Church.

And that, I think, is the key to the puzzle. Fr. Dear does not think with the Church. He is, if it's not too cute to say it, something of a sola Scriptura Catholic, who uses his hermeneutic of nonviolence to interpret every verse according to his own opinion, and if the Church does not share his opinion, so much the worse for the Church.

Thus we have Peter, James, and John falling asleep on Mount Tabor serving as an "image [that] helps explain today's male-dominated, institutional Church," which "must of course ordain women and married people, and include everyone in its embrace." Where that "of course" comes from, and where it's supposed to go, isn't made clear, but I suppose it follows somehow from the Church not knowing that creative nonviolence sums up the Gospel.

Which brings me to the book's major fault. Fr. Dear is so convinced of the rightness of his opinion that he does very little to convince the reader. Without denying its genuine insights, taken as a whole the book is a sermon to the converted, to those who already agree with him that the Gospel reduces to a message of nonviolence.

The result is a disservice to those who don't agree with him, because it makes it very difficult to discern areas of potential agreement. Saying that nonviolence is all there is to the Faith is a good means of preventing those who say nonviolence has nothing to do with the Faith from questioning their own position.

To a lesser extent, the book is even a disservice to Catholic pacifists, in that Fr. Dear's confidence in the justness of his own position comes off as self-righteousness, and self-righteousness won't win anyone to your side.

Transfiguration is not the book for someone looking for an apology for Catholic pacifism; the assumption of Jesus-as-nonviolent-revolutionary makes for some jarring non sequiturs for those who don't share that assumption (e.g., "If we want to live an authentic, faith-filled life, we need to proclaim good news to the poor, liberty to prisoners, vision to the blind, liberation to the oppressed, the cancellation of Third World debt, and the redistribution of the world's resources from the First World nation to the poorer nations...."). It's too bad, because the Transfiguration is a wonderful mystery through which to view the Christian life, and the Christian attitude toward violence is something most of us Catholics could stand to think more about.

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True devotion to Mary

I was sent a review copy of Shrines: Images of Italian Worship, a coffee-table-type collection of photographs by Steven Rothfeld of personal shrines visible from the streets of Italy, and I wasn't sure what to do about it. Do I keep it, as a bit of distilled beauty on the bookshelf? Do I give it as a gift, since it seems to be in the gift book genre? And what do I write about a book of pictures, with just a brief introduction and a few scattered asides added by way of text, particularly when there doesn't seem to be any sample images online?

Steven Riddle shows me the way on this last question:

The theme of the book is "shrines" in the lower-case meaning of the word--personal, small devotional sites, intimate spiritual places made public so that in some small way you share your devotion with others...

And this last thought brings out one of the poignant touches of the book--these are a commonplace in Italy. Perhaps not everywhere, but they can be encountered with some frequency. Except in the more Hispanic neighborhoods near me, there is nothing like this in the American Way of devotion... We are almost embarrassed by our devotions, it seems. And we have lost the good sense of Chesterton--"if it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly."

If the crafts-magazine enthusiasm of The Catholic Home left me unimpressed, looking at all these different Marian shrines left me wanting to build one of my own.

And the thought of building one of my own calls to mind Chesterton's line quoted by Steven. The shrines pictured in this book are not all things of great aesthetic beauty. Many of them are crude or artless; most have seen better days. But they are works of true devotion (and not, pace the subtitle, of worship), and it's the evidence of devotion rather than craft that makes them beautiful.

I thought it was interesting that these shrines also serve as means of devotion for passersby. People cross themselves as they pass, or commend themselves to the Virgin. In the introduction, Frances Mayes writes of buying a house in Italy that came with a shrine to Mary, to which an elderly man would bring flowers daily. The change of ownership meant nothing to him. It's a tidy example of the idea that private property is to be used for the common good, or if you prefer of the difference between right of ownership and right of use. (Mayes appreciates this, too, if not out of any particularly evident religious devotion.)

In any case, if you see a copy of Shrines, take a moment to look through it. There's a good chance someone you know will like it.

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Heart and hearth

Reading a review copy of Meredith Gould's book The Catholic Home: Celebrations and Traditions for Holidays, Feast Days, and Every Day, has got me thinking about the trend in certain circles to rediscover Catholic traditions.

The book itself I can dispatch by saying I don't recommend it at all. It's a messy jumble, seemingly of whatever the author could think of to write on the various topics that come up. I can forgive the messy jumble -- I blog, after all -- but between the inaccuracies (Advent begins the Sunday after St. Andrew's Day? You pray the Glorious Mysteries "on Wednesdays and Saturdays from Easter until Advent"?) and the peculiar advice she gives (she dismisses as unreasonable the idea of buying the four volume Liturgy of the Hours, for example, while advising everyone to take an icon writing workshop), I get the sense of a great deal of enthusiasm for physical expressions of faith, but not much ordered spiritual depth.

But to the trend of reviving Catholic traditions: What is happening, it seems to me, is not so much a rediscovery of traditions as an interest in discovering any and every tradition. The Swedes do St. Lucy's wreaths? The Italians do St. Joseph's tables? The Poles bless food baskets on Holy Saturday? Great, let's do them all! Isn't that "what Catholics do"?

Well, it might be what Swedish-Polish-Italian Catholics do, if any such exist. I'm not sure it's quite true to say it's what German-Irish-American Catholics do, though.

I do like to read about these various traditions, though, and I'm not above adapting some of them to my own time and place. (Particularly the ones involving food. Particularly the foods involving fried dough.)

To the extent adopting various traditions out of a book or off the Net helps Catholics enter into the rhythms of the liturgical calendar, it's great. I'd caution against a too-dogmatic approach, as though adapting a custom to our time and place is somehow a betrayal -- you can bet the peasants who first made it a custom had no hesitation to change things around -- but my guess is there aren't too many dogmatists on, say, the question of whether anything but goose can be served on Martinmas.

Still, considering that Catholics in the United States today are, to a much greater degree than Catholics of previous generations, cut off from a rich body of cultural and spiritual traditions, we would do well to look around, and even forward, in addition to looking back, for the sort of actions and activities that will sanctify these days and those to come. Few of us live in medieval Catholic villages, and our means for achieving sanctity of heart and of hearth are not necessarily those that worked hundreds of years ago on another continent.

In particular, there aren't going to be too many venerable peasant customs of praying the Divine Office or of lectio divina, but I'll guess they will lead to living an authentic Catholic life better than any number of bonfires or cakes.

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Not coming this fall to Fox

Last week, I read a review copy of a book by Thomas J. Craughwell, Saints Behaving Badly: The Cutthroats, Crooks, Trollops, Con Men, and Devil-Worshippers Who Became Saints, due out in September.

The subtitle gives perhaps a better indication of the contents than the main title. There are twenty-eight brief biographies, about six pages on average, ranging from "Saint Matthew, Extortionist" to "Venerable Matt Talbot, Chronic Alcoholic." In his introduction, Craughwell explains the theme behind the selection:

At least since the nineteenth century many authors have gone out of their way to sanitize the lives of the saints, often glossing over the more embarrassing cases with the phrase "he/she was once a great sinner." I don't doubt the hagiographers' good intentions, but I can't help thinking it is misguided to edit out the wayward years of a saint's life...

The point of reading these stories is not to experience some tabloid thrill, but to understand how grace works in the world. Every day, all day long, God pours out his grace upon us, urging us, coaxing us, to turn away from everything that is base and cheap and unsatisfying, and turn toward the only thing that is eternal, perfect, and true -- that is, himself...

[The message of] great sinners who became great saints... is reassuring: if these people can be saved, then so can you!

And in fact, Craughwell records the facts (and the legends) in an admirably forthright, non-tabloid style. Bad behavior is understood broadly, ranging from "St. Vladimir, Fratricide, Rapist, and Practitioner of Human Sacrifice" to "St. Peter Claver, Dithering Novice," and in a couple of cases, the misbehavior may be entirely legendary.

The full list of saints:

• St. Matthew, Extortionist
• St. Dismas, Thief
• St. Callixtus, Embezzler
• St. Hippolytus, Antipope
• St. Christopher, Servant of the Devil
• St. Pelagia, Promiscuous Actress
• St. Genesius, Scoffer
• St. Moses the Ethiopian, Cutthroat and Gang Leader
• St. Fabiola, Bigamist
• St. Augustine, Heretic and Playboy
• St. Alipius, Obsessed with Blood Sports
• St. Patrick, Worshipper of False Gods
• St. Mary of Egypt, Seductress
• St. Columba, Warmonger
• St. Olga, Mass Murderer
• St. Vladimir, Fratricide, Rapist, and Practitioner of Human Sacrifice
• St. Olaf, Viking
• St. Thomas Becket, Hedonist
• St. Francis of Assisi, Wastrel
• Bl. Giles of Portugal, Satanist
• St. Margaret of Cortona, Rich Man's Mistress
• Bl. Angela of Foligno, Gossip and Hedonist
• St. Ignatius of Loyola, Egotist
• St. John of God, Gambler and Drunkard
• St. Camillus de Lellis, Cardsharp and Con Man
• St. Philip Howard, Cynic and Negligent Husband
• St. Peter Claver, Dithering Novice
• Ven. Matt Talbot, Chronic Alcoholic

As you can see, it's a varied list. Some of their stories are well-known, some relatively obscure.

I should point out that Craughwell leaves implicit what he calls the message of these stories, that no one is beyond salvation. There's very little editorializing, systematizing, or moralizing. Perhaps the closest he comes to this is in writing, "It is safe to say that under the formal process of canonization that has been in place in the Catholic Church for the last several hundred years, Olaf would never have made the cut."

Limiting Saints Behaving Badly to biography makes it a hard book to fault. It does raise some interesting questions -- not least what we today should say and think of St. Olaf -- without trying to answer them, but that leaves the reader free to come up with his own answers. And his own questions, too, for that matter.

I'd think this book could lead to some good discussions for a book club, and I intend to suggest it to my parish's DRE as a possible resource for teenage catechesis. (A few misbehaviors don't make suitable reading for younger children.)

There's a five page bibliography, so although you could get the gist of most of these lives at e.g. Saints O' the Day, most of the sketches are more extensive and detailed than you're likely to find online.

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Not my choice

I admit to being surprisingly disappointed by George Weigel's God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church. My disappointment is surprising because I was toying with the idea of buying the book when a review copy was offered me.

The opening chapter, "The Death of a Priest," was great. It covers the final sickness and death of the blessed John Paul II, and those of us who love and miss him will find this chapter a clear exposition of the first few months of 2005, and a good reminder of those experiences.

In Chapter 2, "The Church That John Paul II Left Behind," Weigel lists the "EPIC ACCOMPLISHMENT" and the "FRUSTRATIONS AND AMBIGUITIES" of that papacy. Here things get a little... skewed.

I think I'm reacting to Weigel's reportorial tone, well suited to a recitation of the chronology of the events covered in the book, extending into his opinion and analysis. Certainly one man's epic accomplishment may be another's frustration, but Weigel seems content to simply assert his judgment rather than defend it, as for example when he writes that "the Church and the world will be wrestling with the thought of John Paul II for centuries."

Well, maybe.

Weigel also seems even more reluctant than I to criticize John Paul II. None of the frustrations and ambiguities are the Pope's fault, not even Weigel's dissatisfaction with many of the bishops the Pope appointed. The papacy is interpreted as though it had only a two-part munus, of priest and prophet; to the extent the blessed John Paul II chose to govern as prophet, Weigel gives him a full pass. Which is fine as a personal choice, but it doesn't produce the most insightful analysis.

And then some other oddities creep in, bits of ecclesial flotsam some of which constituted a nine-hours' wonder on St. Blog's, but that seem really out of place in so durable a format as a hardcover book. (I think in particular of the mention of sleazy pictures (sorry, Googlers, you're out of luck here) once posted on a Jesuit website.)

So my initial enthusiasm cooled, and it got to the point where reading the book was a chore, where I'd think, "Oh, I should finish that so I can blog a review." But then, getting to the point where reading the book is a chore is itself suggestive of a review.

I know a lot of other bloggers have commented favorably on God's Choice, and I was expecting to as well. I will say it seems like a good record of the events, and a handy overview of Pope John Paul II's papacy you might be able to hand to your kids in a decade or so when they ask what the big deal with him was anyway. I can't say how the book is on the title character, since I'm not going to force myself to read past Chapter 3 (on the funeral; subsequent chapters cover the conclave, an overview of Pope Benedict XVI's pre-papal career, and the future of the Church).

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