✣ Highlights from the week online
How Sherlock Holmes deduced the afterlife At the National Catholic Register, Sherlock Holmes fan Dan Andriacco went sleuthing – on the trail of Sherlock’s faith. Holmes wasn’t a Catholic, but he seems to be a believer of some sort. He says that flowers demonstrate “the goodness of Providence” – a matter of “deduction”, he tells Watson. He dissuades one character from suicide by telling her, “Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off it,” and warns another: “It is not for me to judge you. You will soon answer for your deed at a higher court than the Assizes.”Holmes believes that “If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest.” But he himself was hopeful: life, he remarks in The Adventure of the Red Circle, is “a series of lessons with the greatest as the last”.
An ambiguous faith? How very convenient
At Word on Fire, Bishop Robert Barron discussed the new film Silence. (Spoiler alert). It follows a Jesuit missionary to Japan, Fr Rodrigues, who is arrested by the authorities. “As Japanese Christians, men and women who had risked their lives to protect him, are tortured in his presence, he is invited to renounce his faith and thereby put an end to their torment,” the bishop wrote. After agonising, Fr Rodrigues gives in, and abandons his faith to work for the Japanese government.
Many commentaries, the bishop said, “emphasise how Silence beautifully brings forward the complex, layered, ambiguous nature of faith”.
But Bishop Barron offered a “dissenting voice”. He worries “that all of the stress on complexity and multivalence and ambiguity is in service of the cultural elite today, which is not that different from the Japanese cultural elite depicted in the film.”
He continued: “The secular establishment always prefers Christians who are vacillating, unsure, divided, and altogether eager to privatise their religion.” By contrast, the martyrs in Silence “at the decisive moment witnessed to Christ with their lives”.
The weapon that frightens every tyrant
At liturgicanotes.blogspot.co.uk, Fr John Hunwicke offered a theological justification of satire and ridicule.
Our age, Fr Hunwicke pointed out, is well suited to satirists: “Never was there a time when the Great, the Wise, and the Good were less able to control a narrative ... the narrative ... all the narratives. The internet has done for them and their customary techniques.”
Satirists can be saintly: Blessed John Henry Newman was the greatest in the English language. And Mgr Ronald Knox, a fine satirist, defended the art. “Our sense of the ridiculous,” Knox wrote, “is not, in its original application, a child’s toy at all, but a weapon, deadly in its efficacy, entrusted to us for exposing the shams and hypocrisies of the world.” The tyrant can do everything to crack down on dissent; but “he is afraid of laughter”.
✣ Meanwhile…
✣ Archbishop Charles Palmer-Buckle of Accra, Ghana, has a longstanding commitment to interfaith dialogue – which he has often put into practice in a country whose Muslim population is expanding. But observers were startled to see him wearing a Rastafarian outfit at one recent event. Archbishop Palmer-Buckle’s striped rastacap, jacket and jewellery were, said the website GhanaWeb, “a strong indication that he wants a united Ghana that tolerates all religions for a peaceful co-existence”.✣ A philosophy professor is experimenting with a new teaching method. Chad Pecknold, of the Catholic University of America, is organising a 15-week Twitter course on City of God by St Augustine. The classic work of political theology is over 1,000 words long; undaunted, more than 700 tweeters have signed up for the class.
✣ A Sri Lankan church made an unfortunate mistake when distributing booklets at a carol service. The booklets were supposed to contain the text of the Hail Mary, to help of non-Catholics attending. But somehow the printer had downloaded the wrong text: he included the lyrics of the song “Hail Mary” by rapper Tupac, featuring lines such as “revenge is the sweetest joy”. The booklet was speedily withdrawn.
✣ The week in quotations
We can be sure Mary will treasure and ponder all that we whisper to her Cardinal NicholsHomily for Solemnity of Mary, Mother of GodSociety seems to have persuaded that making children in labs is ethically A-OK
Prof David Oderberg
Prospect magazine
A failure to face modernity
How the late AA Gill criticised the BBC’s lack of ‘sensible and serious religious broadcasting’
Quoted in the Times
It’s a grave social sin
Indian Cardinal Cleemis says there is discrimination against the Dalit caste, even in the Church
Interview about a new bishops' document
✣ Statistic of the week
3.9m
Pilgrims visiting the Vatican in 2016
Source: Office of the papal household
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