Why Catholics Are Right

By Michal Coren, 228 pages, Mcclelland.

Canadian journalist and writer Michael Coren addresses much of the basic Catholic-bashing that has become a normal part of culture. Rather than defensive, he often takes the battle to the atheists and liberals, who delight in slandering the Church, regardless of the truth.

Half-truths are the specialty of anti-Catholics, as they highlight such historical episodes as the Crusades, Galileo, or papal infallibility despite knowing very little about these things. Half-truths, though easily refuted, fit into our sound bite, intellectually careless culture where "I feel" is more important that "I think".

Coren's exuberance is as important to his argument as the facts he lays bare. He can inspire readers to take the fight to the slanderers: "in a culture where various forms of religious and atheistic fundamentalism, crass materialism, and clawing decadence eat away at civility and civilization the only permanent, consistent, and logically complete alternative is the Roman Catholic Church."

The fundamental flaws in Catholic attacks make it easy to go on the offensive, but many Catholics refuse to demand respect from others. That is why this book is so refreshing.

In dealing with the sexual abuse cases, he notes that Protestant denominations, with their married and female clergy, have had similar problems, as have public institutions such as schools. Catholic leaders at the time did what government and education leaders were also doing, sending offenders for counseling and moving them elsewhere. This was the liberal outlook at the time, yet liberals today produce scathing reports on the Church for simply following the liberal guidelines of the day.

Coren, again taking the argument on the offense, makes the point that one of the roots of the sexual crisis was the liberalism of the 1960s and 70s, which allowed for more permissive seminaries that accepted undesirable but politically correct candidates into the priesthood.

Throughout the book Coren notes deep anti-Catholic media bias. The UN, and its fabled peacekeepers, and sports teams have had similar sexual scandals, yet they have not been in the media spotlight.

Concerning history and such liberal sound bites as the Inquisition, the Crusades, and witch burnings, Coren shows that often the numbers are skewed, as with the witch burnings. "Millions" of women did not die; the numbers are in the tens of thousands, and it was in Protestant lands where the worst excesses occurred. Men were targeted as least as frequently as women, so this was not a case of hatred of women, as feminists have often mis-argued.

Regarding medieval and early modern justice, Coren notes: "the Church has generally been ethically and politically ahead of its time and throughout history has been an enlightened and enlightening force."

This includes the Inquisition, which was fairer and much less likely to use torture than royal instruments of law. The Spanish Inquisition is a special case. Initially approved by the pope, it soon became an instrument of Spanish government power, something Rome strongly disapproved. Its nastiness reflects the Spanish crown, not the Catholic Church.

And on it goes, slander after slander debunked. The Church needs more Michael Corens to set the record straight against a long anti-Catholic campaign. One hopes he writes a similar book to debunk all the current male-bashing.

Dynamics of World History

By Christopher Dawson, ISI Books, 511 pages, $16.95, ISBN 1-882926-78-X.

The late Harvard professor of history, Christopher Dawson, never tried to be impartial or above his culture. Not only did he think it absolutely normal to entrench oneself in one's tradition, he felt that this was vital. Dawson was one of the most authentic thinkers in the humanities at a time – the 1920s until today – when academics have been racing to see who can deconstruct their own tradition the fastest.

His writings therefore offer a unique perspective on history.

Dawson upholds a Catholic view of history without hesitation. He highlights the cultural and spiritual wealth of Catholicism, and ceaselessly points out the shortcomings and falsities of alternatives. Yet he does so without blanket statements and with good reason. He exhibits no Catholic triumphalism.

Thus he notes the near-inevitability of the splintering of Christianity. First, Christian leaders have sometimes been too close to power and politics. When this happened, as in the Eastern countries, vast stretches of ancient Christian lands were lost to Islam, and the Greek and Latin churches split. Then when medieval Latin Christianity became too worldly, the Reformation further fragmented Christianity.

Dynamics of Wold History's sociological insights add greatly to this spiritual and theological sense to history. Dawson sees ethnic and cultural differences as the basis for many theological divisions, as between Greeks and Armenians, and Latin Catholics and Germanic Protestants.

Dawson, however, avoids fatalism. He doesn't believe in the inevitability of these divisions. He stresses that if Christians could only see that a lot of their theological divisions really mask other differences, we could move towards Christian unity. Without an adequate understanding of the sociological fact, we could never get to the theological fact.

Again, regarding the modern spiritual vacuum into which all sorts of monsters have stepped (he was writing in the heyday of European fascism), he also avoids a fatalistic outlook. The Church has a duty, as at all times, to do battle with the world, in the sense of the Augustinian division of the two cities. This same basic spiritual reality for the Christian and the Church has not changed one iota in 2000 years – only the masks change.

He quotes the Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz: “Religion, opium for the people. To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in an afterlife. And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death – the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.”

Technological and economic progress without spiritual or cultural gain can only lead to emptiness. Here is the Church's vocation in the modern world, then: To give meaning and depth to a world with none. Dawson's words are shockingly up to date because we still have this problem, if not in a bigger dose. We have, he claimed, lost true freedom – the true spiritual freedom of the Middle Ages – in our devotion to equality.

He calls for the same things for which many great spiritual leaders, including Dostoevsky and Pope John Paul II called: “Sooner or later, there must be a revival of culture and reorganization of the spiritual life of Western society.”

But Dawson is such a great read not only because of his range of learning and depth of understanding. He also occasionally lays down the spiritual laws to history. He writes from within Catholic culture and tradition, and sees that vantage point as a great place to be a historian. He thus judges the spiritual direction of the West:

“History has shown that no true solution is to be found in the direction which the eighteenth-century Enlightenment took, i.e., by constructing a purely rational philosophy of religion based on the abstract generalities that are common to all forms of religion. For deism is nothing but the ghost of religion which haunts the grave of dead faith and lost hope.”

Dynamics of World History is a great read because its words are still relevant to the West, which continues to battle the same demons as in Dawson's day.

Ireland's Saint: The Essential Biography of St. Patrick

By J.B. Bury, hardcover 205 pages, $21.95, Paraclete Press, ISBN 978-1-55725-557-0.

In this reprint of the 1905 original, the fabled Irish historian J.B. Bury uses legends and facts to show how St. Patrick didn't introduce the faith to Ireland. Rather, he consolidated and united the faith that already existed, as was the case with countless other Christian missionaries in early medieval Europe. From that foundation, yes, he did evangelize.

Great missionaries like Saints Boniface, Cyril and Methodius, and Patrick, were organizers as much as preachers. For instance, one of St. Patrick's central achievements was making Latin the ecclesiastical language of Irish Christianity.

Latin gave unity to Ireland at a time when the island's various tribes and clans, kings and sub-kings, were disunited and therefore constantly squabbling and warring with each other. The Druids had failed to created a united nation with one leader. The consolidation of Christianity and the use of Latin would have drawn many people and their leaders to the new religion in the hope that this disunity could come to an end.

Latin's prestige was another major reason for its importance. As Bury points out, Ireland never came under Rome's direct rule. Yet, because Ireland was so close to Roman Britain and Gaul, and the Celtic peoples were a skilled seafaring lot, the country had been considerably influenced by the Empire, and like all barbarian folk, they would have looked upon Rome and her language with a certain mystical awe.

Patrick therefore never translated the Bible into one of Ireland's languages. Building a church meant building church culture, and Latin was to be the medium of that.

As an efficient organizer, St. Patrick would have targeted the ruling classes. He needed to build a national church hierarchy, and this demanded well-trained priests and monks who could live off of the land. Bury makes the case that, in Patrick's view, the Irish church would never get off the ground with only peasant converts. It needed the support of the aristocracy so it could build up enough wealth to support church culture and structure.

Ireland's Saint is at times almost magical reading because Bury respects the legends surrounding the saint. Rather than rejecting them or, worse, deconstructing and treating them with condescension, he uses them as sources for history. He recounts with relish the tall-tales surrounding St. Patrick, as when the saint gets into magical combat with local Druids over such things as burning buildings (and the people inside) to the ground as a way to show the power of his God over that of the Druids.

Bury appreciates the theological and historical significance of such stories, as the various legends showed Patrick's charisma, the incipient faith of the Irish, or the Druids' fear of the new creed.

Bury the Irishman understood his people's poetic thinking. He regarded the legends surrounding the saint as the Irish way of assimilating St. Patrick's Christian teaching into their culture. Ireland's Saint shows how the saint and the Christianization of Ireland in no way destroyed Irish culture, but rather complemented it and brought it to its full potential:

“Patrick was as fully convinced as the pagan that the powers of magicians were real, but he knew that those powers were strictly limited, while the power of his own God was limitless....This point of intellectual agreement between the pre-Enlightenment Christian priest and the heathen, their common acceptance of the efficacy of sorcery, even though they put different interpretations on its conditions, was probably a significant aid in the propagation of the Christian religion.”

Ireland's Saint gives us a good understanding of the hows and whys of ancient and early medieval evangelization: “If Christianity had offered to people only its new theological doctrine with the hope of eternal life and its new ethical ideals; if it had come simple and unadorned without an armory of mysteries, miracles, and rites; if it had risen to the height of rejecting magic not because it was wicked but because it was absurd – it could never have won half the world.”

Words of Light: Inspiration from the letters of Padre Pio

Compiled by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, 206 pages hardcover, Paraclete Press, $23.95.

Saint Padre Pio(1887-1968) lived an intense spiritual life, waging war with Satan yet feeling the hand of God. In his letters, he wrote with exceptional clarity about his mystical experiences.

This book of excerpts of such letters reflects many traditional elements of Catholic spirituality that the faithful can practice in their everyday life.

The Saint had a highly developed critical self-awareness. His heavy thoughts come from a truly humble part of his inner life. He often experienced God's distance and an inner emptiness, but rather than giving in to despair, he wondered where these sentiments came from. Did they indicate some level of resentment on his part, for instance?

This self-awareness led him to accept his sinfulness; in fact, he had a mystic's sense of sin's destructive power over the soul: “The fear of offending God once again makes me shiver, racks me with pain and agonizes me. I fear my heart, which is unfortunately ignorant of what is truly evil.”

He dealt with this potential despair by maintaining a deep personal relationship with Christ, rather than by remaining centred on himself. When praying, he felt a close connection to Jesus, and all sentiments of distance and depression left. When this happened, he feared nothing for himself nor for others.

He never had much doubt over his faith. He questioned his own actions or spiritual state, and blamed himself for the distance that he felt between himself and God. Towards the Lord he usually expressed deep faith, love, and gratitude.

Even when wracked physically, mentally, and spiritually by Satan, sometimes on a daily basis, he avoided blaming God. In fact, he praised and thanked God for delivering him from the powers of the devil. This faith in the Father's protection is one of the most powerful – and sometimes most colorful – parts of the book:

“Bluebeard [Satan] follows, with divine permission, to wage war against me; but God is with me.” And more explicit: “I complained to my Guardian Angel about this, who, after having preached a nice little homily to me, added, 'Give thanks to Jesus, that he treats you as one chosen to follow him closely up the steep slope of Calvary.'”

Perhaps most strongly is the Saint's articulation of his suffering for God. He believed that Jesus was close to those who suffer, and so he too wanted tribulation, writing without bitterness: “My life is becoming a cruel martyrdom.” He saw his trials through Christ's agony, which, the Saint believed, continued up to the present day because of the grievous sins of humans. Saint Pio shared in this pain. Yet for this, he only felt gratitude towards Jesus.

This sense of human sin and the harm that it does to the soul and to one's relationship with God is a constant theme in Saint Pio's letters.

The Saint was so readily capable of sharing in Christ's anguish because of his great, unfailing hope that God would come to his aid: “Do you not see that I have no more strength to fight, that all my vigor is gone?...Oh my God, you who know the extreme bitterness of my spirit, do not delay in coming to my aid. You alone can and must draw me out of this prison of death.”

These innocent, charming, and poetic selections testify to the way that God so deeply touched Saint Padre Pio.

The Promise

By Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, translated by Balinski, Malone, and Duchesne. 177 pages. Eerdmans $18.00.

“But it is plain to see that under the cover of faithfulness to the Covenant and belonging to the Covenant, the figure of Christ has often served as a pretext to forget the Father, the unique God. One of the tragedies of Christian civilization is that it has become atheistic while claiming to remain Christian. It has made Christ into an idolatrous figure, a son without a father – and thus without the Spirit; its only spirit, ultimately, is the spirit of man.”

Cardinal Lustiger, who converted to Catholicism from Judaism in 1940, wrote the above words while archbishop of Paris (1981-2007). In The Promise he speaks out against antisemitism and discusses the roots of this racism, blaming Christians who have remained “pagan.” By this he means that many Christians fail to allow Jesus to convert their hearts. They allow their beliefs and needs to change Jesus.

Christ becomes a god or one of their many gods, because they have not appreciated the grace that led to Jesus. They have failed to understand that Jesus is a Son of Israel, and could only accomplish his salvific work by being Jewish. The movement of some current liberal Christians, especially those enamored by liberation theology, to make the Vedic Scriptures of India or other basic religious writings into another Old Testament for the Greek New Testament only underscores the failure of many Christians to understand and accept the truth about Jesus.

The Promise is therefore less a book about Christian-Jewish relations and more a book of Christology. Just who is Jesus of Nazareth? Firstly, Lustiger emphasizes that he is Jesus of Israel. A believer must enter through the Old to get to the New Testament. The New makes sense only through the Old.

Lustiger sounds like a Church Father with his simplicity and power. He doesn't attempt to add anything new. His depth and integrity make process theology, liberation theology, and other contextual theology look rather thin and confused. Lustiger's thought ranks with that of John Paul II and Benedict XVI's for clarity, witness to the truth in the face of contemporary apostasy, and theological depth.

He unearths things that we either forget or take for granted.

Like Benedict XVI and John Paul II, Lustiger is acutely aware of the spiritual and intellectual crisis of Western civilization, since like the other two he experienced it personally as a young man:

“Ten years of higher education in philosophy and theology allowed me to become thoroughly acquainted with the major works of Christian Tradition and of Western modernity, and to find there, along with challenges that sometimes cannot be met adequately, the living sources of faith, where reason can be nurtured and comforted. That sufficed to commit my freedom unequivocally in answer to God's call.”

Lustiger warns of the “pervasive sociology of power, which in many cases mortally wounded the Catholics' love of the Church and trust in her.” The Promise describes the Church after Vatican II as “badly undermined” in France because of the intellectuals, where “most Christians had to bear the burden of intellectual challenges for which they had not been prepared.”

He links these difficulties to Catholic-Jewish dialogue and to the gradual opening up in the 1970s to discussion of the Holocaust by its Jewish survivors, many of whom had been silent until then (Lustiger lost his mother to the extermination camps).

The Promise is a “book of remembering Israel's gift of Christ to the world.” Lustiger repeatedly ties together the themes of redemption through Israel, antisemitism, the emptiness of our age, and the false Christianity of those who call themselves Christians but never really converted from paganism.

He writes, for instance, that “The specific characteristic of pagans is to be those who do not know that darkness can be transformed into light, who do not know that they are sinners, that they can be forgiven and that death can be vanquished, by God along, the source of life. Our time is the time when darkness and death still reign, and when, nonetheless, we are charged with bringing forth the light.”

The Pope's Legion: The Multinational Fighting Force that Defended the Vatican

By Charles A. Coulombe, 250 pages, $26.95.

Like an Indiana Jones' movie, The Pope's Legion starts moving from the get-go and doesn't stop until the very last. The Zouaves themselves lived life like this. As a besieged fighting force they hardly had the chance to stand still.

These fighting men found meaning even when the tide of civilization had turned against them and the Catholic Church. Especially in retrospect, their fighting is something of a Greek tragedy. The military battles could never, in the end, go their way.

The pro-papal Zouaves were put together to fight the unification of Italy, since this movement demanded the papal territories. Though not all the unificationists were anti-Catholic, as a whole this movement was anti-clerical and sought to make Italy modern and post-Christian.

Coulombe, excellent at holding various threads of the story together at the same time, compares these men and their romantic, Christ-centered spirituality, to the Crusaders. The author also spends time discussing the Italian, European, and international political and cultural situation in which the Zouaves were fighting. From the vantage of hindsight, these politics make the work of these fighters seem ever-more tragic: they were in reality fighting not only the Italians under Victor Emmanuel II, Garribaldi and Cavour, but the whole mindset and policy of the U.S. and Europe.

Given the forgotten nature of the Zouaves, Coulombe serves readers well by spending a great deal of time on the beginning of this fighting legion. French allies in Algeria, a Berber mountain people called the Zwawa, in 1838 “became a regiment under the already distinguished Major Lamorcière. Wearing their native dress of baggy trousers, short vests, and native headgear, the Zouaves, as the French called them, were an imposing sight.” Eventually French soldiers joined, and the Zouaves became a part of the French military.

Years later, when the Italian unificationists were brutalizing their way into the papal territories, Lamorcière, a faithful Catholic, voiced the anxiety of the Catholic world, which was rapidly mobilizing to the side of the steadfast papacy with echoes of the crusades:

“Christianity is not merely the religion of the civilized world, but the animating principle of civilization...The revolution to-day threatens Europe as Islamism did of old, and now, as then, the cause of the Pope is that of civilization and liberty throughout the world.”

Not only echoes of the crusades here, but anticipation of the Catholic Church's fight with Eastern European communism, where Pope John Paul II and the Church represented freedom in the face of another variation of modern thought.

Lamorcière helped the papacy establish the Pontifical Zouaves, who were initially filled in 1860 with 15,000 volunteers from every Catholic country, which in the case of the Netherlands and a few others, led to the stripping of citizenship.

Coulombe's love of the Zouaves and the cause, and his respect for the sacrifices of the men, make this book a spiritual as well as historical read, as he ties courage, faith, and honor to the Catholic faith. He offers countless mini-portraits of the men, who came from all classes and yet all entered at the lowest rank.

Many men had had previous military careers; many went right after graduating from school; and none did it in order to gain personally. When off duty, the men could be found not at the pub but in churches. After the wars had finished, many became priests, though some continued the life of adventure and soldiering.

Coulombe gives these men an aura of chivalry in the heat of battle as well:

“Having secured Crocetti, the Franco-Belgians, Swiss, and carabinieri assaulted Cascini. But the Sardinian artillery and infantry rained down on them a hail of shot and shell. Falling back upon Crocetti, the papal troops found themselves hotly pursued by Sardinians charging down the slopes; they turned round and attacked with bayonets – the Sardinian charge faltered and broke, with the defenders fleeing back the way they had come under cover of fire.”

The Zouaves, and the papacy itself, were as much victimized by the indifference of their supposed friends and allies – such as France or Austria – as by the zealousness of the Italian nationalists. Had things been more evenly matched, Cavour and his fellows would never have won given the heart of the Zouaves.

Because Coulombe is such a romantic, perhaps this book is less than critical of the Zouaves themselves. A deeper look at some of the negative aspects of Catholicism, the papacy, and this fighting force would have given a fuller sense of the situation. Why, for instance, did so many people in Italy and other historically Catholic countries dislike the papacy and the Church so much? The Pope's Legion reflects to a great degree the siege mentality that Catholics often have in the face of modernity. This means that only one aspect of the story has been told.

Bioethics Matters: A Guide for Concerned Catholics

By Moira McQueen, Novalis, 105 pages, $9.95.

Pope John Paul II accomplished many things as pontiff, but one of the most important for the long-term is clarity, something at which his successor has also been extraordinarily good.

Clarity from the Church has become ever more important. Brisk scientific advances, particularly in the medical field, have constantly added to the moral disarray of the post-sixties everything-goes culture.

Given current levels of moral uncertainty in our society – sometimes even among Catholic teachers and other lay members – McQueen's simple introduction to bioethics, which is the ethics surrounding medical and biological issues, helps to straighten things out.

McQueen, a lawyer and theologian by trade, lectures in Christian Ethics and Sexuality and Marriage at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto. She is also the Executive Director of the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Centre.

McQueen's simplicity parallels that of Pope John Paul II, in that the moral thing to do is often quite simple, though not necessarily easy.

Unlike most books on ethics, this one doesn't bog down in case studies. Nor does Bioethics Matters exhaustively examine every angle on issues. One of the strategies of those undermining a moral view of the universe is to complicate and befuddle every issue with ceaseless “what if” scenarios. This tends to make traditional Christians look like inflexible, out-of-touch meanies and themselves look compassionate and open-minded.

Yet McQueen brings the debates back to earth by reminding us that we can find clear solutions even in fast-paced medical sectors full of moral chaos. Her discussion of in vitro fertilization exemplifies this. She keeps her argument as simple and understandable as possible, echoing throughout the book the view of the Magisterium:

“The Church teaches that this use of technology separates the unitive and procreative aspects of intercourse between husband and wife, and therefore is not allowed. With in vitro fertilization, new life depends on the impersonal acts of scientists and laboratory workers. The Church points out that it is completely against human dignity to bring a human child into the world this way, instead of through a personal, marital act of its own mother and father.”

Echoing Pope John Paul II, Bioethics Matters builds its argument around the dignity of the human. Central to this pontiff's ethics was “personhood.” McQueen uses this to great effect for her discussion of many of the issues.

Again, she takes the simplest, least confrontational route to end confusions about personhood. She preempts a never-ending debate with people who want to muddle the argument: “Personhood cannot be proved or disproved by philosophical argument.”

She reminds the reader that whereas Catholic teaching clearly states that personhood begins at conception, “Other views of personhood have to invent or decide upon other starting points, mainly to accommodate the intent to override any legal status the new life would otherwise acquire by virtue of existence.”

In other words, moral hucksters offering up alternatives to Catholic teaching have to play around with semantics in order to safeguard their legal “rights.” They are using the very existence of innocent lives to do so.

McQueen puts the debate in stark, easy-to-understand terms: “A societal denial about personhood enables us to allow abortion as a choice.”

McQueen also brings up another reason besides deliberate moral confusion for society's ethical rot: “Developments in reproductive technology radically affect people's attitude towards new human life. We are in a position to create life but also to reject it at the embryonic stage if it does not fit our expectations and demands. No longer are we co-operating with God.”

She goes on to discuss the dreadful reality that governments, medical science, medical practitioners, and potential parents regard the embryo as property rather than as a human person. She cites the many problems that result from the fact that it takes many attempts for an embryo to survive in the womb. This means that clinics make several extra embryos that then get destroyed or used in research. Just as problematic, what happens to frozen embryos if the couple divorces, no longer wants children, or are killed in an accident?

Even more important than these issues, Bioethics Matters unearths the big spiritual and ethical failure that got us to this point of moral confusion in the first place: “The use of phrases such as no longer required and spare to describe unwanted embryos shows how easy it is to downplay the fact of the humanity of every embryo, made in God's image.”

McQueen builds her consistent and compelling argument on the theology underlying ethics. The first of the book's four parts offers a theological groundwork, and includes easy-to-understand definitions of important theological practices such as hermeneutics and teleology, and ways of thinking about ethics, such as relativism, consequentialism, and deontology.

As well, McQueen's Catholic notions of the importance of the individual's personhood and the integration of body and soul ground her argument.

Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason

By Russell Shorto, 299 pages hardcover, Doubleday, $30.00.

A missing skull, the French Revolution, the development of the modern museum, and a possibly re-discovered skull all fit together in the story of the building of Cartesian-based modern knowledge. Part-detective story, part-history of philosophy, Descartes' Bones weaves together fascinating historical episodes of individuals and nascent modern institutions with the evolution of science and Western thought.

The great philosopher Rene Descartes died in Stockholm and was buried there in a regal ceremony, only to be dug up a few decades later at the request of the French government, who had the bones brought to France and re-interred in Paris.

In parallel with this story, Shorto discusses Descartes' philosophical method as the foundation of modern thinking, the legs on which science, technology, and democracy stand. Cartesian philosophy uses “methodological doubt” to question every piece of received knowledge and to replace received wisdom with reason.

While most contemporary thinkers place a big space between science and faith, Shorto goes to pains to explain that Descartes was a faithful son of the Church who believed that his duality of mind and matter would actually place faith and science into 2 separate realms of understanding. Shorto shows how the modern scientific-secular takeover of the world and religion's decline was not Descartes' intention at all. In other words, don't blame Descartes, blame (perhaps) Cartesian philosophers.

Soon after the publication of Discours de la Methode, Europe's religious and intellectual movers and shakers felt threatened by the new philosophy because their own thought was based on Aristotelian philosophy and on accepting rather than doubting received knowledge. Naturally, the Church had a lot at stake, Shorto notes: “Aristotle's orientation of knowledge was teleological, which made it easy for the Scholastics to adapt it to conform with a Christian view of creation, so that as the chain of life-forms proceeded from the simplest organisms to more complex ones it also reflected a spiritual hierarchy. In the eighteenth century this system began to lose its usefulness.”

Descartes' Bones gives us a short-and-sweet discussion on the ins and outs of Aristotelian thinking, especially regarding the universe's structure. Aristotle and subsequent science believed that everything was made up of 4 elements, earth, water, fire, and air. By the time of Descartes, this thinking was exhausted, but only great minds like that of the French philosopher could see that.

Descartes aimed with his methodological doubt to rebuild knowledge from the ground up, something that the scientists of the seventeenth century immediately perceived. Public lectures on Cartesian philosophy, even while the philosopher was still alive, were rancorous, potentially violent affairs, with university careers being made or destroyed by taking a side.

Cartesianism spread quickly in the decades following the publication of the short, easy to read Discours de la Methode, and 1 of the great hallmarks of the modern era sprang up -- the belief in progress and future well-being. Cartesians believed that the new thinking, especially when channeled into science, would allow humans to live to the biblical 120 years and would enable the creation of all sorts of fantastic machines as well as give new understandings of the very nature of the universe. Best of all, this was all just around the corner.

Shorto's discussion of the French Revolution focuses on the personalities relevant to the growth of Cartesian-based science and the runaround over Descartes' lost remains. In this discussion Descartes' Bones is particularly effective at explaining the characteristics of modern thinking. Museums were developed, for instance, because many parts of society had by then moved from a God-based to a human-based world view, and so statues and alter pieces could be taken from churches and presented as isolated artistic or cultural artifacts devoid of religious meaning.

One church, a new Ste. Genevieve, under construction at the time of the Revolution, was turned into the Pantheon, where the Revolutionaries wanted to house the remains of those people on whose thinking the Revolution was based. After intermittent debate, it was decided that Descartes' remains were to be put there alongside Voltaire, Rousseau, and other great thinkers.

Yet Shorto reflects on the emptiness of the Pantheon: “In redesigning it so, architecturally replacing faith with reason as a source of worship, the revolutionaries created a unique monument, and visiting it today gives a feel not only for their motivation but for its naiveté and hollowness. The strangeness comes sweeping over you the moment you enter: the vastness is almost as laughable as the idea of dedicating a building to 'great men' and 'fame.' It sounds lampoonable, vacuous. Scenes from myth and French history are painted on the walls, but there is nothing in between. ... Maybe the oddest thing is the unyielding lack of adornment, the painstaking absence of religious motif in a sanctuary devoted to the dead. In a place like this the idea is driven home to you that reason alone is an empty vessel.”

This book gives an added dimension to the current hodgepodge of atheistic, pro-science books trying to convince people of the backwardness of religion. Shorto's book offers a more elegant view of the faith and reason dialectic, showing reason's drawbacks when it is unaccompanied by a spiritual viewpoint:

“Liberty, equality, democracy – all were offspring of the cogito and the orientation of humanity around reason,” Shorto notes, before citing David Hume's warning that it should not be used as the basis for morality: “reason, he knew, could be put to the most unreasonable pursuits. As a tool it can build a new society, but it can also kill and maim, and misusing it – through naïve belief or duplicity – is one of the tropes of modern history.”

Ultimately Shorto believes in the possibility that the materialist-spiritual split in the West, so dominated by the materialists, can be healed only by the heart, something that would not be totally foreign to Descartes the Catholic.

Parish Priest: Father Michael McGivney and American Catholicism

By Douglas Brinkley and Julie M. Fenster, CAD 17.50, 240 pages, Harper Perennial.

Authors Brinkley and Fenster tell the story of a powerful man while conveying a sense of the times in which the priest, the founder of the Knights of Columbus, lived. Parish Priest places Father McGivney in his society through familial and ecclesiastical connections. McGivney had to find a way to fit into the social customs of the times even as he went about his ministry.

For instance, the daughter of the most prominent Episcopalian clergyman in New Haven, Connecticut, where Fr. McGivney was working at the time, had converted to Catholicism and later died. McGivney fulfilled his priestly duties towards the deceased even while minimizing the scandal. He allowed the Episcopalian minister to conduct a service in the Anglican church for his late daughter, a very forward move by the Irish-American priest.

The authors' esteem for the Catholic priesthood is at the heart of the book's success: “They [parish priests] celebrate Mass, baptize infants, visit the sick and dying, and preside at weddings and funerals. It's the parish priest to whom many of America's 65 million Catholics turn in times of personal crisis or if poverty strike a family. They serve on the level of one human helping another.”

Parish Priest shows Father Michael as a heroic parish priest among many heroic Church leaders. For example, they emphasize that he was not the only Catholic pastor to die largely of exhaustion at a painfully young age, 38 in his case.

Father Michael was one among many heroic priests striving day and night to improve the lives of the poor and factory workers of New England. The authors convey the strong character of these leaders: “The many high-powered men who were drawn to the priesthood believed with a kind of determination in the ideal, protecting it with their deeds, and not just words.” Father McGivney, for one, set up the Knights to offer community to men and life insurance for the families of deceased members, two extremely important needs in this time and place.

Parish Priest also includes solid, informative theology of the priesthood. “'At the altar in Holy Mass,' [Jacques] Miller wrote, 'it is Jesus Christ who offers gifts, changes the bread and wine into His own Body and Blood, and immolates the victim. As Jesus Christ and the Church, according to St. Augustine, are not two Christs but one Christ, so the Eternal Priest and all the priests born in time are not a multitude of priests, but one Priest. The man disappears in this August mystery.'”

The authors demonstrate how American culture—at least at that time—can coexist and thrive alongside a strong, thriving Catholicism, and vice versa. This issue was a real problem in nineteenth-century America.

Traditions in Turmoil

By Mary Ann Glendon, 471 pages, Sapientia Press.

“The position of women is linked with the fate of the entire human family. There can be no real progress for women, or men, at the expense of children or of their underprivileged brothers and sisters. Genuine advances for women cannot overlook the inequalities that exist among women themselves. Enduring progress for women must be rooted in solidarity between young and old, between male and female, as well as between those who enjoy a comfortable standard of living with ample access to basic needs and those who are suffering deprivation.”

These prophetic words, found in Traditions in Turmoil, were spoken by Pope John Paul II's representative to the 1995 Beijing Women's Conference, Mary Ann Glendon, law professor at Harvard University. She defends the faith in a contentious, anti-Catholic academic and intellectual environment.

The writings and speeches in Traditions in Turmoil, most of which are quite short and to the point, testify to Glendon's courage and intelligence. Her great Catholic faith, including her profound trust in the Church and its leadership, comes out even more powerfully.

Glendon is so refreshing because she is a female North American university professor who refuses to buy into the feminist industry's duality of Woman-as-Victim and Woman-as-Superwomen that has overtaken other conceptions of femininity and sexuality and even motherhood itself.

Yet rather than sounding dowdy or old fashioned, Glendon brings out the great wisdom of the Catholic tradition in the same manner that Pope's John Paul II and Benedict XVI have done.

Glendon's appreciation for the cultural significance of religion and of the essential link between culture and religion remind the reader of Pope John Paul II's deep connection to Poland's spiritual geography and history, which of course were Catholic geography and history. Glendon's following words remind us that leaving the Catholic church comes at a great loss:

“I am always amazed when I read of Catholics of my generation who complain that they felt stifled in the Church in the 1950s. For me, as a girl in a small Massachusetts hill town, pre-Vatican II Catholicism was a window opening out to the wide world that lay beyond the Berkshires. Its ceremonies spoke to me of a history before Plymouth Rock, and its liturgy linked me to every living Catholic on earth.”

Her intellectual boldness in the face of so much hostility to Catholicism was developed at an early age, when she read the words of Theodore Hesburgh: “When you encounter a conflict between science and religion, you're either dealing with a bad scientist or a bad theologian.”

It thus comes natural for Glendon to approach her faith with a critical view, again something that finds a parallel in the thinking of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. This is a very deep current in the Catholic tradition. St Thomas Aquinas believed that the intellect was a gift of God and that he need not fear Aristotelian philosophy or any seeming conflict between faith and other ways of thinking.

Mary Ann Glendon and Traditions in Turmoil continues the great Catholic tradition of wedding brains with piety.

John Paul II & St. Thomas Aquinas

Edited by Michael Dauphinais & Matthew Levering, 259 pages hardcover, Sapientia Press.

John Paul II & St. Thomas Aquinas is a collection of scholarly essays by different authors. It makes a very important contribution to the understanding of John Paul II's teachings. One writer in the book notes that the encyclical Evangelium vitae “with its biblically centered argumentation, draws upon Aquinas's theology of law at the very hinge of its discussion.”

Avery Dulles writes that in Love and Responsibility, John Paul's pre-papal book on sexuality, “From Aquinas he takes over the idea that love is ordered to that which is objectively true and good. He formulates a personalistic norm to the effect that one may never use other persons as means to an end...Wojtyla grounds this principle in the metaphysical insight that the person has inviolable intrinsic dignity.”

Dulles thus highlights the bridges that John Paul made between Thomism and personalism. This is important because central to Catholic thinking is the constant connection of its theology and traditional philosophical methods with modern ways of thinking. John Paul succeeded in tying a medieval thinker, Thomas Aquinas, with a most modern philosophy.

Pope John Paul II was schooled in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas and the centuries of development of the philosopher's thought, known as Thomism or neo-scholasticism. The pontiff was also schooled in more recent philosophy, especially personalism, which emphasized the importance and dignity of the human individual, though personalism often differs from Western individualism by often emphasizing spiritual values over materialistic ones.

Thus the late pontiff's writings are usually a mix of Thomism and personalism. He emphasizes the eternal, unchanging truths of the Church, in the style of Thomism, but applies these truths to the individual, and strives to show how they amplify the dignity of the person. His Theology of the Body is the best example of his mixture of the eternal truth with the individual human.

John Paul II & St. Thomas Aquinas reaquaints us with John Paul's major books and encyclicals by taking this philosophical reading of them. The book reviews and deepens our knowledge of writings that we think we've already digested.

Dulles writes of Veritatis splendor that it “invokes the authority of St. Thomas in maintaining that natural law is a participation in the eternal law of God...Although he speaks of natural law and divine law, he avoids all legalism. He accepts from St. Thomas the idea of natural law as the light of natural reason imprinted upon our minds by God.”

This book does more than unearth John Paul's links with Aquinas. It also places the late pope within the history of modern philosophy by discussing phenomenology, personalism, utilitarianism, Plato, and medieval scholasticism.

Michael Sherwin in his essay sums things up best: “John Paul did not speak of truth and freedom in only one way, but followed the Gospel of John in applying the terms analogically.”

Cluny: In Search of God's Lost Empire

By Edwin Mullins, Novalis, CAD 29.95, 239 pages.

This excellent and highly readable book offers a panorama of medieval religious and political history, since the Benedictine Cluny-monastic movement played a central role in European life in the tenth to twelfth centuries. Cluny, like the Cistercians, Franciscans, Dominicans, and lesser-known communities, reflects the fact that the Roman Church could always reform itself from within, and never needed a Luther or Calvin.

The author shows us how the Cluny network grew from not-so-humble origins into a transcendent leader of Christendom.

Cluny: In Search of God's Lost Empire comes with maps and beautiful sketches of Cluny-inspired architecture. The author, Edwin Mullins, tells the story without bogging himself down in academic jargon. Rather, he appreciates this history as if it's a fine glass of wine. He loves the spirit of the order and of the times, while remembering basic injustices done to various groups of people.

Cluny: In Search of God's Lost Empire combines scholarship with a poetic or spiritual outlook, something quite necessary to appreciate the elegance and depth of the medieval Christian period: “[L]isten carefully and we can hear the echoes of an extraordinary past. A thousand years ago this now-shattered place in southern Burgundy made an impact on the Christian world more profound and more enduring than that of any pope or emperor, or any ruling monarch of the day including the kings of France and England.”

The importance of Cluny for the cultural, agricultural, economic, and social development of Europe can't be overstated, and Mullins argues the case, again from page one: Cluny's monks “inherited a Europe that lay in ruins and proceeded to rebuild it, laying many of the foundations of Christian culture and civilization. For more than two centuries Cluny was the spiritual heart of Christianity.”

The story of Cluny is the story of that bygone era, Christendom, a high point in many ways for Catholics and their spirituality of community, masculinity, discipline, and symbolism.

Cluny: In Search of God's Lost Empire outlines the importance of symbolism for the medieval—and therefore Cluniac—mind. First was the importance of liturgy: “[T]here was always time in Cluny for ritual-daily life in the abbey was controlled by it. Whether it was the total silence observed throughout the period of Christmas, or the daily reading of a chapter of the Rule of St. Benedict..., every hour, every day, every season at Cluny had its all-controlling ritual and ceremony.”

Second was the importance of architecture, especially Romanesque: “[I]dentified by such features as rounded arches and windows, simple classical columns with carved capitals, and usually a rounded apse beyond the altar at the eastern end.”

Mullins again emphasizes the enduring heritage, religious and otherwise, of Cluny: “To this day many of the towns and villages in the region possess Romanesque parish churches in a distinctive Burgundian style, which owes its origin ... to the power and initiative of a succession of abbots of Cluny.”

Dom Gabriel Sortais: An Amazing Abbot in Turbulent Times

By Guy Oury, OSB, Cistercian Publications, 333 pages.

This interesting book uses notebooks, letters, and other source materials to come close to the heart of the vocation of a French Cistercian monk who died in 1963.

“'If you want to know at what moment God first asked me to follow him, remember the fire we were watching the evening before our departure for Noirmoutier, where I saw the flames die down at the spot where the cross from my rosary was,' he wrote to one of his sisters on September 30, 1923. This was the first sign of his call.”

This was the calling of a very passionate, even reckless young man who didn't make time for his studies. Not well known, the story of this monk sheds light on the mysterious struggle of vocation and the equally riddlesome Cistercian order, whose strict monasticism and tradition of near-silence seem so odd to this busy world.

Sortais' spirituality, rather than arid and cold, was as passionate and loving towards God as that of any modern Pentecostal:

“It was then that the full light came, which touched off a great interior struggle, and the struggle became obvious because of his copious tears. God's call was no longer a hypothesis; it was there, pressing, demanding an answer. But, then, could he refuse God? Did God require such a sacrifice? 'I found myself suddenly changed interiorly,' he wrote in his notebook.'”

Dom Sortais loved France, and so the author carefully recounts the monk's life through the lens of French and European history, including World War II, when he had to leave the monastery and become a military chaplain. He experienced the terror of coming upon a crowd of frenzied French citizens who, at the time of the worst German-French fighting, turned on two French nuns, accusing them of spying for the Nazis and then killing them. They then wanted to turn on Dom Sortais, but his strong character and indignant reaction to the murders ended the riot.

As with this example, the author shows Dom Sortais to be a born leader of men.

This is a worthwhile read because most English Catholic books are presently coming out of lay Catholic or seminary and diocesan priest experiences in English North America and academia. Dom Gabriel Sortais, conversely, tells the story of a now unusual spiritual path, and one that has the full weight of the Christian and European spiritual tradition behind it.

Monastic spirituality had been integral to the life of the Church up until the Second Vatican Council, and aside from a few exceptions such as Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating, these church leaders, to the extent that they are still around, are not being listened to by the wider church. This is a heavy loss, as their heroic way of life and strong sense of duty have much to counter the nonsense of current pop culture.

Dom Sortais lived a tough, real monastic life: “Feeling poor meant nothing to him.... He preferred to come back to God as to the source of all power a hundred times a day, like a beggar who gives away as quickly as he receives anything.”

Here Comes a Sea Followed by an Ocean: Very Simple Reflections on the Second Vatican Council, after 40 years, by Father Gianni Carparelli

179 pages, Caritas.

Carparelli remembers Vatican II as a time of excitement and joy, and believes deeply in its work. He advises the reader to go back to the original documents. He avoids a political interpretation, instead emphasizing the liturgical side.

This leads the author to emphasize the Trinity as a communion rather than a number. Vatican II addresses the communitarian nature of the Church. The author asks Catholics to extend that community to estranged Catholics, to those “who feel judged too harshly by the Church,” and to “those who have been hurt by the Church.”

Because of Carparelli's love for the pontiffs and Vatican II, these words invite the outsider back into the Church without blaming faulty priests and leaders. Carparelli one never loses sight of the mystery of Christ and community, which are the deepest aspects of the Council. The book also shows why and how Catholics should love the hierarchy and especially the magisterium.

Here Comes the Sea briefly analyzes each of the Council's documents but, again, from this liturgical- spiritual-mystical stance, as in the following words about Lumen Gentium:

“May I invite you to make an effort to read through the symbolic language and to envision yourself immersed inside this mystery, soaked with it, that throws us into the future and at the same time invites us to build it?”

Here Comes the Sea breathes new life into Vatican II because, unlike countless volumes of liberal theological discourse that weighed the Church down in the Council's aftermath, Carparelli faithfully loves and preaches the Catholic tradition:

“If we now start to think with a little bit of common sense, we will also understand that some guidance is needed. Not everything can be left to individual personal interpretation. Never forget that we are children of communion.”

The power and success of this book hinge on the spirituality of the author. The book reads more like a common sense spiritual director than a strict dogmatic theologian. Like only a few very special spiritual writers, including Pope John Paul II and Teresa of Avila, the author succeeds in communicating to the reader something of the essence of Catholicism.

Carparelli brings out the direct and simple faith of the conciliar fathers, who more than aggiornamento (updating), Carparelli notes, wanted ressourcement, a return to the original roots of Catholicism. As the author indicates through his spiritual direction for the reader, the ultimate point of ressourcement is Christ:

“[T]he discussion whether Christ is of the same nature as God or of an inferior nature, if he is only man or whether he is man-God in one person, is not as superficial as it might first seem. There is behind this a concept of faith and therefore of life, the sense of the presence of God amongst us and of the Christian vocation of citizens in history.”

The Best of 'The Public Square' Book Three,” by Richard John Neuhaus

229 pages, USD 15.00.

Neuhaus: “Berlinski is especially effective in showing how Darwinians kick any idea of purpose, design, or teleology out the front door, only to smuggle such ideas in by the back door. Nature 'selects' this or that, Nature 'chooses,' Nature 'targets,' and so forth. This Nature, whether upper or lower case, is a kind of deity in the details, ever invoked and ever denied.”

The genius of the late Father John Richard Neuhaus was his ability to engage in the intellectual life of America – both secular and religious -- with great insight and orthodox theology. A convert to Catholicism after years as a Lutheran pastor, Neuhaus engaged in the intellectual issues of the day with wit, sarcasm, and the depth that comes from reflecting the time-honored tradition of the Catholic Church.

In discussing a book on the limits of Darwinism, this cerebral bent gives intellectual legitimacy to religious believers; Neuhaus' following words reflect the fact that the faithful, contrary to the media and academia's portrayal of Christians as stupid yokels, can think as well as the rest of the world:

“One is sometimes asked whether one 'believes in' evolution. More strident Darwinists adamantly insist that it is not a matter of faith; it is not a theory to be accepted or rejected; it is a fact to be acknowledged. But of course that is silly. It is precisely, and Darwin intended it precisely as, a theory to explain how the complexity of living systems came about. And there may be something to it in terms of micro-evolution, in possibly explaining how changes happen within particular species. As for macro-evolution – a general and all-encompassing explanation of how we and all other living things came to be – Darwinism is, in my considered judgment, preposterous.”

These words are among the best Christian explanation of uneasiness with Darwinian theory. Neuhaus might be a bit witty or cagey at times, but he avoids the sort of personal slander that many other culture-warriors engage in.

Interestingly, Neuhaus' pre-Catholic ministry focused on poor black people in New York. He marched with Martin Luther King and supported civil rights in the 1960s. Many liberals would call Neuhaus a right-wing nut or a neo-con, but he most deeply represents Catholicism's ability to exist above the left-wing, right-wing political divide.

The Priority of Christ: Toward a Postliberal Catholicism, by Robert Barron

352 pages, Brazos Press.

The Priority of Christ discusses a whole swath of issues unearthed by post-Enlightenment philosophy's rejection of God, which culminated in Friedrich Nietzsche's Death of God and Jean Paul Sartre's Hell is Other People. It would be an understatement, then, to suggest that Robert Barron is ambitious.

He begins at the beginning - the source of the modern mentality. As with so much else in contemporary society, we find these roots in the High Middle Ages, between 1100-1450. The discussion is necessarily academic and presupposes a high degree of knowledge about the relevant movers and shakers, but readers who know these players are in for a treat.

His Thomistic-inspired discussion parallels Pope John Paul II's concept of freedom. This is important, because leading secularists in France and America, who always seem so influential in universities and therefore among society's leaders, assert that freedom, their most cherished value, is threatened by God or by any belief in God. They have concluded, and have caused countless millions to conclude, that freedom can only exist in a theological vacuum. Freedom and God cannot co-exist.

For Robert Barron, Thomas Aquinas' idea of freedom, based on his famous analogical theology, allows Catholic theologians great grounds for rejecting secularist philosophers. Aquinas said that God's being is primary and our being secondary. We can therefore understand God's being by analogy (An analogy is a kind of comparison: Although I cannot know something directly, in this case God, I can know something indirectly by comparing it to things that I do know and that share some qualities with this unknowable entity. From my mother's love, I can get a good sense of God's love, even though divine love is of course of an entirely different level than that of any human's):

“Aquinas maintained consistently throughout his career that God is inescapably mysterious to the human intellect, since our frame of reference remains the creaturely mode of existence, which bears only an analogical resemblance to the divine mode of being. We may say that God exists, but we're not quite sure what we mean when we say it; the 'cash-value' of the claim that God exists is that there is a finally mysterious source of the to-be of finite things.”

Briefly put, thinking about God in this analogical way means that God is of a different being than we are and that we do not have to fear God encroaching on our freedom. Since God's being is primary, his being sustains us and therefore gives us greater and greater life.

Barron locates the modern, zero-sum way of thinking in Duns Scotus: “In an effort to make the to-be of God more immediately intelligible, Duns Scotus proposed a univocal conception of existence, according to which God and creatures belong to the same basic metaphysical category, the genus of being. Though God is infinite and therefore quantitatively superior to any creature or collectivity of creatures, there is nevertheless no qualitative difference, in the metaphysical sense, between the supreme being, God, and finite beings.”

Barron makes the point that Scotus's model unhinges humans from our metaphysical anchor to God: “[N]o longer grounded in a common source, creatures lose their essential connectedness to one another. Isolated and self-contained individuals (God the supreme being and the many creatures) are now what is most basically real.”

Barron is faithful to the Catholic tradition, and so The Priority of Christ represents an important step forward in the new-evangelization.

The Apostles, by Pope Benedict XVI

$14.95, 174 pages small hardcover, Our Sunday Visitor.

Taken from a series of lectures by Pope Benedict XVI from March 15, 2006 to February 14, 2007, this handy book uncovers the essentials on Christianity's beginning. Accessible for theology beginners yet rich enough for everyone, The Apostles traces the early development of the Church through its first leaders.

The Pontiff does so by bringing out the personalities of these men and women, rather than by offering abstract or complicated dogma. The author succeeds in showing just how much Christianity revolves around not only the supreme personality of Jesus Christ and the reality of the Trinity, but also the personalities – strengths, weaknesses, successes, and failures – of those trained and sent of by Jesus to the corners of the earth.

The pontiff also offers interesting information about the early Church:

“The Book [of Revelation] should be understood against the backdrop of the dramatic experiences of the seven Churches of Asia (Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea) which had to face serious difficulties at the end of the first century – persecutions and also inner tensions – in their witness to Christ.”

Using the Bible, extra-biblical sources, and some Christian legends, the Holy Father establishes the basis of the Catholic Church's hierarchy. He comes therefore to justify the hierarchy.

As with all of Cardinal Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI's writings, this one gently yet directly uses the wealth of the Christian tradition to discuss all sorts of theology in one small work.

Thomas Merton: Master of Attention, by Robert Waldron

101 pages, $19.95, Novalis.

Waldron develops an important aspect of the contemplative side of Merton, the use of attention in his prayer and wider spirituality, often comparing the monk with the French mystic Simone Weil. The author bases his ideas on the journals, books, and poetry of Merton rather than on other people's books about Merton. The reader therefore gets an immediate, simple notion of Merton, where the power of these original writings is drawn out.

The book's author himself groans at the idea of another Merton book. Yet the surprising depth of Master of Attention comes, no doubt, from the richness of Merton himself. The Cistercian monk's works are a jewel not only for Catholics but for all religious and spiritual types. In this way, Catholicism can sneak into the lives of people who may not otherwise have given the Church a glance.

Merton appeals to a wide audience because his elegant spirituality brings out the best in his tradition, and does so from many sides. In this sense he is one of the most important Catholic theologians of the past century.

Like Pope John Paul II or Saint Padre Pio, Merton renews the Church by unearthing the deepest, most beautiful parts of Catholicism rather than by focusing on the negatives. He reforms by bringing out the great gems of our tradition rather than by getting into all sorts of power struggles with the hierarchy.

Waldron mixes important biographical information about Merton so as to give the background and therefore fuller meaning to these spiritual insights and writings. The author discusses the importance of Merton's father, a painter and somewhat religious man, on the monk's sense of the spiritual value of art and beauty:

“Shortly after viewing the Byzantine icons, Merton sensed his [deceased] father's presence in his hotel room on the corner of Via Sistina and Via Tritone [in Rome]. He writes one of the most haunting passages in modern twentieth-century memoirs: '...The sense of his presence was as vivid and as real and as startling as if he had touched my arm or spoken to me ... I was overwhelmed with a sudden and profound insight into the misery and corruption of my own soul, and I was pierced deeply with a light that made me realize something of the condition I was in.'”

Master of Attention also examines how both Zen Buddhism and nature influenced Merton, though the author emphasizes that the monk always remained orthodox and steeped in Catholic culture and spirituality, something that not all Merton experts do.

The richness, variety, and depth of Merton's writings tempt many analysts to force their own feelings onto his thought, and Waldron falls for this trap at times. The author does a Jungian deconstuction of the monk's personality, perhaps reading too much into things. Like all books on Merton, then, readers should take this one with caution.

Dynamics of World History, by Christopher Dawson

ISI Books, 511 pages, $16.95.

The late Christopher Dawson, former professor at Harvard University, took a Catholic view of the past. God's breaking into human history makes history history. Without this action, humans would tend towards a belief in reincarnation.

Though Dynamics of World History, a collection of Dawson's writings, focuses mainly on Western civilization and Christianity, his sweeping understanding of the spiritual and psychological forces of the past parallel the writings of the great American mythologist Joseph Campbell who, though raised Catholic, never saw his subject matter through Catholic lenses.

Dawson, writing in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, attributed the military and political violence of his day to the spiritual vacuum in Western history since the Enlightenment. Spiritual decay led unavoidably to all sorts of violence.

Technological and economic progress thus present problems because they have come at the expense of culture and spirituality. We have more than ever materially, yet we are empty spiritually. Interestingly, while Dawson wrote many decades ago, these thoughts apply just as well today.

We have yet to solve the basic conundrum that issues from societies putting all their energies into wealth creation and technological development, and nothing into spirituality and the higher arts. This is precisely the place where the Church has its most important role to play today – to fill this spiritual and artistic vacuum.

Dawson also took a sacred view of the Church, believing that Catholicism has been fighting the same noble, spiritual battle throughout history, and that facing distortions and enemies were a normal part of its vocation. Sometimes the greatest enemy of the Church is within:

“Wherever the Church has seemed to dominate the world politically and achieves a victory within the secular sphere, she has had to pay for it in a double measure of temporal and spiritual misfortune. Thus the triumph of the Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire was followed first by the loss of the East to Islam and then by the schism with the West.”

He also claimed that the Church's historical opponents, including Protestantism and the “Liberal Revolution would not have existed apart from Christianity – they are abortive or partial manifestations of the spiritual power which Christianity has brought into history.”

These writings cover a very large area of history and sociology. Dawson attributed religious schism, as between the Latin and Greek churches, and between Rome and Protestant churches, to ethnic and sociological differences. These nationalistic and cultural tensions invaded the theological arena, so that the Irish remained Catholic, for instance, just as much out of their hatred for England – which had become Protestant/Church of England - as out of their faithfulness to Rome.

Dawson applied the same Catholic, spiritual view to art, literature, history, and every other aspect of Western civilization. A big thinker, he noted: “[T]he essence of history is not to be found in facts but in traditions.” Contrary to the claims of modern historians, he never tried to transcend culture and be totally objective.

John Paul II: My Beloved Predecessor

By Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI, 121 pages, $19.95, Pauline.

“What can this sick, suffering, tired old man say, who in moments of physical fatigue speaks with visible weariness?” These words were written by then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (present Pope Benedict XVI), a close associate of Pope John Paul II, concerning the late pontiff's controversial visit to France in 1996.

John Paul II's rich theological and spiritual legacy only continues to grow. My Beloved Predecessor brings together a collection of writings on John Paul, his work and ministry, by Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Doctrine of the Faith.

Ratzinger the theologian writes with such clarity that his thoughts on John Paul's teachings help us understand the late pontiff, including some of the difficult-to-understand philosophical pillars of John Paul II such as phenomenology and personalism.

Ratzinger sums up the workings of these two closely-related philosophical schools on John Paul's ideas: “This precision in seeing, this comprehension of man beginning not from abstractions and theoretical principles, but seeking to grasp his reality with love, was – and remains – decisive for the pope's thought.”

Because this collection comes from writings in reaction to or in support of teachings and events during the pontificate of John Paul II, they contain a freshness and simplicity that clarifies and keeps to the original feeling and intent.

The funeral homily remains the most powerful statement on John Paul's pontificate: “The Holy Father was a priest to the last, for he offered his life to God for his flock and for the entire human family, in a daily self-oblation for the service of the Church, especially amid the sufferings of his final months.”