TOO SOON DATED:

Strangers in the House: When Catholics in the Media Turned Against the Church (Mark Gauvreau Judge, November 2003, Crisis)

A few years ago I picked up a new copy of Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain and was pleasantly surprised to notice that the newest edition comes with extras that were added in 1998—an introduction by Robert Giroux and “A Note to the Reader” by William H. Shannon, the president of the International Thomas Merton Society. Giroux’s introduction is a fine one, a short reflection on Merton and the story of how Storey became a surprise best-seller. Shannon’s piece—not to put too fine a point on it—is an offensive, smug, anti-Catholic disaster. It really isn’t too much to call it a calumny and a defacement.

The problem can be boiled down to four paragraphs under the title “Religious Atmosphere.” It serves as a warning that the reader is about to step into a toxic atmosphere: WARNING…ENTERING PRE-VATICAN II CATHOLICISM. “The Roman Catholic Church you encounter in this book,” Shannon pronoun-ces, “is almost light years removed from the church that we recognize as the Roman Catholic Church today. Today’s church is the product of the revolution (not too strong a term) set in motion by the Second Vatican Council.” [...]

Chesteron once remarked that he loved the Catholic Church because it had prevented him from becoming a child of his age. William Shannon, sadly, is very much a child of his age, as are his Catholic compatriots in the media. I daresay that in a hundred years, his introduction to Merton’s masterpiece will seem far more dated than the text it introduces. Indeed, it is Merton who gets the last word on Shannon. It occurs when Merton realizes the error of his old life:

I saw clearly enough that I was the product of my times, my society, and my class. I was something that had been spawned by the selfishness and irresponsibility of the materialistic century in which I lived. However, what I did not see was that my own age and class only had an accidental part to play in this. They gave my egoism and pride and my other sins a peculiar character of weak and supercilious flippancy proper to this particular century: but that was only on the surface. Underneath, it was the same old story of greed and lust and self-love, of the three concupiscences bred in the rich, rotted undergrowth of what is technically called “the world,” in every age, in every class.

Here's what you get when you descend into the rotted undergrowth, Matrix Revolutions (James Lileks, 11/07/03, The Bleat) (via Ed Driscoll):

I took away something else from the Matrix trilogy: it is a product of deeply confused people. They want it all. They want individualism and community; they want secularism and transcendence; they want the purity of committed love and the licentious fun of an S&M club; they want peace and the thrill of violence; they want God, but they want to design him on their own screens with their own programs by their own terms for their own needs, and having defined the divine on their own terms, they bristle when anyone suggests they have simply built a room with a mirror and flattering lighting. All three Matrix movies, seen in total, ache for a God. But they can’t quite go all the way. They’re like three movies about circular flat meat patties that can never quite bring themselves to say the word “hamburger.”

Artists, if for no other reason than aesthetics, really need to be of the party of God. After all, it's a tall order to dress up selfishness and materialism so that they're pleasing to behold--for who among us enjoys the selfishness and acquisitiveness of others in the way we enjoy our own?--and if you portray nothing but the moment you live in your art is doomed to be awfully transitory, an artifact of the age, rather than an icon for the ages.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 10, 2003 9:43 PM