Position Papers - August/September 2017 by Position Papers

A review of Catholic affairs

Catholic Health Care by Fr Conor Donnelly

Young Teens And Fatima by Jennifer Kehoe

Film review: Dunkirk Number 511 · August/September 2017 €3 · £2.50 · $4

by Steven D. Greydanus

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Number 511 · August/September 2017

Editorial by Rev. Gavan Jennings

In Passing: We live in hope by Michael Kirke

Catholic Health Care: Apologia Pro Vita Sua (A defense of one's own life) by Fr Conor Donnelly

Young Teens And Fatima by Jennifer Kehoe

The real Citizens’ Assembly by Rev Patrick G Burke

Book review: That Nothing May Be Lost by Fr John McCloskey

Book review: Sons of Saint Patrick by Rev Gavan Jennings

Film review: Dunkirk by Steven D. Greydanus

Editor: Assistant editors: Subscription manager: Secretary: Design:

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Rev. Gavan Jennings Michael Kirke, Pat Hanratty, Brenda McGann Liam Ó hAlmhain Dick Kearns Eblana Solutions

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Editorial

his June I had the good fortune to accompany a group of students on a hiking trip in the Alps. In the course of strolling through the beautiful alpine scenery around Mont Blanc I fell in with two Israeli men, both in their late thirties. One of them told me he was squeezing in a week in the Alps before returning to Israel for his son’s Bar Mitzvah – the all important ceremony marking the transition from boyhood to manhood. And what did we do to mark this rite of passage in Christianity he asked me. I was stumped. Could I really say Confirmation? I had to truthfully reply that we don’t really have one. And this got me thinking about the situation back home in Ireland. Societies everywhere have recognised the importance of guiding boys out of boyhood into manhood, often formalising it through some rite of passage; rites often entailing terrifying challenges for the boys in question. The initiation is always overseen by other men, and often involves a symbolic abandoning of the mother’s protection, of the cosseting feminine world.

At what age does a Irish boy become a man? Who are the men who guide him? Do Irish mothers consciously step aside to allow the males take over? Does he even “become a man” at all in anything more than a biological sense? These questions have been made problematic by several decades of anti-masculine thinking and practice in the English speaking world at least, part of whose fruit is the gender confusion rife in so many young men. Perhaps the Church – in her role as an “expert in humanity” as St John Paul II put it – needs to be at the vanguard of the recovery and defence of masculinity, knowing as she does that no man can become a saint without first being a man; for, as the theological tag puts it, “grace builds on nature”. Increasingly it appears that the Church may be the last refuge of unabashed masculinity (and pari passu of unabashed femininity). But this role requires that the Church herself overcome a centuries’ old distortion which has downplayed human virtues (in this case the virtues of manliness) in favour of supernatural

qualities, and thus has tended to present a distorted ideal to men, the ideal of the homo religiosus. This is the man whose masculinity has been damaged, even completely eclipsed by his supernatural life. It is the kind of man presented in much unfortunate hagiography and even in lives of Christ himself. This has led in places to a Church which, in the vivid words of Dorothy Sayers, “has very efficiently pared the claws of the lion of Judah, making him a fitting pet for pale curates and pious old ladies”. Another conversation I had recently reminded me of how inspirational boys can find tales of manliness. A recently ordained American priest, passing through Ireland en route home, told me after a gap of several years he’d be meeting up with his US Army Ranger brother just back from Afghanistan. The Rangers are an elite corps of men selected from the very best soldiers. He told me that his brother had wanted to be a Ranger since his early boyhood – on account of the autobiographies of US Rangers and Navy Seals that he’d read as a child. The priest remarked in passing that this was the way to inspire young boys to be saints: challenging them to manliness and holiness. This reminded of the words of St Josemaria Escriva in The Way: “Be firm. Be virile. Be a man. And then... be a saint.” Every male saint in the Church’s canon of saints – if the portrayal of their personality is not distorted by a misplaced piosity – can serve to inspire young boys. Think of the manly heroism of the martyrs: Paul, Thomas More, Oliver Plunkett, or of the manly charity of men like Damien of Molokai or Don Bosco. These firm, virile and manly saints can serve to guide young boys – through inspiration – from boyhood into saintly manhood.

In Passing: We live in hope by Michael Kirke

hey said it would take ten years. It did, just about that. I’m no measurer of economic development and progress but it does seem that the Great Recession is over and the waters of a kind of prosperity are lapping the shore once more. In Ireland we are more or less on out feet again, if some recent headlines are to be taken at face value.

ranked fifth in the world for prime retail rent growth. That headline and those cranes might be a two-edged sword and doubtless will be causing some to cross their fingers in the hope that it is not a sign of a boom before the next bust. But what about the more crippling recession – or rather, regression? Any sign of remission there? It is a regression wider, deeper and ultimately more damaging than any in the material order and it is still draining the blood from the living tissue our civilization. We now live in nations where values have become so fragmented and have been so

“New property millionaires are being created at a rate of a dozen a week. There are now close to 4,000 homeowners in Ireland whose property is worth €1m or more”. Not to mention the spectacle of cranes flying over the city of Dublin. It is now

weakened by their fragmentation that they no longer seem up to the task of holding our societies and communities together. There are voices calling us to our senses, however. Eugene Vodvolaskyn, Russian academic philologist and novelist is one. Joseph Ratzinger, emeritus Pope Benedict XVII, is another. Philosopher Roger Scruton is a third. There are more – but where are their disciples, without whom they will just be voices crying in the wilderness.

Scruton in his book, On Human Nature, reminds us of how Milton conjured the truth of our condition from the raw materials of Genesis, and in doing so set a standard for art which was truly human. We might add Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes, like Milton, inheritors of the treasures of the High Middle Ages who have never been surpassed in their vision of what is is to be human and divine. Modern man and much of his literature, his philosophy, his politics, in his flight from God is a wrecker.

All three of these see a two-fold development in our culture which is near the heart of the disintegration which threatens us: excessive individualism and secularization. It is twofold because the one leads to the other. Indeed, like malign cells in the body, they complement each other and feed off all around them. Excessive individualism has no room for the Other – and certainly no room for God. Secularism, by eliminating God, has nowhere to lead us except to worship the Self.

“Take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art,” Scruton writes, “and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this ‘living down,’ which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind – and with it our kindness”.

Pinpointing these two maladies as key issues to be faced if our civilization is to be rescued from this regression, Vodvolaskyn traces the degeneration in this way:

modern age, the former tells us, takes it that the human being is the measure of all things. While, he says, the same could be said of the Middle Ages, there is one vital qualification. “For medieval man there was one correction: The person is the measure of all things, if it is understood that the measure was given by God.”

In the modern age, the individual required recognition. Faith required lack of faith so that the believer would have a choice and so that faith wouldn’t be a mere everyday habit. This train gathered speed but didn’t stop. It kept moving even after reaching its station. It now seems to have gone pretty far beyond its destination. The cult of the individual now places us outside divine and human community. The harmony in which a person once found himself with God during the Middle Ages has been destroyed, and God no longer stands at the center of the human consciousness.

Roger Scruton adds that thinkers in the eighteenth century compounded the degeneration. He rightly points out that our academic political philosophy has its roots in the Enlightenment, in the conception of Citizenship that emerged with the social contract. That contract replaced inherited authority with popular choice as the principle of political legitimacy. Not surprisingly, he says, it has had little time for piety, which – if acknowledged at all – is confined to the private sphere.

Vodvolaskyn echoes the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his famous “Warning to the West”, given after his exile from Russia. Humanism of the

The concept and definition of “person”, explored by Scruton in his book, is a key to the entire crisis. Our civilization has now such a garbled concept of the

person, its nature and dignity, its unified essence as body and soul, that it has all but shipwrecked us on the rocks exposed by the receding waters.

least in the urbanised and materialistic sectors of its population. While there are still many there who feel that true value and virtue have been swept away by fickle modernity, there are many others rejoicing and celebrating the change.

Without the correction supplied by medieval man, in Vodvolaskyn’s view, humanism becomes inhuman. With excessive individualism, the rights set down for the individual multiply. The Russian foresees a demand inevitably coming for a right to cross the street against a red light. Take that literally or metaphorically. Ultimately, he argues, because our concept of rights is anti-humane at its core, it activates the mechanism for self-destruction. “The right to suicide turns out to be our most exemplary liberty.”

What has happened to Ireland is what is likely to happen to any cluster of humanity whose moral compass is put in the hands of entertainers, celebrities and a political class whose members care more about their media image and so-called legacy than about the true good of the people. Ireland may be fast approaching a cultural condition illustrated by Vodvolaskyn in the following anecdote. He recounts an encounter, some twenty years ago, with a Dutch pastor, an advocate of The Netherland’s culture of tolerance, who took him on a tour of Amsterdam.

Ireland, not too long ago was still a safe place to negotiate the world, to raise a family, to pursue the good life. It was holding on, albeit somewhat superficially, to the more metaphysical world view characteristic of the Middle Ages which Vodvolaskyn identifies. It is no longer so, at

The Dutch people are tolerant, he told me, and hence in Amsterdam, there are no ethnic or religious minorities, an achievement

made possible by the fact that although a majority of residents are of Dutch descent, only around twentyfive percent call themselves Christian. His enumeration of the achievements of Dutch tolerance concluded with an account of the removal of a stanza about the help of God from the national anthem of the Netherlands. As you can understand, explained the pastor, various people have various gods, and they can be offended that the anthem names only the Christian God. This is a triumph for tolerance, isn’t it? Listening to him, I thought, if this is a triumph, what would catastrophe be like?

As in the Middle Ages, the world itself is becoming a text, though the texts vary in these two cases. The medieval world was a text written by God that excluded the ill-considered and the accidental. The Holy Scripture, which gave meaning to the signs that were generously scattered in daily life, was this world’s key. Now the world is a text that has any number of individual meanings that can be documented. Think of the blogger who describes, minute by minute, a day that has passed. But the modern age, with its false humanism, centered exclusively on man, repudiated the Christian vision. The progressivist delusion clouded the picture and abandoned the vision of a unified world where the past and the present were one force.

That was before the spectre of jihad made its appearance on Dutch soil. One wonders what the pastor is thinking today. Vodvolaskyn, in an essay entitled “The New Middle Age”, published in First Things over a year ago, as a philologist might be inclined to do, identified the world as a text.

Vodvolaskyn, being Russian, looks at the modern world from that perspective. But he is also profoundly Christian and fully aware of the historic unity of

spirit which Christianity brought to what we call the West. He is also deeply optimistic about the potential which this spirit still has to transform and renew the now decaying civilization in which we find ourselves.

politics does not bring about the kingdom of God, it must be concerned for the right kingdom of human beings, that is, it must create the preconditions for peace at home and abroad and for a rule of law that will permit everyone to ‘lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way’ (1 Tim. 2: 2). One could say that this also implies the demand of religious freedom. Similarly, the text is confident that reason can recognize the essential moral foundations of human existence and can implement these in the political domain.

Both Vodvolaskyn and Joseph Ratzinger – surely not only one of the greatest popes of the modern age but also one of its wisest political philosophers – see that the changes that have to come have to take place in our hearts as well as in our culture and in our reason-based political institutions. For both of them utopian dreams are paths to disaster for mankind – as they have shown themselves to be from Cromwell’s time up to the age of ISIS.

Scruton, for his part, warns us of the totalitarian traps which the modern philosophies of Peter Singer and Derek Parfit, both icons of progressivism, set for us with their consequentialist moral reasoning.

Ratzinger points out in Values In A Time of Upheaval: The enthusiastic messianism of an eschatological and revolutionary character is absolutely foreign to the New Testament. History is, so to speak, the kingdom where reason rules. Although

Both philosophers overlook the actual record of consequentialist reasoning. Modern history presents case after case of inspired people

led by visions of “the best,” believing that all rational beings would adopt those visions if only they would think about them clearly. The Communist Manifesto is one such vision. It gives a picture of “the best” and argues that all would work for it, the bourgeoisie included, if only they understood the impeccable arguments for its implementation. Those who stand in the way of revolution are selfinterested; but they are also irrational and would change sides if they thought seriously about principles that everyone could will to be laws. Since their interests prevent them from thinking in that way, violent revolution is both necessary and inevitable. Vodvolaskyn argues for a conservative project and thinks that if the West is able to move beyond its geopolitical disagreements with Russia, it will see one possible future for our common European civilization. One of his fears,

which he elaborates in his First Things essay “The Age of Concentration”, is that if Russia attempts this by means of a harsh dictatorship of the majority, then it will fail and destabilize society no less than, say, “the dictatorship of the minority that we can observe at times in the West.” Today as ever, he holds, – contrary to progressive conceits – it is possible for a society to recognize a place for religion and uphold traditional notions of marriage and family. For Scruton it is not only possible, it is essential. In his book he subscribes to the “deep insight” shared by Burke, Maistre and Hegel, that the destiny of political order and the destiny of the family are connected. “Families, and the relationships embraced by them, are nonaccidental features of interpersonal life.” Contemporary progressivism’s deconstruction of the family is at the heart of our society’s catastrophic regression.

But piling hope upon Vodvolaskyn’s hope, we look for a new Renaissance. But this renaissance will not be a rediscovery of the ancient world. It will be a rediscovery of the treasures of the Middle Ages, cast aside so dismissively by those who consider the word medieval just another expletive. Western Europe, Russia, and the United States, he maintains, represent various branches of a single tree. The basic systemic feature of this civilization is Christianity, both as a religious practice and as a specific kind of culture. If European civilization is fated to survive, it will require a rediscovery of Christianity. And that will, he says, take place both on the

level of persons, of nationstates and at a pan-European level. Once more, we live in hope.

ABOUT THE  AUTHOR

Michael Kirke is a freelance writer, a regular contributor to Position Papers, and a widely read blogger at Garvan Hill (www.garvan.wordpress.com). His views can be responded to at mjgkirke@gmail.com.

Catholic Health Care: Apologia Pro Vita Sua (A defense of one's own life) by Fr Conor Donnelly

t a pro-life conference in Manila in the ’80s, a Liverpool female GP, of Irish origin, stated that: “We can be very proud of our Church.” She went on to say that “our Church is the only Church in the world that has stood by the principle of the dignity of every human life in the past thirty years … The Catholic Church is the number one health-care worker in the world.” In the succeeding years, I experienced the veracity of her words. The best hospitals in Muslim Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, Buddist Bangkok and secular Hong Kong are Catholic hospitals (many with Irish

connections). When people are really sick, the last place they go to is a government hospital. In Nairobi, there is a Mater hospital founded from Dublin. Through outstations, it reaches the vast neglected rural areas of the country where the government does not dare to go. It is the same story all over Africa. And if that weren’t enough, one-third of all AIDS patients in the world are cared for in Catholic hospitals. The prestige of Catholic health care, and of being connected with it, is almost embarrassing. Due recognition  The obstetricians who made the maternal mortality rate in

Ireland in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s the lowest in the world have not received due recognition. O’Driscoll, O’Dwyer and De Valera (obstetrician) did so by promoting a “respect-for-life” agenda. In the Irish Medical Journal of 1970 Prof O’Driscoll has an article entitled: ‘Abortion, the therapeutic argument’, where he proves that abortion is never necessary to save the life of a mother. At the time, Holles Street became a world leader in the management of labour. Every family in South County Dublin is what they are today because of the 24-hour service that has been available at St Vincent’s Hospital for the past 200 years. It was the best on the planet, and everyone knew it, whether it was for a sprained wrist in a rugby match, an appendix, or a dying relative. While working there as an intern in the ’70s, we had referrals from all over the country. Against this global verdict of excellence, the recent insular

complaints about St Vincent’s Hospital cannot be directed against healthcare with a Catholic ethos, but rather the respect-for-life ethic contained there. In the list of 203 maternity complaints over a forty-year period, published recently by the HSE, nowhere did “Catholic health care” appear. As another champion of Irish women, he wants them to have access to every kind of modern “services”, and among those services are in vitro fertilization (IVF), common in maternity hospitals. These involve the destruction of human embryos. But if your medical practitioner does not care for life, where does that leave you? IVF has a 25% success rate, costs a fortune, and involves much psychological trauma. Naprotechnology has an 50% success rate, is non invasive and cheap. Interestingly, China recently trained 50,000 teachers in the Billings method of family

planning. Mainly because it is free, non invasive and does not endanger women’s health. It has also been proven to be as effective as ‘the pill’ (see the British Medical Journal, Ryder, September 1993). The right to know In the past thirty years, I have not heard many health-care professionals raise their voices about the horrors of abortion (not even those of late term), their side effects, the side effects of contraceptives, or the morning-after pill – some of which can be fatal – some of which include depression, breast cancer, infertility, and regret. Or the dangers of badly staffed abortion centres in the USA and UK. An Irish woman died recently in a botched abortion in London. You would think that the chairman of the Institute of Obstetricians might have had time for a comment, even if only to warn those young mothers who might be in the midst of an agonizing decision on whether or not to travel.

This, not to mention the revealing Planned Parenthood videos that have surfaced recently. You would think that the 3,000 young Irish girls per year going for abortion in the UK should know these well-documented facts, and have the right to hear them from leading obstetricians. (The figure is 100,000 in Italy and 22,000 per year in Singapore.) Leaders have a responsibility to inform and to teach. The aforementioned Liverpool GP also said that “one of the first rights of women is to know, and women are not being told the truth”. Irish women would do well to check out the respectfor-life credentials of their obstetricians. Have they carried out an abortion? Have they discarded human embryos? If we know the form for the Derby and the National, why not on matters of greater importance? There is need for more transparency. Obstetricians need to publicly show their hands.

As abortion training is standard practice in most maternity hospitals around the world, it has to be presumed that most Irish obstetricians have performed at least one abortion, and possibly many. If IVF is common, it means they are regularly discarding human embryos. They are not exactly innocent bystanders.

ordinary citizens, along with 1,000 doctors, who like the dogs in the street, smelled the horrors of abortion. The eighth amendment was not Churchbased â&#x20AC;&#x201C; quite the opposite. It was a major battle, which, in the end, was carried by a twothirds majority of the nation.

In the 1983 referendum, in which I was involved, there was lamentable silence from the obstetricians of the country, with a few notable exceptions.Â Together with the lawyers, politicians and clergymen of all denominations, they said nothing. It was the

Some people like to say that the country has changed, but scientific truth does not change. It has been scientifically unsafe for the past fifty years to say that life does not begin at conception. The battle now is not just to protect human life but to protect scientific

Protecting scientific truth

truth. Subjective sincerity, nice feelings, a desire to please some women – none of these are substitutes for scientific truth. Truth, in all its forms, is a profoundly liberating phenomenon. When human embryos are used, frozen, and abused, there is an underlying contempt for every human person. An educationalist in the US, James Stenson, has said that universities today are experts in producing “technically skilled barbarians”. People are treated as things and as trash. There is a lack of care and respect. The ethos of the golden age of Irish obstetrics has passed and has been replaced by a utilitarian, materialistic culture. Marx should be happy about how effectively his ideas have taken root. Investigations will reveal the truth of whether there was a lack of respect for life in the Tuam controversy. If true, it will be an anomaly – it was not the norm. But we also have to ask, if IVF is now common in

Irish maternity hospitals, does that mean there is a septic tank in each one, and if not, why not? Where are the embryos and how are they disposed of? This could reveal a story that is much bigger than anything that might have happened in Tuam. These are government and taxpayer-funded hospitals. Where are the investigative journalists? Women should be asking where are my embryos? Should the recent demonstrations that took place outside Leinster House move to The Coombe, the Rotunda and Holles Street? If there is even the most minimal chance that these human embyros are persons – and all the scientific evidence is in their favour – then why are they being treated with such a lack of respect? People on the boards of these hospitals should be asking lots of questions. Setting the pace Why Holles Street wants to move to St Vincent’s is obvious. But for an independent hospital, would it not have been

more rational to move to a general hospital, like Loughlinstown or Blanchardstown, with a more government-related history, rather than one owned and run by religious sisters? Proximity is not the only answer; nor that it is a university hospital whose reputation for excellence is second to none. You cannot argue with quality. It is the sisters in St Vincent’s and the Mater who have set the pace – and the story is the same all over the world. In the description of the financing of St Vincent’s Hospital that appeared in The Irish Times, Diarmuid Ferriter, quoting a history of the hospital, suggests that a large part of the funding came from the government, through the Irish Hospitals’ Charity Sweepstakes. That needs further study to see how much of the sweepstakes actually went to hospitals in general, and St Vincent’s in particular, and how much of it was government money and not the money of citizens who bought a sweep ticket. I have my doubts.

He omits the role of Sir John Galvin. At the time, it was rumoured that the hospital cost £1 million to build and £1 million to stock, and that Mr Galvin, a very generous low-key benefactor, paid for half the cost. He may not appear in the history for reasons of discretion, but his picture, showing him at a prominent place at the opening ceremony, decorated the walls of the hospital near the main door in the ’70s, suggesting such a significant role. This was decades before the Celtic Tiger, when Irish governments had little money and less competence. Over the years, when governments began to contribute to the hospital, they were subsidising the health care of the tax-paying citizens of South County Dublin who were flocking to this hospital – as governments were presumably doing with hospitals elsewhere – as a duty of distributive justice. Anything less would have been thievery. The government was not contributing to a religious

order, or buying bricks in the hospital or the right to do so, on behalf of the citizens of the State at some future date, as some journalists now seem to suggest. It seems to be implied that the voluntary contributions of tax-paying citizens of South County Dublin to St Vincent’s had no value or relevance. When the government subsidised our education, did they expect to own us in the end, too? To those who complain about the value of the land owned by the religious orders, where they have been running social services for decades, my advice would be for them to go and build their own hospitals, schools, care-centres for the blind, deaf, mentally and physically handicapped. Let us see how they do in fifty years’ time – and then we can compare. Otherwise it’s all hot air. Stunning contribution As the nuns pass out of the vanguard of healthcare, the only responsible reaction can be

awe, gratitude and admiration for their stunning contribution. They have set the bar very high. Through delivering the highest standards in health care and education, these Irish women – many our aunts and grandaunts – have turned our primitive backwater into a modern state. De Valera (politician) may have been the figurehead and the voice of our fledgling nation, but a well-trained army of religious in every town and village did most of the heavy lifting. Thousands of doctors and nurses have been trained to these same standards, and have brought them to every corner of the earth. As a country, Ireland may have had little, materially, to contribute to the world, but in the health care and education delivered through its religious orders, she has spread these standards across the globe – and millions of people have been, and continue to be, the beneficiaries. As our missionary orders deplete in numbers, the baton is passing to a new lay cohort, whom it is to be hoped, will further develop on that respect

for life. Whatever form the new government of St Vincent’s takes, it is receiving a great legacy of respect for life in all its forms. The hospital has been a shining light in its 200-year history, and must continue. We need more hospitals like it.

process, and its purpose – respect for human life.

Medicine, worldwide, is losing its soul. A new generation of medical students and medical practitioners must come forward – authentic revolutionaries who are not afraid to challenge the status quo, and to be conscientious objectors to the prevailing destruction-of-life culture. The protection of the eighth amendment will help that

ABOUT THE  AUTHOR Fr Conor Donnelly qualified as a medical doctor in University College Dublin in 1977 and worked for a year at St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin. He was ordained a priest in 1981 for the Prelature of Opus Dei. After obtaining a doctorate in Theology from the University of Navarre, Spain, in 1982, he spent twenty-two years in Asia, in the Philippines and Singapore. He is currently the chaplain of Strathmore Business School in Nairobi.

Young Teens And Fatima by Jennifer Kehoe

his morning, 13th May, I was dropping our two younger middle children, now young teens, to various places involving about twenty minutes in the car. I told one who is singing in the choir for the school’s First Communion to wait in the church for me to pick him up after the initial crowd has dispersed because the church and the parking area are both small. I suggested he spend those ten minutes praying and maybe considering the children of Fatima and the lives they lived. They asked me why I am talking about Fatima these days and I told them that today is the one hundredth anniversary and asked them whether they knew

anything about it or the children. Being younger in the family, it’s easy to fall through the stools as regards religious formation (Fatima coming under the category of things we would do well to believe but not necessary to the faith). We sometimes put so much effort in giving the older children a strong moral, doctrinal, philosophical education that we forget to do the same for the younger ones. It’s something parents especially of large families need to constantly be aware of. Osmosis has only a part to play, they must also be personally instructed (that’s my theory anyway). Anyway, it turns out to my shame that they knew little to

nothing about Fatima. So in the space of the short drive I summarised what had happened and how it has fitted into European history. How they have been praying the prayer the angel told the children to recite during the rosary. About communism and it’s rotten fruit, about angels and Pope Leo XIII. They were absolutely fascinated, full of questions and dying to watch some of the programming which will surely be on EWTN today. I dropped off the first child and had time alone with the other, the older of the two, as she needed to go to the other side of town. That short conversation led to her opening her heart about her faith as regards her peers, how she can live it in a world in which religion, and especially Catholicism, is considered strange and how to stay joyful even when it’s difficult. She was especially drawn to the explanation of how love frees us from laws with the example that it’s not law which prevents her from killing her beloved little sister, it’s love. The law doesn’t

even apply to her because she doesn’t want to do that thing anyway. The more we fall in love with Jesus, the less we are bound by laws. That is very freeing knowledge to have … that “The Truth will set you free.” Can you even imagine how liberating that is for any teenager who thinks, and whose friends think, that God is a party pooper and that religion is nothing but oppressive rules. When she sees the “rule” being her love of her sister there’s no hint of coercion or oppression. On the other hand, I pointed out how Jesus was always so tender with sinners, especially sexual sinners such as the woman caught in adultery and the woman at the well because he knew they were looking for him, just in the wrong place like so many young people are doing, even some she already knows. God's little ones wandering precariously, objectively blameless, because who has ever told them? Just like the biblical sheep without a shepherd, and how she needs to be tender toward everyone, never thinking badly of them. She was drinking it in! As she got out of the car

she turned and said “This is so INTERESTING!” Three things: (1) Don’t be afraid to talk to your children, all your children not just the first one or two, about faith. They are dependent on you because nobody else is going to tell them. Don’t underestimate their thirst. Don’t presume they’ll find this topic boring. If you are still amazed they'll pick that up. How can we not be amazed at all these things? (2) Time and again I have found the best conversations with my children have been in the car while I am driving. It makes it easier for them to open their hearts. I wonder if it’s because

there’s no eye contact and it’s a calm environment. It reminds me of confession, where the priest leans in a listening pose as opposed to a conversational one. It’s easier for the penitent to offload what can at times be embarrassing. (3) It’s still morning on 13th May and already I’m seeing fruits blossom. What a great day this is! (4) You cannot tell your children what you don’t know yourself. Yes, well spotted, that’s four things. A girl can change her mind.

ABOUT THE  AUTHOR

Jennifer Kehoe is a young mother of six, living in Kildare, Ireland. She runs a blog “Raindrops on my Head,” at http://jenniferkehoe.blogspot.ie.

The real Citizensâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Assembly by Rev Patrick G Burke

oices in the pro-life community are calling the Rally for Life march which took place in Dublin at the beginning of July this year the real Citizensâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Assembly. I can understand why they might think so. The Citizensâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Assembly was set up by the Government to find out where people stood on the issue of abortion and come up with recommendations as to whether the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which acknowledges the right of the unborn child to life, should be repealed or retained, and, should it recommend repealing it, to put forward suggestions as

to what kind of abortion regime should follow. It should be noted that there was widespread cynicism about this Assembly on both sides of the debate when it was first suggested. Pro-lifers felt is was the Government's way of avoiding the inevitable political fall-out that would come from introducing a referendum to repeal the Eighth to an electorate that not only had made it clear that such a referendum was not a high priority for it but was also not in favour of abortion on demand even if it was no longer as clearly pro-life as it once was. On the other hand the pro-abortion side regarded the Assembly as a

delaying tactic, a way of putting off the referendum it had been working so hard to see take place for many years. Even before it began, pro-life organisations were dubious about the Assembly, believing that it was designed to produce only one result – that is, a recommendation for repeal of the Eighth followed by a liberalisation of abortion laws in this country. They continued to be very critical of the Assembly while it was in session, pointing to what they claimed was a lack of balance in the speakers making presentations to it. Too many, they felt, were proabortion. So it came as no surprise to pro-life groups that the Assembly ultimately recommended not only repealing the Eighth but called for abortion to be legalised in almost all circumstances and to effectively bring in abortion on demand. But this result was quite a shock to pro-abortion advocates. They had hoped, I believe, that the Assembly would indeed recommend that the Eighth be repealed, but basically on the

grounds that it was necessary to do so on “compassionate” grounds, in order to facilitate abortions in what are usually referred to as the “hard cases” such as rape, incest, and situations where the unborn child suffers from a condition where he or she is not expected to live long after birth. With the Eighth no longer in place to protect the rights of the unborn child to life, the hope was that they would soon be able to pressure the government into ever more liberal abortion laws and and if that pressure failed, they would take to the courts in this country and elsewhere confident that, with the Eighth gone, litigation would force the government to bring in the kind of liberal abortion legislation that they could not bring in by democratic means. Even the most liberal sections of the media, however had to acknowledge that the Assembly had gone too far with its recommendations. They hadn't much choice; even the proverbial “dogs in the street” knew that its proposals were wildly out of kilter with public opinion. And polls conducted

shortly after the Assembly finished its work confirmed this; these made it clear that while there may be a wide diversity of opinion when it comes to abortion in this country, very few indeed wanted to bring in the abortion on demand that the Assembly was calling for.

was intended to lead to, abortion on demand. Such a rejection would set the pro-abortion agenda back a very long time indeed, because it would be years before anyone could reasonably hope to try and call another referendum on this issue.

This made its recommendations something of a disappointment to the pro-abortion side; not so much with what it had proposed, for it would seem quite obvious that what it had called for was essentially what pro-abortion advocates ultimately hoped to see as the legislative regime in this country, but rather that by going so far in what it was calling for that not only had the Assembly made it abundantly clear what the end-goal of this campaign was, it had also put forward proposals so extreme that they had little likelihood of being passed. Much as the proabortion side had chafed at the delay they saw the Assembly as being, even worse would be a referendum to repeal the Eighth that was rejected by the people because it had been made abundantly clear that repealing it would inevitably lead to, and

Ironically the Assembly, which is generally acknowledged as having failed to give a true picture of where the people stand on abortion, is nonetheless still being used as the justification for a referendum on abortion. What form that referendum will take and what recommendations it will put before the people still remains to be seen. But the government has said repeatedly that a referendum will take place in 2018. However, that promise places the pro-abortion side in what might be considered to be something of a Catch-22 situation. Pope Francis has scheduled a visit that year. Not surprisingly the pro-abortion lobby fear that his visit might inspire something of a Catholic revival in Ireland that would most likely doom any chances of a vote to repeal the Eighth in its

aftermath. So they need the referendum to take place before he comes. However, they also realise they need time to “reeducate” people concerning the merits of abortion and to construct a convincing formula that makes it look like repealing the Eighth will not open the doors to abortion on demand in this country. So they can afford neither to rush nor to wait as doing either risks costing them the “prize” of winning the referendum to repeal. It should also be noted that coming up with a way of convincing the public that it is possible to both repeal the Eighth and at the same not introduce a regime of abortion on demand is a very tall order indeed. The introduction of the so-called Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act, which allowed for abortion in certain circumstances, was brought in despite specific electoral promises that no abortion legislation of any kind would be introduced. This previous betrayal has left people wary of trusting politicians when it comes to this issue. And the media, used to being the only

game in town when it comes to influencing public opinion, has had its position undermined in recent years by online platforms and social media outlets. People get their information from many sources these days, not just radio, television, and newspapers. The influence of the traditional media has been further weakened over the last few years by a documented decline in public trust. People, to put it bluntly, have come to realise that those working in the old media are, on many issues, not as interested in reporting what happens as they are in influencing outcomes, and as a result they are paying less attention to what those in the media have to say. All this must make the Rally for Life very worrying for those promoting abortion. Tens of thousands of people came to march – perhaps as many 80,000 and probably no less than 50,000 – and they sent a very unambiguous message. That message can be summarised as follows: life begins at conception; no one has the right to deliberately end the life of an unborn child; and the

Eighth Amendment is the only way to protect that right and must be retained. By contrast the “counter rally” organised by pro-abortion groups to oppose the march attracted very few supporters. The highest estimate of those who came to express a contrary view to the marchers was two hundred; lower estimates puts it at half that. So tens of thousands came to support the Eighth Amendment and celebrate the countless thousands of lives it has saved over the years, and only a few dozen turned out calling for its repeal. This seems to give a pretty clear picture of where the people stand. And where they stand is diametrically opposed to

the breathtakingly liberal proabortion recommendations made by the Assembly. And so it therefore also makes very strong case that pro-life voices are correct in saying that when it comes to representing the views of the man and woman in the street who will be voting when and if a referendum takes place the Rally for Life was the true Citizens’ Assembly.

ABOUT THE  AUTHOR

The Rev Patrick G Burke is the Church of Ireland rector of the Castlecomer Union of Parishes, Co Kilkenny. A regular contributor to Position Papers, he was formerly a broadcast journalist with the Armed Forces Radio and Television Network. He blogs at thewayoutthere1.blogspot.ie

Book review That Nothing May Be Lost

That Nothing May Be Lost: Reflections on Catholic Doctrine and Devotion

A book review by Fr John McCloskey

mong the many achievements of late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia must be counted his son, Father Paul Scalia. Many Catholics in America were introduced to him through his father's televised funeral Mass in 2016. His homily on that occasion was a model for how to successfully interweave Catholic teaching on the “Four Last Things” with well-chosen details of the deceased's life, rather than offering a eulogy. That homily appears as an appendix in Father Scalia's new book, That Nothing May Be Lost: Reflections on Catholic Doctrine and Devotion. As he opened his homily:

Author Fr Paul Scalia

Publisher Ignatius Press, 2017

We are gathered here because of one man. A man known personally to many of us, known only by reputation to even more; a man loved by many, scorned by others; a man known for great controversy, and great compassion. That man, of course, is Jesus of Nazareth. It is He whom we proclaim: Jesus Christ, Son of the Father, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified, buried, risen, seated at the right hand of the Father. It is because of Him, because of His life, death, and Resurrection, that we do not mourn as those who have no hope, but in confidence

commend Antonin Scalia to the mercy of God. Father Scalia's book is a collection of brief articles, many originally published in the Arlington Catholic Herald, that are related to aspects of Catholic teaching, living, liturgy, feast days and seasons. They are gathered into nine groups whose titles convey the richness and attractiveness of Catholicism: “The Lord: Knowing and Loving Jesus of Nazareth”; “The Church: Knowing and Loving the Body of Christ”; “Paradoxes of Faith: The Tension and Balance of Catholic Teaching”; “The Sacraments: Christ's Life Placed Within Us”; “The Virgin Mary: The Beauty and the Power of the Mother of God”; “The Saints: The Mortal Masterpieces of God's Grace”; “Prayer: In Conversation With God”; “The Life of Grace: Christ Within Us”; and “Feasts: The Pattern and Rhythm of the Christian Life." In each, Father Scalia clearly expresses what Catholics of our time most need to know or remember to adhere to and celebrate their faith in our common journey to the Father.

A bonus for readers is the array of “names” that introduce the various sections of the book. Among these are Scott Hahn, Helen Alvaré, Mary Ellen Bork and Raymond Arroyo. In addition, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia contributes the foreword. In reviewing a collection that covers aspects of almost every area of Church life, it is difficult to single out specifics without seeming to suggest that that is what the book is about. The introduction identifies the common thread in this way:

Although I could not articulate it twenty five years ago, I desired to bring souls healing, peace, and salvation by teaching the Catholic faith. After twenty years of priesthood, that conviction about the Church's teaching and the desire to communicate it have not diminished. Indeed, after years of service as a parish priest, they have only grown stronger – because a priest is privileged to see both the great depths of human

suffering and the great miracles of divine grace.

fragments and allows the truths to be lost.”

The book’s title comes from the account of Christ’s Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish. Afterwards, Christ commanded his apostles to “gather the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” Father Scalia applies this metaphor to the Church, whose “… mission is to hand down the faith whole and entire for the salvation of souls. To neglect one dimension or the other, to cut corners here and there, only puts souls at risk. ‘Heresy’ comes from the Greek haireisthai, ‘to choose’. The heretic chooses one teaching to the exclusion of others. He fails to gather the

The metaphor can also be successfully applied to Father Scalia’s book, which I recommend for Catholics and all those interested in better understanding, in a balanced and full fashion, the faith he so ably professes and teaches.

ABOUT THE  AUTHOR

Rev C. John McCloskey III is a Catholic priest of the Prelature of Opus Dei and member of the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross. He is the former director of the Catholic Information Center of the Archdiocese of Washington. Website: www.frmccloskey.com.

Sons of Saint Patrick:   A History of the Archbishops of New York, from Dagger John to Timmytown

Book review Sons of Saint Patrick

A book review by Rev Gavan Jennings

his book from Ignatius Press tells the story of the ten archbishops of New York, stretching from Archbishop John “Dagger John” Hughes – appointed in 1850 – to Cardinal Timothy Dolan in the present day. All ten men are “sons of St Patrick”, being Irish by birth like John Hughes, or else children or grandchildren of Irish immigrants thereafter. At 506 pages it is a hefty book, perhaps a bit daunting at first, but in fact makes for a surprisingly accessible, engaging and even gripping read. Reading it is made all the more pleasant by the natural and unobtrusive way in which the strong faith of the authors

Author George Marlin & Brad Miner

Publisher Ignatius Press, 2017

comes shining through in their words. As I worked my way through Sons of St Patrick I began to realise just how ignorant I was of the contribution of Irish Catholic emigrants to American sociey. Growing up in Ireland, America was never far from one’s thoughts, with all those American aunts, uncles, cousins and eventually siblings living in the States – and I’m sure this is the experience of the vast majority of Irish people. And yet like most things that are on your doorstep, one tends not to give them much thought, and until I picked up Sons of St Patrick I have to confess I had not given

much consideration to how the Irish emigrants to America helped forge the Catholic dimension of the most powerful nation on earth. From the very early pages of Sons of Saint Patrick it is very apparent that the Irish emigrants of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were a force to be reckoned with. Their calibre is reflected in these ten prelates. This immense work of research presents the fascinating story of the heroic fortitude of the men who lead the diocese of New York since the early nineteenth century. The environment in which these ten archbishops laboured has by no means been an easy one. Since its inception as a diocese in 1808, and indeed before that, since the late seventeenth century, Catholics have had to struggle continually against the anti-Catholic prejudice of those for whom “American” meant “Protestant”. New York Catholics and their prelates had a constant fight on their hands against the misapprehensions (and

sometimes plain bigotry) of the dominant Protestant ascendancy; it was a battle fought out in the newspapers, in the court of public opinion in general and in the field of education in particular. The sheer courage, and even pugnacity, of the archbishops in this environment is impressive. Famously when in 1844 Archbishop John Hughes went to see the then Mayor of New York to protest against planned demonstrations by the anti-Catholic “nativists”, the Mayor asked him whether he was afraid that some of the Catholic churches would be burned, Hughes replied: “No, sir, but I’m afraid that some of yours will be burned. We can protect our own.” It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the anti-Catholic atmosphere of mid-nineteenth century New York has been replicated in John Hughes’ native country – and perhaps we could learn a lesson or two from his fearless pugnacity in defending the rights of Catholics.

The book is divided into four sections. The first and shortest sets the scene: tracing the prehistory of the archdiocese starting in the seventeenth century with the missionary work of Isaac Jogues (who, when he arrived in what was then New Amsterdam in 1643, boasted only two other Catholics in a town of three hundred souls). The second part of the book spans a period of almost one hundred years, from the time of John Joseph Hughes in the mid nineteenth century through the lives of the four following archbishops, ending with Patrick Joseph Hayes who died in 1938. Those five archbishops established and consolidated New York as an archdiocese to be reckoned with. The third section takes us through the remainder of the twentieth century, beginning with the fascinating figure of Francis Joseph Spellman, with whom the archdiocese appears to reach the apogee of its prestige and influence, not just within the USA but worldwide. He is followed by the endearing figure of Terence James Cooke; it comes as no surprise to learn

at the end of the chapter that his beatification process has begun. The section ends with another lion of the episcopacy: John Joseph O’Connor. The fourth and final section of the book is rather ominously titled: ‘The Church in Crisis’ and deals with the tenures of Edward Michael Egan and the present archbishop of New York, Timothy Michael Dolan. The crises referred to are primarily the “priest-predator crisis” but also the battles surrounding abortion, the LGBT ideology, and education. These issues are not limited to New York of course; they are worldwide in their scope, but perhaps they have taken on a special virulence in the New York diocese. Once again the archbishops of these crises have, for the most part, shown themselves to be up to the challenge. They have firmly defended the teaching of the Church and the rights of the Catholics of the diocese in the face of some ferocious opposition, and all this with a certain panache and, particularly in the case of

Cardinal Dolan, a smiling optimism. While reading about the Irish emigrant community which moulded the diocese of New York, I could not help but think of Pope Benedict’s admonition in his 2010 pastoral letter to the crisis torn Church in Ireland: “As you take up the challenges of this hour, I ask you to remember ‘the rock from which you were hewn’ (Is 51:1). Reflect upon the generous, often heroic, contributions made by past generations of Irish men and women to the Church and to humanity as a whole .…” The faith filled lives of our emigrant forebears described in Sons of

St Patrick could certainly help us Irish to heed Pope Benedict’s admonition. It would make any Irish person proud to read of what has been achieved for the Church by our fellow Irishmen and women in the USA, and specifically in the archdiocese of New York.

ABOUT THE  AUTHOR Fr Gavan Jennings is a priest of the Opus Dei Prelature. He studied philosophy in Dublin and Rome and now works as a chaplain to university students.

Director Pierre Coffin, Kyle Balda and Eric Guillon

Film review Dunkirk

A film review by Steven D. Greydanus

unkirk is the first film Christopher Nolan has made that feels bigger than the director’s preoccupations and obsessions. There is something ironically liberating about this sprawling yet frequently claustrophobic war movie about soldiers trapped by the sea, crowded in long queues on a great concrete and wooden jetty waiting for ships, or hunkered in the bellies of destroyers, all awaiting the bullets or bombs that could rain down at any moment. What is liberating is that the stakes and the difficulties are clear and the goal and burden of survival is shared by soldiers and civilians alike. The tangle of

Universal Pictures

expedient or necessary lies under which characters in Nolan’s stories so often labor – skewing their perceptions of reality, meaning and even their own actions, pitting characters as much against themselves as against one another – is basically absent here. The protagonist of Memento needs the lie he tells himself to construct heroic meaning amid crushing tragedy. The conspirators in Inception want their mark to find meaning in a lie he wrongly believes to be his own idea. The Prestige depicts characters finding meaning in a selfcreated deception imposed on everyone around them, even

when it destroys their own lives. The Dark Knight culminates in the notion that the people of Gotham need a noble lie to give them hope. If the wisdom of that last conceit was later crossexamined by The Dark Knight Rises, by the trilogy’s end the question whether ordinary people are capable in truth of rising to the challenge of saving themselves and each other still had no real answer.

ordinary people responding to a shared crisis? Did he find in this renowned chapter of history something his fictional stories strained toward but couldn’t realize?

Even when The Dark Knight Rises dropped hints of a popular uprising, Nolan seemed unable to pull it off. His latest, Interstellar, was equally pessimistic about the hoi polloi coming together to save the Earth; instead, mankind’s hopes rest on elite scientists solving the equations to evacuate the planet.

Whatever the case, Dunkirk plays in a way not only as Nolan’s best film, but as a kind of an antithesis – even an antidote – to all the others. The notion of Dunkirk spirit arose largely because of the celebrated role of amateur sailors risking their lives by serving alongside military forces in a makeshift flotilla of small ships – merchant marine vessels, fishing boats, pleasure craft and more – who sailed between England and Dunkirk to help pull off a seemingly miraculous evacuation of more than 330,000 stranded troops before the Nazis closed in for the kill.

Is this partly why, of all the war stories he might have told, Nolan was drawn to the story of a battle whose very name became a catchphrase – “Dunkirk spirit” – for can-do solidarity and heroism uniting

This spirit is embodied in the film above all in the character played by Mark Rylance, a middle-aged civilian named Dawson with a wooden motor yacht called the Moonstone who sets out for Dunkirk with his

son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and a young friend named George (Barry Keoghan). Rylance plays Dawson with a low-key, matter-of-fact sense of duty and civic virtue that feels like the film’s most authentic period detail, embodying unlost “Lost Generation” steadiness into a second world war. He’s a man who finds poetry in the sound of a Spitfire engine and prose in turning the bow of a pleasure ship toward ground zero of what’s left of the battle for France. Urged to return home by a shell-shocked soldier (Cillian Murphy) plucked from the stern of a torpedoed ship, Dawson says simply, “There won’t be any home if we allow a slaughter across the channel.”

sense that who they are is much less important than what they do, Nolan’s talents are in the service of something greater than himself. While he tells the story very much his way, for almost the first time it’s not his own story that he tells.

But Dawson is only a small part of a portrait of a larger operation in the most widespread and complicated war in history. The scale of the drama, the breadth of the canvas, both restrains Nolan and frees him.

Dawson is one of a trio of leading figures in three overlapping threads playing out in different time frames or rates of compression, like the layered dreams of Inception. Early titles establish the three settings and time frames: We spend one hour in the air with Royal Air Force Spitfire pilots led by Tom Hardy’s ace Farrier; one day on the sea with Dawson on the Moonstone and other military vessels; and one week at “the Mole,” that jetty on the beach where hundreds of thousands of soldiers wait and hope for rescue – among them a British private named Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) who bands together with two fellow survivors (Aneurin Barnard and Harry Styles).

Like his characters, who are barely characters at all, in the

These three sequences are edited to give each

approximately equal weight. You could almost say that every second we spend in the air with Farrier is roughly comparable to a minute of Dawson’s day at sea and about a half-hour of Tommy’s week on the beach. Within this controlled, artificial triptych structure, Nolan orchestrates a perfect storm of harrowing battle chaos in myriad, if not all, forms. We never see the ring of German tanks and artillery hemming in the Allied forces at Dunkirk, but there are firefights and sandbag blockades in the streets of Dunkirk, fighter planes harrying soldiers on the beach, destroyers crippled by U-boat torpedoes, and dogfighting Spitfires and Messerschmitts peppering each other with machine-gun fire.

the Mole don’t know about the flotilla of small ships sailing to their rescue, nor do they understand the absence of RAF support on the beach is partly due to the challenge of protecting vessels of soldiers who have already been evacuated. What they do understand is that London had given up hope of rescuing the vast majority of the troops at Dunkirk.

At the same time, it’s far from a constant barrage of action and mayhem. Tension, silence and simply waiting are part of all the movie’s narrative threads.

Dutch-Swedish cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema (Interstellar, Spectre), shooting in 65mm (with about 75% of the film shot on IMAX film), creates astonishingly lucid, immersive environments of sky, sea and sand. The dogfighting footage in particular captures such sweeping images of sumptuous clouds in endless blue that each angry burst of gunfire seems like a desecration. (Yes, by all means see it in 70mm IMAX film projection if you possibly can.)

Notably, the story threads unfold in isolation for most of the film; the rattled soldiers on

Hardy, again creating a compelling character largely without the lower half of his

face or much intelligible dialogue, gives a controlled performance that’s all businesslike grace under fire. His character is the most traditionally heroic, and his aerial gallantry builds to one of the most stunning feats in any war movie I’ve seen – and it’s not even his last great moment.

Unwonted religious inflections color the opening titles: Anticipating the language of Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches” speech, which is given a strikingly muted reading at the denouement, we’re told from the outset that the soldiers at Dunkirk are waiting for “deliverance” and even for “a miracle.”

Other than the images, my favorite bits of Dunkirk are some of the more dated character moments. Startled by the shell-shocked soldier’s insistence on returning home, Dawson’s son Peter asks his father if the man is a coward, and Dawson explains that he’s not himself and may never be again. Later comes a tragic moment in which Peter tells the shattered soldier a merciful lie, but an inconsequential one, not a Nolanesque necessary lie. If Dunkirk transcends Nolan’s obsessions, it doesn’t escape all his blind spots. Religion is basically nonexistent in Nolan’s films, but it shouldn’t have been left out of this story.

Nolan is often considered a materialist, and might see nothing miraculous in the remarkably favorable maritime conditions favoring the evacuation operation (including unusually prolonged cloud cover hampering aerial operations and oddly moderate seas in the typically choppy English Channel – unusual enough that for some scenes the filmmakers had to mix up their location shooting at Dunkirk with footage shot at a lake in the Netherlands). People at the time, though, saw Providence at work in the weather. At any rate, where there are desperate men in large numbers, there is prayer, and more so in World War II than

today. (Dunkirk, or Dunkerque, means “church of the dunes,” for what it’s worth.) I wouldn’t go so far as to call Dunkirk a miracle, but like the event it chronicles, it’s certainly an improbable wonder: an unfashionable sort of war film, largely starring unknowns, with an entirely European (almost all U.K.) cast and no American presence, no strongly developed characters or typical character arcs, about an operation that was a success, but not a victory. The film is a victory: a celebration of a spirit of solidarity that seems all but lost today.

ABOUT THE  AUTHOR

Steven D. Greydanus is the Register’s film critic and creator of Decent Films.  He is a permanent deacon in the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey. This review www.ncregister.com.

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