Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE To the Editors Your brothers' keeper I wish to note the omission of religious brothers from the introductory page to the supplement on Catholicity in higher education [April...
...And I'm in your debt for indicating that function so economically in your letter...
...My point, though, was that this effort was not entirely successful—because, in my judgment, it effaced some essential elements of the biblical tradition (for example, it's prophetic dimension...
...From the editors: Our apologies...
...He wanted to make us feel the father's love for his son and the son's trust in his father...
...But Guido can also be seen as a Nazi-era catcher in the rye, assigning himself to protect childhood innocence from the horrors of reality, which happens to be the most natural of human inclinations in times of trouble and tragedy...
...JOHN BLAKE MORE Cancun, Mexico The author replies: I think I entirely agree with John Blake More that it is a grave error to think that the only proper framework for interpreting the gospel of Jesus Christ is classic Greek philosophy...
...Of course he wouldn't deny it...
...Mann: If no horror of Crucifixion, then no glory of Resurrection...
...The Greek connection may have been the best available arrangement for the cultures of the Mediterranean world in the early centuries of Christian history, and it turned out to be remarkably adaptable to the peoples of northern Europe and Asia...
...Richard alleva Repent When I first read the editorial note "Richard Neuhaus May Repent" [March 12], I thought of the old rule, so familiar to soldiers in an army, "Let no good deed go unpunished...
...O tempora, O moresl (rev...
...But clinging to it in our day seems to amount to declaring that Christianity renounces its proper ambition to become a truly universal religion...
...But nonsense on the Left goes untreated, unreported, unexamined, except by, it seems, your own John Garvey and Richard John Neuhaus...
...EDWARD T. OAKES, S.J...
...CORRESPONDENCE To the Editors Your brothers' keeper I wish to note the omission of religious brothers from the introductory page to the supplement on Catholicity in higher education [April 9...
...The writer is past president of The Catholic University of America and of La Salle University...
...I did not leave the theater breathing "a sigh of comfort...
...Be advised, however, that De Mott's article did not shore up my faith in the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic church...
...REV...
...For Mr...
...There is a reason for the stress in Neuhaus's "The Public Square" on the sins of the cultural Left: the bias of the Left toward reporting its own flaws...
...In other words, the culture makes sure Falwell looks as silly as he often makes himself out to be...
...That would be the "Western imperialism" I was talking about...
...But reading on in that same issue I found that John Garvey's column "Sneering at Religion" provided the best commentary on the editorial...
...CUTHBERT CARSON MANN Glendora, Calif...
...Father Neuhaus has openly confessed that running a journal of opinion can itself be the near occasion of sin, the sin of crankiness...
...Alleva III Richard Alleva's review of Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful reads somewhat like a priest's wayward homily so fixed on the Crucifixion that it downplays the Resurrection...
...Nor should they be required to if they are genuinely attracted to authentic (but not necessarily Greek) Christianity...
...And when it isn't, more than despair is needed to make life palatable...
...Perhaps Benigni can be blamed for having the audacitiy, or the lack of imagination, to think that such a theme could be put in the context of a Nazi extermination camp, yet he might also have believed that viewers would supply the horror of such a situation themselves, from what they already knew of those camps...
...and many of us have followed up at diocesan and regional levels ever since...
...Eleven members of my congregation, including our superior general—alone among the orders—participated in conversations in 1989 that were an important stage in the evolution of Ex corde ecclesiae...
...In actual fact, Griffiths tries to liberate the religious mind from subservience to any particular system of philosophy by showing, first of all, that the Christ event is one thing and the philosophical terms (conceptual structures) in which we interpret it are quite another...
...Baltimore, Md...
...BROTHER) PATRICK ELLIS, F.S.C...
...Question authority, even the authority of fictional narrators...
...And I didn't blame Benigni for having the audacity to set his tragicomedy in a concentration camp...
...That affirmation also is incorporated in the Jewish expression: "L'chayim," that surely must have consoled many Holocaust victims...
...REV...
...It seems to me that the irrepressible Benigni, whose name suggests his personality, hints at quite different motives...
...He faults Roberto Benigni for muffling the horror of the Holocaust "for the sake of the viewer's mental comfort...
...But (Continued on page 4) Commonweal 2 April 23,1999 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 2) why should we believe him...
...McCudden: Yes, Life's narrator does tell us at the outset that we are about to see a "fable...
...The worldwide success of Benigni's film is not so much a form of Holocaust denial as an affirmation of life that can even most jubilantly be reflected in Benigni's prancing on the backs of chairs at the academy awards presentation...
...Michael Perry: You understand very well the function of the critic...
...Thus, even clowns can be helpful when, laughing on the outside, they are crying despairingly on the inside...
...Beyond philosophy Please let me take gentle issue with the last paragraph of David Toolan's review of Beyond Darkness [January 29], Shirley Du Boulay's recent biography of Bede Griffiths, and especially with the sentences suggesting that Griffiths's understanding of pluralism "merely exchanges the imperialism of Western metaphysics for an imperialism of Eastern metaphysics...
...Semitic phenomenon, Greek hermeneutics: historically linked but essentially distinct and potentially separable...
...Alleva's clarity In his review of Life Is Beautiful [March 26], Richard Alleva wrote what I thought and expressed what I couldn't...
...The genre itself doesn't excuse the artist from being responsible to his subject matter...
...I'm grateful not just for the review but also for the closure it brought to my mixed reactions...
...Benigni was obviously not concerned with illustrating the horrors of the Holocaust (deportees stumbling half-dead out of boxcars, barracks with tiers of living skeletons...
...Yes, dismay at leftish bias can seem like the censoriousness of the schoolmarm, if not handled correctly...
...I wrote, "The Holocaust should never be comfortably conveyed" (emphasis added...
...What I saw in Life's first half was whimsical realism leavened with mild slapstick, a blend familiar from hundreds of Italian comedies such as Big Deal on Madonna Street...
...And hence I can only praise Bede Griffiths's effort to interpret Christianity using the categories of Advaita Vedanta...
...But so, it seems, can mote-and-beam criticism of that dismay...
...In addition to the seven which the Christian Brothers sponsor in the United States, various other orders of brothers have similar long histories...
...But even if Life is a fable, so what...
...Yet the movie itself tells us at the outset that it is "a fable" and it makes no attempt to be realistic...
...The second half is tragicomedy laced with horror, a tricky combination which Benigni, in my opinion, is largely unable to bring off because he is unwilling to risk bruising the sensibilities of his audience...
...For sure, la vita is often not very bella...
...Nowhere in my review do I ever accuse Benigni of denying the Holocaust...
...Alleva joins other prominent critics such as John Simon and David Denby in seeing Benigni's film as a denial of the Holocaust, and Benigni's character, Guido, as little more than a clown...
...The latter proceeds from the former...
...Still, while not without its dichotomies and ambivalences of feeling and fact, Life Is Beautiful is an excellent film...
...For example, when Jerry Falwell averred that the anti-Christ is a Jewish male now roaming the world, the press made sure that Falwell's "exegesis" was trumpeted around the world, with an added fillip of jibes from latenight comedians ("Sounds like Sidney Blumenthal," Mark Phillips said tongue-in-cheek...
...In so doing, they all require a willing suspension of disbelief that paradoxically facilitates belief...
...I left disturbed by the inhumanity of the system that created the camps, but genuinely touched by the story of the father and the son...
...My review complains of his lack of audacity in settling for pathos instead of power...
...his own father was in a concentration camp...
...It worked that way for me...
...Denver, Colo...
...Amid the mystery of life and death, it is religion, art, philosphy, and humor that offer welcome solace...
...Even so, while we have grown inured to being ignored in certain circles, I devoutly hope Commonweal isn't one of them...
...frowin brownfield Springfield, Mo...
...And this horror can be conveyed even with comedy, as Lina Wertmuller proved in the last half-hour of her great film, Seven Beauties...
...The author replies For Mr...
...Alleva II I think Richard Alleva missed the point of Life Is Beautiful...
...JOHN MCCUDDEN Evanston, III...
...For Rev...
...Commonweal 4 April 23,1999...
...It should be said that, from the moment of birth, we are all condemned to die, even though the horrors of the twentieth century prompted Samuel Beckett to offer the bleak alternative view that we are really condemned to live...
...DAVID TOOLAN 'Affaire Pinochet' Thanks immensely for publishing Maryknoll Father Stephen De Mott's information on the Pinochet affair [March 26...
...MICHAEL PERRY Rockaway Point, N.Y...
...Such omissions have long been part of our lot, but this one was especially unpleasant because of our corporate and individual contributions to American Catholic education at all levels, including university and college-degree granting institutions...
...and that confession then provides the editors of Commonweal the opportunity for some rather captious free advice on how to avoid this sin...
...The proof has to be in the film itself, not in its preface...
...Not all cultures in today's world see reality in terms of Greek thought forms...
Vol. 126 • April 1999 • No. 8
