The Refiner's Fire, by John L Brooke:

...WILLIAM A. DONOHUE The writer is president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights...

...That they were thus dependent is a familiar story, but here it is patiently detailed...

...Brother Peter Lavin has turned the orphanage he runs into "an institution that is quite plausible in its everyday functioning...

...She is currently writing a book on Leviticus...

...a masterpiece, but it's surely more than an experience...

...Doesn't this give Mr...

...A non-Mormon and not a Mormon-basher, he has nothing to slake but the thirst born of his own curiosity and nothing at stake except an historian's integrity...

...Brooke's devisers of Mormon cosmology had two sets of raw material at hand as they invented...

...Was founder Joseph Smith a prophet of God, as the orthodox Saints believe, or a charlatan, as his and their critics often do...

...Now in my other outreached hand will be a pathbreaking volume, The Refiner's Fire by John L. Brooke...

...The author replies: I am grateful for Robert Imbelli' s incisive letter...

...As usual, Aquinas was right: The res of Eucharist is not singular, but twofold...

...In the sentence that followed those words, for example, the reviewer wrote: "I've never seen a more compelling movie on the tyranny of adults and the exploitation of children or one more poised to intervene...

...Here, Christology and ecclesiology are complementary-not competitive-coordinates...

...For at Communion the priest says 'The body of Christ,' and you reply 'Amen.' When you say 'Amen,' you are saying yes to what you are" [Sermon 272...

...Whatever happened to truth in packaging...

...As for the millions Steinfels says would understand the book but "spurn it" because the author is the pope, would Steinfels knock that down a bit, to, say, hundreds of thousands...

...Two items, especially, need further comment: (1) Christology/Ecclesiology in Eucharist: In spite of Imbelli's fears of a "new one-sidedness," the recovery of the ecclesiological component of eucharistic faith and theology does not require that we sacrifice the "vertical" for the sake of the "horizontal...

...On page 410 this year there is a record of "Progress during Administrations of the Presidents," beginning with Joseph Smith, during whose presidency 280 members were attracted...

...While non-Mormons think of these Saints as being segregated in the Great Basin Ghetto surrounding Utah, they are to be found most anywhere and they will keep making more Saints everywhere...

...Of course, I'm unhappy that he's unhappy, but otherwise I wonder what he had for breakfast...

...Are there other ways to look at him and the restoration movement which he fostered...

...I thank Mr...

...Ludwig Wittgenstein and his ilk, along with traditional apologetics which locates our troubles largely with Descartes and (Steinfels ignores this cornerstone of the pope's complaint) the Enlightenment...

...This book was marketed largely as a souvenir, the literary equivalent of a T-shirt bought in Denver, as Steinfels might concede as he concedes that millions will buy it who can't understand it...

...NATHAN MITCHELL Too kind to JPII Oak Park, 111...

...Is there any other light appropriate for such a repugnant practice...

...Donohue for the opportunity he's given me to reiterate my admiration for this superb movie, but I must tell him that I don't give a tinker's dam for what the sleazy Village Voice thinks about The Boys of Saint Vincent or anything else...

...Jan Shipps' s Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (University of Illinois) is the book I have usually handed the curious...

...Martin E. Marty Diocesan and denomina-tional yearbooks and pe-riodicals these years bring little but bad news...

...Its primary purpose is not to produce a solitary "vertical" object for adoration, but to effect an inclusive, communal outcome- a people formed in faith and love by the Spirit who joins them as "one body, one spirit in Christ...

...MARY DOUGLAS has taught at Northwestern and Princeton...

...To Brooke's credit, he provides good reason for the Saints to take a fresh and critical look at their roots and branches...

...He and his neighbors dug for buried treasure all over New York and thereabouts...

...It is your own mystery that you received...

...In Brooke's terms, he lived in the tension or with the paradox of "purity and danger" that came with hermetic traditions...

...It is a superb portrayal of a man (to quote my July 15,1994, review) "so encased in the armor of self-righteousness that even the embers of his humanity have been stamped out...

...This is the pope who plays the electronic media as if he owned them...

...They played or worked with seer stones, went divining, and some of them became expert at counterfeiting...

...Many of Brooke's pages are devoted to the influence of local Masonic rites on the Mormon founders...

...Donohue has selected for quotation...

...2) "The Liturgy of the World": I find it astonishing that anyone acquainted with the "liturgy of the world" (as a theological notion) could think of it as "Rahner Lite...

...I did and do think highly of a movie called The Boys of Saint Vincent, which portrays priest-pedophilia in quite a negative light indeed...

...In a marvel of research and compression he tells the story of medieval and then Reformation-era alchemy, hermeticism, and magic, as Catholics and Protestants alike watched spiritual power flow "between invisible and visible worlds...

...Smith also was surrounded by and often contributed to contemporary efforts to nurture or tap into the flow "between invisible and visible worlds...

...It becomes increasingly urgent for the people they call Gentiles to understand them...

...The review closes: "The Boys of Saint Vincent may not be a masterpiece, but it's surely more than an experience...

...RICHARD ALLEVA From the editors: Despite Richard Alleva's closing comment, it's worth noting that the Village Voice reviewer (J...

...He takes more time, uses more pages, delves more deeply, and offers more detail than did Shipps...

...That is why the very hallways of Saint Vincent are photographed in a spectral light, and the hymns on the soundtrack are used to spooky effect, and the crucifixes hanging from the brothers' belts seem as menacing as truncheons...

...And not only are the kids possessed by dread but so are the nonpedophile brothers, one of whom finally topples Lavin from power...

...To that I have a question: What kind of interviewer could have gotten the papal attention...

...It would be instructive to know why Mr...

...Not many years ago Protestant-Catholic-Jewish America was served by (good enough) historians who tended to tell stories of staid and strait religions, the flow of forces into "mainstreams" and "establishments," the balancing of upsetting spiritual agencies into tried, true, and often dull movements and institutions...

...Remember: "invent" can mean "find" or "make up...

...To the Editors: In his screen column for February 10, Richard Alleva tells us that he considers The Boys of Saint Vincent to be "the finest film of 1994...

...Infused into these usually neutral or benevolent things is the dread that Lavin has inspired in the hearts of his charges, not the revulsion that the filmmakers may or may not feel for the Catholic church...

...A Catholic brother...

...If they would all raise their hands, we would have a better idea...

...4,734,000 of these are in North America...

...It forbids us to think of salvation as a Gnostic fantasy played out in some other (more "spiritual") world...

...This America is a place where people in the past smuggled in their gods in plain brown wrappers, kept household idols under the table, believed in everything a little bit and tried almost everything more than a little bit...

...An exception makes its appearance each year when the Church Almanac of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints thuds through the mail slot and then weighs down the desk...

...His book is a model of the historian's enterprise...

...Augustine gave it classic expression: "If you want to understand the body of Christ, listen to what the Apostle Paul says to the faithful: 'You are Christ's own body, his members...

...The structure reflects its creator...

...Understanding is a task never made easy, thanks to the esotericism of Mormon teachings and life...

...and utterly rotten at its core...

...thus, it is your own mystery which is placed on the Lord's table...

...But this redefinition points to the world itself-to the human person, especially-as the privileged place where God's lively presence is first named and known...

...Thus too Aquinas argued in the Summa Theologiae [IIIa.80.4.corpus] that the res (the ultimate reality, content, meaning) of the Eucharist is twofold: It embraces both (1) the substantial reality of Christ's presence in the sacramental species, and (2) the reality of that "mystical body of Christ, which is the communion of saints" ["corpus Christi mysticum, quod est societas sanctorum...

...Hoberman) had more to say about the film's purpose than is suggested by the three words Mr...

...Yet in the Village Voice [June 7, 1994], a publication which is not generally known for its affection for Catholicism, the same movie on priest pedophilia was dubbed "programmed to offend...

...They may see some elements of self-portraiture in the Saints, who exaggerate some features of American religious life and mirror others...

...or a "Move over, Elijah...

...Alleva thought so highly of a movie which portrays the church in such a negative light that even the likes of the Village Voice won't dispute the purpose of the film...

...For the very heart of this liturgy is the cross of Jesus-an event that can hardly be dismissed as sentimentality...

...DENNIS O'BRIEN, a frequent Commonweal contributor, is the author of God and the New Haven Railway (Beacon...

...Her most recent book is In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers (Sheffield Academic Press...

...So millions of TV viewers buy his book, seeking food for the soul to go with that mass appeal, and what do they get...

...When this decent person tells Lavin, "You're a sick and evil man, Peter, and a disgrace to your order," audiences feel relieved at the victory (however temporary) of good over evil...

...Finally, Steinfels scorns the fawning interviewer and his lobbed soft questions...

...Just asking...

...kind of signal or clue...

...PETER STEINFELS 'Voice' vs...

...Brooke, like Shipps, does not position himself in either the "Smith the Prophet" or "Smith the Charlatan" camp...

...Via the radical English Reformation sects and innumerable New Englandish underground or parachurch experiments, seekers helped create a spiritual envelope in New York State in the 1820s, the time of the rise of Joseph Smith...

...And who, in this scene, represents good...

...In other words, they were like the Americans of 1995...

...MARTIN E. MARTY teaches the history of American religion at The University of Chicago...

...And he invites Gentiles to understand their neighbors better while they suspend disbelief and look in on people who live "between purity and danger...

...I would argue that the greatest danger to eucharistic faith today flows from Christological assumptions that are divorced from ecclesial context (in both theology and praxis...

...I do not doubt for a moment that faith redefines our perception and experience of nature and history...

...But this Canadian film isn't just an indictment of pedophilia...

...Members may believe in God and behave in godly ways, but their efforts do not add up to organizational prosperity...

...And who represents evil...

...Sacraments, after all, are actions of the church, not the mystical intuitions of individuals...

...Donohue a sense of the film's complexity and basic fairness...

...Whoever is a part of the Mormon people finds the whole story to be plausible...

...I also wonder what book, what marketing, what interviewer would satisfy him, or is it, as I suggested in my review, simply a question of what pope...

...Often one wishes he would utter a "Hey...

...in such a way that the liturgy which the Son has brought to its absolute fullness on his cross belongs intrinsically to it, emerges from it...

...It requires us to take world and history, nature and body seriously...

...Just asking...

...If there's anything all agree on, it's his unparalleled ability to sway or at least draw crowds...

...On the fifth page, did he write "Gotcha...

...If "cognitive minorities" prosper, here is evidence of the most prosperous such minority among us...

...For Augustine, Christ's body is both on the the table and at it...

...By the time his successors, under Brig-ham Young, took the Latter-day Saints to Utah, the "Mormon cosmology" of the subtitle was quite well developed, though it has always been open to more development...

...This number grew to 8,688,511 by May of last year...

...Theological Investigations, XIV, 169-170...

...This was, incidentally, the theological basis for Vatican II's insistence on full, active, conscious participation as belonging essentially to the liturgical act...

...JIM BOWMAN The reviewer replies: I liked the pope's book, and I detect that my friend Jim Bowman is unhappy about that...

...To the Editors: In his January 13 review of Pope John Paul II's Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Peter Steinfels approvingly says the pope intended his book for mass consumption but in an early four-page passage mentioned nine philosophers, a Polish archbishop, and four books of the Bible...

...Alleva New York, N.Y...

...The world and its history," wrote Rahner, "are the terrible and sublime liturgy, breathing of death and sacrifice, which God celebrates and causes to be celebrated in and through human history...

...ANNA HARRISON'S "365 Saints Calendar" (Workman) will be published in August...

...This is a both/and (not an either/or) position, and it is very traditional...

...this Smith is really nutty...

...Instead he blends the passion of the detective and the dispassion of the good judge as he describes the background and context of Mormonism...

...For Aquinas, it was impossible to discuss Christ's eucharistic presence without discussing the ecclesial communion which that presence intends...

...The reviewer replies: I didn't and don't think highly "of a movie which portrays the church in such a negative light...

...Whoever is an eighth of an inch beyond Mormondom may see this instead as a story of self-delusion, other-delusion, folly, and even chicanery...

...In short, the liturgy of the world forces us to deal with God's deeds in Christ in all their scandalous particularity, their raw, historical messiness...

...They believed in the uncanny, the supernatural, the impinging of angelic messengers on their ordinary lives...

...They improvised new religiosities right under the noses of the orthodox clergy and violated the proprieties of middle-class pieties while going through the motions of being ordinary...

...Latter-day Saints see everything religious and cosmological in distinctive ways, unshared by their neighbors-and then plop themselves down inside the moderate and conservative forces of American society where they seem perfectly, perfectly at home: in the best of two worlds...

...It is loaded with statistics of growth in numbers and donations, burdened with pictures of temples and enhanced by lists of addresses...

...REVIEWERS DENNIS M. DOYLE, who teaches ecclesi-ology at the University of Dayton, is the author o/The Church Emerging from Vatican II (Twenty-Third Publications...

...In that wondrous environment Smith was visited by divine personages, received golden plates of revelation and seer stones to interpret them, found companies of fellow con-spirers ("breathers-together"), founded a church, led it west, took unto himself wives, and was martyred in Illinois...

...The trend these days is to move behind the facades and edifices, to look at slipstreams and sidestreams until one relativizes the mainstream concept, and discovers a different America than the one that had looked familiar...

...Who approved that marketing, those nasty Vatican types on whom we find ourselves blaming so much, lo these many years into the Wojtyla papacy...

...Christology must be understood "ecclesiologically," and ecclesiology must be understood "Christologically...

...It is this whole tumultuous history of God's dealings with humankind- in Christ, in the community of faith-that provides the motive for eucharistia and shapes the content of the eucharistic prayer...

...A Catholic brother...

...Bishops cut staffs and close churches, and only in the suburbs near the megamalls is there good news about religious institutions...