Catholics and American Culture
Fisher, James T.
SOMETHING HAPPENED AnHnrtaMt culture Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team Mark !>. Massa James T. Fisher Students of twentieth-century American Catholicism have...
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...This film is hardly nonsense, especially to the millions consuming it...
...That this type of alienating ideology exists and can be so creatively expressed and packaged is what needs to concern the faith community and those who review the films our young people are seeing...
...Of course left-wing terrorists "turned to extreme violence because they believed that their ends justified their means...
...Mario Cuomo is one public theologian who would certainly have to figure prominently in a sequel to Catholics and American Culture...
...12-word minimum...
...Commonweal 28 July 16,1999 More 'Matrix' I was surprised by Richard Alleva's review of The Matrix [May 21...
...Does anyone doubt that it was much easier for a Catholic to gain the presidential nomination of a major political party in 1960 than it will be in 2000, or in any subsequent election so long as the politics of abortion pits some Catholic politicians against the church while others are marginalized by the logic of "pluralism...
...but the ideas can only be manifested by the words, images., etc...
...Reporting to the President and working with the Union's senior staff, the director will be responsible for: designing and overseeing both on- and off-site experiences that will introduce participants to the educational life of the Union, exploring ways to make the program available to those whose first language is Spanish...
...ALL TYPES...
...Mallarme replies that poems aren't made of ideas but words...
...When shall we begin to articulate and use the concept of the human person as the lens by which we review our cultural artifacts...
...15 percent, 12 times...
...Certainly Alleva mentions that humans are capable of free thought in relation to the domination of machines...
...By the 1950s, however, a smaller but influential group of Catholics had emerged who were committed to a very different cultural system "in which religious symbols no longer functioned in primarily tribal or class terms...
...By the same token, the protagonists of the film are quite aware that their actions in this cyber world have real-world consequences, as a death in the matrix meant a death of one's real body...
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...The position may require weekend and evening work to coordinate with weekend retreats and organizational dinners, and to participate at occasional speaking engagements...
...Massa's work stands out, however, for its gracious tone, located in the vast if often unexplored midrange between the jeremiad and the triumphal...
...His skipping over the other levels must mean that they were not worth discussing...
...James T. Fisher, author of Dr...
...Massa James T. Fisher Students of twentieth-century American Catholicism have been known to congratulate one another on the sly for choosing a field replete with colorful and fascinating characters and dramatic, compelling events...
...America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-61, teaches in the Theological Studies Department at Saint Louis University...
...From Leonard Feeney, the Cambridge Jesuit who fulminated against the infidels at nearby Harvard in the late 1940s, to the women of the Immaculate Heart of Mary congregation in Los Angeles, whose reformist zeal rocked the church and captivated the secular media in the late 1960s, Massa deftly shows how "public" Catholics "moved from the margins to the center stage of American culture in the years after World War II, with mixed results from a theological point of view...
...Salad bar seminarian...
...He even explains the spiritual significance of the epochal 10-10 tie between the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame and the Michigan State Spartans in their 1966 "Game of the Century...
...Rome-based author/ novelist/lecturer Desmond O'Grady has plentiful, interesting, non-PR-type answers...
...These are not superficial and have to do with a messianic figure who would awaken the world to what's truly real...
...While Catholics and American Culture brilliantly limns "the background era to contemporary American Catholicism," we should not entirely overlook the claims of a counternarrative...
...Left-wing terrorists never claimed that capitalism or its effects were unreal, but turned to extreme violence because they believed that their ends justified their means...
...l-888-80Story...
...Massa's contention tnat the contributions of Merton and Sheen—for all their spiritual rigor—were diluted into "commodities" for mass consumption echoes a growing theme in the work of young scholars...
...As for one person's expressed despondency after reading the Times article, I have received dozens of letters from people uplifted and encouraged by the same article...
...I'm not surprised...
...The writer is the director of the Pauline Center for Media Studies...
...Massa views both Mclntyre and the IHM nuns as "ironic pawns of that same Holy Spirit who had inspired conservative Pope John to call Vatican II in the first place, with results that no one could have foreseen, predicted, or approved...
...A further point: The issue of celibacy should not be a part of this discussion...
...Discounts 5 percent, 3 times...
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...richard alleva For authentic ministry Ken Lovasik's "Not for Hire" [June 4] should be required reading for every priest who has resigned from the priesthood...
...Resignation is resignation...
...Washington Theological Union, 6896 Laurel Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20012...
...While the 1966 Notre Dame-Michigan State gridiron contest is a rich subject, it is not always clear how the tilt—and its inconclusive outcome—apotheosized the "new" Notre Dame at the height of the Hesburgh era (and though Massa claims the tie did not jeopardize Notre Dame's hope for a bowl bid in 1966, the Irish actually esCommonweal 27 July 16,1999 chewed postseason contests altogether between 1925 and 1970, a trivial point but for those who—in Massa's own spirit—view Notre Dame football history as a subfield of historical theology...
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...Excellent opportunity for an executive with proven success who wants to utilize his or her talents in a positive, rewarding way...
...The President will report to the Board of Directors and work with various committees of the Board, the Rector of the retreat house and the current Executive Director, Development Director and staff...
...Alas...
...Candidates should contact the Search Committee, c/o the Malvern Retreat House, Malvern, Pennsylvania, 19355...
...Many of these memorable figures and singular happenings are treated in Mark Massa's thoroughly engaging study of Catholics and American Culture...
...KEVIN C. RHOADES Emmitsburg, Md...
...But rather than passing by this important point to focus on the Red Brigade's view of reality and capitalism, why not take a good look at The Matrix as a popular-culture creation reflecting on ourselves...
...In my modest effort to keep violent films of substance from being lumped in with dreck, I partially praised in the same review Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Go, and explained why...
...For deep down, this film questions the integrity of the human person...
...WILLIAM M. PETERSEN Summit, N.J...
...Furthermore, when shall we begin to converse in our families, schools, faith communities, and with the media industries about the place of the human person in the "entertainment information" communications process...
...Isn't this what evangelization is all about...
...Massa's eclectic approach is in fact so effective that—his disclaimer notwithstanding—Catholics and American Culture even embodies a new "master narrative" gradually emerging within American Catholic studies, characterized by a command of secular social theory and a sober appraisal of the theological losses incurred through cultural accommodation...
...In its very first quarter-hour, that very vivid human person Laurence Fishburne declares his certainty that reality can be restored once the tyranny of the robots is overthrown...
...Administrative experience which demonstrates: excellent written and verbal communication skills...
...O'Grady will be available for stateside talks/seminars in late August and the first half of September...
...A humane and equitable policy would balance the rights of the church and those of the individual priest, and for his need of help in adjusting to a profoundly different life...
...Salary and benefits are commensurate with experience...
...One of the central tenets of the lunatic Left was that democratic capitalism had given the world "one-dimensional man...
...One Harvard student with no religion wrote that the seminarians in the article moved him to read the Bible and visit a Christian church for the first time in his life...
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...CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 4) They are a sign of the new springtime of the church, prepared by Pope John Paul II...
...It is this certainty of the reality to come that licenses the chicly staged slaughters that are the real centerpieces of this film, rather than any Pirandelloesque questionings of the nature of reality...
...to find a response in pessimism—indeed nihilism—is a much graver problem that calls for a concerted, active response by those wishing to enter into dialogue with the film community and viewers alike...
...But disagreement and lack of discrimination are not the same thing...
...Given this array of material, Massa wisely eschews the quest for a "master narrative" in favor of a nicely integrated collection of '"soundings' of representative figures and events that offer an important glimpse of 'how we started there and ended up here.'" "There" is the immediate postwar era of Paul Blanshard's best-selling, Ivy League-endorsed attacks on the Catholic church, while "here" finds Catholics enjoying such thorough mastery of American culture by the late 1990s that they "appeared to have inherited the millennial kingdom" once the exclusive province of their erstwhile Protestant adversaries...
...The deeply Niebuhrian sense of Christian irony Massa weaves throughout his story proves highly efficacious as well, especially in his treatment of Dorothy Day, whose purported separatism was actually deeply rooted in her mastery of certain American cultural traditions that in turn made her by far the most effective Catholic radical in American history (this reviewer was once invested in a similar interpretive posture toward the Catholic Worker movement, as duly noted by Massa...
...Before he enters a seminary, Mr...
...This comment is out of sync with John Paul II's profound respect for nonCatholic Christians, as expressed most fervently in the encyclical Ut unum sint...
...Degas tells Mallarme he wants to write poems and has loads of great ideas for them...
...Neo, the main character, vows at the end of the film to "wake people up and show them that anything is possible...
...JPII calls it the key to his pontificate...
...Alleva knows that many films have several levels of meaning, but in this case he reviews only the most superficial one, the film's violence...
...Wilpert doesn't specify anywhere in his letter the scenes in which imagery or dialogue explores in depth the parallel between cybernetic reality and "hyperreality," or the fate of being a messianic figure...
...Or how...
...ability to collaborate with faculty, staff and a variety of publics...
...A medium comprising many arts, film is made of words, images, acting, dialogue, etc., and certainly of ideas too...
...ROSE PACATTE, FSP Boston, Mass...
...On the other hand, Pacatte is absolutely right that The Matrix is "a populist culture creation reflecting on ourselves...
...This is called aesthetic discrimination, which is exactly what Wilpert found lacking in my piece, because he disagreed with my opinion and, presumably, the reasoning behind the opinion...
...Pacatte seems to think so, and I find this sad...
...To my way of thinking, it is no longer enough to criticize a film for its violence or profanity or to label it "nonsense...
...e-mail de.ogrady@agora.stm.it President THE SAINT JOSEPH'S IN THE HILLS retreat house, owned and operated by the Laymen's Retreat League, a nonprofit organization that operates a 125-acre retreat facility in Malvern, Pennsylvania serving over 20,000 weekend and midweek retreatants annually, is seeking a successful, professional, full-time President...
...Or why...
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...Then I panned The Matrix and explained why...
...That is, according to Baudrillard, the mass media and popular culture govern our everyday world, creating a fictional reality that becomes more real to us than reality itself...
...it is an issue separate from that of resignation...
...Massa's wit and generosity leaven a work that might otherwise have sunk under the freight of its prolific "modeling...
...Will experience be so constructed by someone else that humans no longer have the power to think, decide, and act for themselves for the good of society...
...In the spirit of James Joyce's dictum that Catholicism means "here comes everybody," Catholics and American Culture features an eclectic methodology that might be dubbed "here come all the social theorists," as each chapter is animated by works of one or more seminal thinkers, often to great effect...
...Afterwards I asked myself: Do these filmmakers think people can know reality...
...www.turningmemories.com Did you know...
...All genres...
...And further, to ask if in the future we will be able to know reality: Will there even be a reality we can know for certain...
...But the film's other aspects deserve serious consideration...
...Certainly the film should be faulted for its level of extreme violence, which contributes to a culture where violence has become ordinary and acceptable, but this does not justify dismissing the film in its entirety...
...Matrix of The Matrix' Richard Alleva's review of The Matrix [May 21] missed the the crux of the problem with the film, and others like it of the sci-fi cyberpunk genre: the dark view of the human person...
...The showpieces of The Matrix and the very reasons for its existence are the kung fu, virtual-reality duels, and these fights are monotonous and stupid...
...In view of her position at the Pauline Center, I hope Pacatte comes to realize this...
...marketing the program and recruiting church leaders to participate...
...Massa, a Jesuit who teaches church history and American studies at Fordham University, has produced a sweeping and dramatic account of American Catholicism's headlong tumble into cultural legitimacy between 1945 and 1970...
...Finally, Alleva's connecting the protagonists of the film with Red Brigadestyle terrorism is faulty...
...An important aspect of the film, left out in the review, is the parallel between the film's cybernetic reality (the "matrix") and the mass-media-created "hyperreality" of the world we live in, to use a term of the social theorist Jean Baudrillard (whose book Simulacra and Simulation appears as a prop in the film...
...john k. hawes Southampton, N.Y...
...Only rarely does Massa's intrepid quest to link cultural change with theological innovation result in a slight overreach...
...The first and last task of any film reviewer is to evaluate individual movies, not "to enter into dialogue with the film community...
...GREG WILPERT New York, N.Y...
...It seems quite apparent to me that the filmmakers intended viewers to draw this parallel between the film and contemporary society...
...In his recent letter [Correspondence, June 4], aspiring seminarian Christopher Roberts excoriated you for being insufficiently Catholic...
...These minor quibbles aside, Mark Massa has constructed his own compelling model for a new form of American Catholic studies...
...The things that are relevant to us today are a result of this popular but fabricated culture...
...What are we waiting for...
...Only in this sense can the utilitarian morality of the main characters be questioned, but no more so than those of the protagonists of any other action film in which innocent bystanders are killed in the pursuit of a larger goal...
...Evelyn Waugh, on the other hand, called the Jesuit "stark raving mad...a case of demonic possession and jolly frightening" after witnessing Feeney preach at the Saint Benedict's Center in Cambridge...
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...Feeney, as Massa notes, was disciplined for disobedience rather than heresy (two decades after the controCommonweal 26 July 16,1999 versy Avery Dulles could still describe Feeney's "doctrine" as "solid...
...And is art or even entertainment nothing more than a helpless reflection of malaise in our culture...
...Something has clearly changed in the past two decades, and we will be fortunate indeed if a historian of the next generation animates this period for us with the lucidity Massa applies to an era now clearly part of our past...
...Along the way Massa provides fresh interpretations of the cultural and theological work of such old favorites as Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Fulton J. Sheen...
...Those interested should contact Desmond O'Grady, via B. Gosio, 00191 Rome, Italy...
...The IHM insurgents—led by Mother Mary Humilata Caspary and the noted pop artist Corita Kent—were thwarted in their efforts to institute sweeping "liberal changes" in the order's rule and the lifestyle of its members, but since an ecumenical council of "the highest body" of the church "had itself authorized and mandated" a spirit of change, the legitimacy of the sisters' reform imperative "at least rivaled the legitimacy of the concerns of the archbishop of Los Angeles...
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...i www.commonwealmagazine.org 1 Commonweal 30 July 16,1999...
...For those of us who have chosen to sever that episcopal link, there is no theological justification for a free-lance ministry—saying Mass, witnessing marriages, or baptizing babies...
...How many times do we have to watch Reeves bouncing off walls or see Commonweal 29 July 16,1999 rows of cops mowed down by gunfire...
...Responsibilities include the implementation of League strategic plans, development of an endowment fund to support the League's mission, and the oversight of marketing and public relations campaigns...
...Manuscripts Wanted MANUSCRIPTS WANTED...
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...He's the author of Rome Reshaped: Jubilees 1300-2000, forthcoming in September from Continuum in English, and being published in seven other languages...
...Wilpert may be right that The Matrix is chock-a-block with Baudrillardian ideas, but may I relate a story he probably already knows...
...Continually...
...In his chapter on Leonard Feeney, for example, Massa adapts the "deviance" theories of sociologist Emile Durkheim and anthropologist Mary Douglas to bolster his argument that Feeney's manic insistence on "no salvation outside the church" was doctrinally sound in the church of 1948, but "the experience of postwar American Catholicism itself" in a pluralistic society had rendered this teaching perilous to the life of the community...
...The lucidity of Lovasik's article contrasts strongly with the lack of clear thinking about the resignation of priests...
...Our future priests give many of us renewed hope for the new evangelization on the threshold of a new millennium...
...The review ends up doing exactly what Alleva condemns earlier in his article, where he warns that in the effort to blame popular films for the recent spate of school shootings, films "of substance will be rounded up and shoved into the same van with movies that are sheer dreck...
...10 percent, 6 times...
...Presumably, in this new reality people will be able to "trust sense information...think and integrate thought and emotions...take responsibility for actions": precisely the things Pacatte says the movie continually questions...
...Respectful dialogue leads to reflection and reflection can lead to action...
...Massa argues that this cohort, who was critical of McCarthy and found its values reflected in the pages of America and Commonweal, was driven—no less than the senator's vociferous Catholic supporters—by a profoundly religious world view with a distinctive "cultural cast to it...
...In fact, to anyone wanting to look beyond what is obviously distasteful in popular film culture today, this film is a brilliant postmodern mirror...
...THAT WE'LL BE CELEBRATING THE YEAR 2000 AS A JUBILEE YEAR...
...The author replies: Sister Pacatte writes, "The Matrix continually questions the human person's [sic] capability...to know truth...," etc., etc...
...The film suggests that this is an awakening most people avoid because the true reality is too difficult for them to bear...
...REV...
...Another completely ignored aspect of this film are its religious overtones...
...Those priests who take leave of their ministerial duties are typically confronted with intransigency and stone-walling...
...Anthropologist Clifford Geertz's model of "religion as a cultural system" is enlisted to bolster Massa's claim that Senator Joseph R. McCarthy "recognized the congruence between his political concerns and the symbol system that many American Catholics already shared," in building a loyal constituency of coreligionists...
...experience in designing and implementing programs...
...1 to: Director of Enrollment Management...
...It struck me as a simplistic view of a complex film by a reviewer who normally writes with a much greater awareness of the subtleties of film...
...Extensive travel will be required...
...But what were their ends...
...To question is human...
...Roberts should reflect on whether he's willing to follow the pope's lead in all matters, not just those that seem congenial to him...
...fax 011/39/06/3332186...
...and using the various marketing and recruiting activities to promote the Union's career development efforts...
...A stirring account of the battle between Cardinal Francis Mclntyre and the Immaculate Heart of Mary community in Los Angeles in 1967-68 extends Massa's sense of irony to the outskirts of tragedy...
...Do they believe in human freedom and responsibility...
...The Matrix continually questions the human person's capability to know: to know truth, to trust sense information, to be able to think and integrate thought and emotions, and to take responsibility for actions...
...His point that ministry, Eucharist, and church are inextricably linked and that union with the local bishop is required for authentic ministry is one of the earliest assertions of Christian belief...
...Funded by a grant from the Lilly Endowment, Washington Theological Union is seeking an administrator for a three-year period to develop and implement a program specifically aimed at educating church leaders about the benefits of graduate education for ministry...
...Editing WRITING COACH/EDITOR/GHOSTWRITER accepting all projects...
...But don't make me start quoting Marcuse...
...as the ultimate insult, he compared you to Luther...
...and an understanding of the dynamics of theological education...
Vol. 126 • July 1999 • No. 13
