The Problem With A Catholic Subculture (And With Me)
Barbara Nicolosi wrote a post on Monday that, in her characteristic fashion, pokes a finger right into that whole hornet’s nest that is the Catholic bunker mentality. In an interview with Lay Witness, she talks about the problems we have with Christians - Catholics in particular - being ignorant of the culture they live in. This all comes within the context of a discussion of art, and who the patrons of art should be. It used to be the Church, but it isn’t anymore. Nicolosi seeks to answer the question of where the departure point was for the Church:
Was there a time when the Church just stopped caring about the arts?
I’m not an art historian, but I am sure it is all connected to the fact that the community of artists went with social Darwinism and began to attack belief in the transcendent, and so the community of faith and the community of arts ended up at odds with each other for the first time in human history.
On a national level, America became the most influential country in the world and was dominated by Protestants. And Protestantism is, of course, touched by Jansenism, so they are not a people of the arts. The only art form that Protestants are comfortable with is music, for reasons I don’t understand.
The interesting thing is, in the United States the national Catholic Church became the Irish Church, which was the one European Church that did not have a vibrant artistic tradition. There is a fascinating book called Why Catholics Don’t Sing by Thomas Day, in which he makes the case that because the Irish Church was a persecuted Church, it had no artistic expression. They used to huddle in a field and say Mass because they weren’t even allowed to have churches while they were persecuted by the British. So the Irish clergy came to America and didn’t bring a sense of visual or musical aesthetics with them, and they became the national Church here. How else to explain the embrace of the awful music in Glory and Praise.
I don’t know what they’re problem in Europe was, except maybe they just reached the point of saturation where they were surrounded by sacred art. You know, there’s a church on every block in Italy, and it’s stuffed with stuff. So at a certain point, they had so much that they couldn’t even see it anymore, and in this country, we had so little that we had nothing to see.
But what happened, of course, too, was a huge movement after Vatican II for everybody to become like Thomas Merton in the Abbey of Gethsemane. Rip out all the statuary and lose the colors and symbols and just have white walls. Well, that’s probably OK for Cistercian monks who live in complete silence and have no distractions, but we lay people really need the sensory helps to stay focused at Church! Somebody should have thought it through better before allowing the terrible iconoclasm of the 1970’s and ’80s to eviscerate our beautiful churches.
[snip]
It’s a sin what we have been doing with the arts in the Church for the last few decades. I get really mad when people criticize Hollywood and say, “Why doesn’t Hollywood make better movies?” And I respond, “Excuse me, why doesn’t St. Mary’s have better music at the 10 o’clock Mass? When you get your act together, we can talk about Hollywood.”
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: When it comes to religion and the apprehension of truth, AESTHETICS MATTER. Barbara Nicolosi gets this in a way that few who are out there, working in the world, do. And that’s a problem that she is more than willing to indict others for:
On the darkest side, the refusal of Christians to have a voice in the mainstream culture comes from fear and ignorance and laziness. We haven’t experienced the love of God enough to send us surging into the culture to express our joy. We don’t really care about our neighbors who are languishing amidst the messages of a culture of death.
The best spin I can put on Christians ducking down in caves of their own making today is the desire to protect their kids from negative influences. However, from a pastoral standpoint, the emphasis needs to be not on protecting our children. The emphasis needs to be on preparing our children. The fact is, your little kid is not going to become a disciple when he’s 18. He’s a disciple when he’s 6 to his kindergarten class. And he needs to be comfortable in his moment, which is a 24-hour news cycle, visual image dominated Internet world.
We need to be people who are disciples of 2007. As John Paul II called for over and over and over, we need to “Throw open the doors of the media to Christ.” Imagine that! Throw open the doors of the media to Christ! That is not dwell in the cave and shut it out, whining that, “It’s all garbage.” That is saying that we need to infuse these means that God has given us to fill the world with tidings of goodness and truth and beauty.
Now, the question is, if you’ve been raised in a cave, are you going to become a film director? Are you going to ever be on the Today show as an actor talking to Katie Couric and saying, “Oh yeah, and I go to church on Sunday,” if you’ve been raised in a cave? No.
So by raising Christian kids in a “safe” cave by shutting out the culture in the hope that they’re going to be unscathed, what we actually do is we create useless, impotent disciples for this modern time. They would be great disciples for 1827. But the fact is, they cannot enter into this moment. They can’t read and enter into dialogue with the signs of their own times.
This is why, despite my own temptations to just shut off the TV and move to the boonies I can’t. Correction - that’s partially why I can’t. Part of it is that I’m simply drawn to it like a moth to a flame. I want the city. I want to go see movies. I want to sit down once in a while with a beer and a good real-time strategy game. I want to be a part of everything that’s going on, to get right square in the middle of it and separate the wheat from the chaff. Maybe that’s dancing the edge a little too much for some, but anything else just isn’t living as far as I’m concerned. If I were still single, I’d move in a heartbeat to New York or Rome or Tokyo. Or even Los Angeles. Because whatever assessments we have about the good and bad things that stem from our culture, that’s where the culture is coming from. And we need to be aware of it to know where it’s headed, and what we can do.
And I can’t, can’t, can’t stand hiding from it. It’s not who I am.
This is why I get uppity about arbitrary anachronisms, or the adoption of homeliness as a fashion statement by Catholics. We shouldn’t be throwbacks just because we’re afraid of today. We shouldn’t adopt the look of the FLDS because we’re afraid of immodesty or impropriety. We need to work to be the best we can within the parameters of what’s going on, right now, every day. And it’s possible, I know, because I see it. It’s out there, often unwittingly. There are people with no connection to our belief system out there wearing modest clothes because they find them fashionable, or making good art because it’s beautiful, or making and enjoying good food because it delights the senses.
They don’t realize it, but they are tapping into the sacramentality of life that we are not taking advantage of. How many times have you heard that some celebrity is Catholic, only to say, “Yeah, and I’m sure I know how orthodox they are.” Well just where the hell are the good Catholic paragons of society going to come from if not from our families?
Nicolosi has so many good things to say I can’t possibly fit them all in, but here’s more that needs to be read. When asked what her Act One Hollywood training program is looking for, she responds:
Well, the first thing we’re looking for on the writing side is people who can spell! I wish I was kidding! I get people all the time that come to me and they want to be writers but they can barely write two sentences that are clear. It’s very rare to find somebody who actually has a good writing style.
And then we need people who have been reasonably well educated in storytelling. We give our writers a list of the hundred most influential novels ever written. And we ask them to check off how many they’ve read—not how many they’ve seen in the movies, but how many they’ve read. The young people coming to us on the average have read only seven of the hundred most influential stories ever written. And these people are top of their classes! We’re not talking obscure stuff here. I’m talking Hemingway and Hawthorne and Austen and the Greeks. So we have a huge problem. This a particular challenge for these two up-and-coming generations—the Gen-Xers and the Millennials—they’ve been completely cut off from their cultural heritage.
And then they need to be somewhat culturally savvy. They ought to have a sense of what is the best work that is out there and why. Often, the real conservative Christian kids that come to us have seen every movie done in the Golden Age but they haven’t seen anything since Star Wars. And it’s the same problem because if you haven’t seen The Matrix, you don’t know your audience today.
On the executive side, we want people from top schools, top undergraduate programs, and even grad programs, who are primarily law and finance oriented. So we want lawyers, law students, MBAs, people with finance degrees and any other people with corporate or business experience. We’re preparing people there for the executive suites of Hollywood, and that’s the talent pool the industry draws from.
I would say the next thing we want is committed Christians. We have all denominations. I’m very sad that we have had so few Catholics go through the program. I have gone to these schools—the Catholic schools, the special Catholic schools—I’ve gone to them all several times and spoken there and pleaded, and what I find there is that kids do not have any apostolic drive. After getting these great Great Books educations, what they want to be is maybe a DRE in a small country parish in the backwoods where nobody will notice them and they can just shut the world down and out. You know, there’s nothing apostolic in that. St. Paul could’ve done that—the Church would be nothing if we had done that. We have not received a mandate to head for the hills.
There is something wrong in a Church in which we are preparing kids to only play in the Catholic subculture. [whispers] There was never supposed to be a Catholic subculture! You know what disciples do in the Catholic subculture? They have personality fights and power struggles. Well, I’d rather be martyred by the world and the devil than be killed by a fellow Catholic because they don’t like the way I say the Rosary or something.
YES! EXACTLY! How much navel gazing have we spent our time on? Forget “we”! How much navel gazing have I wasted my time on?!? I think I’m fighting the good fight, battling with the progressives and anti-traditionalists of the world, but I’m bringing the fight to other Catholics who, wrong as they are, are at least on the inside.
I am a writer. A story teller. A videographer. A photographer. A lover of fiction. A lover of films. An aesthete. And what have I done with it? Jack-diddly, thanks very much, because I’m either too lazy or too afraid or too stupid to realize I have only so much time on this earth to use the gifts God has given me for something other than comm-box wars.
A balance must be struck. It may be ugly out there, but that doesn’t avoiding it all is the right solution.
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I stopped reading Barbara Nicolosi a long time ago. There are so many things wrong with her worldview it’s hard to know where to begin. She wants us to dive into mainstream American culture so we can be apostles? That’s insanity. Did St. Paul frequent the temple prostitutes so he could be “all things to all men”? Nicolosi has apparently forgotten that Catholicism is about holiness first and foremost. Insofar as the culture (it’s hard to call America’s media sewer a “culture”) pulls us away from this, then we must resist the culture and create alternatives.
The reason my Catholic homeschooled children have very little exposure to movies, music and literature produced after the 1950s is because most of what was produced after the 1950s is pure anti-Christian garbage. What they do get will be in very small doses until they have a firm grasp of what ought to be considered normal. If someday their college friends invite them to a rock concert, I want their reaction to be one of horror and disgust, not “Gee wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a top-notch Catholic rock band so we can be apostles to pot-smoking punks everywhere!!!!!”
I have a feeling that Nicolosi would have preferred St. John 2:15 to read: “Love the world, and all the things which are in the world. If any man loves not the world, the charity of the Father is not in him.” Likewise St. James 1:27: “Religion clean and undefiled before God and the Father, is this … to keep one’s self immersed in this world.”
That said, I don’t advocate total withdrawal. Yet. We try to participate in the mainstream as much as possible without letting the rot infect our minds and souls. Now and then a good film is released, and we watch it. But music? Nothing that is considered “mainstream” is redeemable apart from a small number of country ballads. As for literature, the mainstream is a total wasteland.
The formative years are critical. I’m 41 and will probably never get the depraved images, ideas and music of the 1970s and 80s out of my head. This slavery to “mainstream” culture is a devastating spiritual handicap and not something decent Catholic parents are going to willingly inflict on their children.
Jeff,
I’ve spent enough time seeing the arguments from both sides to know that there’s no definitive way to settle this. I know that your view is antithetical to hers, and I was thinking of you while reading it and writing this post.
But I guess in that regard we’ll have to agree to disagree. I’ve never withdrawn myself from the culture (and yes, I know it’s not culture in the sense of the word it should be) but it hasn’t taken me down with the ship.
I also don’t know that Nicolosi would say about music, but it’s different than film, anyway. And I agree with her - we have to know the medium in order to figure out how to utilize it. Those with the will to do so take over because we sit back and cry foul. You can’t win if you don’t engage.
There’s no way to plot a definitive course. But if you read her interview, look at what she says about how the gays planned their agenda and inserted it into the media.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Steve, on one level, everyone has to draw the line. Even Barbara Nicolosi draws the line someplace. One suspects - or anyway, one hopes - there are “mainstream” films that even she will not watch. Or at least will not recommend. The problem is that immersion in mainstream culture desensitizes a person to its pungent evil and destroys one’s powers of discernment.
I agree with your comment about knowing the medium. The producers of “Therese” knew the medium and used it to produce and distribute a truly beautiful film. Nicolosi trashed it anyway. They had a small budget and its level of sophistication just couldn’t compete with Sex in the City. “Bella” comes along and does the same thing, but that wasn’t worldly enough for Nicolosi either. She wants Catholics to meet the world on the world’s own terms: George Carlin did just that and died an atheist.
Worldlings have enough worldliness without Catholics delivering more of it. Let Catholic artists, writers, and film producers give worldlings something they don’t have for a change. There isn’t as much money in that, but such are the times in which we live.
She might use the example of Mel Gibson and TPOTC, which she approved of. Mel Gibson, it is true, does get away with doing the Hollywood thing and keeping his faith intact. But look at the price he has paid in terms of his lifestyle. It’s not a coincidence - and not to be wished on anyone.
Hated the movie Therese. My apologies to Jeff Culbreath who I think the world of.
A difficult question to be “of the world” but not “in the world”. And I guess we all struggle with it in our own way.
Problems with Therese, it showed a girl who did not work. That is not contemplative life.
Ora et pro nobis.
Teach your children to work hard. Laugh. Enjoy a simple life. Love Our Lady.
Simple but hard. Easy but difficult:
Christianity.
Jeff,
I know that everyone has to draw the line, and the fact that you’re bringing that up leads me to believe you didn’t read the whole interview in Lay Witness. She talks about how to train your kids to be critical viewers and how to draw lines. She talks about how her own parents did that:
Mom and Dad watched great movies with us. Rear Window and Giant and On the Waterfront and Camelot. And they talked to us about them. I remember when my mother had us watch Doctor Zhivago. I was about 14, my sister was 16. And my mother said, “Now, this is a movie about adultery. But it’s a very beautifully made movie. It’s about art and it’s about sin and it’s about communism.” And she said, “We’re going to watch it together because I want you to see this beautiful film and then we’re going to talk about it.” And it was great, because I learned about sin in a way that was not an occasion of sin.
I saw wonderful movies, and then when I was in high school and college when my friends were seeing garbage, I had no interest in it—or I could see it right away, “Oh, this is just stupid,” or, “This is lame,” or, “This is so barbaric.”
I understand that immersion in mainstream culture desensitizes, but I’d hardly call watching a couple of movies a week and a handful of shows “immersion”. I spend less time watching TV and movies than I do commuting; and I try to only rent those films I believe will be worth watching. But I guarantee I’ll watch things you wouldn’t. My criteria is different…I want to see that the story is worthwhile, that the film is artfully made, that there’s a point to it all.
And in the case of movies like There Will Be Blood or No Country For Old Men which both had great production values and acting and were compelling films, the sheer pointlessness and hopelessness of them needs to be pointed out to people. Discussed. Not just left to be consumed by the masses with no input from our side. She discusses this as well:
Now it’s an interesting question to say, “Well, how far do you need to plunge into the signs of the times in order to be able to use them as a means of evangelization?” For example, the 2006 Academy Awards. Do people need to see all five films so that they can go into the workplace and say, “Yeah, I saw The Departed and I thought it was depraved barbarity”? I think you need to know what is out there enough to be able to talk about it. You better not start talking about it if you don’t know what it is. If you hear everyone around you talking about The Departed, and that’s where your 18-year-old peer group is, I think you have to watch enough of that movie to come and say to them, “OK, let’s talk about this movie. Let’s talk about what it’s saying here about being a hero.”
For example, the hero in The Departed was sleeping with another man’s fiancée. And the movie worldview suggested by default, “It doesn’t matter. The main thing is he was standing up to the mob.” You see, that would be something for Catholics to talk about with this age and say, “No, you can’t be living an impure life in one area and expect to be able to make heroic choices in another area.” That would be something we could say, but we can’t say anything if we haven’t seen it.
And the fact is, the movie made $120 million. So a lot of people saw it. And the Church isn’t responding. My sense of the Church in these last 30–40 years has been zero response to the culture and the marketplace of ideas.
Now as for Therese, well, I’ll just say that yours is the first positive comment I’ve ever heard about that movie. And I do mean ever. I’m not surprised that Mary Alexander hated it…everyone I have heard of who has seen it does.
That’s not because it’s about St. Therese - the fact that it’s about her is why everyone WANTED to like it. It’s because it’s bad storytelling. It’s bad writing. It’s bad moviemaking. Now I’m saying that’s what I’ve heard, because I haven’t (because of hearing all that) been extremely motivated to see it. But it’s in my Netflix qeue and I will. And I’ll talk more about it then. But Nicolosi doesn’t “trash” the movie. To the contrary, she says:
I have no personal animosity towards the folks at St. Luke’s. They are certainly very devout Catholics, and very sincere in their desire to put drama at the service of the Gospel.
It’s just that everywhere I go, good Catholics ask me about the project, and “Isn’t it a shame that Hollywood is shutting out the movie just because it’s devout Catholic?!” No, the project is not being shut out because it’s Catholic. If it’s getting shut out, it’s because it’s a bad movie. It is disingenuous to try and get people into the theaters on some pretext of “showing Hollywood”, when what you are really trying to do is desperately make back some of the millions and millions of dollars you obtained from good people who trusted you to know how to make a good movie.
I’ve never seen her review the movie, only discuss her original readings of the script. She offered them advice which they flatly turned down. Her criticism of the script was that it was “missing all the most basic points of introducing and growing characters, of structuring for some kind of suspense, of thematic development.”
Another Catholic review I read said that “Unfortunately, the film that I have now seen, though earnest and pious and crafted with great care, perhaps even great love, was not so much a movie as a plodding, poorly-scripted catechism of dreadful ‘on the nose’ dialogue.”
This isn’t what is going to evangelize, Jeff. It’s just more preaching to the choir. WE love Therese’s story and so if it comes across as lives of the saints on film, well, we’re used to that.
There’s a place for all the effort we put into the echo chamber, but it’s not enough.
As for Bella, well, the same theme applies. Of that film, Nicolosi said:
In short, I don’t think Bella is great. It’s not really “Catholic” (in the sense of overt spirituality). And it really isn’t pro-life (in the usual sense of that term). Is it the worst film ever made? No. I’m not saying that at all. It is a first-time project from some filmmakers with clear potential, that has some nice moments and certainly loads of good intentions behind it. But is it great cinematic story-telling, or even really good cinematic storytelling deserving of all the raves it is getting? No….
…What is going on is a wildly over the top marketing blitz in which the investors in Bella are trying desperately to recoup their investment, by telling good Catholic people that they must support this film to send a message to Hollywood. As with so many other mediocre Christian movies, the only “message” that Hollywood will get if Bella does well, is that the Christian audience has no idea what a good movie is and will rave about anything that remotely mirrors our world-view. And the really sad thing is, that message isn’t true. Most Christian people, like the rest of the world, do know a good story when they see one. So many, possibly most of the folks who are going to dutifully show up to support Bella this weekend are going to be disappointed or annoyed, or generally confused at what it is they are missing that everybody else is raving about. Trust your gut, audience of The Passion, you’re not missing something. There’s just not much in Bella to miss.
We rented the movie, and Jamie and Kiana watched it while I was at work. When I got home, Jamie told me not to even bother watching it. It was badly done, she said, and I wouldn’t be able to sit through it.
But of course the hype wasn’t that it was a well-made film; it was that it was a pro-life one. And as Madeleine L’Engle once said, “Christian art? Art is art; painting is painting; music is music; a story is a story. If it’s bad art, it’s bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.”
In my opinion, your assessment of what Nicolosi is promoting is the exact opposite of what she is really doing. She isn’t promoting worldliness, she’s promoting good art produced from a Catholic sensibility.
Newman famously wrote that it is “a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless literature about a sinful man.” Portrayals of people in books, films, etc. need to be realistic to be Catholic. That is, the stories need to be about fallen man and the hope of redemption, even if redemption is never realized.
I condemn the culture on a daily basis, but I won’t dismiss it wholesale. Hollywood knows how to make beautiful films, even if they are empty ones. Beauty is a manifestation of truth. If Catholics can get behind the scenes and produce good movies accessible to the masses that adopt a truly Catholic sensibility even when telling a run of the mill story, the truth of our view comes through and begins to turn the tide. Overtly Christian movies need to be brilliantly produced to overcome the cynicism of the audience by the production values. The impetus on those films is much heavier in that regard.
That’s what, as I read it, Nicolosi is all about.
Whew! I thought I was anathema for not liking the movie ‘Therese’. I WANTED to like it, but just couldn’t.
Mary, your description for living the Catholic life is spot-on, and bears repeating:
Ora et pro nobis.
Teach your children to work hard. Laugh. Enjoy a simple life. Love Our Lady.
Simple but hard. Easy but difficult:
Christianity.
ora et labora - pray and work
Neither choice –opting in or out– is more desireable than the other. We need both. Just make your choice with your eye on Heaven and do it well today.
Has anyone read Berman’s The Monastic Option?
Jeff,
I have to say that your example actually proves Steve’s point.
The producers of “Therese” knew the medium and used it to produce and distribute a truly beautiful film.
Therese was one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. Amateurish doesn’t cover it. I didn’t know it was possible to make a film without either acting, writing, directing or cinematography. It was exactly the point Steve is making. Catholics loved it and thought it was wonderful and “beautiful” because of its subject matter, but if this is what we can expect as an answer to the secular anti-culture from Catholics, we’re in big trouble. That awful piece of drek is about the worst advertisement for Catholic values since the Novus Ordo started hiring guitar groups.
Allow me to reprint the review I wrote of THERESE for my old site back in 2004 (it’s in Web Archive, but the print is white; otherwise I would just link):
——————————————————————
THERESE (Leonardo Defillipis, USA, 2004, 2)
….
With THERESE, we have a quite different problem. Clearly, the people involved tried to make an A-list movie. But their reach far exceeded their grasp. THERESE comes up so short in the basic cinematic ABCs that a rational world would consider the fact that THERESE is a biography of a great saint (based on her own memoir) a matter to hold against it — “St. Therese of Lisieux deserves better,” basically. And as a movie, THERESE is simply terrible — badly shot, badly lit, badly scored, often badly acted, and often badly written.
At the most basic level — what you look at on the screen — THERESE has some of the worst cinematography I’ve ever seen. The frame often cuts characters off at the head (and I don’t believe this was a framing issue at the theater, since the lead review at the IMDb noted the same problem. The film also looks seriously underlit, with the colors mostly washed-out and the images so grainy that it looked a cheap 16mm blowup from Fotomat. The two most important closeups in THERESE — her getting up from her long illness through Mary’s intercession, and her last words “My God, I love You” — look like they were shot through a haze. There is also little focal depth to the film, so the film drowns in a sea of blurry mud. The shot of Mr. Martin taking Pauline to the Carmelites ends with a long shot of the family mansion — and you can’t even see the family’s faces.
The acting is declamatory and stagy (if sometimes effective in that style), with everyone speaking in complete, literary sentences. But the casting is off, because when Therese is about 12 or 13, she is being played by an actress who looks to be in her early 20s. The score is excessive and syrupy, and with very little variation (the same sugar is poured over the funeral of Therese’s mother, the one moment in Therese’s early life that has to have some harrowing quality). There is very little drama and even that’s fumbled away (the scene of Therese imploring the pope to join the Carmelites is twice telegraphed and flatly performed). The establishing shots of Rome are so obviously stock footage as to be almost parodic. And the direction is clumsy (Therese’s last look at her father is cut away from too quickly). In short, nothing in THERESE works.
This will all seem like needless cavilling or obsession with cinematic form to some of my Catholic readers, who might have a special devotion to the Little Flower or been beneficiaries of her intercession. I would never denigrate such “real life” miracles or works. And I have no doubt that God can use a bad movie to work wonders in men’s souls, but that’s for Him to decide — and being God, He can use PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE for such purposes if He so chooses.
But until sainthood is imputed through the camera lens, all we lowly mortals can do is consider THERESE as a movie. I don’t want to go too deeply into the tiresome issue of the subjectivity of taste, but I think THERESE is a clear-cut case. Anybody who says this movie is good is not responding to the movie itself, but to its real-life story events (in which case actually viewing the film is superfluous, as is making it, come to think).
# posted by Victor : 6:22 AM
“Therese was one of the worst films I’ve ever seen.”
Considering your latest comments at Orwell’s Picnic, is it safe to say that you prefer “The Simpsons” to “Therese”? Let me ponder that for a moment …
Anyone who saw the film “Therese” expecting to be dazzled and entertained Hollywood-style was bound to be disappointed. Perhaps there was something misleading about the way this film was marketed. For my part, I was moved and inspired, along with everyone else I know who saw the film (apart from internet critics I have never met).
If they never produced another film with a budget over $100,000 the world would be a better place.
Now Jeff, don’t be cranky.
I know this thread has been abandoned, but it takes me awhile to mull things over in my head, not to mention that I rarely have even 5 consecutive minutes on the computer without someone screaming in my ear. I still wanted to share my few thoughts, rather late than never. I haven’t read B. Nicolosi prior to this article; I think her insights are worth pondering. I really appreciate her advice on how to raise children with a knowledge of the arts, and I definitely think we need to have more Catholics engaging the world through literature, film, and music – more Evelyn Waughs and less Bud Macfarlanes. I do believe, though, that this article deserves some criticism. Perhaps she’d agree with some of my criticism, I don’t know, I just don’t think from this particular article that she’s got it spot on.
“…what they want to be is maybe a DRE in a small country parish in the backwoods where nobody will notice them and they can just shut the world down and out. You know, there’s nothing apostolic in that. St. Paul could’ve done that—the Church would be nothing if we had done that. We have not received a mandate to head for the hills.”
Nothing apostolic in that? Apostolic ministry is doing what God calls us to do. Not every saint is meant to be a St. Paul. The Church grew through St. Paul’s evangelization but only b/c he was called to and given the grace for that mission. She makes disparaging remarks about men and women who “just shut the world down and out” by working in a country parish as a DRE, yet St. John Vianney was only the pastor of a tiny country parish and he had tremendous influence in his native land after the faith was nearly destroyed by the Revolution. But he didn’t have a direct influence on the arts, it might be argued. Coincidentally, I recently read von Hildebrand’s biography of St Francis of Assisi and von Hildebrand devotes an entire chapter to the amazing influence St. Francis had on the arts, during his life and for centuries afterwards. For example, Dante and Michelangelo both belonged to the Third Order of Franciscans. A poor beggar who had no intention to do anything other than loving God in simplicity influenced the works of Dante and Michelangelo. How are we to know that those DREs aren’t in those backwoods parishes to instill the faith in souls who will ultimately be called to penetrate the fields of modern art?
Furthermore, the certain souls who are effective in their active apostolates (in whatever form or fashion, including the arts) are only successful because of their firm roots in the interior life and the grace brought into the Church through the souls who have “run to the hills”. She speaks of St. Paul but we cannot fail to recognize that the foundation from which he evangelized was maintained by the contemplatives, such as the Blessed Mother. The Church designates 2 patrons of missionaries – one who traveled the world and another who was a cloistered nun. Archbishop Sheen and Padre Pio were contemporaries – who could be said to have had a greater impact on the world? Superficially it might seem like the former, as Catholics we should know that it was the latter. And while Sheen had his unique role in which he fought the devil, a role that he was destined to play, the stigmatist friar fought the devil in a much more exemplary fashion. By all means, let us have Catholics who permeate society but let us not downplay the role of those Catholics, even amongst the laity, who are called to lead hidden lives of sanctity – where they are presumably called to be. They are not necessarily merely “naval gazing”, more often than not it’s their personal growth in sanctity and that changes cultures more than any active work.
And I think she exaggerates the idea of Catholic families protecting their children by hiding them in so-called caves. I know a few families who do such, but most good Catholic families I know, especially the home-schooling variety, make a point of introducing their kids to the world and the people in it. They just happen to be prudent about “when” and selective about which elements they bring to the meeting. Must our children be inundated with secular media to be able to relate to everyone around them? Must they be immersed in secular culture in order to engage the world with their unique expressions of truth and beauty? I personally believe that my children become more creative as they spend time in nature, and less so as they spend time in front of the tv or computer. Tolkien’s imagination is largely attributed to his appreciation for nature, not secular forms of media. (Case in point, my kids are currently in the lid of their sandbox, which they have deemed a “kayak” going down the river that is their blow-up pool.) They do watch movies – the classics like Mary Poppins and Old Yeller, and also some of the modern Disney movies like Finding Nemo, etc. But it’s their experiences in the canoe, or on the beach, or even in our backyard that fuel the stories they tell at the dinner table or at night as they lay in bed.
I understand that Nicolosi isn’t saying anything about nature, but that’s my point. From this article, it seems that her idea of being able to relate to the world is one-dimensional… literally. “He’s a disciple when he’s 6 to his kindergarten class. And he needs to be comfortable in his moment, which is a 24-hour news cycle, visual image dominated Internet world.” The modern world is obsessed with technology, but Catholics need not be in order to engage the culture. We can severely limit (not avoid completely, but limit) all the junk and instead bring a fresh perspective and vision to entertainment and the arts by raising children who are truly in the world…as in the physical world of beauty that God gave us, and by introducing them to good literature. And this isn’t just because tv and the internet bring immoral, negative influences into children’s minds, but simply because most of it is nothing but junk food for their brains.
Oh, and I’m relieved to say that I’ve read more than 7 books from her list. At the same time, I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve only read 21 of the 100. Thankfully, Peter has the majority of those titles on the bookshelves of our home.
Sarah,
You may be shocked to hear that I agree with pretty much everything you’ve said here.
Some of this has been covered in another post, which you may have read here: http://steveskojec.com/2008/07/09/zach-frey-weighs-in/
I would be surprised to hear that Nicolosi thinks DREs are useless…I believe it’s more an exaggeration on her part in noting that we as Catholics are cultivating a bunker mentality because we are worried that the culture, such as it is, will up and overwhelm us. And it’s far, far easier these days to become a DRE in a controlled parish environment where everyone is Catholic than to try to confront the world with your work. And I think that’s what she’s driving at - that the inclination to hide where we’re comfortable isn’t enough. We have to really engage.
But obviously we need DREs and theology teachers and the like. As I said on the other thread, it’s not either/or but both/and.
As for your comments about nature, I think you’re right there as well. Imaginations thrive in those environments, and also, limiting what kinds of media our kids feed off of is essential. But it’s one thing to limit it, it’s another thing entirely to come home from work and find out your wife let the kids watch a Disney movie and so you pick up the TV and melodramatically smash it into the dumpster. (I know a guy who did this.)
But Nicolosi’s point (and Newman’s, in the other thread) is that we have to expose our students to the world so that they know how to deal with it. We do it with caution, with humor, with teaching, but we do it in such a way that they can discern what is good from what is toxic when they get there.
And that’s the big problem - like it or not, all of our kids are going to grow up some day, and if they’ve been kept in a compound in the hills they are probably really, really going to want to go out and see what they’re missing. Because they won’t have been taught how to deal with the dark side of life as they went along, under the guidance of their parents, it’s going to hit them like a ton of bricks. And when they see it, they’ll either be horrified and afraid or they’ll be curious and wind up in trouble.
That doesn’t mean we immerse them in filth, but we do guide them through the stuff that the mainstream world is consuming whenever we can do so without sinning. Because to evangelize, you need to know what you’re up against.
But all this is to say that still, yes, I agree. One niggling point that is sticking in the back of my head is your reference to “secular media’. I think part of Nicolosi’s crusade (and we must see her arguments through the lens of her profession, which is to train Christians to succeed in Hollywood in the hopes of turning the tide there) is to stop making such noticeable distinctions between secular and non-secular media. It’s the idea that a Catholic is going to write a story or direct a film from a Catholic worldview, even if their work isn’t explicitly Catholic. The same applies to journalism, say, in that a Catholic should be interested in presenting the facts and finding the truth, rather than distorting it or reporting on it selectively to accomplish an agenda. It’s about bringing our faith with us into whatever we do and doing it well. Catholics used to be the makers of media, of stories, of education, of culture. We don’t do it anymore - we’ve let the enemy take over. And they are using it to corrupt the world.
We need to take it back.