Before providing you with a brief synopsis of the articles in this month’s issue of Position Papers, I would like to draw your attention to two exciting new developments for Position Papers. Firstly, we have completed a redesign of our website which you can find at: www.positionpapers.ie. In it you can easily access past articles and even download pdf versions of entire past issues. If you wish, you can subscribe to the print version for yourself or a friend quite easily here (or indeed make a donation to Position Papers and so help to promote the work we do). A nice feature of the new website is that it can be accessed and easily read on phones and tablets so you have even easier access to our content. Please do use the new website to promote our content among your friends and acquaintances. Secondly, Position Papers now has a regular monthly slot on Radio Maria Ireland which has recently come on air. From 2pm to 3pm on the second Monday of each month, one of the Position Papers team analyses and comments on each of the articles of the latest issue. If you’d like to tune in go to www.radiomaria.ie and click on ‘listen live’.
Michael Kirke, in his In Passing column, take his cue from a recent exchange in the New York Times between their columnist Ross Douthat, and a group of liberal US Catholic theologians who wrote a letter to the paper questioning the wisdom of allowing Douthat free rein to give his interpretation of Catholic Church teaching; essentially they didn’t like his orthodox take on things Catholic. Well, Douthat’s dignified response left the disgruntled liberal Catholic group looking a little silly. He also raised the question which Michael Kirke examines in his piece: the resurgence of a liberal version of Catholic theology and consequently a growing struggle between the liberals and the conservatives in Catholic theology to attain the position of dominance in the Church.
In his article, Rev Patrick Burke suggests – in the context of Church Unity Week – that different Christian denominations would be well advised to set aside their differences and combine their resources in combating the three major forces afflicting Christians so grievously: militant Islam, strident secularism, and religious indifferentism. One would hope and expect that a certain rapprochement between the beleaguered Catholic and Protestant faith traditions on this island would be the silver lining on the terribly dark clouds of these three forces.
Perhaps such a meeting of minds might require that both faith traditions – paradoxically – be coming from a position of strength rather than weakness; in the case of Irish Catholicism this healthier version of the faith might be something like that envisaged by Fr Patrick Gorevan in his piece Irish Catholics, where are you? Fr Gorevan looks at how the historical circumstances of Ireland since penal times produced an Irish version of Catholicism sundered from its cultural medieval roots, disengaged from the public square and everyday life in general.
In our cover-story, Siobhán Ó hAodha revisits the ecology of the recent encyclical Laudato Si from the standpoint of a contemporary Greek Orthodox theologian, John Zizioulas. In her densely argued piece she shows how the work of Zizioulas throws light on the ecological thought of Pope Francis. For Zizioulas, man has a key priestly task of restoring creation’s communion with God – lost since the Fall. In this man is essentially, as the title of her article puts it, a ‘Priest of Creation’.
We carry another very interesting article from our regular writer Fr CJ McCloskey on a recent pastoral letter from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on the plague of pornography which is sweeping the world with consequences much more disastrous than any of the virus epidemics we’ve been lead to fear so much. The US bishops address the question head on in this very helpful pastoral letter, one which, Fr McCloskey suggests, should be read by all parents and family members and I would add that this is not limited to the USA. The pastoral letter is, incidentally, twenty-eight pages long with no less than 113 scholarly footnotes, making it an invaluable resource.
This month we carry Austen Ivereigh’s review of the book length interview with Pope Francis, The Name Of God Is Mercy, in which the Holy Father explains why mercy is the defining theme of his papacy, and defends this to some degree against his critics. Given that much, if not almost all, of the teachings of Pope Francis come to us filtered through the lens of a media which is often theologically illiterate and sometimes downright devious, it strikes me as important that we Catholics can engage more directly with the mind of our Supreme Pontiff through works such as this.
Finally we look at Bishop Robert Barron’s review of Alejandro Iñárritu’s new film The Revenant which looks to be quite a gripping, if raw, film which contains a very timely lesson regarding the role of our belief in God to break the spiral of vengeance and violence.