When you consider the combined critical and commercial success of Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol since its release in Dubai on December 7, having within a month already secured the second highest box office haul of the franchise so far – which is no doubt sure to increase exponentially as DVD sales are added to the tally – it’s not difficult to see how the phrase ‘cruise control’ could take on a whole new significance. If the box office success of Ghost Protocol is hardly surprising, what is exciting about the film is the almost exclusively positive reception it has received.

Responding to Brad Bird’s total cinema approach and Cruise dogged determination and impressive work ethic, the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes posted a score of 93% fresh on the tomato meter, virtually unheard of for an action movie, calling the film ‘Stylish, fast-paced, and loaded with gripping set pieces, the fourth Mission: Impossible is big-budget popcorn entertainment that really works.’ If the success of the series initially seemed to some improbable, that’s ok. Cruise is more interested in the impossible. So ‘improbable’ or ‘unlikely’ is a walk in the park.

The Tom Cruise factor

In a recent feature on the actor, Empire magazine tried to pin down what it is that keeps Tom Cruise so passionate about what he does. His ability to evoke empathy from an audience is uncanny and is likely a part of what makes him such a popular presence in Hollywood, both in front of and behind the camera. In an interview with new co-star Paula Patton on working with Cruise, it’s clear that what drives Cruise to keep pushing himself for new challenges is also what encourages his colleagues to go the extra mile with him. ‘He’s very compassionate; he can read a room and see who in the room needs something. Because of that, working with him inspires you. You can be feeling lazy and then you look at him and are like “Why are you being lazy? Look at what Tom Cruise is doing! He’s on his second workout of the day and he’s got more money than God!’” It is this passion for what he does that fuels the success of the Impossible franchise and has audiences coming back for more.

Charisma pours out of Tom Cruise; no-one denies his star quality. After all, nobody does what Tom Cruise does quite like Tom Cruise. You might however be forgiven for not always taking him seriously. But as Empire affirms with their no-nonsense approach, you’d be foolish to underestimate the man. ‘There are idiots who say Tom Cruise can’t act. The world’s best directors disagree. As do audiences: his movies have taken more than $7 billion at the box office.’ So when Cruise insisted that a director with no previous experience in live action take the helm of one of Hollywood’s biggest franchises, the big wigs at Paramount Pictures were in no position to argue.

Something new each time

For each new instalment of the popular spy series Cruise has insisted there be a new director with new ideas, with something different and exciting to bring to the party. With the first in the series Brian DePalma’s slick and sophisticated suspense thriller gave us a traditional spy game with a whole host of iconic set pieces that would set the film apart from genre competitors. The first film had a tone and energy that John Woo would build on in the sequel, taking the series in an exciting new direction, leaving an indelible mark on the franchise in his own inimitable style, fusing beautifully choreographed stunts with an atmospheric soundtrack and stylised visuals. In the third film, fresh from the success of his hugely popular TV series LOST, director J.J. Abrams shook things up with an altogether more visceral and hyper-realistic take on the action.

With Ghost Protocol Brad Bird takes us right back to basics, with a traditional spy thriller which has wit enough to revel in the popular tricks of a tried and tested formula, keeping the dialogue light but sincere and allowing Cruise’s mind-boggling stunts – including scaling the outside of the world tallest building in Dubai (which the actor performed himself) – to steal the show.

From a breathtaking sequence which sees Cruise scale the Burj Khalifa and an exhilarating chase through a desert sandstorm, MI: Ghost Protocol has everything you might expect from a spy movie at the top of its game, as well as a few things you definitely wouldn’t expect. Cruise set out to bring us the best of the Mission: Impossible series so far. By the prodigious talent of director Brad Bird, whose mission it appears to have been to take the ‘Impossible’ to heart, we have an action movie that is 100% pure, unadulterated entertainment. All in all, that’s Mission accomplished, I’d say.

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

This morning I invite you to reflect on St Eusebius of Vercelli, the first Bishop of Northern Italy of whom we have reliable information. Born in Sardinia at the beginning of the fourth century, he moved to Rome with his family at a tender age. Later, he was instituted lector: he thus came to belong to the clergy of the city at a time when the Church was seriously troubled by the Arian heresy.

An inspirational priestly community

The high esteem that developed around Eusebius explains his election in 345 A.D. to the episcopal see of Vercelli. The new bishop immediately began an intense process of evangelization in a region that was still largely pagan, especially in rural areas. Inspired by St Athanasius – who had written the Life of St Anthony, the father of monasticism in the East – he founded a priestly community in Vercelli that resembled a monastic community. This coenobium impressed upon the clergy of Northern Italy a significant hallmark of apostolic holiness and inspired important episcopal figures such as Limenius and Honoratus, successors of Eusebius in Vercelli, Gaudentius in Novara, Exuperantius in Tortona, Eustasius in Aosta, Eulogius in Ivrea and Maximus in Turin, all venerated by the Church as saints.

With his sound formation in the Nicene faith, Eusebius did his utmost to defend the full divinity of Jesus Christ, defined by the Nicene Creed as ‘of one being with the Father’. To this end, he allied himself with the great Fathers of the fourth century – especially St Athanasius, the standard bearer of Nicene orthodoxy – against the philo-Arian policies of the Emperor. For the Emperor, the simpler Arian faith appeared politically more useful as the ideology of the Empire. For him it was not truth that counted but rather political opportunism: he wanted to exploit religion as the bond of unity for the Empire. But these great Fathers resisted him, defending the truth against political expediency.

In exile

Eusebius was consequently condemned to exile, as were so many other bishops of the East and West: such as Athanasius himself, Hilary of Poitiers – of whom we spoke last time – and Hosius of Cordoba. In Scythopolis, Palestine, to which he was exiled between 355 and 360, Eusebius wrote a marvellous account of his life. Here too, he founded a monastic community with a small group of disciples. It was also from here that he attended to his correspondence with his faithful in Piedmont, as can be seen in the second of the three Letters of Eusebius recognized as authentic. Later, after 360, Eusebius was exiled to Cappadocia and the Thebaid, where he suffered serious physical ill-treatment. After his death in 361, Constantius II was succeeded by the Emperor Julian, known as ‘the Apostate’, who was not interested in making Christianity the religion of the Empire but merely wished to restore paganism. He rescinded the banishment of these bishops and thereby also enabled Eusebius to be reinstated in his see. In 362 he was invited by Anastasius to take part in the Council of Alexandria, which decided to pardon the Arian bishops as long as they returned to the secular state. Eusebius was able to exercise his episcopal ministry for another ten years, until he died, creating an exemplary relationship with his city which did not fail to inspire the pastoral service of other bishops of Northern Italy, whom we shall reflect upon in future Catecheses, such as St Ambrose of Milan and St Maximus of Turin.

Testimonies to a special relationship

The bishop of Vercelli’s relationship with his city is illustrated in particular by two testimonies in his correspondence. The first is found in the letter cited above, which Eusebius wrote from his exile in Scythopolis ‘to the beloved brothers and priests missed so much, as well as to the holy people with a firm faith of Vercelli, Novara, Ivrea and Tortona’ (Second Letter, CCL 9, p. 104). These first words, which demonstrate the deep emotion of the good pastor when he thought of his flock, are amply confirmed at the end of the letter in his very warm fatherly greetings to each and every one of his children in Vercelli, with expressions overflowing with affection and love. One should note first of all the explicit relationship that bound the bishop to the sanctae plebes, not only of Vercellae/Vercelli – the first and subsequently for some years the only diocese in Piedmont – but also of Novaria/ Novara, Eporedia/Ivrea and Dertona/ Tortona, that is, of the Christian communities in the same diocese which had become quite numerous and acquired a certain consistency and autonomy. Another interesting element is provided by the farewell with which the letter concludes. Eusebius asked his sons and daughters to give his greeting ‘also to those who are outside the Church, yet deign to nourish feelings of love for us: etiam hos, qui foris sunt et nos dignantur diligere’. This is an obvious proof that the bishop’s relationship with his city was not limited to the Christian population but also extended to those who – outside the Church – recognized in some way his spiritual authority and loved this exemplary man.

The second testimony of the bishop’s special relationship with his city comes from the letter St Ambrose of Milan wrote to the Vercellians in about 394, more than twenty years after Eusebius’ death. The Church of Vercelli was going through a difficult period: she was divided and lacked a bishop. Ambrose frankly declared that he hesitated to recognize these Vercellians as descending from ‘the lineage of the holy fathers who approved of Eusebius as soon as they saw him, without ever having known him previously and even forgetting their own fellow citizens’. In the same letter, the bishop of Milan attested to his esteem for Eusebius in the clearest possible way: ‘Such a great man’, he wrote in peremptory tones, ‘well deserves to be elected by the whole of the Church.’ Ambrose’s admiration for Eusebius was based above all on the fact that the bishop of Vercelli governed his Diocese with the witness of his life: ‘With the austerity of fasting he governed his Church.’ Indeed, Ambrose was also fascinated, as he himself admits, by the monastic ideal of the contemplation of God which, in the footsteps of the Prophet Elijah, Eusebius had pursued. First of all, Ambrose commented, the bishop of Vercelli gathered his clergy in vita communis and educated its members in ‘the observance of the monastic rule, although they lived in the midst of the city’. The bishop and his clergy were to share the problems of their fellow citizens and did so credibly, precisely by cultivating at the same time a different citizenship, that of heaven (cf. Heb 13: 14). And thus, they really built true citizenship and true solidarity among all the citizens of Vercelli.

‘In the world’ but not ‘of the world’

While Eusebius was adopting the cause of the sancta plebs of Vercelli, he lived a monk’s life in the heart of the city, opening the city to God. This trait, though, in no way diminished his exemplary pastoral dynamism. It seems among other things that he set up parishes in Vercelli for an orderly and stable ecclesial service and promoted Marian shrines for the conversion of the pagan populations in the countryside. This ‘monastic feature’, however, conferred a special dimension on the bishop’s relationship with his hometown. Just like the Apostles, for whom Jesus prayed at his Last Supper, the pastors and faithful of the Church ‘are of the world’ (Jn 17: 11), but not ‘in the world’. Therefore, pastors, Eusebius said, must urge the faithful not to consider the cities of the world as their permanent dwelling place but to seek the future city, the definitive heavenly Jerusalem. This ‘eschatological reserve’ enables pastors and faithful to preserve the proper scale of values without ever submitting to the fashions of the moment and the unjust claims of the current political power. The authentic scale of values – Eusebius’ whole life seems to say – does not come from emperors of the past or of today but from Jesus Christ, the perfect Man, equal to the Father in divinity, yet a man like us. In referring to this scale of values, Eusebius never tired of ‘warmly recommending’ his faithful ‘to jealously guard the faith, to preserve harmony, to be assiduous in prayer’ (Second Letter, op. cit.).

Dear friends, I too warmly recommend these perennial values to you as I greet and bless you, using the very words with which the holy Bishop Eusebius concluded his Second Letter:

I address you all, my holy brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, faithful of both sexes and of every age group, so that you may… bring our greeting also to those who are outside the Church, yet deign to nourish sentiments of love for us.

Dearly beloved,

I know now that you are safe, as I was hoping. When I receive a letter from one of you and see in your writings your goodness and love, joy mingles with tears. Both emotions are inescapable, as they vie with each other in discharging their duty of affection, when such a letter satisfies my longing for you. Days pass in this way as I imagine myself in conversation with you, and so I forget my past sufferings. Consolations surround me on all sides: your firm faith, your love, your good works. Dearly beloved, I rejoice in your faith, in the salvation that comes from faith, in your good works, which are not confined to your own surroundings but spread far and wide. Somehow or other I have managed with difficulty to complete this letter. I asked God constantly to keep the guards away hour by hour, and to allow the deacon to bring you some kind of greeting in writing, not simply news of my suffering. So I beg you to keep the faith with all vigilance, to preserve harmony, to be earnest in prayer, to remember me always, so that the Lord may grant freedom to his Church which is suffering throughout the world, and that I may be set free from the sufferings that weigh upon me, and so be able to rejoice with you. I also ask and beseech you in God’s mercy, that each one of you should add his own name to the greeting in this letter. Of necessity I cannot write to each of you as was my custom. So in this letter I ask you all to be content with this greeting and to be good enough to give my respectful good wishes to those who are outside the community and are kind enough to be my friends.

I invite you all to join me in praying for the success of the next International Eucharistic Congress, which will take place in 2012 in the city of Dublin! I take this opportunity to greet warmly the people of Ireland, as they prepare to host this ecclesial gathering. I am confident that they, together with all the participants of the next Congress, will find it a source of lasting spiritual renewal.’ (Benedict XVI, Homily [live broadcast via satellite] for the closing of the 49th International Eucharistic Congress in Quebec, Canada, June 22, 2008)

Pledge of future glory

It happened recently in a certain part of Ireland. He had gone to bed early after announcing to his family that he was feeling unwell. It was the first time anyone could remember his doing such a thing. After a near-century of good health he was dying. As the days wore on he spoke less and less. In the end he said nothing at all … except one word. Each day when the priest brought him holy communion, he clearly pronounced the word ‘Amen!’ He was using his last resources of energy to pronounce the one word that was no longer superfluous. Faced with imminent embarkation ‘on the way of truth’ (‘slí na fírinne’) this daily communicant for longer than anyone could remember was uttering the one word that remained entirely and increasingly relevant. To Christ the Lord, the Truth, who came to him in the holy Eucharist, his one and emphatic response in union with the whole Church was ‘So be it!’ When all other forms of communication had lost their currency, dialogue with Jesus was becoming ever more intimate. His relatives who accompanied him during his last days were greatly consoled and felt themselves inspired towards holiness. At the end, when his communion became viaticum they confidently prayed that for their beloved father, grandfather and great-grandfather the ‘pledge of future glory’, the ‘medicine of immortality’ had indeed become glory and immortality. By his example he had taught them that the Eucharist is indeed ‘communion with Christ and with one another.’

IEC 2012: A unique opportunity

The International Eucharistic Congress to be held in Dublin in June 2012 is a unique opportunity for the ‘lasting spiritual renewal’ the Holy Father is hoping for us. It is of course a great honour to host such an event of the universal Church. The significance of IEC 2012 is heightened by the fact that it is the fiftieth International Eucharistic Congress. Furthermore this Congress occurs in the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of Vatican II, and the twentieth of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. As such, it will be a prelude to the ‘Year of Faith’ announced by Benedict XVI (October 11, 2012 to November 24, 2013) to give ‘new impetus to the mission of the whole Church’. The challenge therefore is to make this unique opportunity a milestone in our personal renewal and thereby in that of the Church of which we are ‘living stones’ (1 Pet 2:5).

There is also a broader context. In the Church we are living in intensely ‘Eucharistic times’. The twentieth century saw rich development in Eucharistic theology and devotion. The great encyclicals of Pius XII such as Mystici Corporis (1943) on the Mystical Body of Christ, and Mediator Dei (1947) on the sacred liturgy paved the way for the Second Vatican Council which is entirely situated within the horizon of the Eucharistic sacrifice as ‘the fount and apex of the whole Christian life’ (Lumen Gentium 11). The treasures of the Council’s doctrine have been distilled and reiterated by subsequent Popes, in the first place by Paul VI in his encyclical on the holy Eucharist Mysterium Fidei (1965).

Blessed John Paul II and ‘the ineffable Sacrament’

Blessed John Paul II devoted enormous attention to the Eucharistic mystery in his example and in his teaching. In his first encyclical (4 March 1979) he wrote:

Indeed, the Eucharist is the ineffable Sacrament! … It is not permissible for us, in thought, life or action, to take away from this truly most holy Sacrament its full magnitude and its essential meaning. It is at one and the same time a Sacrifice-Sacrament, a Communion-Sacrament, and a Presence-Sacrament. And, although it is true that the Eucharist always was and must continue to be the most profound revelation of the human brotherhood of Christ’s disciples and confessors, it cannot be treated merely as an ‘occasion’ for manifesting this brotherhood. When celebrating the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of the Lord, the full magnitude of the divine mystery must be respected, as must the full meaning of this sacramental sign in which Christ is really present and is received, the soul is filled with grace and the pledge of future glory is given (Redemptor Hominis, 20).

In the second year of his pontificate John Paul II issued the Letter Dominicae Cenae (February 24, 1980) on the mystery and worship of the Eucharist, which was followed up by the Instruction Inaestimabile Donum (Sacred Congregation for the Sacraments and Divine Worship, April 17, 1980).

The last encyclical of this great Pontiff was dated April 17 (Holy Thursday) 2003, entitled Ecclesia de Eucharistia and dedicated to the ‘Eucharist in its relation to the Church’. In this beautiful text Bl. John Paul rejoiced in the ‘positive signs of Eucharistic faith and love’ while clearly indicating ‘alongside these lights, there are also shadows’. In fact this encyclical aims precisely ‘to banish the dark clouds of unacceptable doctrine and practice’ (n. 10). The document shows not only John Paul II’s pastoral courage but also his personal love for the Eucharist (cf. n. 22). He himself seems to embody the ‘Eucharistic amazement’ he seeks to ‘rekindle’ (cf. n. 6). This dogmatic text paved the way for the Instruction Redemptionis Sacramentum (Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, March 24, 2004) ‘on certain matters to be observed or to be avoided regarding the Most Holy Eucharist’.

Benedict XVI on the Eucharist: spoken and unspoken teaching

The continuity between the pontificates of John Paul II and his successor was evident in the Year of the Eucharist (October 2004 – October 2005) initiated by the former and concluded by the latter. It also fell to Benedict XVI to preside over the eleventh ordinary assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Eucharist (October 2005) which had been convoked by his predecessor. The fruits of this synod were gathered together by the Holy Father in the Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis (February 22, 2007). Benedict XVI has taught on all aspects of the Eucharistic mystery in numerous homilies, addresses and audiences as well.

Particularly striking also are those aspects of the current Holy Father’s Eucharistic teaching not expressed in words. The dignity with which the Pope celebrates Mass sets the standard for authentic liturgical renewal as envisaged by Vatican II. Precisely the ‘Supreme Pontiff’ (Pontifex Maximus) is the ultimate arbiter of liturgical good practice. The ‘Benedictine arrangement’ whereby the celebrant faces a crucifix in the centre of the altar emphasises the essence of the Mass as the sacramental offering of the Sacrifice of the Cross. The quality of vestments and music and above all the reverence of the papal ceremonies are an essential part of Benedict XVI’s Eucharistic magisterium.

Eucharistic adoration is another of Benedict XVI’s great ‘teaching moments’. Periods of silent prayer before the monstrance during solemn exposition have become a hallmark of his pontificate both in Rome and abroad. One thinks for example of the hushed throng at Hyde Park in adoration within the throbbing metropolis of London, at the papal prayer vigil on the eve of the beatification of John Henry Newman in September 2010. Similarly the storm-drenched multitude of young people kneeling at the Eucharistic vigil at World Youth Day in Madrid on August 20, 2011 was a powerful catechesis.

‘Powerful’, because the People of God united with the successor of Peter in worship of the sacred host is an icon of the Church in her deepest essence: Ecclesia de Eucharistia, the Mystical Body which is born from the Eucharistic Body. ‘Powerful’, because the ‘sacred silence’ is filled with Christ’s communication with each person, joining each one to himself and one another. And ‘powerful’, because, as the Holy Father teaches, ‘it is precisely through our gazing in adoration that the Lord draws us towards him into his mystery in order to transform us as he transforms the bread and the wine’ (Audience, November 17, 2010). In other words, Eucharistic adoration as preparation for or continuation of the celebration of the Sacrifice brings about the two-fold communion at the heart of the New Covenant: ‘union with Christ and with one another’. This is precisely the theme of IEC 2012.

One way to prepare for IEC 2012 might be to explore its theme by reading or meditating on some of the treasury of Eucharistic texts offered by the magisterium over the last century or so.

IEC 2012 and the renewal of the Church

The Eucharist is a source of deep renewal precisely because it brings about ‘communion with Christ and with one another’. Indeed, as Benedict XVI teaches: ‘Every great reform has in some way been linked to the rediscovery of belief in the Lord’s Eucharistic presence among his people’ (Sacramentum Caritatis 6).

Communion with Christ profoundly renews each one of us. Eucharistic communion reinforces the radical ‘renewal’ of our being which occurred at baptism. By the infusion of sanctifying grace we became a ‘new creation’ (2 Cor 5:17) in Christ, nothing less than ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Pet 1:4). The Bread of life strengthens the fundamental identification with Christ of each of the faithful.

The Eucharist simultaneously unites the faithful ‘with one another’ in the communion of saints, an ineffable family which transcends space and time, life and death. Given its theme, IEC 2012 is a providential opportunity to rediscover the Church. Viewing the Church from a Eucharistic perspective can free us from any sterile ‘horizontal’ approaches and lead beyond purely ‘sociological’ or ‘political’ conceptions of her mystery. In fact, to deepen our understanding of the Church as ‘communion’ is to appropriate the fundamental teaching of Vatican II that ‘the Church is in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race’ (Lumen Gentium 1).

The Communion of Saints

We go back to the scene of the old man quietly passing away in the intimacy of his home. He seems isolated not only geographically but also physically as he fades out of human conversation. But we need to look more deeply. By his intimate union with Christ in the Eucharist this ailing member of the faithful is in lively communion with all his brothers and sisters in heaven and on earth, of all places and times. Through holy communion the dying man shares the life of the entire Church. Apparently insignificant and hidden, he is at the heart of the communion of saints.

He shares in the communio sanctorum in both senses: He has ‘communion in holy things (sancta)’ especially in the Eucharist (objective sense) and he is a living part of the ‘communion of those made holy (sancti)’ by the sacraments (subjective sense; cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church 948).

To take part in the Eucharist devoutly is the supreme exercise of the ‘greatest commandment of the Law’, to love God and neighbour (cf. Mt 22: 35-40). The Eucharist is ‘communion with God and with one other’ because it is the sacrament of God’s love.

A news item over the Christmas period mentioned the finding of two planets the size of the Earth, rotating around a star like our sun, though a bit older. On reading further, we learned that the planets are much too close to their star to have any chance of sheltering any life form at the present time, so the claim is that they might have sheltered life in the past. This brings me to have a quick look at the current efforts in the search for life in the universe, and the possible implications of its potential finding, and the philosophical roots that underpin such efforts.

The German Naturphilosophie movement

The notion of spontaneous generation was widely accepted in medieval times, when the popular belief was that mice and cockroaches came from dirt. The German Naturphilosophie movement proposed that all creation is a manifestation of the World Spirit, and that all matter possessed an elemental spirit, and that the more organised forms had this spirit in more intense degree. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was the main proponent of this idea, and he was followed by F. W. A. Schelling (1775-1854) and by the naturalist l. Okenfuss (1779-1851), from whom the more famous biologist Ernst Haeckel borrowed it. The Irish physicist John Tyndall (1820-1893) was a most determined opponent of the possibility of spontaneous generation occurring in the conditions of today’s natural world, but he was also a follower of the Naturphilosophie movement of Hegel and Schelling, and according to Ruth Barton, who has written most sympathetically and knowledgeably about Tyndall, he was a pantheist rather than an atheist or an out-and-out materialist. Tyndall followed the developments in science in his time closely, and he believed that the vital forces complied with the principle of conservation of energy, and that all forms of energy, including vitality, electricity, magnetism, heat and mechanical energy could be inter-converted in certain circumstances, so that life was simply a ‘mechanism’. He did not see any contradiction in his position.

Haeckel taught that life began on the bottom of the ocean, from a primeval form of slime that he called Urschleim, a concentration of organic molecules including proteins. When, in the studies of materials dredged from the sea-bottom by the surveying services of the Royal Navy, Thomas Huxley thought that he had found Haeckel’s Urschleim, he called it Bathybius haeckelii, as if it was one more living species. Within one year, chemical study of the putative species Bathybius haeckelii proved that it was only an inorganic precipitate, and Huxley hurried to accept the correction, but Haeckel defended the biological nature of Bathybius until the 1880s.

The evolving position of Darwinists

The advent of Darwin’s theory of evolution in 1859 had unforeseeable consequences for spontaneous generation. In The Origin of the Species, Darwin was careful not to upset his readers too much, and in the closing paragraphs he mentioned a Creator, who created the earliest forms of life, or perhaps just one form, from which all others derived in time through the process of natural selection. His correspondence shows that this view changed, and that he became a more thorough-going materialist as time went by, thus accepting the notion of spontaneous generation of life from inorganic materials. This, he said, was a logical extension of his theory, although he did not have any evidence to show for it.

Initially, then, in the early 1860s, spontaneous generation and evolution were perfectly compatible ideas. But by the end of the 1860s a big gap had opened in the evolution camp between those who rejected spontaneous generation as something that could occur now, relegating it at best as something that could have occurred in the very early days of the history of life, and those who accepted it as a theory that could explain present-day phenomena such as putrefaction, infection or fermentation. The most constant proponent of spontaneous generation in Victorian England was a young Darwinian doctor, Henry Charlton Bastian, backed up by many scientists of high repute, including von Liebig, whose most articulate opponent was John Tyndall. Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, switched from supporting to opposing Bastian, to a large extent for political reasons, and had little regard for academic ethical standards in dealing with his former disciple and his work. In the late 1860s and early 1870s Huxley confronted a big scandal that was highly visible to the public through the pages of the London Times: the defection from Darwinism of St. George Mivart, who had converted to Catholicism because he disagreed with the Darwinian view of the origin of man. One scandal was bad enough for Huxley.

The fact that Tyndall, choreographed by Huxley, proved Bastian wrong had many positive consequences: the introduction of aseptic techniques in surgery, treatment of drinking water for human use, practices in the preparation of foodstuffs, sewage management, etc, but the intellectual question of the origin of life in the early days of life on Earth was not settled by Tyndall, Huxley or Bastian and it remains open today.

Re-concocting the Urschlime

In 1953, the American scientists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, following the dialectic materialism of Engels, Marx, and the official voice of Marxist Russian science Alexandr Ivanovich Oparin (1894-1980), reopened the debate with a famous experiment. They tried to reproduce in a glass flask the supposed conditions of the early atmosphere on Earth, using high concentrations of ammonia, water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane but no oxygen, passing an electric discharge through the mix, in the presence of ultraviolet light. The analysis of the products of the reaction showed the presence of some simple organic molecules, such as formic acid, urea, and most importantly the amino acids glycin and small quantities of alanine, the two simplest components of the twenty amino acids that constitute proteins. This was the newer version of Haeckel’s Urschlime. In their view, the primitive ocean became a pre-biotic soup containing all the requisite components, which, accumulating in some warm little pond subject to evaporation, could polymerise to form proteins, and from these the first living forms would have derived.

Information theory and further knowledge of biochemistry very quickly put a stop to the Miller-Urey scenario. While the Miller-Urey reaction produces a mixture of isomers of each amino acid, all living forms contain exclusively one of these isomers, the so called L forms. Similarly all genetic material from living forms contains only one isomer of the sugar ribose, or deoxyribose, the R form. Such exclusivity can be explained through the action of enzymes, but these proteins, made of L-amino acids, could not have been formed just by random selection of amino acids of the right type. Besides, the so-called fundamental dogma of molecular biology states that the information flows from DNA to proteins, and not vice-versa, so the pre-biotic soup must have contained the precursors of DNA and the genetic code, components that can not be visualized as emerging from random inorganic processes.

Geology and astronomy collide with spontaneous generation

Geology and a study of the origin of the solar system provide additional checks to the Miller-Urey theory (or its ancestor, Haeckel’s Urschlime). The Earth’s moon plays an essential role in stabilizing the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. It is known that the moon originated through an off-centre collision of a Mars-sized proto-planet (named Theia) with a very young Earth. The moon’s early orbit around the earth was less than one third of its present radius. The Earth’s orbit around the Sun would have been much longer, but the earth would have spun around its axis much faster, making for duller, shorter days of just five hours duration, and longer years. All these made for enormous tides, frequent tsunamis and storms and very strong gravitation effects on the crust. Such a collision, which in scientific parlance is called a ‘Goldilocks’ or a just-right event, was essential to place the Earth at a distance from the Sun which would allow it shelter life in due course. It is also known that Earth’s primitive atmosphere contained a lot more nitrogen and oxegen than Miller had calculated.

This brings us to the news report that opened this brief glance at the history of life on Earth. To shelter life, external events must have occurred in those other planets too, such as the impact with Theia, starting from the right conditions of position and composition, both of the Sun and the allegedly life-supporting planet. This considered, life-supporting planets might be a lot less numerous than imagined on the basis or sheer numbers of stars.

With regard to the nature of what life might be in the eyes of science, some of the factors sketched above – with no recourse to miracles, irreducible complexities or divine fingerprints – have suggested to a number of scientists that the phenomenon of life might be beyond the scope of science. Science is full of things we can not explain. Why are there only five perfect regular solids? Why is there is no algorithm to trisect an angle, while there is a very simple algorithm to bisect it using a set square and a string? Newton found that, given their masses, it was reasonably easy to predict the position of one single planet around its sun, but that no algorithm exists to make such prediction if a third body is introduced in the system. Science has always been happy with the fact that in nature there are unknowables that are, however, possible. And it is useful to know also that science is good at pointing out when a proposed solution to a scientific problem is impossible, although this can be a fairly slow drawn-out process in the history of ideas.

1. The shape of Eucharistic Congresses in history and at the present

From the time they began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Eucharistic Congresses have had the scope of ‘making our Lord Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar ever better known, loved and served … and of working to extend his social reign in the world’ (General Rules of 1887, art. 1). The historical root of Congresses consists, therefore, in this twofold dimension, represented by ‘Eucharistic piety’ and ‘the social aspect of the Eucharist’. This twofold dimension has borne fruit in the International, National and Diocesan Eucharistic Congresses which in recent decades have characterised so many local Churches.

The Work of International Eucharistic Congresses began in France in 1881 as a fruit of the Eucharistic apostolate of Saint Peter-Julian Eymard, ‘the apostle of the Eucharist’ (1811-1868), and of other outstanding figures such as Blessed Antoine Chevrier (1826-1879), Léon Dupont (1797-1876) and Bishop Gaston Adrian de Ségur (1820-1881)….

International Eucharistic Congresses appeared as public events focused on stimulating the faith of Catholics in the ‘Real Presence’, on promoting increased zeal for devotion to the Eucharist outside of Mass, and on proclaiming the social Kingship of Christ against the laicism then regnant….

The cultic aspect of Eucharistic Congresses was linked from the very beginning to the advancement of ‘the social reign of Christ’. This formula sought to open a path for the public affirmation of the faith and the mobilization of the Catholic laity, who were often oppressed, above all in France, by the movements of anticlericalism and laicism.

Pope Leo XIII himself gave his blessing to the work of International Eucharistic Congresses and supported the celebration of national Congresses, the first of which was held in Naples, Italy, in 1891. He thus gave an effective impulse towards a renewed religious sense at the end of the century, to recovering essential Christian themes and to laying the foundations for a new Christian presence in society. In this way he reopened the way to the social commitment of Catholics who were often marginalised by the rise of a secularist culture….

To the twofold historical dimension of the Congresses (i.e., Eucharistic piety and social commitment), it is nowadays necessary to add the pastoral significance of every gathering as a Statio. This dimension represents a call to reinstitute the deep bond between Eucharist and Church, and to emphasise the fundamental role of this sacrament in every activity of the Church….

2. The meaning of a Congress

The ‘Statio orbis’ which the Irish Church – and Dublin in particular – is preparing, is a specific moment in the journey of the universal Church. It is an occasion for a pilgrim ‘gathering’ of the faithful from every part of the world, an authentic sign of faith and charity in communion offered by the believers of this country to all mankind. This sign will be all the more effective in so far as the following points are taken into account.

The International Eucharistic Congress (IEC) is not a triumphalistic manifestation of faith, a great act of homage shown to the Eucharist, but a grace for the ongoing renewal of the Eucharistic life of all the People of God….

The IEC is not a privilege bestowed on Dublin, but a service to the continuing journey of God’s People. Eucharistic life is not ‘something extra’, something that remains on the sidelines of the various activities that every Particular Church is called to carry out. Rather, it is the source and summit of the life and activity of all the baptised….

The celebration of a Congress is not restricted to its closing week, but is concretely expressed throughout at least a two-year journey of preparation. Along this journey what is celebrated in the concluding days is more deeply understood and lived out…

3. The impact of Eucharistic Congresses on ecclesial life

Every International Eucharistic Congress has a profound impact on the life of the Church, even if this is not always easy to measure. The impact of the Congress of Dublin will be all the greater, since it will be the fiftieth IEC, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council….

After focusing for the first thirty years on Eucharistic works, that is, on Eucharistic worship outside Mass and all related cultic and social activities, Eucharistic Congresses came to the support of the Magisterium’s efforts to offer an ever-wider access to the grace of the sacrament. Thus, at the time of Saint Pius X, they encouraged the effort to lower the age for children to receive their First Communion and to promote frequent communion. Between the two World Wars they supported the missionary commitment of the Church by meeting for the first time in continents outside Europe and focusing on the Eucharist as a force for evangelization….

The commitment to a constantly deeper appreciation of the Eucharistic mystery continues, even as we look to the coming event of the Congress in Dublin, which will have at its centre a reference to the Eucharist as the mystery of communion with Christ and with our brothers and sisters.

The Eucharist and evangelisation constitute two inseparable realities that are part of the Church’s essence. This is true not only in countries which have traditionally been the focus of missionary activity, but also in those countries evangelised long ago. One thinks, for example, of Europe, where some countries marked by a centuries-old Christian culture are now experiencing a progressive falling away from the faith, a distancing from the common roots of Christianity and a growing split between Gospel and culture….

The first thirty-seven International Eucharistic Congresses did not deal with the themes of ecumenism and interreligious dialogue, except at the Congress of Jerusalem in 1893 – although only partially and in a manner quite different from our approach today. The time had not yet come, but we can hope that coming years will see a greater openness to the essential link between the Eucharist and the communion of the Churches. If by its very nature the Eucharist manifests and realises the forma ecclesiae, it represents not only the goal, but also the way and means of attaining visible communion between the Christian Churches.

The space of a month

There is something about the period of a month that seems to attract the human mind. Our memory can just about cope with that time span – any more and things start to dissolve. Possibly this is because it is a natural unit of time based in the movements of the moon: the lunar phase, after all, takes about thirty days.

Usually in the course of our lives, it takes time to get a purchase on events, to understand the meaning of things, even to realise what has happened. In my experience, grief only really hits the bereaved after a month. I vividly recall that it was at my grandmother’s Month’s Mind, that I first felt the bleak chill of loss.

Our Catholic liturgy understands this natural human rhythm: that the penny needs time to drop; and seems to play on such natural memory to allow us to see the meaning of things gradually.

On January 25 each year, we remember Christ’s most spectacular early convert, St Paul of Tarsus: the man who vowed in his youth to exterminate the memory of Jesus; but who, later, for that same name, died a martyr’s death and spilt his own blood.

A month after the birth of Christ

On this day one month ago, we were keeping the feast day of the birth of that same Jesus. Now that the gluttony and the glitz have faded, we can think back on the poignant events that we recall on Christmas Day with perspective. Today’s feast is that perspective. May I suggest that this day is naturally linked to the feast of Christmas; and provides a key to unlocking the true meaning of the fact that God became man in Palestine?

To what was St Paul converted? There are two facts that stand at each end of his Christian life: it began in blindness; and ended with execution. And between those two traumatic poles, St Paul’s life speaks of very little ease or stability. We all know the facts: for thirty years, he was a nomad, repeatedly hounded, arrested and beaten. As even a casual glance at his letters will show, even the Christian communities he founded often fell back to the practices of paganism. And in all his protesting about being a real apostle, can one hear the echo of an anxiety that he may never have been quite accepted as ‘one of us’ by the first hierarchy?

Did St Paul know peace? Well, yes. But it was not some sort of bliss or smile-filled happiness. It was the converted Paul, after all, who complained of the mysterious ‘thorn’ in his side – whatever that was; and pleaded his own inability to control himself: ‘Those things I would, I do not; those things I would not, I do.’

Yes: strip away the tinsel and the life of St Paul is about sacrifice and suffering and obedience. This is something we can skip over when reading the New Testament.

What do these facts teach us? Perhaps that these seem to be the realities even after a call by Christ; possibly, especially after a call by Christ.

But should that surprise us? They were also the facts of the life of Jesus; and they have something to tell us.

More than that: the lives of Our Saviour and his greatest missionary convert must be inspirational to us: those who would be daily be converted to and follow Him.

As usual this month we begin out with one of those Fathers of the Church dealt with in the Addresses of Pope Benedict; this month it is a lesser known Father: the North Italian bishop Saint Eusebius of Vercelli. Like his contemporary St Athanasius, Eusebius is a reminder to us that very troubled times have produced great saints. Michael Kirke, in his ‘In Passing’ column, inspired by a recent stay in hospital, draws our attention to the distortions wrought by a media which is overly focussed on bad news. It is an interesting piece (as ever) and a salutary warning against the pessimism which, if the best-selling travel guide Lonely Planet is to be believed, the Irish have in spades; we are ‘fatalistic and pessimistic to the core’ they say despite all the apparent cheeriness. Well, the media isn’t helping, according to Michael.

These days we’re hearing lots about neutrino particles which may or may not be breaking the speed of light barrier (not appears to be the final answer to that question), and about the search for the hypothetical massive elementary particle ‘the Higgs boson’. Well burning questions in the world of science are nothing new, as Michael DeArce shows as he takes us back to the nineteenth century debate surrounding ‘spontaneous generation’: the scientific theory that life on earth began in a purely random fashion. This debate continued into the twentieth century, and perhaps is not entirely closed, despite recent findings in science which have poured a bit of cold water on the notion.

We have the last article in Fr Patrick Gorevan’s very informative series on the new English translation of the Roman Missal. This month it is, fittingly, on the dismissal. Our main story this month is the upcoming International Eucharistic Conference, taking place in Dublin in June. Fr Donncha Ó hAodha, in the first of a series of articles in preparation for the conference, discusses the steps taken by Pope Benedict, and Blessed John Paul II before him, to inculcate within Catholics a greater sense of reverence towards the Blessed Sacrament. On the same theme, we include a précis of an address by Archbishop Piero Marini to the Irish Episcopal Conference in which he outlines the background and objectives of Eucharistic Congresses. The Church gives us a feast for the conversion of St Paul on January 25, in addition to his ‘ordinary’ feast day which he shares with St Peter on June 29. We have included a reflection from Fr Eugene O’Neill on the upcoming feast. And for the film buffs among you, we conclude with Ronan Wright’s review of the latest in the series of Mission Impossible films: Ghost Protocol. Sounds tantalising.

Finally, we would like to wish all our readers a very happy new year.

In the film The Matrix we explore the threat to our humanity by forces seeking to create a perfect world. It is a world in which men and women have been distorted beyond recognition into characters in a computer programme devoid of any real human qualities. With a little adjustment it is not as far-fetched as it might seem. In our own media-driven world we are already distorting the truth in an alarming way. Ireland’s national broadcaster has just incurred damages rumoured to be in the region of €2,000,000 for ruining the life of an innocent man, a Catholic missionary priest whom it portrayed as a rapist through the medium of its investigative flagship, Primetime Investigates. It all serves to remind us that we have a dangerous capacity to create something which at first serves our best interests and then allows it to become a distorting and all-consuming monster.

The television programme was presented last May and for most viewers it was simply driving another nail in the coffin of the battered reputation of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. Gross and unjust allegations were presented to the viewing public as journalistically verified fact and allowed to feed into and feed on a prejudice which has already been created by the constant focus of the media on the crimes and misdemeanours of a minority of Catholic priests.

A few weeks ago the Iona Institute, an Irish think-tank focussing on religion and family in the Irish context, found that the majority view among Irish people now is that Catholic priests and religious are responsible for one in five instances of child abuse in the country. The reality is that one in thirty of such cases are perpetrated by this group. Now that is what we call distortion.

But the really alarming thing is that we seem to be quite prepared to live with this distorting mirror and fail to recognise the lethal nature of this cancerous growth within our society. There may be people who consider that the Roman Catholic Church is an institution that we would be better off without – but getting rid of it on the basis of a gross distortion of public opinion is probably not something even the liberal intelligentsia would advocate. Houston, we have a problem – and it is not just a problem of distorting the public image of the Catholic Church. It is a problem which distorts most of the things it touches and it is a problem endemic in the culture of news, news-gatherers and news organisations.

‘The Truth in the News’

The now defunct Irish Press newspaper had as it motto, placed right under the masthead of the paper, ‘The Truth in the News’. I was very proud of that motto when I had the pleasure and privilege of training with and working as a journalist for that paper. Newspapers have a tendency to give themselves some rather meaningful if sometimes pretentious titles – The Guardian, The Daily Mirror, The Examiner, The Inquirer; Ireland even has The Impartial Reporter. At one time those certainly represented the good intentions of proprietors and journalists who tried to live by their implicit mottos of guarding the truth, reflecting the truth, examining and inquiring and impartially reporting without fear or favour. But to live and work by those principles of operation involved more than just reporting isolated facts. They were seen as expressing a commitment to present society with an honest and balanced view of itself. To do that the facts which were presented had to in some way be balanced within the context of a bigger picture. It is in this that we are now failing abysmally.

Essentially it is a ‘story’ problem. News is gathered in the form of stories and without some story there is really little news. But the story is not an end in itself. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is the objective. When this is lost sight of then the story itself can become dangerous and distorting.

A stay in hospital

All this was brought home to me very recently on a very personal level when I had to spend eight days in the care of a big – very big – Dublin hospital to undergo surgery. A week before I was admitted I heard reported on television that the hospital was having big problems. Managerial decisions had to be imposed on it from outside by the Health Service Executive which runs the Irish health service. This, a little like the broadcasting debacle above, simply fed into a sense of the overall state of dysfunction which daily and nightly news reports of health service disasters has created among Irish people. We shrug our shoulders and ask ourselves why can’t these people get their act together and organise a decent system of health care for us?

Eight days in Dublin’s Adelaide/Meath Hospital in Tallaght gave me an entirely different perspective on Ireland’s much-maligned health service. News bulletins on Irish radio and television are seldom if ever without some damning report of another mal-function in one or other of the country’s hospitals – missing files, misdiagnosed illness, and patients on trolleys for days on end – all giving an impression of near total systemic failure of the institutions entrusted with the care of the nation’s sick and sickly. The end result is an abiding impression of a health service from hell.

The truth is very different. In fact the hospital is a miracle of effective administration, of superbly professional nursing and medical care, of warmth, kindness and dedication. Except that it is not really a miracle. It is a perfectly natural phenomenon where good people go about their work showing a wonderful range of human qualities and virtues, day after day, week after week and month after month. What appalled me – to a point of anger – was the fact that out in the wider world there exists this parallel public impression of a health service in disarray. Saying this is not to deny that problems exist and are sometimes not dealt with as they should be. They do. But the distorting effect on public opinion which the emphasis these problems get in news reports is not just something regrettable, it is a travesty. In pursuing ‘the story’ in the way they do, news organisations are not mirroring reality at all, they are not guarding anyone’s interest, and they are fooling themselves if they think they are being impartial in what they do.

Truth requires the big picture

The solution to this injustice is not, of course, to ignore the problems. They must remain in focus. The solution is to widen the angle to bring in the bigger picture. Journalists must resist the inclination to spice up their stories by giving the impression that something terrible has happened, is happening or is about to happen. That clearly is part of the journalist’s instinct. But they cannot pursue it at the expense of the wider truth, the lives and integrity of ordinary people who dedicate themselves to something as beautiful and noble as this particular field of human endeavour is. It is not enough for the journalist to say that providing the bigger picture is not my job. Everyone is responsible for the truth.

The problem is a much wider one than just the health service and its institutions, or the churches and their institutions. For example, the constant reporting of crime and criminality without any attempt to give the public a feel for the overall context of the general level of well-being in our societies is another distortion and one with all sorts of consequences – creating fear, anxiety, depression and distrust – which can undermine the values by which we try to live.

The integrity of the world’s media organisations has taken a severe battering in recent times. News International’s phone-hacking scandal now being investigated by the Levenson enquiry in the UK, the Irish state broadcaster’s destruction of an innocent man’s life and reputation, are but two instances of a sorry saga. There will be more until such time as the culture surrounding the news industry begins to identify the deeper values which must underpin its service to humanity.