Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...

... another papal document is announced! Since I'm blogging from a new tablet and have not yet cracked all its intricacies, I cannot provide the link that is circulating online to the announcement by the Vatican press office. You'll find it. If you want to, that is. My betting is that by Friday we will not be able to avoid it very much. Or will we? Prepare for a two-paragraph tangent on my favoured hobby horse...

See, that's the problem with the information age. It always assumes you are ready to hear the news and that you will want to know the news. Indeed, it always assumes you need to know the news and that any news out there is good for you.

One of the major problems with all those assumptions is that the information age is absolutely indifferent to whether news is true or not. Notice the language used about false news: it is not called false but 'fake' news. Could it be that this is no misnomer?  If they called it false news, then the news consumer could rightly demand true news. But the opposite of fake is not true; the opposite of fake is authentic/original. And the problem with that Greek looking word is that it is full of German subjectivist guff about the supremacy of sincerity (not meaning to knock sincerity obviously). No, the information age does not offer true news! It offers authentic news, sincerely meant, honestly fabricated from sources verified by no lesser moral authorities than journalists, many of whom are even honest souls. But none of this produces true news; only authentic news, quality sourced and - ooh err, feel the love! - responsibly reported.  But I digress...

Assuming this announcement about a new papal encyclical is both true and authentic, my simple question is: why read the story? Why get drawn into the whole sorry storm of fawning idolisation and incoherent rage that will no doubt attend the letter's publication? We all know what will happen. Spadaro et al. will gather around to talk about a new parallel theology or a quantum interpretation of the moral law or perhaps a bio-evolutionary rereading of theandric hermeneutics or some such. They will hold the largest levers of the information pump. Meanwhile, the Christians,

...a declining band
Will point with monitory hand,

 and say what we are now accustomed to saying repeatedly, desperately, fruitlessly about Pope Francis's utterances (I here abstract from all carefully made distinctions about magisterial authority about which I profess my incompetence). Need I go on?

 I'm not advocating incidentally that the best response is one of blythe indifference - the response that no doubt 97% of the world's population will have - or a well-studied yawn. Heaven forfend.

I'm not quite sure what to label my strategy, if I can stick to it (which I doubt). But I'm minded to call it the "post-coenam" strategy. Don't panic. This is the kind of moment lived by the disciples while Christ was in prison overnight. We sometimes think - I know I'm tempted to think - that the wheels have finally come off the Catholic Church and that this papacy is proof that whatever is true, it's not what we thought. That is not a wholly unfaithful thought but it is a dangerous one without tethering it to the gospel.

In which case, in my view our patrons now are the disciples after the arrest of Jesus. Jesus is in prison; Peter has betrayed him; everything is in disarray; the glory of Palm Sunday is long gone and the sense of power from Jesus' miracles is a thing of the past, a mere dream. We've never been in such a sorry mess, you say? Well, we haven't but the disciples have. Those special friends of Jesus with hardly two acts of courage to rub together in the early hours of Good Friday. Is that over dramatising things? Maybe. But I've known people give up on the Church seemingly for less.

So, friends, that's my advice (not that you were asking). Walk this mile with the disciples. Perhaps it's better to call it the post-Gethsemane hour. The only question now is whether you are going to stick with him.

We keep looking for light in the wrong places; that's human. But if you want to face the probable debacle of this Thursday with some peace, don't follow the news trails.  Read the gospel. The age of innocence is long gone.

Prayer request

Please pray for the 9 month old nephew of a friend of mine who must have an emergency heart operation on Wednesday morning. His name is Gioele.

Sawing off the branch on which I'm sitting

Anyone who has read this blog before will know I have a downer on digital culture. I am of course thereby thrust unwillingly, albeit not unconsciously, into the classic position of the man who is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting. So be it, say I. If it is so, it will not be the least absurd of all the contradictions that circulate the globe in a digital format.

Better that than other vices which existed prior to the internet and will always attend those who try to communicate in any way imaginable (which is all the human race!): the vices I refer to are a failure to be conscious of one's tools of communication; a failure to be aware that they shape what we say and even what we think; and the failure to admit that humans always have an ambiguous relationship with their tools. Errors or vices, say you? The former very often lead to the latter.

I know what you're thinking, so stop it! A bad workman always blames his tools. That may be true but its truth is not nearly so close to home as that of the lesser used adage: we make our tools and our tools make us. What kind of man does the internet make? That is the question. That is all the more the question if, as today, we spend so much of our time thinking, feeling and operating through its channels.

None of this would matter perhaps until we get to the question of whether the man made by the internet conforms to the man planned in the mind of God. Here the question is not whether the internet can be a good source of information or even a weapon of leverage in the information age. The question is whether immersion in it is compatible with our call to wisdom, the greatest of the gifts of the Holy Ghost and the one that makes us most like God.

Saw-saw-saw.  I know. Some questions are best left to simmer on their own.

And another thing...

My wife tells me I often pause during conversation, even during sentences, for an unnervingly long period. Perhaps never so long as eleven months, however! I did promise at the end of my last post (16 April 2017) that I might not be blogging very much but nearly a whole year is perhaps an exaggeration. Is there anybody there? said the blogger, knocking at the moonlight screen.

Several years ago I published a long extract from Georges Bernanos on the topic of the differences between Martin Luther and St Francis. The burden of the extract was all about how one reacts to corruption in the Church and how one kind of reaction - the obvious kind - threatens to lead us down the same path as Luther. Luther had a point about Church corruption; not that that was his only preoccupation. But his answer to it was a damaging as St Francis's was beneficial. St Francis's response was not to go around the place scourging the evil doers. It was, to paraphrase Bernanos, to return to the fountains of sanctity.

Bernanos could afford to be wild in his rhetoric. He didn't have a Church to run. The Franciscans were split in the early years - not to say more recently - by the competing interpretations of just how far one can take the demands of evangelical poverty: fountains of sanctity then or sources of dispute? I suppose what Bernanos might have said to those arguing for the utter necessity of competent administration is that it can only ever be one small element in what is the wider, deeper and more challenging vocation of being called to follow the Lord.

But I digress. I only wanted to say that I decided out of the blue this morning to start blogging again. Anyone who has read me over the years will know what I think of the Church's current administration. Indeed, my strap line beneath the blog's title refers to it. But if I come back here now, it is only in the spirit of Bernanos's St Francis. I said some time ago we are living in a post-dubia Church. Indeed, we still are. But why should it also belong to the dubia-refusers?

One of the many insights of French cultural anthropologist René Girard - among some silly things - is that if we allow our actions to be shaped by reaction to our aggressors, we unconsciously risk imitating them. Much better, therefore, to adopt the St Francis's agenda. Dip into the sources of sanctity and share them with others. As I come back to blogging, I would much rather adopt that strategy than any other.

The waves crashing around us have sunk many a small ship in the last couple of years. The going has been hard. The questions many and complex.  Not a few people have taken as their gospel point of reference the story of Jesus asleep in the boat in a storm while the apostles, hardened fishermen though some of them are, get increasingly desperate. It is the Lord himself who tells us not to be afraid, although I have to say my feeling is less fear and more like nausea.

Still, the solutions are now what they have always been. Love, duty, joy .. and no panicking. Easier said than done.

Still, for what it's worth, 'Ahoy there, shipmates.' I'm back, at least for a while.

The Magdalen Hour

I love early morning on Easter Sunday. It is the Magdalen Hour, the hour of peace restored and joy renewed.

It is the hour of recognition: coming about not through some automated exercise in information collection - Mary didn't Google Christ after all! -  or through some methodologically sound collection of verifiable data subjected to the most rigorous examination and deconstruction... certainly not! As contemporary French author Fabrice Hadjadj tells us in The Resurrection: Experience Life in the Risen Christ,  it came simply through Christ's call across a quiet spring garden just stirring after dawn: 

'Mariam!'

'Rabonni!'

It is one of the only exchanges that St John preserves in Hebrew.

I don't know why the translator or the editors chose such an appalling title for Hadjadj's book. The French title is Resurrection, mode d'emploi (Resurrection: a user's guide), which tells us two things: first, what the book is about (the Resurrection) and, second, that it is consciously setting out to parody the infamous classic Suicide, a User's Guide, a taboo volume that came out in the 1980s and a go-to self-help book for suicides before the internet took over that particularly evil role.

But I digress...

The Magdalen Hour - the counterstroke to the hour of darkness announced on Thursday evening by St Luke (22:53).

These moments are comforting in a week when we've seen flashes of conflict in the Middle East and the Korean peninsula. It doesn't do to feed oneself a diet of geopolitical panic. That has not stopped us redoubling our prayers for world peace to the Immaculate Heart of that Mary whose own hour - according to St Ignatius and I'm sure various others - came even before Magdalen's.

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Hadjadj's book also contains another gem which has occasioned me much thought this Lent. His first chapter is actually a reflection on the soldiers who took money from the High Priests to lie about what they saw at the Resurrection. It seems this fact is often passed over in commentaries on the gospel but Hadjadj points out very adeptly that there is something universally relevant about the opposition between belief in the Resurrection, and the getting and spending of some other token in place of that belief. I suppose the Old Testament calls this idolatry, although we hardly recognise that as a metaphor for our own practices any more. Fools that we are...

Different versions of last night's Collect show this. The words 'puram tibi exhibeamus servitutem' are translated 'that we may render to Thee a pure service' by some older translations, but 'that they may render you undivided service' in at least one modern translation. Undivided service is what it's all about. How often - I articulate Hadjadj's thought no doubt in a garbled way - do our hearts get involved in the trading of affection for imaginary benefits, like those soldiers who let their desire for money get the better of the truth they had witnessed at dawn (Matthew 28:15).

We tend to think of the conspiracy predating Christ's death. But St Matthew's account of the High Priests' actions after the Resurrection suggest they are still at it afterwards. If it took gall to conspire against Christ before he was slaughtered; how much worse was it for them when they heard from the mouths of these soldiers that the Temple had indeed been rebuilt in three days. Let us hope for their sake that the Chief Priests simply did not believe the guards; but in that case why bribe them, rather than punishing them for lying?

But we are all conspirators in fact, actors in a grand auto-destructive plot: promising ourselves this or that benefit at the cost (and what cost!) of the truth we have learned and professed belief in. We do not know the puram servitutem. Our hearts are still divided by an affection for those coins - name your poison - that will block up the door to the opened tomb. Who will roll the coin away?

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I don't know how long this blog can stagger on for. I'm increasingly committed to digital minimalism and am more inclined to simply dig my own field rather than spraying my thoughts over the internet. The single most fruitful thing we could all do is to cut ourselves off from the net and spend the time we would have wasted on it in prayer, reading and reflection. I have been teetering on the edge of this contradiction too long now to remain a committed blogger.

The challenge instead - the challenge I set myself - is to find the things that bring nourishment to our own souls and those of our families. So little of that can depend on a microchip. The neo-scholastic naive reductionism about the neutrality of technology has hurt us all long enough.

But let me finish on a happier note. One of the joys of today is the music of the day Mass. There are few more perfect hymns in the Liber Usualis than the Victimae Paschali Laudes. It is the soundtrack of the Magdalen Hour. Dic nobis Maria quid vidisti in via?

She can tell us of course and indeed she does. But it doesn't matter what we hear, unless we prefer it to all our big data and wretched bit coins.

Happy Easter.

Deep work, Sertillanges and the temptations of digital culture

What a difference three weeks make! Well, a small difference here and there. The guerre improbable, paix impossible state we achieved by mid-January seems to be rumbling on. Cardinal Mueller at least appears to want to stand on the right side of the question, even if for now it is only through TV interviews and the like.

One cannot help be drawn back to the landing site of Amoris Laetitia's unexploded bomb. I call it unexploded because whatever the crushed buildings and the crater beneath it, it has not yet done all the damage it can and probably will do. The latest rumours of bad-things-to-come include women deacons to mark the anniversary of the Reformation and Vatican III. The former I believe, the latter I find highly improbably. Still, Vatican II was improbable, so who can tell? If any pope since Paul VI is capable of organising the three ring circus of a universal council, it's Pope Francis.

All that being said, the question on my mind is more or less the same question as we always face: how do we bear fruit in a time of crisis? There is an awful effect of escalation in such moments that is as tempting as the original forbidden fruit. Let me take an example. What the pope is up to, according to my lights, is insufferable. I hardly need explain why here. But I cannot see how that could justify gulping down the name-calling, mouth-foaming wormwood that passes for commentary in some circles. Sure, Jesus called the Pharisees a brood of Vipers and Whitened Sepulchres. But he also knew everyman's inner thoughts and could walk on water. We are enjoined to come after the Lord or to be perfect as our Heavenly Father, but not to pretend we are the Lord or that we can dole out judgment and justice in the same way. Leave that to him. We can only hurt ourselves in so doing.

Yet, as I say, the real question is about how we bear fruit in a difficult time. Our first response these days is to be up-to-date on all the latest developments. It is the information age, or so it is labelled, and to be LinkedIn, Twittered and PM'ed seem as indispensable as breathing, eating and drinking. Every age lives crises through its own cultural matrices, and the glory and misfortune of our age is to live these things mostly through a social media feed.

Nevertheless, the crazier things get out there - the more barking mad the rumours of Francis's next stunt become, the more the ranks of AL's defenders swell - the calmer and saner we must all try to be. Living the crisis through the Internet seems inevitable because, well, how else can we get our information? That is true of course to some degree.

But the thing about the Internet, the thing that not enough people are yet prepared to admit, is that most of us live in the Internet as a swamp into which we are continually sucked, rather than as a river into which we dip for what we need. We are driven to open our feeds not as if we are sipping at tea cups, but gulping like hungry chicks after our parents' regurgitated food.  What we want to know may be important - rather like nourishment is important - but how we access it is suspect.

I have been thinking about this all the more after reading Cal Newport's Deep Work. Read it you should, putting aside the rather grinding self-interest that drives Newport. His starting point is simple. In an age where automisation and robotisation risk destroying major areas of the job market, only high-performing knowledge workers will be able to make themselves indispensable. So much for the self interest.

What follows is a wonderful exploration of how to restore the capacity for deep work in the age of social media. Newport, a computer scientist by profession, calls himself a digital minimalist and has all the latest psychological research on the nature and performance of attention at his fingertips. One of his key arguments - which he proves eloquently and convincingly for my tastes - is that if you want to work deeply, you have to get off digital media and stay off it most of the time. Email too needs a severe reining in, within the limits of your professional duties of course. The capacity of these technologies to disrupt and fragment attention is extraordinary.

I feel daft writing this now on a blog. Am I not calling my readers to precisely this kind of fragmentation? Well, no! But we are all in danger of it. Let everyone look to their own conscience in this regard. One correlation I draw from Newport's cautious remarks on digital withdrawal is this: if you have to get on the Internet, don't do it with avidity. Go in, get your information and get out before the swirl of hyperlink currents sweeps your attention into a literal cloud of unknowing.

One of the most interesting references in Newport's book is to Fr Sertillanges's The Intellectual Life.  I must say I was taken aback to find a reference to Sertillanges in a book by an MIT galactico, but there you have it. Sertillanges was a French Dominican of the generation of Garrigou Lagrange or perhaps slightly older. His What Jesus Saw from the Cross is reasonably well known. How Newport came across him I have no idea. Nevertheless, it struck me as fascinating that in order to find an intellectual path out of the attentional chaos of digital culture, Newport should alight on a practitioner in the Thomistic tradition.

There is a tantalizing dilemma for us all in such lessons. We uber-Catholics are unconsciously proud of our Catholic heritage and roots, as well as jumping mad about the current wave of ecclesiastical vandalism. Yet in some ways we hardly make room for our own heritage. We ought to be the first to abandon our routers and smart phones, and yet we find in the Internet a crucial source of information and encouragement that we do not fight alone.

My sense of this question is that somehow it cannot last. Baptizing the Internet may turn out in the end to have been as misguided as those people who tried to turn rave parties into Christian services.

The Church's Cold War

I was reading today about Raymond Aron's post-war work Le Grand Schisme. Aron was a leading French intellectual who stood not for any extreme but rather for a secular (in the French sense), moderate consensus. This was at a time when many of France's leading intellectuals were either tainted by association with the hard-right, Nazi-collaborating Vichy government of the war years or else cosy-ing up to Soviet Communism like the myopic Jean-Paul Sartre. In any case, Aron came up with one of the formulae that helped define the Cold War at the end of the 1940s, and it went by way of this delightful juxtaposition: paix impossible, guerre improbable.

The Cold War made for an impossible peace. Many of the protagonists on either side of the Iron Curtain, at least when Aron forged his expression, were resolved to oppose implacably the ideas and efforts of their enemies. Let's indulge in a little schematisation for the sake of brevity. The Soviet bloc wanted to see the proletarian revolution spread everywhere; the West, on the other hand, having just defeated one dictator, were not about to embrace another dictator of a different stripe. Paix impossible.

And yet at the same time it was unlikely they would actually go to war. Indulge in a little skirmish via client states? Yes. Agitate and aggravate the other side? Well, of course. But actually initiate the steps for an all-out conflict? Not likely. The costs were too high in reality, and nobody who had survived the Second World War would have been inclined to disagree with the virtues of an uneasy peace. Or, in this case, a state of improbable war.

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Having read Aron's formula, I could not help but reflect on the post-dubia situation we now find ourselves in. Is this not a case of paix impossible? Those who have doubts about Amoris Laetitia are not looking for the correction of its punctuation. The ambiguities of the text raise questions that touch the very heart of a handful of divinely revealed or Church-proclaimed doctrines. On the other side, no liberal is going to want to give up on the concessions that have just been squeezed through the Vatican approval machine. We know very well that they have no intention of stopping at the facilitating of irregular unions. All the other plethora of irregular situations (and invincibly ignorant consciences) must also taste of God's mercy so long and so wrongly denied them.

But then we also are in a moment of guerre improbable.  Francis is not going to make martyrs out of the four dubia-bearing cardinals. He still reeks enough of traditional pietism to offend large swathes of the liberal intelligentsia. At the same time he will offer no clarification that states clearly where he stands on the question or, better still, what the Church firmly and truly believes.

On the other side, I just do not believe that the four cardinals will do anything beyond offering a 'formal correction' that will probably be of the mildest kind. Cardinal Muller's recent intervention has gone some way towards spiking their guns. What kind of formal correction could carry immediate, practical weight - we know it will have theological substance but that is not the same thing - without the backing of the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith? This might not pertain if there are a substantial number of cardinals who associate themselves with a formal correction, but the fear of schism will ensure their numbers are small.

No, to me, it looks set not for a cathartic denouement with movie-style resolutions and relief all round, but rather a long, slow burn of confusion; a state, as Aron said, of guerre improbable.

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Paix impossible, guerre improbable.  Fasten your seat belts, but not because it is going to be a bumpy ride. More because it will be an interminable traffic jam, and we might just fall asleep at the wheel.