Woodlawn is a potent mix of Deep South high school football set against a backdrop of racial tension and the early 1970s Jesus movement

While there are all kinds of things that can rightly divide secular moviemaking from films made by Christian genre movie producers, high school football is the game field they both play, often scoring box office touchdowns on. Perhaps in no small part because Friday night high school football is in some ways best thought of as a secular religion south of the Mason Dixon Line. High school football teams usually play between eight and 10 games in a season, starting after Labor Day. If teams have successful league seasons, they advance to regional or state playoff tournaments. Some schools in Texas play as many as 15 games if they advance to the state championship game. Most high school teams play in a regional league, although some travel 50 to 100 miles to play opponents.

Ranker, the social consumer web platform launched in August 2009, designed around collaborative linked datasets, individual list-making and voting, which attracts 20 million unique visitors per month, in fact, has a category simply called “The Best High School Football Movies.”

It’s a pretty impressive list.

Ranked number one is Friday Night Lights the 2004 film directed by Peter Berg, which documents the coach and players of the 1988 season Permian High School Panthers football team in Odessa, Texas and their run for the state championship, based on the 1990 book, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H. G. Bissinger. The film won the Best Sports Movie ESPY Award.

Number two on Ranker’s list is Remember the Titans, made in 2000, and based on the true story of African-American coach Herman Boone, portrayed by Denzel Washington as he tries to introduce a racially diverse team at recently but voluntarily integrated T. C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia in 1971. It was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.

Woodlawn, released last October, is also a true story and in some ways a faith-based version of Remember the Titans, although Woodlawn is set slightly later (two years) and is situated in at Woodlawn High School in Birmingham, Alabama in 1973, a decade after Birmingham had Bull Connor as commissioner of public safety in 1961 when the civil rights “Freedom Riders” bused to the South, and where on Sept. 15, 1963 a bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church, with a predominantly black congregation that served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Four young girls were killed and many other people injured.

Woodlawn opens with a prologue set three years earlier on Sept. 12, 1970 where legendary University of Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, the Crimson Tide’s iconic fedora-wearing legend, well played by Jon Voight, tries to ease tensions by inviting John McKay and his University of Southern California (USC) Trojans team to play at Legion Field in Birmingham, marking the first time a fully integrated team had come to play Alabama in the South. The Crimson Tide had one black player at the time. The game was a 42-21 Trojans rout.

Cut to three years later, when Woodlawn High School becomes integrated, with football coach Tandy Gerelds, played by Nic Bishop, welcoming the arrival of such talented black players as Tony Nathan, played by Caleb Castille.

Hank Erwin, played by Sean Astin, just sort of shows up at Woodlawn High School, introducing himself as a “sports chaplain” and asking to address the team. Tandy Gerelds reluctantly agrees. In his impassioned speech Hank asks the players to “choose Jesus” and, much to the coach’s amazement, most of the players agree, including Tony Nathan, who would go onto become a tailback for Alabama and later the Miami Dolphins. Erwin’s sons, Birmingham brothers Jon and Andrew Erwin, directed Woodlawn.

To understand the somewhat enigmatic self-proclaimed sports chaplain Hank Erwin, it is helpful to know something of the “Jesus movement,” which began on the west coast of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, spreading primarily throughout North America, Europe, and Central America. Members of the movement were often called “Jesus people,” or “Jesus freaks.”

Its predecessor, the charismatic movement, had already been in full swing for about a decade. It involved mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics who testified to supernatural experiences similar to those recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, especially speaking in tongues. Both these movements were calling the church back to what they called early Christianity and recovery of the gifts of the Spirit.

TIME magazine had a 1966 cover asking “Is God Dead?” They had another cover story in 1971 on “The Jesus Revolution.” And just one year later, in June 1972, more than 80,000 high school and college students gathered in the Cotton Bowl Stadium in Dallas for Explo ’72, organized by Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru) to celebrate the person of Christ and mobilize youth to take the Good News to friends and family when they returned to their hometowns. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, led the initiative and Billy Graham, now 97, and the most important Christian crusade and revival evangelist of the latter half of the 2oth century, preached at it. And Hank Erwin was there for it.

The dramatic tension on and off the field is elevated by events such as Nathan refusing to shake Alabama governor George Wallace’s hand during an awards dinner, citing Wallace’s opposition to school integration, and Tandy getting in trouble with the local school board because of the team’s religious activities, including Hank Erwin getting the microphone plug pulled while delivering the Lord’s Prayer before the history-making 1973 game that attracted 42,000 spectators (another 20,000 were turned away), only to have the thousands of spectators spontaneously recite it for him.

Peter J. Leithart, a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and is president of the Theopolis Institute, wrote in a review last September after an advance screening of the film in Birmingham in the Catholic journal First Things that “the acting is good, especially Jon Voight as Bear Bryant, Nic Bishop as Woodlawn’s coach, Tandy Gerelds, and Caleb Castille who plays Nathan in his first film. Technically, evangelical films have come a long way.”

Caleb Castille was originally hired as a stunt double for the British actor who was picked to play Tony Nathan, but visa complications left the Erwins scrambling to find a last-minute replacement. Only then did they discover Caleb’s audition tape.

Caleb Castille won two national championship rings with the University of Alabama before he sensed God was calling him out of football to pursue an acting career instead. His father, Jeremiah Castille, played with Tony Nathan on the 1979 Alabama Crimson Tide national championship team.

Still, Leithart was left dissatisfied by Woodlawn. “I think there are a number of reasons for that dissatisfaction, but at base the problem is theological (ain’t it always).

“Evangelicalism is a word religion. I’m a big fan of words, but even talking pictures aren’t fundamentally about words. It’s no accident that the hall of fame for directors has a large share of Catholics (Fellini, Hitchcock, Scorsese), Orthodox (Tarkovsky, Eisenstein), and sacramental Protestants (Bergman, Malick). This can’t be the whole story, of course, since aniconic Judaism has produced some of the world’s great filmmakers. But there’s something to it: Evangelical films over-explain, over-talk. They don’t trust the images to do the work.

“I suspect a more sacramentally oriented evangelicalism, an evangelicalism more attuned to types and symbols in scripture, would make better films.

“Evangelicalism is also a conversionist faith. The key crisis of life is the moment of commitment to Christ. In Woodlawn, most of the characters convert early in the film, necessarily so because the story is about the effect of the revival on race relations. But that means that the line of character development is flat. The really crucial character development has taken place in the moment of conversion. The main exception is Coach Gerelds, and not surprisingly, it’s Coach Gerelds who ends up being the dramatic focus of the film, the character whose emotions and motivations we get to know best.

“Theologically speaking, character development is ‘sanctification.’ A conversionist form of Christianity places less emphasis on sanctification than on conversion and justification. In films, that translates into drastic oversimplification of human psychology. For evangelicals, there are only two sets of motivations, as there are two kinds of people: Saved and unsaved. While that is ultimately true, it is not the whole story.”

Woodlawn, distributed by Pure Flix Entertainment, owned by David. A.R. White, raised in a small Mennonite farming town outside of Dodge City, Kansas, brothers Kevin and Bobby Downes, and Michael Scott, did impressively better perhaps with the very secular Rotten Tomatoes, which is by no means always kind to either evangelical or high school football films, and is the leading online aggregator of movie reviews from a mix of professional critics and its community of users, with an overall score of 77 per cent, and an audience score of 82 per cent (earning a “full popcorn bucket”) meaning the movie received 3.5 stars or higher by Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes users. Rotten Tomatoes noted under “Critics consensus: No consensus yet.” Rotten Tomatoes is part of Fandango’s portfolio of digital properties.

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Christian Cinema, Popular Culture and Ideas

Dissed by the secular media and New Catholic Generation’s Catholics Watch, Pure Flix Entertainment rocked the box office with opening of God’s Not Dead 2

The April fool’s joke this year apparently was on the secular skeptics, smarmy and oh-so-hip young Catholic religiös from New Catholic Generation’s Catholics Watch, and myriad other naysaying Nellies. God’s Not Dead 2, which opened in the United States Friday, April 1, rocked the pop culture theater box office with a three-day weekend opening of $7.624 million in box office receipts as of Sunday, April 3, according to Box Office Mojo, the leading online box-office reporting service, operated by Seattle-based Internet Movie Database, (IMDb), which is owned by Amazon.com, and widely considered the number one movie website in the world.

That was a good enough showing for God’s Not Dead 2 to finish fourth that weekend behind Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Zootopia and My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2. All in all, not too shabby, and suggesting some crossover appeal into the ranks of the unchurched. The original God’s Not Dead in 2014 went on to gross more than $60 million in the United States.

Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian’s film critic, huffed in his April 28 review: “The almighty may not be dead, but Nietzsche is rolling in his grave. Angry, smug self-pity is becoming the keynote of the God’s Not Dead Christian movie franchise. This new drama is about how Christians are threatened and oppressed in … well, where do you think? Iraq? Syria? Places where millennia of Christian traditions are genuinely being trashed and their believers in real danger? Erm, no – this film is set in the U.S., where Christians are crushed under the jackboot of sneering liberals and pantomime-villain atheists.” The storyline for God’s Not Dead 2 (you can watch a YouTube trailer here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxz-Y-c2UUc) has public high school history teacher Grace Wesley (played by Melissa Joan Hart) responding to a student’s question about Jesus’ teachings, as they relate to the non-violent teachings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. The teacher’s response acknowledges that “the writer of the Gospel of Matthew records Jesus as saying, ‘You have heard it said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” In response to another student’s comment, she adds some additional remarks about those who would die for what they believe.

By the end of the day, the teacher finds herself facing the wrath of the principal, the school board, and her union representative, after a text message from yet another student in the class finds its way to the first student’s parents, who are irate.

Offered the chance to apologize for mentioning Jesus in the classroom, she refuses, asserting that she had done nothing wrong in answering the question. In short order, she is put on leave without pay and a proxy civil action on behalf of the school board by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) follows, as they attempt to have her fired and her teacher’s certificate revoked.

Now, truth be told, I’m a fan of the Guardian. The London-based newspaper is one of the truly serious remaining English-language titles internationally. And Bradshaw’s review is not without merit for pointing out places like Iraq and Syria where Christians are undergoing real persecution today. Point taken. But at the same time it would be naïve to suggest an overt reference to Christianity in American classrooms today is not somehow a potentially high-octane mix that could land a teacher in a major conflagration. So while the point may be overdrawn in God’s Not Dead 2, it, too, has merit and isn’t simply a matter of paranoia on the so-called Christian Right, as some secular liberals would have you believe. The Oberlin Review, established in 1874, and the student newspaper of Oberlin College in Ohio, called God’s Not Dead 2 “a Slice of Trump-Era Propaganda” in a headline for an April 14 review by arts editor Christian Bolles, going on in the piece to call it a “nauseatingly unnecessary follow-up” to the original movie.

In the original God’s Not Dead, released by Pure Flix Entertainment in March 2014 (watch a YouTube trailer here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMjo5f9eiX8), Josh Wheaton, an evangelical college student (played by Shane Harper) enrols in a philosophy class taught by Professor Jeffrey Radisson (played by Kevin Sorbo), an atheist, who demands his students sign a declaration that “God is dead” to pass. Josh is the only student who refuses to sign. Radisson requires Josh to debate the topic with him but agrees to let the class members decide the winner. I admit the cosmology, not to mention the philosophy, is pretty convoluted in places to be fully persuasive as Christian apologetics, but when it comes to evolution versus creationism this is a very old and convoluted debate in America, no matter which side you find yourself on. While the debate over competing theories of Darwinian evolution and biblical creationism was famously showcased during the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee in 1925, the resolution of the matter – much to the surprise of secularists who had thought it settled for 50 years – is no closer today than it was in 1925, or when it reignited around 1975.

If anything, the issue is more contested in more venues in more ways than ever, with “intelligent design” now added to the mix in recent years, much to the dismay of secular scientists, other academics and many public school science teachers.

Evolution is the theory that generations of animal and plant species alter and transform over time in response to changes in their environment and circumstances, a process known as natural selection.

Intelligent design is the proposition that scientific evidence exists to show that life in its multitudinous forms was caused by the direction of a higher intelligence. In 1925, prosecutors charged John Thomas Scopes, a high school science teacher in Dayton, Tenn., with teaching evolution, which had just been outlawed. Represented by the famed defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow, Scopes was found guilty and fined after a high-profile trial, but the conviction was later overturned on a technicality, although the statute prohibiting the teaching of evolution remained on Tennessee’s law books until its repeal in 1967.

William Jennings Bryan, a well-known Populist, former Nebraska congressman and three-time candidate for the United States presidency, who delivered one of the most famous and fiery orations in American history almost 30 years earlier in 1896 with his “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, denouncing a gold standard monetary policy, argued the prosecution’s case for the State of Tennessee.

Saturday Night Live (SNL), which was perhaps last truly funny around the time it debuted on NBC in 1975 – about the same time the Darwinian evolution and biblical creationism debate reignited – parodied God’s Not Dead 2 last month, which while fair game, came as a surprise probably to exactly no one. Maybe that’s also why SNL last night, 30 years after its debut, brought back former cast member Dana Carvey to resurrect his “Church Lady” sketch, which he performed as character Enid Strict hosting her talk show Church Chat between 1986 and 1993, to deal now with a satanic Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

New Catholic Generation administrator Renée Shumay, joined by several of her young smirking cohorts, have done at last count at least three Catholics Watch vids on Gods Not Dead 2 since January, two based on trailers, and a more recent one based on the full movie, each being more smarmy than the one before. New Catholic Generation bills itself as a “Catholic teen initiative that uses YouTube to spread the Catholic faith.” God help us. Catholics kids are oh-so-cool don’t you know. And we wonder why evangelical Protestant Christians sometimes question whether Catholics are really Christians?

Ohio-based vlogger Shumay, who has worked for the last year for Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), is an alumnus of the proud-to-be-orthodox über Catholic Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, I’m embarrassed as a co-religionist to say. If you are in doubt, check them out for yourself at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcY_wn_6g7E and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0cu_NXEXuU

It’s a very Catholic Thing, the whole “we’re-the-one-true-Church-and-you’re-not” sort of petty one-upmanship. Unfortunately.

Maybe someone should get the word out to Shumay and her New Catholic Generation hotshots that Protestant-bashing masquerading as pop culture criticism is not so cool in 2016.

While it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as the sex-and-morality hot-button issues of his pontificate, although it does garner some coverage, one of the most interesting facets of Pope Francis in action is to watch is his truly remarkable rapprochement with Protestants, particularly evangelicals of all denominations, including his now famous impromptu iPhone video message two years ago for Kenneth Copeland, and other influential evangelicals, done during a January 2014 three-hour breakfast meeting chat at the Vatican with his close personal friend Bishop Tony Palmer, 48, of the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches, a close personal friend of the Pope’s, dating back to their days in Buenos Aires in Argentina. Tragically, Palmer died about six months later on July 20, 2014 in hospital following hours of surgery after a motorcycle accident.

Pope Francis, along with his meetings in 2014 with Palmer, and Copeland, co-host of Believer’s Voice of Victory, also met with James and Betty Robison, co-hosts of the Life Today television program, Rev. Geoff Tunnicliff, chief executive office of the World Evangelical Alliance; well-known Canadian evangelical leader Brian Stiller, Rev. Thomas Schirrmacher, also from the World Evangelical Alliance, and Rev. John Arnott and his wife, Carol, co-founders of Partners for Harvest ministries in Toronto. That meeting lasted almost three hours and included a private luncheon with Pope Francis.

God’s not dead. But Catholic “we’re-the-one-true-Church-and-you’re-not” sort of petty one-upmanship of those working in the evangelical Protestant Christian filmmaking genre should be. If young Catholics’ big knocks against that Christian movie genre are too many heavy-handed theological scripts, clunky acting or cheesy sets that do little more than preach to the choir, we eagerly await their contributions alongside Pure Flix Entertainment to the movie canon.

Criticize or evangelize?

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History

Only historical amnesia prevents us from remembering 1938

It was the age of demagoguery in American politics. And, no, it wasn’t the 2016 Republican Party primaries and caucuses. It was the year 1938.

In an age-before-Trump, you need only to look back to the 1930s and the Canadian-born “Radio Priest” Father Charles Coughlin, from Hamilton, Ontario, later based at Royal Oak, Michigan in the Archdiocese of Detroit, and the anti-Communist and equally anti-Semitic Christian Front he would be the inspiration for in November 1938, although he didn’t personally belong to the organization, and denied that he was anti-Semitic. Historical opinion is divided on whether, or to what extent, Coughlin was anti-Semitic, but it is an uncontested fact his weekly magazine Social Justice reprinted in weekly installments in 1938 the fraudulent and notoriously anti-Semitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery first published in 1903 that purports to expose a Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the world.

Coughlin’s radio show was phenomenally popular. His office received up to 80,000 letters per week from listeners at its peak in the early to mid-1930s. By 1934, Coughlin was the most prominent Roman Catholic speaker on political and financial issues in the United States, with a far broader base of popular support than any bishop or cardinal at the time, with a radio audience that reached tens of millions of people every week. Historian Alan Brinkley wrote in his 1982 book Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression that by 1934 Coughlin was receiving more than 10,000 letters every day” and that “his clerical staff at times numbered more than a hundred.” Coughlin foreshadowed modern talk radio and televangelism.

In addition to his anti-Communist stance, and leaving himself open rightly or wrongly to accusations of antisemitism, Coughlin wasn’t the only clergyman to at least also flirt and even dance at times with Spanish fascism, German National Socialism and demagoguery in the United States in the late 1930s. American Protestant clergyman Frank Buchman founded Moral Re-Armament (MRA) in 1938, as an international moral and spiritual movement with Europe rearming militarily on the brink of the Second World War. “The crisis is fundamentally a moral one,” he said. “The nations must rearm morally,” Buchman said in London on May 29, 1938. “Moral recovery is essentially the forerunner of economic recovery. Moral recovery creates not crisis but confidence and unity in every phase of life.”

Buchman had earlier also founded the Oxford Group, in some important ways the predecessor to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Both the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament, under Buchman’s leadership, faced similar charges to what Coughlin did at times; and again, like in the case of Coughlin, historical opinion is divided, but on the evidence it is clear the German Nazi leadership was wary of Buchman and denounced Moral Re-Armament, which went onto do significant post-war reconstruction work in West Germany in the late 1940s, after the Second World War ended.

We barely know their names today, yet Coughlin had tens of millions of radio listeners in the United States, while Buchman influenced political elites worldwide.

And the legacy of Moral Re-Armament, close to home here in Northern Manitoba, is not insignificant. Just largely invisible.

Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas Archbishop emeritus Sylvain Lavoie, whose archdiocese includes Thompson, toured during university for seven months with “Up with People,” founded by American J. Blanton Belk in 1965, as a conservative counterweight to attract young people during the turbulent Sixties.

Belk was expected to be the heir apparent to Peter D. Howard, a British journalist, who succeeded Buchman as leader of Moral Re-Armament in 1961, but Belk broke away to incorporate Up With People as a non-profit at the encouragement of then Republican U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower, who urged Belk to distance himself from Moral Re-Armament.

And Winnipeg-born Bob Lowery, for years the Winnipeg Free Press’ Thompson-based correspondent, in a life before journalism and living in Northern Manitoba, and immediately after the Second World War ended in 1945, had joined the Moral Re-Armament crusade to help rebuild war-torn Germany, staying there for more than 20 years until 1969.

During the Second World War he had served with the Royal Canadian Voluntary Reserve. Lowery had earned a philosophy undergraduate degree from the University of Manitoba in 1937.

Robert Newton Lowery was inducted by then governor general Roméo LeBlanc as a Member of the Order of Canada in 1996. In the citation accompanying the honour, LeBlanc noted Lowery was “known for his love of the North and has demonstrated genuine concern for the residents of northern Manitoba, working to redress social, economic and cultural differences through his involvement in all aspects of community life.”

In 1997 he was recognized with a Silver Eagle Outstanding Citizen Award from the Indigenous Women’s Collective of Manitoba. A park is also named after him here in Thompson.

He had moved to northern Manitoba in 1969, the same year he left Moral Re-Armament in West Germany, and become a correspondent for the Winnipeg Free Press, based here in Thompson.

In 1982 Lowery published the book The Unbeatable Breed: People and Events of Northern Manitoba in collaboration with photographer Murray McKenzie.

Lowery retired in 1997. He died at Norway House on Dec. 17, 2000.

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Catholics, Lent

Fat chance, last chance: Fat Tuesday

080206-N-7869M-057 Atlantic Ocean (Feb. 6, 2008) Electronics Technician 3rd Class Leila Tardieu receives the sacramental ashes during an Ash Wednesday celebration aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp (LHD 1). U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Brian May (Released)

Fat Tuesday. Mardi Gras. Máirt Inide. Dydd Mawrth Ynyd. Fastnacht. Fastelavn. Sprengidagur. Güdisdienstag. Vastlapäev. Užgavėnės. Fettisdagen. Laskiainen. Shrove Tuesday. Call it what you will, but make sure you eat – and eat big and eat rich – on this moveable feast, based on the lunar cycles of the moon, and celebrated around the world, falling this year on Feb. 9 – the last day of shrovetide before the penitential season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which is its colloquial name. Dating to the A.D. 900s, the official name is the Day of Ashes.

“Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return,” will be said by Catholic priests in churches around the world Wednesday, as they make the distinctive of signing the foreheads of the faithful with the sign of the cross in ashes, blessed by a priest and made from burning palm fronds which have been saved from last year’s Palm Sunday masses. Blessed ashes having been used in such religious rituals since the time of Moses.

The historical reason that pancakes are associated with the day preceding Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent is that the 40 days of Lent form a period of liturgical fasting, during which only the plainest foodstuffs are eaten by the devout. Therefore, rich ingredients such as eggs, milk, and sugar are disposed of immediately prior to the commencement of the fast.

Pancakes and doughnuts are an efficient way of using up these perishable goods. The word shrove is a past tense of the English verb “shrive,” which means to obtain absolution for one’s sins by confessing and doing penance.

Shrove Tuesday gets its name from the shriving or confession that Anglo-Saxon Christians made immediately before Lent, a season of soul-searching and repentance.

For Roman Catholics, Lent runs from Ash Wednesday on Feb. 10 up to but excluding the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday on March 24. The evening of Holy Thursday is already part of the Good Friday liturgical day, the first of the three days of the paschal triduum, so it is not liturgically a part of Lent in the Roman Catholic Church, although it is still reckoned as part of the “40 days of Lent,” because the paschal triduum begins the evening of Holy Thursday and concludes with the evening vespers of Easter. The triduum includes Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and reaches it high point at the Great Easter Vigil. The name “Maundy” comes from the Latin antiphon Mandatum Novum, meaning “a new mandate.” The new mandate from Jesus is taken from John 13:34: “Love one another as I have loved you.”

In many mainline Protestant churches, Maundy Thursday is still liturgically part of Lent since many do not recognize the triduum as distinct from Lent.

In regards to fasting and abstinence for Roman Catholics during Lent, particular regulations vary in each country according to the norms established by national episcopal conferences and approved by the Holy See, so it is not always easy to know what regulations are in force. The Ottawa-based Canadian Conference of Catholics Bishops (CCCB) says, “Fasting means cutting down on the amount and richness of our food and drink. Done as a penance for sin, it helps us to pray better: an empty stomach can lead to more attentive prayer. The money we save on food should be given to others in alms, In reference to abstinence, the Canadian bishops go onto say, “This form of penance needs to be seen as a near cousin of fasting. We may give up meat or other desirable foods on one or two days a week during Lent, especially on Friday, the day of Christ’s saving death on the cross. Our abstinence is another way of sharing in Christ’s work of saving the world.”

The norms for Canada are based on the Canadian Conference of Catholics Bishops’ Order of Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours and Celebration of the Eucharist, known more commonly and simply as the Ordo, which is essentially a guide for clergy in Canada, updated from time to time, to aid in preparation of the liturgy. The Ordo dates back to the Middle Ages:

All Fridays are days of abstinence from meat, but Catholics may substitute special acts of charity
or piety on this day;
The paschal fast is observed on Good Friday and, where possible, continued through Holy
Saturday;
Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are days of fasting and abstinence from meat;
The law of abstinence from meat binds those who are 14 and older; the law of fasting binds
those from 18 to 59 years of age.

While Canadian bishops have placed particular insistence on Fridays of Lent as days of penance, the “manner of fulfilling this duty is left to the discretion of the faithful.” (National Bulletin on Liturgy, 42 – from the 1966 statement of the CCCB on Penance).

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Christian Cinema, Eschatology, Popular Culture and Ideas

Left Behind and the Canadian boys from North Bay, Ontario, brothers Peter and Paul Lalonde

Sometimes it’s a “special feature” embedded deep on the DVD off the “main menu” that is the real nugget. After not finding enough bandwidth to watch a Netflix offering, I dug deep into my DVD collection last night to pull out the first Left Behind movie by North Bay, Ontario brothers Peter and Paul Lalonde, filmed in 2000, and which made its theatrical premiere on Jan. 26, 2001 at a star-studded red carpet event at the Directors Guild of America (DGA) theatre on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. The DVD special feature, “Seeing is Believing,” has interviews with some of those on hand for that theatrical premiere, including the redoubtable Tom Selleck.

At the time almost 16 years ago, Left Behind: The Movie was the biggest and most ambitious Christian genre movie ever made, and it was hoped by many in the evangelical community to be the big crossover movie that would appeal also to the general public – read the “unsaved” or “non-believers,” as well as those already preaching in the choir. Left Behind: The Movie was an unusual release because it went to video first in October 2000, then theatres in January 2001. It opened in 800 theatres and grossed $4.2 million. It won “Bestselling Title of the Year from an Independent Studio” and “Sell-through Title of the Year by an Independent Studio” from the Video Software Dealer’s Association.

Alas, Left Behind has never quite realized that early promise and the franchise has been beset by problems of various kinds over the last decade.

For the uninitiated, Left Behind started out as a a series of 16 best-selling novels by Americans Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, published between 1995 and 2007, dealing with the Protestant evangelical Christian predispensationalist End Times view of the Rapture and the Tribulation that follows. The drama comes from the struggle of the rag-tag Tribulation Force against the Global Community and its leader Nicolae Carpathia – the Antichrist.

LaHaye, now 89, is a sometimes controversial evangelical minister, who conceived the Left Behind books, although Jerry B. Jenkins, 66, a sports-oriented biographical writer, did the actual writing of the books from LaHaye’s notes.

LaHaye was inspired to write the books in part by the late Iowa filmmaker Russ Doughten’s movies, such as his 1972 film, A Thief in the Night, followed by its three sequels – A Distant Thunder in 1978, Image of the Beast in 1980 and The Prodigal Planet in 1983. Doughten, who earned his master’s degree from Yale Drama School in 1954, died at the age of 86 in August 2013.

Jenkins, on the other hand, has said, “I write the best I can. I know I’m never going to be revered as some classic writer. I don’t claim to be C. S. Lewis. The literary-type writers, I admire them. I wish I was smart enough to write a book that’s hard to read, you know?” Having read all 16 books in the series – from Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days, published in 1995, and then Tribulation Force: The Continuing Drama of Those Left Behind; Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; Soul Harvest: The World Takes Sides; Apollyon: The Destroyer Is Unleashed; Assassins: Assignment: Jerusalem, Target: Antichrist; The Indwelling: The Beast Takes Possession; The Mark: The Beast Rules the World; Desecration: Antichrist Takes the Throne; The Remnant: On the Brink of Armageddon; Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages; Glorious Appearing: The End of Days; The Rising: Antichrist is Born: Before They Were Left Behind; The Regime: Evil Advances: Before They Were Left Behind; The Rapture: In the Twinkling of an Eye: Countdown to Earth’s Last Days, right through to Kingdom Come: The Final Victory in 2007, I can only say, “true that Jerry.”

In the Protestant premillennial dispensationalist interpretation of Bible prophecy, which posits a pretribulation secret Rapture – there is a belief that Christians will be taken up from earth in a sudden, silent removal of true believers by God prior to a time of tribulation and the Second Coming. For this belief, pre-tribbers rely heavily on Saint Paul and 1 Thessalonians: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”

That is very much an evangelical Protestant rather than Catholic reading of 1 Thessalonians, as the passage describes a very loud and public event, not a secret Rapture. Catholics do, however, believe in a future Antichrist, and a coming trial and time of apostasy before the Second Coming.

While some of the Apostolic Fathers of the early church, including Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Methodius, Commodianus and Lactanitus – were premillennialists who believed that Christ’s Second Coming would lead to a visible, earthly reign – the pretribulational Rapture espoused by the Protestant premillennial dispensationalist end times writers is premised on the notion that Christ sought to establish a material and earthly kingdom, but the Jews rejected him, so the Church by necessity is a parenthetical insert into history, created as a result of Jews rejecting Christ, resulting in the existence of two people of God: the Jews, the “earthly” people, and the Christians, the “heavenly” people.

The premillennial dispensationalism on display in recent years is of a much more recent vintage and is for the most part the creation of John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish curate with of the Anglican Church of Ireland, who would eventually leave that church and in the early 1830s with a small group of men form what would come to be known as the Plymouth Brethren. It was Darby who postulated the secret Rapture and much of what premillennial dispensationalism today teaches about 190 years ago.

The Left Behind movie franchise, which is now up to four movies with a fifth possible, is perhaps surprisingly, a Canadian phenomenon, spearheaded by two brothers from North Bay Ontario, Peter and Paul Lalonde, who first came to wide notice on television in 1989 with their weekly half-hour show This Week in Bible Prophecy, before going onto form Cloud Ten Pictures in St. Catharines, Ontario in 1995. Paul Lalonde worked as social worker at various group homes in North Bay before attaining his televised pulpit, while Peter Lalonde was a good enough goalie he might had a shot at playing NHL hockey had he wanted to.

Peter Lalonde has said he became a “Christian as a result of seeing The Prodigal in 1983 in a church. I went back on Sunday, then again, and several weeks later I became a believer.”

Left Behind: The Movie was quickly followed by Left Behind II: Tribulation Force in 2002 and Left Behind: World at War in 2005, all starring Kirk Cameron, 45, still perhaps best known to the larger public as a teenage actor for his role as Mike Seaver on the ABC sitcom Growing Pains between 1985 and 1992, and Brad Johnson, Gordon Currie, Janaya Stephens, and Cameron’s real-life wife, Chelsea Noble.

But none of them would be back by the time the fourth movie, simply called Left Behind, was finally released nine years later in October 2014.

The most recent Left Behind movie was produced by Paul Lalonde and Stoney Lake Entertainment, a company he formed in 2012, and released through Cloud Ten Pictures, with Nicolas Cage starring as Rayford Steele, Johnson’s former role as an airline pilot, with Civil Twilight’s song “Letters from the Sky” being used in the trailer and movie.

The choice of Cage caused some quiet murmurs in certain evangelical circles, although not particularly loud ones for the most part, as Cage, a bankable box office star, is rumored to be Roman Catholic.

Why the long delay? Some nasty litigation is one explanation. LaHaye, who had sold the film rights for Left Behind to Joe Goodman, Bobby Neutz and Ralph Winter, owners of Namesake Entertainment in April 1997, before the End Times novels became a publishing phenomenon, hated the film. Namesake Entertainment had sold the rights to make the film to Cloud Ten Pictures in 1999. Left Behind: The Movie was privately financed and cost $17.4 million to make, including production, post-production, publicity, marketing, and distribution costs.Its theological consultants included John Hagee, author of Four Blood Moons: Something is About to Change, published in October 2013, from Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, and Michigan televangelist Jack Van Impe.

Widely known as “The Walking Bible” for spending about 35,000 hours in memorizing 14,000 Bible verses, Van Impe, who at 84 is a bit of a youngster compared to 97-year-old Billy Graham, where Van Impe got his start at the age of 17 playing the accordion before he started preaching, was hospitalized in early April with serious cardiac problems, missing taping almost six months worth of half hour episodes for his long-running TV show Jack Van Impe Presents, an eschatological commentary on the news of the week, which he normally co-hosts with his wife, Rexella Van Impe, while a number of guest co-hosts stepped in during his long convalescence in hospital and at a Michinga nursing home before his return to the airwaves in early October. The Van Impes have been married since 1954.

Sharp-eyed observers in Left Behind: The Movie could get a quick glimpse of Jack Van Impe as one of the passengers caught up in the Rapture mid-transatlantic flight. The Lalondes and Cloud Ten Pictures discovered early on theological consultants, musicians and all kinds of normally behind-the-scenes folk, like most everyone, enjoy the chance to have their 15 seconds of fame on the silver screen, too, which is also good for holding the line on production costs from the filmmakers’ perspective.

LaHaye, however, was not so easily charmed. He sued both Namesake Entertainment and Cloud Ten Pictures in July 1999, claiming the the producers told him that the movie’s production budget would exceed $40 million, although there was no language in the contract to that effect. LaHaye also claimed that he had sold the film rights on the condition that the picture be produced by a major studio with big-name Hollywood box office stars, and released to theaters in late 1999 so as to capitalize on the Y2K phenomenon.

LaHaye’s lawsuit was thrown out of U.S. federal district court in 2003, but by that point Cloud Ten Pictures and Namesake Entertainment had filed a countersuit against LaHaye for breach of contract, among other allegations.

Ultimately, in August 2008, the two sides settled their legal differences out of court, and LaHaye reportedly liked a rough cut he saw of the new Left Behind movie.

Unfortunately for Cloud Ten Pictures, Paul Lalonde and Stoney Lake Entertainment, LaHaye, if he did in fact like the finished final cut as well, was pretty much alone in that opinion. To say the film was savaged by critics in both the serious religious and secular press would be a charitable understatement. Two examples, one from the religious press, one from the secular, pretty much illustrate the debacle

Jackson Cuidon, writing in Christianity Today, said, “[t]he Left Behind movie is just a disaster flick injected with the slightest, most infinitesimal amount of Christianity possible. This is, in one way, good – no one needs to be upset, or get angry, or be offended, or question their beliefs, or the beliefs of those around them, or anything, because the film takes no stance on anything. The film is so inept, confused, and involuted that there’s no danger of even accidentally cobbling together something that could necessitate a defense of Christianity.”

That was the mild criticism. Andrew Barker (no relation), senior features writer for Variety, penned this piece published Oct. 2, 2014, the day before the film opened in theaters: “In what was surely a first in the annals of motion-picture marketing, an early ad for Left Behind featured a quote taken not from a film critic, but rather from Satan himself, who allegedly quipped, ‘Please do not bring unbelievers to this movie,’” Barker wrote.

“This presents a rare scenario in which Christian moviegoers ought to feel perfectly secure heeding the advice of the Devil, as this faith-based thriller is likely to inspire far more dorm-room drinking games than religious conversions. With a Sharknado-inspired visual style and a deeply weary lead performance from Nicolas Cage, Left Behind is cheap-looking, overwrought kitsch of the most unintentionally hilarious order, its eschatological bent representing its only real shot at box office redemption.”

OK, for the record, eh. I’m a big fan of the Sharknado franchise, too, so find your analogical comparisons elsewhere, and for God’s sake, if no other, lighten up namesake Barker! Cheesy is OK. Popular culture is made up of a rich cornucopia of cheesy television and movies that almost require a mandatory bowl of Cheetos® to consume such classics.

I haven’t seen the most recent Left Behind movie yet (although I have seen the first three). Will I? Quite probably should the opportunity present itself. Why? I’ve been a writer long enough to know critics like to hear the sound of their own voices above all else and if purple prose and hyperbole serve the day’s writing purpose, so be it. Most film critics are about as qualified to write about religion and especially eschatology as I am to perform neurosurgery.

Besides I have something of a soft spot admittedly for the Lalonde brothers, the boys from North Bay. Way back in 1993 and 1994, when I was a first-year graduate student in 2oth century American history at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and was contemplating what thesis topic I might pursue for my master’s degree, one of my possibilities under consideration was premillennial dispensationalism and the Rapture, which made watching This Week in Bible Prophecy something of a guilty pleasure. But in fairness, much of what I first learned about the “cashless” society and biometrics, including palm geometry and retinal scanning, all of which came true in the years that followed, so much so they’re almost commonplaces today, I first learned more than 20 years ago watching Peter and Paul Lalonde.

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Catholicism

Catholic Church: Change comes when it comes

I’ve always heard something haunting but yet beautiful whenever I hear Karin Bergquist’s rendition of Over the Rhine’s “Changes Come” from the 2008 Cornerstone Music Festival in Bushnell, Illinois. She wrote the song, with her husband, Linford Detweiler, and the Cincinnati alt-country band recorded it five years earlier in Nashville on Oct. 19, 2003. The lyrics go partially like this:

“Changes come, Turn my world around, Changes come, Turn my world around. Jesus come Turn my world around Jesus come Bring the whole thing down Bring it down.”

Change comes when it comes.

For some reason, this song has been running through my head, as I reflect a bit on Nostra Aetate (“In Our Time”) the 624 words in English language translation declaration on the relation of the Roman Catholic Church to non-Christian religions that Catholic bishops adopted 50 years ago today, near the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, which ended Dec. 7, 1965.

Perhaps it also resonates after the three-week Synod on the Family from Oct. 4 to Oct. 25, which just ended. One of the great issues of the synod, which advised Pope Francis, was whether civilly divorced Catholics who remarry, and haven’t received an annulment within the Catholic Church, might be admitted pastorally, if not doctrinally, to the sacrament of the Eucharist. The Church teaches that the sacrament of marriage is “indissoluble” and that remarried Catholics who have not received annulments are committing adultery and living in sin. They may receive communion if they abstain from sex.

Pastoral versus doctrinal. Discipline versus doctrinal. Orthodox versus heterodox. These are always the stuff of great Catholic debates among ourselves. Doctrine encompasses the overall teachings of the Church. For example, Humanae Vitae (“Of Human Life”) now Blessed Pope Paul VI’s encyclical teaching on birth control. Pastoral practice is how the Church applies doctrines in real life.

Doctrine is important, but not every doctrine is dogma, which refers to core Catholic beliefs, such as the Resurrection, which is foundational. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the kingpin upon which all of Christianity and Catholicism stands or crumbles. If Christ has not been raised from the dead then Christian faith is futile. No other prophet of any religion has come back from the dead. In the Apostle Paul’s First Letter to the Church at Corinth in (15: 14-19), he writes of the resurrection of Jesus as being the central doctrine in Christianity: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain,” Paul observed. And if Christ has not been raised, he added, God is being misrepresented because “we testified of God that he raised Christ.” Therefore, if Christ has not been raised, “your faith is futile: “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.” The entire Christian faith hinges upon the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus on the third day.

The Old Testament Mosaic law allowed for divorce and remarriage among the Israelites. The Israelites saw divorce as a way to dissolve a marriage and enable the spouses to remarry others so the Pharisees questioned Jesus when he taught on the permanence of marriage by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?

As we see in the Synoptic Gospels of Saints Matthew (19: 3-8); Mark (10: 2-9); and Luke (16: 18), Jesus answered, “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.

“They said to him, ‘Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?’ He said to them, ‘For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.’”

Catholics therefore believe Jesus re-established the permanence of marriage among his followers and raised Christian marriage to the level of a sacrament, teaching that sacramental marriages cannot be dissolved through divorce, which was part of Jesus’ perfection of the Old Law, of which he said, “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them.”

While there is much debate about what the synod’s advice on the subject to the Holy Father means, the final document offers divorced and remarried Catholics the possibility of returning to fuller participation in the Church, on a case-by-case basis, after receiving spiritual counselling from priests in what is called the “internal forum.” It says nothing about whether divorced and remarried Catholics may or may not receive communion. But it does say divorced and civilly remarried Catholics “must not feel excommunicated.” The document said that opening to Catholics in less-than-perfect situations was not a “weakening of the faith,” or of the “testimony on the indissolubility of marriage”; instead, it was a sign of the church’s charity.

In his closing address last Saturday night, Pope Francis said the Synod on the Family was “about trying to view and interpret realities, today’s realities, through God’s eyes, so as to kindle the flame of faith and enlighten people’s hearts in times marked by discouragement, social, economic and moral crisis, and growing pessimism.

“It was about bearing witness to everyone that, for the Church, the Gospel continues to be a vital source of eternal newness, against all those who would ‘indoctrinate’ it in dead stones to be hurled at others.

“It was also about laying bare the closed hearts which frequently hide even behind the Church’s teachings or good intentions, in order to sit in the chair of Moses and judge, sometimes with superiority and superficiality, difficult cases and wounded families.

“It was about making clear that the Church is a Church of the poor in spirit and of sinners seeking forgiveness, not simply of the righteous and the holy, but rather of those who are righteous and holy precisely when they feel themselves poor sinners.”

Change comes when it comes.

Peter, the first pope, and the apostles that Jesus chose were, for the most part, married men, although the Council of Elvira decreed in 306 a priest who sleeps with his wife the night before mass would lose his job.

It wasn’t until Pope St. Gregory VII in 1074 that celibacy was imposed uniformly across the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church. And It wasn’t until 1215 that the Fourth Lateran Council used the word transubstantiated, when speaking of the change that takes place in the Eucharist, while it would be a few years later at the Second Council of Lyons, convened in 1274, that the teaching of Pope Innocent IV was used to develop a formal declaration on purgatory.

In 1964 and 1965, a year after the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy was enacted, the new mass (Novus Ordo) in the vernacular rather than Latin was introduced, the priest turned around and started celebrating mass facing the people, who could stand to receive the Eucharist, as the altar rails were soon to be removed.

Now Blessed Pope Paul VI proclaimed Paenitemini (Apostolic Constitution On Penance) on Feb. 17, 1966, which allowed episcopal conferences to permit Catholics in their jurisdictions to substitute some other penitential practice aside from abstaining from meat on Fridays, a prescription which had been in force in the universal church since Pope Saint Nicholas 1, also known as Saint Nicholas the Great, in 851 (with the exception in Canada of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday in accordance with the prescriptions of Canon 1253, proclaimed in 1983. Fridays are days of abstinence, but Canadian Catholics can substitute special acts of charity or piety on this day).

Following the lead of the Vatican and national episcopal conferences in France, Canada and Mexico earlier in 1966, the U.S. norms (which are similar but not identical to those in Canada) were approved in “On Penance and Abstinence,” a pastoral statement of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops on Nov. 18, 1966. The first day Friday American Catholics could eat meat on Friday under the new regulations was the first Friday of Advent on Dec. 2, 1966.

Change comes when it comes. Or not. But history will not move backwards no matter how much I personally would like to hear monks chanting vespers in Latin at every mass.

Canadian Catholics, both heterosexual and homosexual, will continue to get married and divorced, either inside or outside the Church.

Same-sex marriage has been legal in Canada for more than 10 years since the federal Civil Marriage Act received royal assent on July 20, 2005. Carey Nieuwhof, a Protestant evangelical and lead pastor of Connexus Church in Barrie, Ontario, in a blog post last June 29 headlined, “Some Advice on Same-Sex Marriage for US Church Leaders From a Canadian” wrote, “Most of us reading this post have been born into a unique season in history in which our culture is moving from a Christian culture to a post-Christian culture before our eyes.

“Whatever you think about history, theology or exactly when this shift happened, it’s clear for all of us that the world into which we were born no longer exists.

“Viewpoints that were widely embraced by culture just decades ago are no longer embraced. For some this seems like progress. For others, it seems like we’re losing something. Regardless, things have changed fundamentally.”

Nieuwhof went onto write: “If you believe gay sex is sinful, it’s really no morally different than straight sex outside of marriage.

“Be honest, pretty much every unmarried person in your church is having sex (yes, even the Christians).

“I know you want to believe that’s not true (trust me, I want to believe that’s not true), but why don’t you ask around? You’ll discover that only a few really surrender their sexuality.

“Not to mention the married folks that struggle with porn, lust and a long list of other dysfunctions.

“If you believe gay marriage is not God’s design, you’re really dealing with the same issue you’ve been dealing with all along – sex outside of its God-given context.

“You don’t need to treat it any differently.

“By the way, if you don’t deal with straight sex outside of marriage, don’t start being inconsistent and speak out against gay sex.

“And you may want to start dealing with gluttony and gossip and greed while you’re at it.”

Meanwhile, abortion has been legal in Canada for almost three decades now, since Jan. 28, 1988 when the Supreme Court of Canada, in Dr. Henry Morgentaler, Dr. Leslie Frank Smoling and Dr. Robert Scott v. Her Majesty The Queen, struck down Section 251 of the Criminal Code of Canada, the 1969 therapeutic abortion criminal law, as unconstitutional, without force and effect, in a 5-2 decision.

The law was found to violate Section 7 the Charter of Rights and Freedoms because it infringed upon a woman’s right to “life, liberty and security of person,” the court held. Morgentaler, Smoling and Scott had been charged in 1983 with performing illegal abortions at their Toronto clinic. A Supreme Court of Ontario jury had acquitted them on Nov. 8, 1984, but the Crown appealed and on Oct. 1, 1985 the Court of Appeal for Ontario set aside the acquittals and ordered a new trial. Morgentaler, Smoling and Scott then successfully appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada to have the Court of Appeal for Ontario decision overturned and their acquittals restored. The following year, on Nov. 3, 1989, then Progressive Conservative Minister of Justice Kim Campbell introduced in the House of Commons Bill C-43, which, had it been approved by both the House of Commons and the Senate, would have made it a criminal offence to induce an abortion on a woman unless it was done by, or under the direction of, a physician who considered that the woman’s life or health was otherwise likely to be threatened. “Health” was defined as including physical, mental and psychological health.

On May 29, 1990, the House of Commons passed Bill C-43 on third reading by a vote of 140-131. Although cabinet ministers were required to support the bill, it was a free vote for all other MPs. On Jan. 31, 1991, the Senate voted on Bill C-43. As with the House of Commons, it was a free vote except for members of the cabinet, in this case Senator Lowell Murray, leader of the government in the Senate. Of 86 senators present, 43 voted for the bill and 43 voted against it. Under the Rules of the Senate, the 43-43 tie vote is deemed to be a “no” vote, therefore Bill C-43 was defeated.

Pope Francis, the pope of mercy, understands how the world and families really are in the real world, rather than how we might simply wish them to be.

Divorce is reality.

Same-sex marriage is reality.

Abortion is reality.

So what are we going to do? As Catholics.

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Books, Catholic, Eschatology, Fatima

Blessed Pope Paul VI on the ‘tail of the devil’ and ‘Smoke of Satan’ and the disintegration of the ‘Catholic world’

“The tail of the devil is functioning in the disintegration of the Catholic world,” said Blessed Pope Paul VI on Oct. 13, 1977 in a formal address marking the 60th anniversary of the sixth and final Fatima apparition – the “Miracle of the Sun” – at Fatima, Portugal on Oct. 13, 1917. “The darkness of Satan has entered and spread throughout the Catholic Church even to its summit. Apostasy, the loss of the faith, is spreading throughout the world and into the highest levels within the Church.” Blessed Pope Paul VI’s remarks on Satan indwelling even the highest levels of the Catholic Church were reported on the following day – Oct. 14, 1977 – in the Milan-based daily Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

It was not the first time Blessed Pope Paul VI had sounded such a warning. More than five years earlier, in what is now known as his “Smoke of Satan” homily delivered on June 29, 1972 on the ninth anniversary of his coronation, the Pope gave the sermon that remains perhaps the most famous and most-argued about in terms of meaning sermons the Holy Father delivered during his 15-year-plus pontificate.

The are several difficulties in analyzing the homily, delivered by Blessed Pope Paul VI, as he celebrated the mass and the beginning of the tenth year of his pontificate as successor of Saint Peter, with 30 “porporati” (cardinals) present, including Lord Cardinal Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, dean of the sacred college; Lord Cardinal Luigi Traglia, the sub-dean; Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, substitute of the secretary of state; and Archbishop Agostino Casaroli, secretary of the council for the public affairs of the church.

The homily was delivered in Italian, so it must be faithfully translated into English for many analysts to tackle it.

The translation here was provided by Father Stephanos Pedrano, O.S.B., a Benedictine monk and priest at Prince of Peace Abbey, a Benedictine monastery founded in 1958 in Oceanside, California, near San Diego. Pedrano was educated at the International Benedictine Athenaeum of St. Anselm in Rome and is fluent in Italian and the translation was rendered in 2006 at the request of Jimmy Akin, the Texas-born self-described nominal Protestant, who converted to Catholicism in 1992, and is now the senior apologist at Catholic Answers, the El Cajon, California apostolate started in 1979 by attorney Karl Keating. You can read the English translation by Pedrano of the papal homily here from Akin’s Nov. 13, 2006 blog posting at http://jimmyakin.typepad.com/defensor_fidei/2006/11/the_smoke_of_sa.html

Aside from any translation challenges, Akin quite rightly points out the Vatican-issued Italian homily (http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/homilies/1972/documents/hf_p-vi_hom_19720629_it.html) is by no means a verbatim account of Blessed Pope Paul VI’s words that day, as we might expect in such a document today, but rather for the most part a “narrative summary” of the Holy Father’s homily by an anonymous narrator, although certain statements are attributed with quotation marks as direct quotes from the Pope, the most famous being “from some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.” Akin argues that even if the reporting is accurate, Blessed Pope Paul VI’s 1972 remark should not be interpreted as a literal assertion “claiming that there were Satanists in the Vatican,” but rather as symbolic representation of the “cultural crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s” and secular influences among Catholics.

The enigmatic Malachi Martin had a more literal take, suggesting the Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer occurred exactly nine years to the day earlier – on the day Blessed Pope Paul VI was coronated on June 29, 1963 – on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, as the Availing Time arrived.

In The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, the novel for children published in October 1950, the Anglican writer C.S. Lewis, one of the leading Christian apologists of the 20th century wrote, “There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.” Catholic writer Robert Hugh Benson, author of the 1907 apocalyptic and dystopian novel Lord of the World, (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/spiritual-warfare/) , who has been quoted approvingly by Pope Francis, would have agreed with Lewis.

There is perhaps no more mysterious figure in the Catholic Church in the second half of the 20th century than Malachi Brendan Martin, born on July 23, 1921 in Ballylongford in County Kerry, Ireland, who we remember today mainly as a best-selling New York City writer of fiction and non-fiction, where in typical Martin style, the two genres were separated, if at all, by a very blurred line at times.

He was ordained a priest for the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1954. Was he an insider at the Second Vatican Council from 1962, as peritus (expert advisor) for German Jesuit Cardinal Augustin Bea, or more accurately a somewhat lesser figure, albeit a highly skilled linguist, translator and Semitic paleographer? Did he act as a shadowy agent or advocate for certain Jewish interests during the council? Did he read the Third Secret of Fatima? Was he a liberal or a conservative? An agent provocateur? A double agent? Was he a valid exorcist? Secretly ordained a bishop by Pope Pius XII? Was he laicized at his own request by Blessed Pope Paul VI in 1965, or just given dispensation from his vows of poverty and obedience, but not chastity? Was he chaste or a serial womanizer who seduced a string of women, including Susan Kaiser in 1964, as alleged by former TIME magazine Vatican correspondent Robert Blair Kaiser in his 2002 book Clerical Error: A True Story, published three years after Martin’s death? And speaking of Martin’s death, even that is somewhat shrouded in mystery. Martin died of a cerebral hemorrhage on July 27, 1999 due to a fall in his apartment in Manhattan, four days after his 78th birthday. More than one conspiracy theorist has argued Martin was pushed by an unseen hand.

Martin first made his claim about the Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer occurring on the day Blessed Pope Paul VI was coronated on June 29, 1963 – on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, as the Availing Time arrived – in his 1990 purportedly non-fiction work, The Keys of This Blood: Pope John Paul II Versus Russia and the West for Control of the New World Order, where he wrote St. Pope John Paul II came “up against the irremovable presence of a malign strength in his own Vatican and in certain bishops’ chanceries. It was what knowledgeable Churchmen called the ‘superforce.’ Rumors, always difficult to verify, tied its installation to the beginning of [Blessed] Pope Paul VI’s reign in 1963. Indeed Paul had alluded somberly to ‘the smoke of Satan which has entered the Sanctuary’. . . an oblique reference to an enthronement ceremony by Satanists in the Vatican.”

He revisited the theme in his 1996 blockbuster fictional novel, Wind Swept House, where Martin wrote at length near the opening of the book about it:

“The Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer was effected within the Roman Catholic Citadel on June 29, 1963; a fitting date for the historic promise about to be fulfilled. As the principal agents of this Ceremonial well knew, Satanist tradition had long predicted that the Time of the Prince would be ushered in at the moment when a Pope would take the name of the Apostle Paul. That requirement – the signal that the Availing Time had begun – had been accomplished just eight days before with the election of the latest Peter-in-the-Line.

“There had barely been time since the papal conclave had ended for the complex arrangements to be readied; but the Supreme Tribunal had decided there could be no more perfect date for the Enthronement of the Prince than this feast day of rhe twin princes of the Citadel, SS. Peter and Paul. And there could be no more perfect place than the Chapel of St. Paul itself, situated as it was so near to the Apostolic Palace.

“The complexity of the arrangements were dictated mainly by the nature of the Ceremonial Event to be enacted. Security was so tight in the grouping of Vatican buildings within which this gem of a Chapel lay that the full panoply of the Ceremonial could not possibly escape detection here. If the aim was to be achieved – if the Ascent of the Prince was actually to be accomplished in the Availing Time – then every element of the Celebration of the Calvary Sacrifice must be turned on its head by the other and opposite Celebration. The sacred must be profaned. The profane must be adored. The unbloody representation of the Sacrifice of the Nameless Weakling on the Cross must be replaced by the supreme and bloody violation of the dignity of the Nameless One. Guilt must be accepted as innocence. Pain must give joy. Grace, repentance, pardon must all be drowned in an orgy of opposites. And it must all be done without mistakes. The sequence of events, the meaning of the words, the significance of the actions must all comprise the perfect enactment of sacrilege, the ultimate ritual of treachery. ”

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Catholicism, Eschatology

Rejoice: Canadian Catholic author Michael D. O’Brien’s Elijah in Jerusalem, the long-awaited sequel to Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, has just been published

Michael D. O’Brien, the Ottawa-born Roman Catholic author and painter, has just had Elijah in Jerusalem, his long-awaited sequel to Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, published by San Francisco’s Ignatius Press, one of the largest American publishers of Catholic books, which was founded by Father Joseph Fessio, a Jesuit, in 1978.

He has worked as a professional artist since 1970 when he had his first one-man exhibit at a major gallery in Ottawa. Since 1976, O’Brien has painted religious imagery exclusively.

When one says Elijah in Jerusalem is the long-awaited to Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, they should perhaps qualify that by making it clear long awaited by readers. Not necessarily O’Brien, who told Joan Frawley Desmond, senior editor of the National Catholic Register in an Oct. 15 interview, that he had not originally intended to write a sequel to Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, published in 1996:

“No, I didn’t,” O’Brien told Frawley, in response to her question asking if he had intended from the beginning almost 20 years ago to write a sequel? “Though the idea of a sequel was often suggested to me by readers, I rejected it for many years,” O’Brien said. “However, during the past few years, powerful images and scenes for the continuing story kept arising in my imagination, begging to be set down on paper. So I prayed and waited. Then came a moment when it was clear that I should write the book – and that the time was now.”

The father of six children, O’Brien, and his wife, Sheila, live in the village of Combermere in eastern Ontario’s scenic, historic, and very rural, Madawaska Valley, about 125 miles west of Ottawa.

I have known about O’Brien, who was briefly both an agnostic and an atheist as a young man, and his work since at least the mid-to-late 1990s, around the time Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, was published, but only got around to reading the novel a couple of years ago. It was a true delight from cover-to-cover. A few years earlier, I had read Plague Journal, one of the novels in his apocalyptic and dystopian 1990s’ trilogy, which also includes Strangers and Sojourners and Eclipse of the Sun. Plague Journal is set in the near future, composed of both written and mental notes made by Nathaniel Delaney, who is the editor of a small town newspaper. The story takes place over a five-day period as he flees arrest by a federal government agency during the preliminary stage of the rise of a totalitarian state in North America. Delaney is one of the few voices left in the media who is willing to speak the whole truth about what is happening, and as a result the full force of the government is brought against him.

O’Brien is an original yet orthodox thinker, writing a novel again with themes rooted in a Catholic view of spiritual warfare, the end times and the Second Coming. While it is not quite uncharted Catholic writing territory, eschatological and apocalyptic themes are often more associated with Protestant premillennial dispensationalist evangelical writers, say Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, and their best-selling 16-book Left Behind series.

O’Brien is interested in exploring the battle between good and evil in history, but also through the souls of individuals, and God’s desire for human beings to choose to love him through an act of free will. Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, Notre Dame-educated Chicago Catholic writer Thomas O’Toole has written, “follows not the simplest interpretations that ‘Revelation’ refers solely to John’s own time,” or “it is exclusively a meditation on the end of things,” or even “a map of the Church’s history.” Rather, it is the interpretation ‘favored by most of the Church Fathers … a theological vision of a spiritual landscape’ that combines all three.”

O’Brien himself, in a talk given by him on Sept. 20, 2005 at Saint Patrick’s Basilica in Ottawa, said, “There is always a battle over every soul. Even if our times prove not to be the times toward which St. John’s Revelation is pointing, each of us must go through a kind of small ‘a’ apocalypse. Each of us certainly will be given a capital ‘R’ revelation at the moment of our deaths when we experience our personal judgment, when all that we are, all that we have done or neglected to do will be revealed.

“The Greek word apokalypsis means a revealing or unveiling. During our lives in this world each of us will indeed face the beast, which is the devil, our ancient adversary, the enemy of our individual souls and of mankind as a whole. In some form or other we must learn to personally resist him and to overcome him in Christ. At the same time we must understand that there will come a point in history when all his malice, all his devices, all his rage will be released in a final vicious attack upon the entire Body of Christ. It will be intense; it will be brief. If we find ourselves in the midst of those three and a half years of total persecution, it will not feel so brief. Yet we must always keep in mind that his time is coming to an end; indeed he is already defeated by the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross and there remains only the final battle through which the Church and the world must pass.

“We are in the final battle, we are in the apocalypse, we are in the book of Revelation, which the Church, beginning with most of the Church Fathers, believes to be a vision of the entire unfolding of salvation history after the Incarnation, culminating in the total victory of Christ over the entire cosmos and its restoration to the Father. The book of Revelation is not a schematic diagram or a flat blueprint or a purely linear timeline. It is a mysterious multidimensional vision which surely contains linear-chronological aspects, but that is not the whole thing. Indeed it is not the main thing.”

O’Brien told Frawley earlier this month: “Satan attempts to mesmerize, like a serpent paralyzing its victim with fear before devouring it. The many fronts of evil are components in the vast and complex war between good and evil the war that will last until the end of time. As the forces of evil, visible and invisible, appear to spread and grow ever stronger, we who follow Jesus must keep before the eyes of our hearts the ultimate truth of his coming victory. A healthy balance is needed in our pondering of ‘end times’ questions. We should remain prayerfully alert, but we should never allow ourselves to become obsessively over-focused on the darkness. Again, the eyes of the serpent can delude us into discouragement and even despair.”

That, to be clear, is not a Catholic reading, nor would it be O’Brien’s reading, of 1 Thessalonians or Catholic theology, as the passage describes a very loud and public event, not a secret Rapture. We do, as does O’Brien, however, believe in a future Antichrist, and a coming trial and time of apostasy before the Second Coming.

Elijah in Jerusalem, published earlier this month, is the continuing story of Father Elijah, formerly David Schäfer, a convert from Judaism and survivor of the Holocaust, who has for nearly two decades been a Carmelite friar at a monastery on Mount Carmel, the mountain of the prophet Elijah, overlooking the Bay of Haifa in Israel.

In the earlier novel, Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, Father (later Bishop) Elijah Schäfer confronted the president of the European Union, a man rising toward global control as president of a soon-to- be-realized world government – a man who displays certain anti-Christ-like qualities – and calls him to repentance as he attempts to sow the seeds to transform the heart of this “Man of Sin” on a secret papal mission that will take him from Israel to Vatican City and Rome, and to other cities in Italy, Poland and Turkey.

In Elijah in Jerusalem, Bishop Elijah Schäfer, appointed by the Pope in pectore as the titular bishop of the ancient Titular Episcopal See of Panaya Kapulu near Selçuk, in Central Aegean Turkey, about 200 miles from Constantinople in western Asia Minor, near Ephesus, and travelling incognito, accompanied by his fellow friar, Brother Enoch, enter Jerusalem just as the president arrives in the city to inaugurate a new stage of his rise to power. They hope to unmask him as the Antichrist prophesied by scripture and to warn the world of the imminent spiritual danger to mankind.

As the story unfolds in Jerusalem, people meet the secretly episcopally-ordained Bishop Elijah Schäfer, and in the process their souls are revealed and tested, bringing about change for good or for evil.

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Books, Censorship, Intellectual Freedom

Banned and challenged books: Libraries take a stand

Spring of 1975: I was an idealistic, although in retrospect naive as to how power actually works in practice, 18-year-old advocate of intellectual freedom as Grade 12 wound down and I saw the increasing efforts of Ken Campbell and his ilk attempt to ban important literature in high school libraries and banish it from the curriculum. Campbell, a Baptist evangelical from Milton, Ontario, had founded a lobby group called Renaissance Canada a year earlier in 1974. While the library and English Department at Oshawa Catholic High School were in no way disposed to buckle under to such a censorship challenge, I saw the fight was real, especially in Peterborough and surrounding area, as downtown Pentecostals, not to mention Bible Belt evangelical adherents from Burleigh Falls to Buckhorn, on the southern edge of the Canadian Shield north of Peterborough, were making rumblings and by early 1976 would publicly launch the Peterborough Committee for Citizens on Decency as their campaign vehicle to ban Margaret Laurence ‘s The Diviners, published just two years earlier in 1974, taking their fight to the public in venues ranging from signing petitions in Peterborough churches to letters to the editor in newspapers, right up to appearing as delegations before trustees of what is now known as the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board. Laurence was living in Lakefield near Peterborough.

In 1968 the Ontario Ministry of Education had given local school boards the authority to determine which literary works would be used in English classes. In the winter of 1976, writes Sheila Turcon, an archivist in the Mills Memorial Library’s William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, “complaints were lodged at two Peterborough high schools against both The Diviners and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971). Both books should have been reviewed by a special committee which had been established two years earlier to review complaints against other books. However, only Laurence’s book was dealt with by the committee.

“The book had been opposed by Jim Telford, a board of education trustee and member of the Pentecostal community, and Rev. Sam Buick. They and their supporters told the Globe and Mail that the novel ‘reeked of sordidness.’ The review committee did not agree and gave its unanimous support for the retention of The Diviners.”

Buick at the time had pastored the Dublin Street Pentecostal Church in downtown Peterborough for three years since 1973.

“On April 22, 1976, the full board decided ten votes to six to keep the book on its approved textbook list,” Turcon said. “Despite this ruling, only Bob Buchanan from Lakefield Secondary School continued to teach it.”

In the end, the new Campbellites did not prevail, but the fight was very public, very protracted and very nasty.

It was in the months leading up to the emergence of the full backdrop in Peterborough, living 50 miles or so down the road to the southwest in Oshawa, I took it upon myself to form a group of high school students from the half dozen or so high schools in Oshawa at the time called the Students Against Arbitrary Censorship Committee (or S.A.A.C.C.) Not the most elegant name or acronym, but I hadn’t enjoyed the benefit of a Loyalist College advertising or marketing course at that point in my life. That would have to wait until the early 1980s when I studied print journalism. So there it was, the Catholic kid, from the faith that brought you the Index Llibrorum Prohibitorum, leading the freedom-to-read charge. Poor Sister Conrad Lauber, my erudite principal. No doubt my S.A.A.C.C. and later Grade 13 high school debating activities have been almost enough on their own to merit her a get-out-of-purgatory-free card, in the unlikely event she might some day need it, simply for enduring my campaigns and playing devil’s debating advocate under the school’s banner. And while my school, and Sister Conrad, stood up, however, uncomfortably at times for my free speech rights, not all Catholics by any means did. After one of my letters to the editor appeared in the op-ed section of the Catholic Register, a gentleman from Geraldton, Ontario took the trouble to write me a handwritten letter, sending it to my home address on Nipigon Street, telling me I was heading for hell. Anonymous telephone calls crisply conveyed similar messages. Pity my long suffering parents. Aside from The Diviners, some of the books Campbell wanted to ban 40 years ago, such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, have remained perennial favourites of censorship advocates, and still show up on banned and challenged book list challenges.

When I said earlier I was naive at 18 as to how power actually works in practice, it is because I thought things like common sense and logic would trump know-nothing ignorance in any given debate and decision, and those advocating banning a book might actually have bothered to read it first. That sort of thing. And I didn’t necessarily think this would be a life-long struggle between the forces of intellectual freedom and ignorance, not to put too fine a point on it. Of course, I was wrong on all counts. Hence the need 40 years on in the struggle to have annual events like “Banned Book Week” from Sept. 27 to Oct. 3, spearheaded by sponsoring organizations such as the Chicago-based Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, the National Association of College Stores and PEN American Center.

While I still feel just as strongly and passionately about intellectual freedom and taking a stand against book banners, I have also these many years on, learned to see the world, dare I say it, in many more shades of grey, than my young black-and-white 18-year-old idealist self. I may still disagree with book banners, but Campbell, who I never actually met, was something of an evangelical caricature for me as a teenager. I know real-life evangelicals now and count a fair number as good friends. They’re not all book banners. And being a Protestant (or Catholic for that matter) evangelical is not incompatible with being an intellectual. Who would have thought that at 18? Not me. And even those who would still ban books I wouldn’t, I’d be hard pressed not to concede that both the world is a nastier, trashier place in some ways than it was 40 years ago (probably the lament of every aging generation, I know) and that I really can’t always accurately judge people’s motives from the outside and what’s inside their hearts, a gift I seemed to have thought I possessed in my youth.

After spending upwards of 30 years working in print journalism, with the exception mainly of the five-year period between 1990 and 1995, when I redressed my youthful lackluster academic performance in university by returning first to Trent University in Peterborough to complete my Honours B.A. in History and then on to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, as an Ontario Graduate Scholar, for a couple of years to do a master’s degree in History, I had the opportunity to return in a small way earlier this year to academia working simply as a clerk at the University College of the North (UCN) new Thompson campus library here in Northern Manitoba. There is something so very Victorian in that word clerk that makes me want to pronounce it “clark,” as I imagine perhaps joining Charles Dickens over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, that particular concoction of Clementines, sugar, cloves, moderately sweet red wine and ruby port.

I am happy to note the “Mission of the University College of the North Libraries” explicitly affirms endorsing “the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which includes, along with the right to express thoughts publicly, the fundamental right of access of every person to all expressions of knowledge. The intellectual freedom fostered and protected by the enshrinement of these rights is basic to the proper functioning of the University and to the healthy development of Canadian society of which it is a part. The University College Libraries supports the principles of intellectual freedom as they are pertinent to all of its activities.”

The 10 books pictured here – Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover – are all found in our stacks for students, faculty, staff and community users to borrow and read. They are also books that have been banned or challenged, some perennially, in other places. “A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group,” says the American Library Association. “A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others.”

The American Library Association “promotes the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinions even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those viewpoints to all who wish to read them.”

You can discover the “top ten frequently challenged books lists of the 21st century” to date and the methodology used to make that determination by checking out the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association webpage http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10#toptenlists

The Banned Books Week website “drew more than 92,000 users and had more than 207,000 page views in 2014,” Publishers Weekly noted Sept. 18. “, Banned Books Week 2015 will, for the second consecutive year, focus on a single category – this time young adult books, which dominates the list of the 311 challenged books in 2014, led by Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. (In 2014, graphic novels was the category of focus.) “There have been very serious flaps over why YA books have very dark themes,” noted Judy Platt, chair of the BBW co-ordinating committee and director of Free Expression Advocacy at AAP.”

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People

True stories: Pastor Ted Goossen’s behind the scenes contributions to the long-running Nickel Belt News’ ‘Spiritual Thoughts’ column

Ted and Mary Goossen, U-Haul truck packed, decamped from Thompson, Manitoba yesterday to begin their new and richly-deserved retirement in Saskatoon closer to their children and grandchildren.

Fortuitously, their home on Riverside Drive, after many months on the market, sold over their last weekend here, with the realtor informing them just before Ted arrived at Christian Centre Fellowship Sunday morning to preach his last sermon as pastor there for the last decade.

Ted’s younger brother, Gareth Goossen, who is also a pastor and lives in Breslau in southwestern Ontario, aptly observed in a Facebook posting: “Awesome! Praise the Lord! I continually am amazed at how Jesus answers our prayers at the last possible moment!!!”

I first got to know Ted in 2008, a few months after I arrived in Thompson to edit the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News. We were kicking around the idea of adding some fresh columns and columnists and one of the ideas that was floated during the summer of 2008 was to have some sort of religion column.

Some of the initial discussion I had, mainly via e-mail, was with Rev. Leslie-Elizabeth King, who retired in May 2014 as minister of the Lutheran-United Church of Thompson on Caribou Drive, but at the time was pastor of St. John’s United Church, before the neighbouring congregations of Advent Lutheran and St. John’s United formally joined together in 2013, after starting a dialogue about their respective futures in 2008.

The old Advent Lutheran Church building was demolished last fall and is the future site of what will be the second Thompson Gas Bar Co-operative store in town.

King had also pastored St. Simon’s Anglican Church in Lynn Lake, a shared ecumenical ministry of the United and Anglican churches, having travelled to St. Simon six times a year since 1998 to administer the sacraments, so she had some broad and candid insights into how religion was done in Northern Manitoba.

Bea Shantz was also originally involved in some of those preliminary discussions I had in the summer and fall of 2008. Shantz was a member of Thompson United Mennonite Church until it closed in July 2006. One of the first churches in Thompson, the Thompson United Mennonite Church formed in 1961. The congregation called its first pastor, John Harder, and built its house of worship at 365 Thompson Dr. in 1963. The Thompson Boys and Girls Club eventually bought the former church.

After it closed, Shantz went to St. John’s United Church and the Lutheran-United Church of Thompson, with the merger of the two churches.

Shantz, originally from southwestern Ontario, lived in Thompson for more than 30 years before she, and her husband, Dale, moved to Winnipeg in June. Shantz was well-known for being an active volunteer in numerous areas, but especially in more recent years with Thompson’s Communities in Bloom committee, as well as the annual Ten Thousand Villages sale of fair trade products from developing countries held every November. She received the 2013 Volunteer of the Year award from the City of Thompson and YWCA of Thompson Women of Distinction award last April.

But in December 2008, it would be Pastor Ted Goossen, who was still pretty much unknown to me, whose name would surface as the co-ordinator of what was to be a new “Spiritual Thoughts” column, which with the exception of one hiatus of a few months after running for several years, has run and continues to run in the Nickel Belt News for going on seven years now.

While the column belongs to the paper, the co-ordination of getting authors to write for it on an almost weekly basis, was delegated from the beginning, under my tenure anyway, to the Thompson Christian Council, and from 2008 until at least my departure in 2014, and from what I’ve been told, beyond, to Pastor Ted Goossen, whose Christian Centre Fellowship is a member of the council.

While most of the columnists in the rotation have overwhelmingly been local clergy who are members of the council over the years, not all have. Pastors whose churches are not members of the Thompson Christian Council, lay people, and on occasion non-Christian perspectives and writers, have also appeared in the column space from time-to-time, a plurality of views I insisted on. For their part, in my experience the Thompson Christian Council always graciously respected the fact while the “Spiritual Thoughts” column was a useful vehicle for evangelizing, at the end of the day it was not theirs, and in some cases not reflective of their views collectively or individually.

More than once, as Ted tried to put together six-month writing rosters for the “Spiritual Thoughts” column in those early days, I would quip to him, often in an e-mail, that organizing such a roster must be something like “herding cats.” While Sunday (or Saturday for Seventh-day Adventists) preaching may the most visible part of what most pastors do, there’s also plenty to do on the other days of the week, such as visiting the sick and burying the dead, and comforting those left behind, or marriage preparation or marriage counseling. Lots to do in other words beside a writing a free column for a newspaper, as heretical as that notion may seem in some journalism circles.

It was about three months after the “Spiritual Thoughts” column started that I had my first social invitation from Ted and Mary to visit Christian Centre Fellowship for an event. Every February or March, the church holds a family enrichment weekend that usually kicks off with a banquet and featured speaker on the Friday night (occasionally the banquet has been on Saturday) and wraps up with a movie night Sunday evening. In February 2009, Jeanette and me found ourselves seated at a table with Tricia Kell, the featured speaker for the weekend, Majors Grayling and Jacqueline Crites from the Thompson Corps of the Salvation Army, a couple that I knew about as well as Ted at that time, and Ted and Mary (when Mary wasn’t working in back in the kitchen.)

Kell is the author of two books, one of which is Chain of Miracles, the 2004 story of how she said the “power and love of God can change a chain of tragedies into a chain of miraculous victories.”

The book described how “God walked her through the abusive relationship and tragic death of her first husband to the accidents that left two of her children both physically and mentally challenged – to another horrifying incident that nearly killed her current husband.”

Kell was born in Halifax and raised as a Roman Catholic. A self-described “air force brat,” she lived in both Europe and Canada growing up. Later, she said, she “developed, owned and managed a successful clothing design company along with other companies.”

She described in Chain of Miracles how her first husband, Jeffrey, with a gun in the vehicle and their three-month-old son, J.J., threw them from a car into a ditch between Ponton and Thompson.
Kell, and her current husband, Gord, live in Winnipeg with their three adult children.

Her second book, Attitude Determines Altitude, was a humorous book, she said, “still based on my everyday life but tells how I beat my fear of flying.” It was published in 2008.

The following year we received a return invitation to share dinner with Paul Boge, the Winnipeg engineer-author-filmmaker.

Boge is an award-winning author who has written The Urban Saint: The Harry Lehotsky Story; Father to the Fatherless: The Charles Mulli Story; Hope for the Hopeless: The Charles Mulli Mission; and most recently, The Biggest Family in the World, chronicling the life of Charles Mulli in an illustrated children’s book published last December.

He has also written two novels in a potential trilogy, The Chicago Healer in 2004, and The Cities of Fortune in 2006.

In 2010, Boge talked about his then recently published book, The Urban Saint: The Harry Lehotsky Story, which explored the life of old west end Winnipeg inner city pastor Harry Lehotsky, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2006 at age 49.

Boge won Word Guild’s best new Canadian author award in 2003 for his first book, The Chicago Healer, published the following year.

In addition to being an author, Boge, is a consulting mining engineer and capital project manager with the family firm Boge & Boge Consulting Engineers in Winnipeg, and no stranger to Thompson. He lived and worked here for nine months in 2003, five months in 2005 and for another 10 months in 2007, while working on three separate surface projects for Vale, and doing much of his writing in his apartment at night.

Boge is also behind FireGate Films, an independent Winnipeg company that made the 2006 feature-length movie Among Thieves, with Boge writing, directing and producing the film, which explores the possibility the end is in sight for the United States dollar as the world’s reserve currency, as Gulf Arab countries including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar have contemplated ending dollar dealings for oil and moving to a basket of currencies including the euro and Chinese yuan or renminbi. The last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than U.S. dollars was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1990.

Boge is also the co-ordinator for the annual Winnipeg Real to Reel Film Festival at North Kildonan Mennonite Brethren Church in mid-February. He is a member of the church.

Five years later, Boge returned as the keynote speaker again this year for the Feb. 27 to March 1 weekend, sharing about his work and how he integrates his faith into his work environment. We’ve kept in touch by e-mail here and there over the last five years and we saw him briefly in Winnipeg in February 2012 at the Real to Reel Film Festival.

Paul’s a great guy and fun to hang around with. So this year, in a bit of a break from tradition, where we had only attended the kick-off banquet or sometimes the Sunday chili dinner and movie night, Jeanette and me ventured out to Nick DiVirgilio’s NC Crossroad Lanes upstairs at his North Centre Mall on Station Road for some Saturday afternoon five-pin bowling. We wound up on a team with Paul. Never let it be said Christians can’t be competitive.

Besides the annual family enrichment weekend, over the last seven years, I’ve dropped by the odd Sunday morning to check out a worship service, usually with Jeanette, but sometimes on my own when she’s been away at International Music Camp in Dunedin, North Dakota. And over this past year I attended every other Saturday at 9 a.m. for their men’s fellowship breakfast, which wrapped up for the season June 13.

How I wound up going to the breakfasts was through a typical Ted invitation. Last Oct. 17, at 7:41 p.m. on a Friday evening I received an e-mail Ted: “We’re having men’s breakfast tomorrow 9 am @ Christian centre.

“You’re welcome to join us.

“Ted.”

Truth be told, the invitation was Mary’s idea. For these mainly, but not exclusively, Mennonite Brethren to invite a third-degree member of Knights of Columbus Thompson Council #5961 from St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church parish here to break bread with them struck me somewhat irreverently perhaps as in keeping with Jesus telling Zacchaeus the tax collector he was coming over for dinner. It also struck me as the kind of invitation my current supreme pontiff, Pope Francis, wouldn’t hesitate to accept. Before I moved to Manitoba in 2007, I knew next to nothing about Mennonites. What little I knew living and working mainly in Southern Ontario was shaped by images of the Old Order Mennonites of St. Jacobs, Ontario. Or was that the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania? Who knew? While I may not have sorted it all out or ever will, I’m pretty sure the Mennonite Brethren I had breakfast with were not Old Order, although I have encountered Old Order-like Mennonites here in Thompson (I once asked a group caroling at Christmas when I was editor of the Thompson Citizen if they would mind me taking their photograph in one of those “duh-what-was-I-thinking” moments. Their leader graciously told me while his salvation wasn’t going to depend on whether or not I took his picture, out of deference to their religious beliefs, he’d rather I didn’t.)

Now Protestant evangelicals are sola scriptura or the “People of the Book,” while Catholic theology relies on the rule of faith-based scripture, plus apostolic tradition, as manifested in the teaching authority of the magisterium of the Catholic Church. Catholics, outside of the seminary or Catholic scholarship, at the rank-and-file lay level in the pews, are generally not catechesized to know the Bible as well as Protestants do. That’s a plain and simple fact. So I appreciated the indulgence of my Protestant brothers during biblical discussions. I still chuckle when I recall the Saturday morning I was attempting to illustrate some point by referring to the Apostle Paul before the Areopagus, where some of the assembled said, “We shall hear you again concerning this,” but I could not quite place where it was in the Bible, and pilot Reg Willems, since decamped to Flin Flon, sitting beside me at the table, said gently, “That would be in Acts, John.”

I learned a lot through those discussions with Ted and Reg, Lloyd Penner, Jason Winship, Dustin Winker, Trevor Giesbrecht, Barry Little, Keith Hyde, Gord Unger, Ken Giesbrecht, Keith Derksen, Claude Pratte, Cohle Bergen, Peter Gosnell, Bill Lennox, Jim Cohan, Wei Wei, Adam Morin and Nick Yoner (with Keith, Gord and Dustin usually doing the cooking). Thanks, guys.

I also learned something about accountability in friendship through Ted these past seven years, as he wouldn’t hesitate to call you on something, if need be.

Two examples from our “Spiritual Thoughts” column collaborative efforts come to mind. The first occurred near the beginning of our work together in 2009, the other near the end in 2014.

In the first case, Jordan McLellan, who was the assistant pastor at the Thompson Pentecostal Assembly, focusing on youth ministry from mid-2007 until he left for Saskatoon to take a position at Lawson Heights Pentecostal Assembly in early 2010, had missed a couple of his submissions for the column without explanation.

I recall fuming to Ted in a telephone call that if McLellan missed a third contribution in such a manner, I was going to “irrevocably” drop him from the column rotation. Perhaps it was the word irrevocably that did it, but Ted didn’t miss a beat with his response, replying that he was glad then that I wasn’t the “good Lord.” Point taken. And never forgotten.

Just over a year ago, young Richard Sheppard, group leader of the Thompson Seventh-day Adventist Congregation, asked to join the “Spiritual Thoughts” rotation. At the time, the local Seventh-day Adventists weren’t part of the Thompson Christian Council (they were admitted by a unanimous vote this past spring) but that wasn’t in itself a bar to Sheppard writing, nor was Seventh-Day Adventist theology. By virtue of their valid baptism, and their belief in Christ’s divinity and in the doctrine of the Trinity, Seventh-day Adventists are both ontologically and theologically Christians. The real problem was perceived to be Sheppard himself, who is off this fall to a Seventh-day Adventist post-secondary school in Lacombe, Alberta.

Richard is a controversialist, by design or evolution, I’m not sure which. He’s zealous. He’s in-your-face. In short, he’s everything management of the Nickel Belt News did not want to see in the pages of the paper in what had been a pretty safe and non-controversial column space.

Management was adamant. That is until Ted outflanked us from the left – for probably the first and only time in his life.

When I sent Ted an e-mail relaying the news that Sheppard wouldn’t be joining the roster, he replied with his own hard-hitting e-mail pointing out that several years earlier when we had briefly run a columnist in that space whose views were anathema to most of the clergy on the council, they had swallowed hard and realized newspapers are supposed to be about free speech.

What happened to that notion, Ted wondered?

Essentially, he accused of us pre-publication censorship and betraying our free speech principles.

What Richard needed was a good editor to work with him and perhaps tone him down a bit in places, not to spike the column entirely, Ted argued.

I shared Ted’s response with my boss, and observed how professionally embarrassing it was to be lectured on free speech and the role of a newspaper by an evangelical pastor who at that moment had truth very much on his side, and was making us look like moral cowards and far more conservative than any views he held.

Ted’s argument prevailed, and Richard Sheppard’s first “Spiritual Thoughts” column, critiquing the popular Christian movie Heaven is for Real, which in Richard’s words was “a spellbinding tale about a young toddler in a clerical family who ostensibly dies on an operating table, visits heaven and comes back with mystifying facts from ‘beyond the grave’ that his own father finds hard not to accept,” ran on June 20, 2014 in the Nickel Belt News, albeit toned down a tad from the original submission, where (and I’m paraphrasing only slightly here, I believe, from memory) Richard suggested the movie was an exercise in necromancy, not a word we saw in a lot of column submissions, and which was excised from what appeared in print – but the entire column did not need to be axed, which was part of Ted’s point.

To my knowledge the particular column generated no complaints. And last I counted, Richard had gone onto write at least five more “Spiritual Thoughts” columns for the paper.

I ran into Richard in person in early April and told him he had Ted to thank for making it into the column rotation. He seemed pleasantly surprised. Nice kid, really.

Safe travels, Ted. Manitoba’s loss is Saskatchewan’s gain.

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