Romero remembered: a new documentary

America Magazine blogs point out that there is a new documentary about Romero entitled “Monseñor: The Last Days of Oscar Romero.” which is due to come out. They’ve got a trailer for the film, here.

I tried to embedd it but really couldn’t work it out.
Meanwhile over at the New York Review of Books, Alma Guillermoprieto writes about the film. She also remembers Archbishop Oscar Romero’s murder and how it ruptured El Salvador. Guillermoprieto interviewed Archbishop Romero and spent time in the country after Romero’s death. Her account is compelling and beautifully written, though critical of the Church’s hierarchy.

Here is a portion of Guillermoprieto’s article in the NYRB but the whole piece is worth reading.

But for the Church rank-and-file Romero has become an extraordinarily meaningful figure, as a quick Internet search of his name can attest. We can find evidence of this in yet another work intended to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of his death: a documentary film, Monseñor: The Last Journey of Óscar Romero, directed by Ana Carrigan and Juliet Weber, and produced by the Kellogg Institute at Notre Dame, a Catholic university.

Lourdes: an exercise in theodicy

Lourdes, a new film about the French Marian shrine from a secular art-house perspective, has won acclaim in the secular press and prizes on the independent film circuit.

In the film, Christine (Sylvie Testud), a young woman who suffers from Multiple Sclerosis and is confined to her wheelchair, travels to Lourdes with the Order of Malta. We learn that Christine goes on pilgrimages in order to travel (It’s not easy to travel in a wheelchair, she says) and that she preferred Rome to Lourdes. She is not particularly religious. The pilgrims do all the typical Lourdes things, visit the baths, pray, go to confession, Benediction, Mass.

Madame Hartl, an elderly and pious lady who shares a room with Christine, starts looking after her. She wheels Christine to the front of the crowd at Benediction, prays for her, makes sure she goes to the baths. A miracle happens and Christine is able to walk again.

America Magazine’s Fr James Martin (chaplain to the Colbert Report and author of My Life with the Saints) gives the film a rave review.

For him, the film perfectly depicts the humanity and reality of Lourdes.

Is Pope Benedict too sentimental about Bavaria?

There’s a flourishing discussion about papalotry, or the inordinate and uncritical adulation of popes, going on between the blogs of America Magazine and Commonweal. I’ll leave papalotry to my betters (Gregory Wolfe offers some good thoughts) and focus on its origins. Catalyst for the debate was Commonweal editor Paul Baumann’s critical post about a speech that Pope Benedict made a few weeks ago when he was made an honorary citizen of the town of Freising, a suburb of Munich where the Pontiff spent his seminary years.

It is perhaps fitting that Mr Baumann’s post is entitled “Confusing Images” because both its focus and intentions were confusing. Ostensibly Mr Baumann is reacting to another Commonweal blogger, Fr Robert Imbelli, who had simply posted up the Pope’s speech entitled “Images of Gratitude”, uncritically. Mr Baumann professes himself surprised by “the adulation the Pope’s remarks elicited”. He describes the speech as “unexceptional and thereby perfectly suited to the blandness of this particular civic ritual” but then proceeds to give to give it a meticulous going over.

He writes: “His appreciative recollections concerned family, neighbours, Catholic feast days, walks in the countryside, the numinous aura of Freising’s medieval cathedral, and cherished memories of his ordination. ‘At the seminary we were one family,’ the pope recalls, and Freising ‘became a real homeland to us, and as a homeland it lives on in my heart.’ The war and the crimes of Nazi Germany are mentioned, but seem vague and distant shadows in Benedict’s telling of the hardships and joys, the cold dormitories, study halls, ‘and so forth’ of his seminary training. Tellingly, he concludes by praising the ‘real Bavarian culture’ of his youth.”

It’s Dowd what done it…

Maureen Dowd — the red-haired doyenne of liberal journalism — whose New York Times columns provoke mirth and wrath, has united both liberal and conservative American Catholics with her latest column, which deals with the Apostolic Visitation of Women Religious currently taking place in the US.

It is a rare occasion that finds Fr John Zuhlsdorf of What does the Prayer Really Say on the same side as Michael Sean Winters, a journalist who writes for the Jesuit America Magazine — but it’s Dowd what done it.

Both men have censured her, even if the reasons they give are somewhat different.

MSW ended his post on the America with this: “It is not that she is wrong, it is that she is so contentedly wrong, so confident in her ignorance, so comprehensively prejudiced against the Church. Why doesn’t she just become a Protestant and have done with it? If you heard her rant on the street, you would give her a dollar and hope she doesn’t spend it on booze. Reading her rant in the Times, you can just flip the page.”

Now the Grey Lady has published the letters in response to the flame-haired lady’s column.