Comment on Fr. Z's "Pondering Francis: Part II

I like this article by Fr. Z.

Father is obviously trying hard to make sense of Pope Francis in a manner that doesn't seem disingenuous.

It seems that there are at least two camps in the world of Catholic bloggers today when it comes to analyzing this pontificate.

There are those who make note of problematic statements and behavior and then ask, "How long will Our Lord allow this to continue?"

But, this camp is small.

The largest camp, the one across the lake, the one with all the new equipment, motor boats, water skiing instructors, and the praise band entertaining the campers after dinner each night, is the mainstream Catholic media.

So many in the big camp have adopted a formula for writing about the Bishop of Rome that seems to pick up the baton dropped by the conservative Catholics of the late-'70's and early-'80's, namely, the idea that if the proverbial "smoke of Satan" has, in fact, infiltrated the Church as Pope Paul VI observed (and this is a matter of debate for them), it is solely due to the misinterpretation of the documents of the Second Vatican Council, documents which were perfectly and beautifully written.

Pope Emeritus Benedict, an adviser at the Second Vatican Council, and a strong proponent of proper interpretation of the documents, defined two councils during his last months as pope. I'll call the two councils the Good Council and The Evil Twin. The Good Council was described in perfect detail in the documents. The Evil Twin was the "council of the media," in the way in which the media had provided bogus analysis of the documents and then promoted error-filled praxis in such a way that, soon, all loyal Catholics embraced the error as orthodoxy.

Obviously, this happened...but, there are now several very detailed histories of the Council (here's a couple of recently released histories: _The Second Vatican Council: An unwritten story_, and, finally, _The Rhine Flows into the Tiber_ has been re-released as _The Inside Story of Vatican II_) that make a case that the media's promotion of the Evil Twin did not necessarily require a great deal of effort, considering that so much of the error was generated by the intentional introduction of ambiguity into the documents. The strategically-placed ambiguity allowed those individuals within the hierarchy of the Church, who were so inclined, to fabricate and propagate praxis that did not conform to doctrine or, in turn, present that doctrine with precision and clarity.

To add salt to the wound, every pope since the council acknowledged the trouble in the Church, and yet, when there were moments in history when the journey down the wide path of personal desire and human-centric worship could have been stayed, when the time was nigh to take hold and fight for that which was once good and fruitful for the Church, the popes let go of the ancient "good" of the old world and remained asleep on the sentimental journey-of-their-youth down the yellow brick road to the utopia implied by the "spirit of Vatican II."

To his credit, Fr. Z does not take the mainstream approach. No mere meme with a "Look'ee here, Zeke! They've gone and took the pope's words out of context again!" is presented here to explain away the "What's Bishop of Rome Francis trying to do, anyway" chatter.

My only reservation, and my reason for writing this comment instead of just posting Fr. Z's blog to my Facebook page, is that I think Fr. Z might be reaching a little bit here in attempting to connect the dots between Pope Emeritus Benedict's concept of continuity and Pope Francis' focus on the “peripheries“. Specifically, I believe we have ample evidence that when Bishop of Rome Francis speaks so fondly of the need to go to the "peripheries" he is not remotely thinking of "Traditional Catholics whose 'legitimate aspirations' have been drawn to the traditional forms of our sacred liturgical worship, and who stick closely to traditional expressions of doctrine, (as a necessary) periphery." Rather, the Bishop of Rome has reserved a less...um...pastoral vocabulary for describing those who stand with Tradition.

That being said, I agree with Fr. Z when he writes, "We must work with what we have...Francis makes it pretty hard sometimes to read him in continuity with his predecessors, but it can and it must be done."

Sadly, Pope Francis CAN be read in continuity with the "spirit" of the Second Vatican Council in as much as Pope Paul VI,  Pope St. John Paul II (who, we must remember, was canonized a saint due to his "holy life" and NOT because of a holy pontificate), and Pope Benedict XVI all allowed the praxis spawned of that "spirit" to thrive during the time that had been given them to fight the good fight.

Dracula Untold (2014)

A movie review by Father Scott Archer

October 20, 2014

When I went to see Dracula Untold, a movie directed by Gary Shore and with Luke Evans (The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug) in the title role, I thought I was going to see an origin story, but it is, in fact, attempting to pass as “the true story behind the story you thought you knew.” This was apparent when I realized the audience is supposed to admire Vlad Tepes’ choice to become a vampire and root for him after he becomes one. As a story, Dracula Untold fails miserably.

The key ingredient in the behind the scenes story of a misunderstood hero is showing the audience that they have not been told the true story in the first place; that the choices you thought the villain made were not actually made, and the character is redeemed in a very clever way. In this way, the audience still gets a “good vs. evil” tale, yet not in the way expected, while allowing the audience to cheer for the character once thought to be the villain. This was very successfully done, for example, in the movie Maleficent (2014), where, even when the choice of vengeance was made, there was repentance and redemption in the end.

The character of Dracula has been used as a classic good versus evil tale, with good triumphant in the end; however, in this retelling, Vlad Tepes (Dracula) makes the choices you expect him to make, which are bad, evil choices. The writers and director try to convince us that these choices are made for good and noble causes, but therein lies the problem. The end can never justify the means. In a tale of a misunderstood hero, the choices must be different. In the aforementioned example of Maleficent we were given the believable and cleverly written premise that her story was never told properly. This is not the case with Dracula Untold.

Vlad still intentionally chooses to become a vampire. Yet, we are supposed to believe he is sacrificing himself to save his country. He continues to make the wrong choices when he has the chance to redeem himself; he instead chooses to make his vampirism permanent by killing his beloved wife. The choice to convince the audience to root for a character who is clearly evil was also a bad one. It makes no difference why he became a vampire. The truth is, he chooses the wrong path, no matter the reason, and the writers and director clearly wanted the audience to support him.

Do we even want Dracula to be a hero? No! We want him to fall in defeat at the hands of someone like Van Helsing. We want… no… we need to have good triumph over evil. In our relativistic world a story about evil versus evil should not come as a surprise, but that does not make it a good story. This movie sought to rehabilitate a monster who cannot not be rehabilitated. However, this story failed in so many other ways.

This is a CGI movie on steroids if ever there was one, and I had the impression that I was watching a video game most of the time. The costuming is the typical medieval-fantasy-Ren fair variety, but I am convinced that the fur-collared coat worn by Vlad is the same one worn by Luke Evans as Bard the Bowman in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. The score by Ramin Djawadi (Iron Man, Game of Thrones) is unmemorable and adds nothing to support the movie in any significant way. The best thing I can say about this movie is that everyone’s hair, for a movie set in fifteenth-century Transylvania, is very clean and perfectly coifed!

Dracula Untold is simply a story that should have remained untold.