Tag Archives: Roman Catholicism

Religion, Uncategorized

The quest for the saint

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Medieval altar to Saint Olaf preserved in Nidaros Cathedral.

Someone on Basefook brought this project to my attention. The idea is to locate the lost bones of St. Olaf (best remembered as a character in my Erling novels) for scientific and cultural purposes.

For a saint as problematic as he was in life, St. Olaf swung disproportionate weight in the religious life of the European Middle Ages. His shrine in Nidaros Cathedral was a rich and elaborate one, making the city of Trondheim a very popular pilgrimage destination (perhaps people calculated that the hard trip over Norwegian terrain would earn them extra penance points). Pilgrims streamed in from all over Europe, lifting up prayers, looking for miracles, and spending money. Sigrid Undset describes such pilgrimages in several of her novels.

During the Reformation, Olaf’s shrine was demolished and broken up, the proceeds going to the king. Yet it seems that the bones themselves were not destroyed. Instead, they seem to have been re-buried covertly. Anyone who knew the secret of their location did not pass it on. But now there’s this project to rediscover them using modern scientific techniques.

My Basefook friends have expressed mixed views on the project. Many of them are – reasonably – concerned that if the bones are recovered, they will once again become the object of pilgrimages and devotion. We Protestants don’t hold with that stuff, and I agree.

Yet, all things considered, I’m for it. I believe in freedom of religion, so let the Roman Catholics do what they like. If it serves as a counterweight to the advance of Islam in Europe, it’s the lesser of two evils, it seems to me. What I’d like is for Lutheran Norway to be preserved, but I’ll take a Catholic Norway over a Muslim one.

Also, I’ll be interested in what analysis of the bones will reveal.

I signed the petition. I’ll be watching the project’s progress with interest.

Fiction

Conclave: Misunderstanding the Stated Theme

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The new movie Conclave has a lot going for it — story tension, performances, a natural gravitas of habit and habitat — but it doesn’t take its theme deep enough to stir the soul.

Acton’s Joseph Holmes writes, “The film is visually mesmerizing and the acting is superb. . . Every liturgical and ritual observance is infused with weight and drama, from the prayers to the manner in which ballots for the new pope are submitted.”

But the leader of the conclave, Cardinal Lawrence, is burdened by doubt, at least, that’s what we’re told. He speaks of doubting God and the church but never doubts its politics.

“This lets the air out of much of the story’s drama. Because the film never shows the ‘conservative’ side, those struggling to retain the old ways, as being sympathetic in any way, we never get to see Lawrence struggle with the rightness of his own position. Ironically, he never doubts himself.”

World‘s Colin Garbarino notes another kind of shallowness. “These churchmen have surprisingly little to say about the Bible’s teachings or church tradition during their debates. Even the conservatives seem more concerned with cultural tradition than doctrinal conviction.”

Photo by Ran Berkovich on Unsplash

Non-fiction, Reading, Reviews

Blogging through ‘The Conservative Mind’: Evangelicalism

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Continuing my fairly random commentary on Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind:

Good will is not enough to safeguard freedom and justice: this delusion leads to the triumph of every demagogue and tyrant, and no amount of transplanted Idealism can compensate for the loss of religious sanctions. Men’s passions are held in check only by the punishments of divine wrath and the tender affections of piety.

This passage from Kirk’s chapter on Orestes Brownson is part of one of many discussions where the place of Christianity – or at least religion in general – is considered. Although most of the notable conservatives in the book are heterodox in some sense, and some are even agnostics or atheists, the importance of religion as such looms large. One exception is Roman Catholicism – several of the great conservatives are Catholics, or at least high Anglicans.

Catholics come off pretty well in this book – which annoys me a bit, of course. Still, I can’t deny that the Reformation was a liberalizing force (heck, I’m proud of it. See my post last night). Luther didn’t abolish the hierarchy of the church (check out the organizations of most Lutheran churches worldwide), but he affirmed the principle that there’s a direct line between the believer and Christ, absent the mediation of the priest. In the context of history, this was a step toward individualism and what Kirk calls “atomization” – mankind conceived as a mass of unconnected individuals, all free-floating clients of the state, undistinguished by family, status, or personal qualities.

It’s interesting for an evangelical to observe that evangelicals are newbies to the conservative movement. Again, this is something I already knew – evangelicals were Abolitionists and the Prohibitionists, trying to re-shape the world through legislation, to change mankind through enlightened government force.

But there were dangers in that approach, as we can see now. The reformer who wants to save the world from slavery and Demon Rum, goes on to try to save it from guns and cigarettes and fossil fuels and transphobia.

And yet I don’t believe in a purely libertarian approach either. I think the government has a role to play in legislating morality – all laws, after all, legislate morality to one extent or another.

I’m thinking it over.