Amour – A Review

Amour has a number of walk-on characters: the concierge and his wife, who provide Georges and Anne with the groceries they need to live in isolation as Anne slowly dies before our eyes under Georges’ care.  And Alexandre, a concert pianist and former student of Anne’s, whose memory of Anne from better days provides her with the dignity now being stripped from her almost by the hour.

Amour also has one minor character: Eva, Georges and Anne’s daughter, who struggles with her father to make sense of death – and fails.  Mostly Amour is about three major characters: Anne and Georges, a couple who have grown old together and are now in their 80s.  And the apartment that contains them. 

Anne suffers a debilitating stroke and fails rapidly before our eyes.  Georges assumes the role of caretaker and witness to her undignified demise.  The apartment is a shabby reminder of better times when the paint was fresh and the rooms were filled with art and music – the books are still there – and most likely more than a touch of Parisian elegance.  A place now reduced to four walls and furniture limited to two chairs and a settee in the living room, two chairs in the kitchen, and eventually a hospital bed in the bedroom.   A fortress to withdraw to when one no longer wants to answer the telephone.

If you have not yet seen the film, this review may not be for you.  It contains spoilers.

Anne and Georges return from a concert to find the lock broken on their  apartment door.  Anne remarks that if an invader were to enter, it would frighten her to death.  We soon learn that it’s not a burglar she has to fear; it’s death itself that has entered their space.

Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke makes horror films.  Amour is his latest, and the film’s title masks the fact the horror this time is not ritual suicide, as in The Seventh Continent (1989), terrorist home invasion, as in Funny Games (1997), or religious sadism and child abuse, as in The White Ribbon (2009), but the fact that life itself comes to an end, and the ending can be anything but pretty.

Amour is not just another movie about the end of life.  It’s about the end of life as a taboo topic.   About death as loss of dignity and the gradual removal of those things which give life meaning – food and drink, communicating with loved ones, music, art, pride in one’s appearance, mobility and the illusion of control over one’s fate.

Emmanuelle Riva’s performance is nothing short of perfection.  How she missed the Best Actress Oscar this year will always be a mystery.  Jean-Louis Trintignant’s performance, by the same token, shows that Haneke knew what he was doing when he wrote the story for Trintignant.   At some point about halfway through the movie I wondered if I was going to be able make it to the end, but I immediately realized I was so engaged by the acting skills of these two masters that there was no way I was going to miss seeing where they would take it.  And there was a second reason, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Amour is a character study of a man who slowly comes to the realization that he is not up to the task he is faced with.  The old line that God gives you no task he doesn’t also give you the tools to deal with may not be true.  You’re never quite sure.  Why didn’t Georges and Anne have a better relationship with their daughter, so she could have stepped in and helped bear the burden?  Why don’t we all have perfect relationships with all the people in our lives?  Why are we all not prepared for the unforseeable? 

The unrelenting suffering and loss of dignity is relieved by one powerful scene where Georges reveals not only an inner strength but what Anne said to him once at the breakfast table: “You are a monster.  But you have been very kind to me.”  We have just witnessed an act of humiliation.  The nurse who has combed Anne’s hair puts a mirror in front of her face and asks her to acknowledge that she has made her beautiful.   The next thing we see is Georges firing the nurse for incompetence.  The scene gets ugly, but Georges has restored dignity and your respect for him soars.

It’s a movie about death and dying.  It’s also about euthanasia.  Haneke clearly wants his audience to ask themselves how much of this pain and suffering they are willing to take.  I can well imagine a young person hearing about the plot line and deciding to give the film a miss.  This is not a film to enjoy; it’s an experience to endure.  I am the same age as the filmmaker, and about ten years younger than the main characters.  I am less likely than a young person to pretend we can brush the topic of death and dying aside.  I want to be prepared to take my own life, and in a way that nobody else will be blamed.  I’m not yet ready to plan my death and I am tortured by the question, when will I be?   Is leaving it to fate the only real option?  I don’t have the courage or the cowardice – I’m not sure which it is – to look away from the question Haneke is asking: Do you have what it takes? 

If you’re lucky, you will die a natural death.  Or you will be cared for in hospice, surrounded by loved ones.  But what if you mess up, and you don’t get dot all your Is and cross all your Ts?  What if you aren’t so lucky?  What if you are left to die on your own, with only one loved one to see you through?  Or no loved ones?

It took me two days to realize the movie was not just about Anne.  It's equally, possibly more, about Georges.  I realized only after some time the significance of the detail that Haneke wrote the story for Trintignant.  You become so focused on the horror of Anne’s rapid decline – a year telescoped into two hours – and the fact you are watching a taboo, that you miss entirely – at least I did – that Haneke stops before an even bigger taboo.  What becomes of you when you have given your all?  When you have taken the responsibility of making a life and death choice for another human being?

A good deal of the story deals with Anne’s loss of dignity.  The scene with the insensitive nurse.  Another, where Georges locks the door to her bedroom when Eva shows up unannounced because he knows Anne doesn’t want to be seen in her present state, even by, and possibly especially by, her daughter.  We see her being spoon-fed and the food dribbling down her chin, we see her spitting out water, we see her sitting naked in the shower being bathed by a stranger.  And we see her, in Georges’ memory flashback, as he wants to remember her, sitting at the keyboard, the graceful lady she once was.

Haneke doesn’t tell a story so much as lay out events in ways that force you to ask questions.  A pigeon flies into the apartment, not once, but twice.  What is it doing in this film?   Is the pigeon a dove?  The Holy Spirit?  The symbolism doesn’t work.   Accidental intrusion of nature into one’s inner sanctum?   Or perhaps the simple absurdity of life in the end.  A metaphor for life as an act of no ultimate consequence, a momentary distraction.

I am aware, in rereading what I have just written here, that I’ve portrayed the watching of this film as self-inflicted torture.  It is an endurance test, but it’s one worth enduring. Others have tried to claim this is a movie about devotion, about two old people who have known love and who ride the end out together.  Or that we should focus not on Anne’s death and dying but on the fact that she went to her death not alone, but in the embrace of a man totally devoted to her – that this was the ultimate love story.  You may see it that way.  I didn’t, but you may.

What I saw instead was the other reason I mentioned for appreciating the film and not wanting to leave the theater.  It is rare – so rare that it almost doesn’t happen at all – that a filmmaker puts all the decision making about what is transpiring on the screen in the viewers’ own hands.  Why does Georges disappear from the story in the end?  Why is this loose end not tied up?  Eva enters the apartment, as in a coda to a piece of music, and we see it now empty of all life, all furniture, all trace of illness and death, and there is no sign of Georges’ last days.   We have seen the obscenity of death in Anne’s slow demise.  We are spared having to look at what happens next.  The last taboo. What happens to Georges?  This is audience participation.  Haneke wants you to write that part of the story.

I’d call Amour a five-star movie.  Not because it grabs you and makes you cry.  I didn’t shed a single tear.  And not because you come out of the theater impressed by superb acting and directing – which you certainly do.  That would make it a four-star.  The fifth star is for new heights in story-telling honesty.  It will be matched in the future, probably.   But I doubt it will be excelled.

picture credit 1: http://www.fact.co.uk/whats-on/amour

picture credit 2: http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Movies/2012/1219/Amour-is-a-moving-film-but-is-perhaps-unintentionally-uncomfortable-trailer 

Habemus Papam

Well, the Italians have got their Italian pope.  He’s from Argentina, so that gives them a twofer.  We are ecumenical, you see.   A Polish pope, a German pope and now an Argentine pope, all in rapid succession.  A pope from the New World, for the very first time.

That’s what the chatter will focus on, no doubt, as people reach out and try to find things about which to sing the praises of the wisdom of the choice.   It should not be lost that this is very much business as usual.   They’ve got themselves a conservative hardliner who will stick to the old boys’ set of authoritarian claims that they are the gatekeepers of heaven.  Top of the list of rules that they will attempt to impose on the world is the one that men and only men must rule.   That women need to subject themselves to their fathers and their husbands.  That they need to recognize God does not want them to speak on matters religious.  The male God does not put into the hands of women the power to forgive sins. 

Gay men and women are expected to go on denying what they know in their hearts, that they are capable of great love and devotion.  They will be expected to continue the fiction that they have a choice between a life of sin, or a life of sexual denial.  Make babies with it, or put it away.

Less clear is what will happen, if anything, within the church to clean away the arrogance that allowed corrupt priests and bishops to be set above the children abused by priests and bishops, when the church first denied it was happening, then blamed it on a few bad apples, then on homosexuality as a sexuality, then complained that others, like the Boy Scouts, were just as bad, and finally shut down churches to pay the billions the courts hit them up for in reparations.   And that's just in the United States.  And the numbers continue to rise.

They tried to maintain this was but a momentary aberration of an otherwise infallible institution, incapable of error.   After all, what is a waif or an orphan here and there compared to the good name of the Church established by Saint Peter and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit?  

Less clear, also, is what will happen to those voices within the church urging it to represent the poor and the powerless, the uprooted and the vulnerable.   One has to assume the jewels, the limousines, the banquets with kings and other top drawer people of the planet will continue as before.  The patriarchy will call the shots.   Priests working under some silly notion of “liberation” will need to stand back.  One assumes, too, there will be no adequate response to the fact the church in the developed world continues to hemorrhage parishoners, that many parishes go without priests, that suggestions these positions be filled by women will be rejected.  We will probably see more emphasis on the successes in the Third World without analysis of what these figures actually represent.

I just watched the Vatican press conference live, and saw three articulate spokespersons present the event as a glorious moment.  Federico Lombardi of Vatican Radio, who speaks such exquisite Italian, Canadian Father Thomas Rosica, who is the image of hardworking bilingual Canada with his easy flowing English and his English-accented but otherwise perfect French, and Spaniard Juan Maria de Tamayo, who spoke only Spanish and you wondered whether we're done with German now, all gave a great showing, even when a Chilean journalist asked them why it is Cardinal Mahoney was allowed to be there, considering his standing as a disgraced church leader, removed from his position because of failure to care for abuse victims properly.  They provided a diplomatic answer, making no mention of the fact that Mahoney’s diocese had just settled claims against it to the tune of some ten million dollars    Clearly the name of the game was keeping this a great moment of optimism and jubilation. 

I love it that a band marched up to the steps of St. Peter’s and played the Italian national anthem.  You didn’t miss the fact that this guy’s name is Bergoglio, now did you?  Not Smith, not Wittgenstein or Hickenlooper (been there, done that - no need for German at any press conferences anymore), not Nkumra.  We’ve got the reins back again.  I understand the early contenders included Marc Ouellet of Canada, and Odilo Pedro Scherer of Brazil, as well as Bergoglio of Argentina.  Clearly there were forces pushing for a guy from the Western Hemisphere.  The other early contender was the Italian, Angelo Scola.  You’ve got to hand it to the Vatican.  Despite the line they put out about what a spiritual process this conclave is and all the talk about Mexican nuns praying around the clock that the Holy Spirit will do the right thing (why would He ever do otherwise?) you’ve got some very savvy old men doing the diplomatic work of political compromise.

In fact, it’s quite remarkable how they know to be consistent when it doesn’t cost them face.  Francis, né Jorge Bergoglio, was the second choice in the last election, when Benedict won out.  So this is a nice little statement about consistency, one of the church’s favorite concepts.  After such a bookish distant pope, they’ve got themselves a man who lives not with a George Clooney type in a palace with gardens to die for but with an older priest, walks around in a simple priest’s robe, and cooks his own meals.  Nice.  Got the common touch.  Rides a bus to work.  Chose a name for himself never used before in papal history.  Francis.  The guy who talked to birds.  Everybody’s favorite saint.  The antithesis of backslappers like Timothy Dolan of New York and self-serving insider thought police like Lavandera and Cordileone of San Francisco, to name a few Catholics who reveal the split between the Democrats in the pews and the Republicans who run the show.

Franziskus, as the Germans will call him (I’d suggest the less latinate Franz, but I admit that sounds too much like somebody who works in a brewery), speaks German.   Francesco, in Italian.   He speaks that too, of course.  François, as the French will call him, will be the first Jesuit to sit on the siège de Saint-Pierre.   That’s a biggie.  Jesuits, despite their vow to be loyal to the pope “as a cadaver”  –  no kidding – look it up:  “perinde ac ("as if")  cadaver,” as their founder put it   –   are notoriously independent and disobedient.

“La presidenta Cristina Fernández de Kirchner envió una carta al flamante Sumo Pontífice de la Iglesia Católica” reads the headline in the Buenos Aires paper Pagina 12.   And no, that does not mean President Kirchner sent a postcard to the flaming sumo wrestler of the catholic church, although that's what she may think of him after all those political battles they had over same-sex marriage.   Sumo is supreme, carta is letter, and flamante is brand-new.  I have it direct from Buenos Aires that people there are pretty psyched, although the Guardian reports there are no tangos in the street for some reason.   Possibly the 20% who actually go to church are at a same-sex wedding somewhere.   Francisco (don’t call me Pancho) will not be using “the First” by the way.  We have come to think for the past couple thousand years that a pope needs a number after his name, but the official word is in.  You’re not officially the first at something until there is a second.

So here we are with a new beginning.  Time to put aside all the information about the failure of the church in the past.  Time to put aside, for now, the role of the Catholic Church in supporting the dictators of Latin America, especially during the ugly years when the generals were dropping young idealists into the sea from helicopters and priests like Christian von Wernich working for the generals were shunted off to Chile afterwards by the archbishop of Buenos Aires to protect him from prosecution.  That wasn’t Bergoglio, by the way.  That was Aramburu, who denied there was anything funny going on.

I would like to know, though, what Bergoglio thought of what was going on at the time.  I still want to hear more from priests like Eduardo de la Serna, who is on record as being none too pleased with his archbishop.  “The least we can say,” said de la Serna last November, speaking about a moral crisis in the country and about a Christmas message put out by the church, “is that we who are in the slums, among the people, with our feet in the mud, we have a view that is very different from the one in the bishops’ document.” 

In response to the news about his archbishop’s election to pope, Father Eduardo expressed some concern.   "I still have many doubts about his role regarding the Jesuits who went missing under the dictatorship." 

But that’s all for another day.  Let’s give Pancho twenty-four hours to get his feet wet.

picture credit

The Faithful Departed - A review

Philip F. Lawler’s The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture is an account of that collapse from the perspective of a Catholic right wing hardliner.   In Lawler’s view,  everything that has gone wrong with the Church is due to its abandonment of its once uncompromising stance that “extra ecclesiam nulla salus” – without the church there is no health.  The church has failed because it has opened itself up to the modern world, whose highest values are increasingly those of democracy and an enlightened embrace of diversity, and come to doubt the wisdom of  holding to a singular notion of truth and authority.  To Lawler, the Catholic Church can never be a “big tent” church.  It must always be exactly and only what the pope and his curia say it is, not what may be derived from the larger body of believers working in concert.

Lawler’s version of  Catholicism, which he adamantly insists is the only possible view that can be called “catholic,” demands unquestioned obedience to the bishop of Rome, and strict adherence to a bevy of dogmatic claims all focused on keeping power over life and death and one’s eternal soul in the hands of the men who run the church.   To a belief that to be a Catholic you have to force a woman who has been raped and impregnated to give birth to the baby.  That you cannot practice birth control, cannot have a sex-change operation, cannot have a hand in euthanasia, cannot vote for a Catholic congressman who favors abortion rights, even for non-Catholics.

I suspect Lawler is wrong when he concludes the church is dead.  It is not dead, but simply evolving.  The bullying church is on the ropes, at least in Europe and America, but the pastoral church is likely to go on for the forseeable future.  The problem is, Lawler doesn’t accept this division.  For him there is only one church and he sees no reason not to label the 90% of Catholics who practice birth control as non-Catholics.  Or not-really Catholics.

Lawler gets the problem right: Church leaders derailed the church in Boston (and this applies elsewhere as well) by yielding to the temptation to build up their power and influence for its own sake, rather than nurturing the religious solidarity on which they depended.   “Cardinals became preoccupied with the needs of the archdiocese as a secular institution, sometimes even to the detriment of the archdiocese as a community of faith.” (p. 248.) 

But he gets the solution wrong – that the church should speak with one voice, and that that voice should be the voice of central authority.  And he sabotages his own solution by writing wistfully of a day when politicians took their orders from bishops and people knelt and kissed their ring.  It’s not the “community of faith” he appears to be longing for but a community of power in numbers, a community run by authoritarians who brooked no dissent.

Lawler and I are working from opposing ideologies.  His is that there is a single divine truth, that it has been revealed to the pope and curia of the Roman Catholic Church, and that there is no room for divergence from their magisterium.  Mine is that truth is not revealed, but discovered, that knowledge is the sum total of all human experience to date, subject to change with every piece of new and conflicting evidence.  There is no middle ground between these two ideological stances, but I trust I can at least describe his views fairly and objectively before explaining why I disagree with them.

Here is Lawler’s evidence for the decline of Catholic power and influence in Boston and beyond:

• A 1958 Gallup poll showed that three out of four American Catholics attended Sunday Mass regularly; by 2000 the figure was closer to one out of four. 
• In that same time period nearly half of all Catholic elementary and high schools closed. 
• The number of Catholic marriages solemnized in churches fell by over 30% and the number of marriages annulled went from about 350 a year to nearly 50,000.
• The number of priests fell by about 20%; the number of ordinations dropped by about 65%.
• Two-thirds of the country’s seminaries closed and the number of women religious fell by over 50%.  Teaching orders declined from 104,000 in 1965 to about 8,000 today.   (p. 73)

“For the Catholic Church in Boston today,” Lawler writes, “there is no earthly hope.”

…Empty buildings—cavernous Gothic churches, rectories, convents and schools—urgently need repairs, but the paltry collections are not even enough to keep up with the current fuel bills.  Priests and nuns are aging, and precious few young people are entering the seminaries and convents to take their place.  The congregations, too, are aging; the pews are dotted with gray heads, while young couples spend their Sunday mornings at home with the newspaper and the television programs that cater to serious-minded secular viewers by featuring discussion of current events.

The entire massive structure of Catholicism totters along on borrowed time.  But the trend is clear.  That whole structure will come crashing down, perhaps within the next generation, unless there is some dramatic change…   (pp. 252-3)

Lawler thinks the church’s problem is that it is a willow when it ought to be an oak.  It should be standing firm and strong, eternal and unchanging.  It should never have surrendered to worldly pressures but held firm against all temptations to modernize.  Vatican II was the beginning of the end, he says – not because of the work of the council itself, but because of what happened afterwards.  The church never should have abandoned Latin, the universalizing language.  Priests should never have begun turning and facing the congregation at worship but continued with his back to them as he led the body in the ritual of worship and the mysteries of the faith.  The problem began in Boston, he says, when the Kennedy family met at Hyannisport to figure out how Catholic politicians now entering the mainstream should compromise as political leaders of Americans outside the faith.  They should never have allowed them to think independently of Rome.  There should have been no allowance for politicians who voted, for whatever reason, for birth control or abortion.  Lawler’s book could have been written by Rick Santorum.

There has probably never been a better illustration of how one can miss the woods for the trees.  The priestly abuse scandal, Lawler says, had three parts: The first part is the abuse itself.  The second is the prevalence of homosexuality among Catholic priests.  And the third is the abdication of authority when bishops, confronted with evidence of abuse, chose to ignore abuse complaints and enabled predators to continue as predators.  (pp. 7-9)

Lawler’s reasoning is that people lost faith in the church because of its failings.  The abuse scandal destroyed the credibility of the church as a moral force, and has caused catastrophic financial harm.  There’s no arguing with his first point.  Moreover, the public image of a church lying to protect its reputation and placing the welfare of its priests over the welfare of their victims was an even greater moral failing.  There is no arguing with his third point, either. 

There is, however, a serious problem with his second claim.  By putting emphasis on the sexuality of the priests in question, rather than on their inclination to abuse children, Lawler says little about the scandal and a great deal about his own homophobia. 

Lawler is a hammer in search of a nail, and he finds one in homosexuality.  Mired in the misconception of homosexuality as a mental disorder, he draws the line not between abuser priests and non-abuser priests, but between gay priests and non-gay priests.  He makes much of the John Jay Report on the scandal, commissioned by the bishops,  which noted that 81% of molestations were of males, and concludes this proves a connection between abuse and sexuality, without seeing the obvious – that even if 100% of all Catholic priests were homosexually inclined, the problem would still be the capacity of any particular priest to abuse, and not his sexual inclination.  According to the John Jay Report, only about 4% of priests have been charged with sex abuse and the number found guilty, obviously far fewer.    Most gay priests do not abuse boys, just as most straight priests do not abuse girls.   And opportunity – the fact that priests are left alone with boys but not with girls – would seem to be an obvious way to explain the rest. 

Lawler, however, is a dog with a bone.

When intelligence agencies discover an enemy spy within their own ranks, they…root out the effects of his treachery.  If the bishops had been determined to conduct a thorough study of sexual abuse they might have done similar investigations into the backgrounds of the priests who were accused.  Who were there (sic) friends among the clergy?  Where had they been assigned?  Did they share vacation cottages with other priests or bishops?  Who had been their seminary teachers? (p. 226)

Nobody could lay better ground for a witchhunt.   The child abuse scandal wasn’t the only reason for the church’s decline, as anyone familiar with the recent uproar in Germany over a rape victim being turned away from a Catholic hospital can tell you.  It does have more than a little explanatory value, though, provided you get the explanation right.  Lawler gets it all wrong.

Lawler’s assumption that homosexuality is by nature corruption leads him to the inevitable conclusion that the very presence in the church of gay people is what is corrupting it.  Not deception, not injustice, not hypocrisy, but rot from within as exemplified by "rampant" homosexuality.  Some people advocate frisking every black kid on the block on the grounds that the high percentage of black kids in trouble means you increase your chances of getting the bad guys.  Round up the homosexuals and anyone who has anything to do with them.  That’ll get the child abusers!

One might expect so much more of Lawler.  He is a Harvard graduate, the author of six books, editor of several magazines.  His articles have appeared in over 100 newspapers in the U.S. and abroad.  But even monkeys fall from trees.  And even good historians – and The Faithful Departed is very readable informative history – can trip over their own ideological blindess.  Lawler doesn’t just stumble, though.  His advocacy of blind obedience to a closed system hobbles him from the start.

Lawler is Director of Studies for the Heritage Foundation, now headed up by Tea Party leader, Jim “homosexuals should not be teaching in the public schools” DeMint.  If you go to their website, the first thing you see is “Join Rush Limbaugh and hundreds of thousands of other conservatives as a Member of The Heritage Foundation today.”   No man should be judged entirely by the company he keeps, of course, but one gets an idea of what Lawler seems to have in mind when he speaks of conservatism.

His solution to what ails the church – to return to the day when young couples living together before marriage should be denied communion – is bizarre.   His advocacy of conservative causes fills his pages.  He uses terms like “pro-abortion,” rather than “pro-choice.”  He speaks of Father Coughlin, the fiery radio-priest of the 1930s as a kind of buffoon, as being “dogged by charges of anti-Semitism.”  (p. 88) Which is an interesting way to put it, when you consider Coughlin’s magazine, Social Justice, published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.   He bewails (p. 129) the change from the time when Catholic children learned the Baltimore Catechism by the rote question-and-answer approach… to “master truths.”  In writing of the Vatican response to the demand for same-sex marriage, a document titled Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons, he stresses that “The Vatican noted that these arguments were ‘drawn from reason’ rather than revealed truth and practically in the same sentence notes that “Considerations described homosexuality as a “troubling moral and social phenomenon,” missing the point that the only arguments used against LGBT rights for some time now have been those attributable to so-called revealed truth. (pp. 208-9)

Lawler makes the case that Vatican II did not change anything, that most Catholics are wrong in thinking that it did.  It was the liberals who hijacked the Council, says Lawler, catching “tradition-minded” Catholics off-guard (p. 71).  He makes no concession to a need for reform, no recognition that priests once turned away women wearing lipstick from communion.  No recognition, in other words, that “conservative” has no meaning out of context.  That what matters is not whether one is liberal or conservative but what one is liberal or conservative about, what is being conserved and what is being cast out.  Lawler makes no mention of the offensiveness of the prayers for the conversion of the Jews in light of charges Pius XII failed to step in with any effective opposition to the persecution of the Jews – for the same reason the church today is shamed by the child abuse scandal, because it acted to preserve the institution at all costs, and not to protect the bodies and souls of the vulnerable.  He cherry picks his events the way he accuses “cafeteria Catholics” of following those rules they will choose to be governed by and rejecting the others.

The church will rise again, is Lawler’s conclusion.  After all, Catholics in Boston were a minority back in the early 19^th Century, oppressed by a hostile majority, as they are today.  “With the power of faith it could happen again.” (p. 258)

Faith, and a return to the old ways.  Back to a time before the 60s and the sexual revolution and easy divorces.  Back before the breakdown of gender roles, before all this talk of ecumenism. 

How is that to be accomplished?  Through unity of thought by imposition of orthodoxy.  By embracing the church militant, marching in lockstep and silencing all dissent.

Lawler tells us only what he thinks went wrong, not how one persuades the world that they should embrace his particular choice of orthodoxies and not some other.

That would be a topic for a different book.

page references are to Lawler, Philip F., The Faithful Departed: the Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture, paperback edition (with a new 2010 preface by the author), Encounter Books, NY and London, 2008