Holidays are for reading. Everything slows on a three-day weekend. It gives us time to read those titles that call to us as we rush past them on an ordinary day. That’s the old reading technology, the kind I love to surround myself with. Then come the blog posts waiting at the bottom of a string of bookmarks in one browser or another. In some respects, the greatest urgency attaches to these. They exist in the ether and might not be there when I want them. Continue Reading

George Tyrrell On Mary, Model of Contemplative Life

Maureen Mullarkey

December 8, 2022

George Tyrrell remains too-readily dismissed as a heretical figure in the modernist controversy. He revered Mary as the sign and summit of contemplative life. Conversely, Pope Francis is on a tear to strangle the Church’s contemplative orders. This December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, seems a fitting time to honor Mary with the words of Fr. Tyrrell written eight years before his expulsion from the Jesuits. Unlike our present pope, Tyrrell lauded the transcendent grace of cloistered distance from the endless vicissitudes of the world. Continue Reading

Veterans Day, November 11

Maureen Mullarkey

November 11, 2022

Veterans Day has lost its sting. The seismic shock of World War I reverberated through American art and culture in ways forgotten now. Yet every generation needs to stare into the chasm between the cataclysm’s ambition—”the War to end all wars”—and its harrowing reality. Forgetful people embrace the illusion that this time, this battlefield, this clash of arms—especially one waged by proxy with someone else’s blood—will be the one to make the lion drop at the foot of the lamb. Veterans Day brings to mind John Singer Sargent’s Gassed (1918-19), an anguished glimpse of the human cost of that enduring deception. Continue Reading

Notes On Hell

Maureen Mullarkey

October 24, 2022

Dante, Hell’s topographer, imagined its location and architecture with such specificity that Botticelli could map it in painstaking detail two centuries later. By now, images that stirred Savonarola’s audience to fear of sin have dwindled to plot devices in pulp thrillers and horror movies. Of all impossible thoughts, Hell is the most unthinkable for us moderns. Displaced by myths of progress, the concept survives largely as a cultural heirloom, a curio. A place where the worm does not die and the ever-burning wrath of God never goes out strikes us as preposterous. Continue Reading

Notes on “Padre Pio,” the Film

Maureen Mullarkey

September 27, 2022

Peter Bradshaw, chief film critic for The Guardian, viewed Padre Pio at its premier in the 2022 Venice International Film Festival. He is a perceptive writer. His review emphasizes two things. One, the film is not a biopic of Pio’s life, as many devotees of the saint expect. Pio/LeBeouf does not appear on screen that much. Bradshaw writes that LaBeouf seems to be making what amounts to a “cameo” appearance. His role accompanies the “main action,” perhaps as commentary on it or complement to it. Continue Reading