The Diana Movie

Poor decisions and missed opportunities. To quote:

Diana, adapted from Kate Snell's book Diana - Her Last Love seems determined to tread the path of least resistance and chronicle the Princess' final two years without upsetting any of the other involved parties along the way. The central focus of the drama is not her divorce, her prickly relationship with the Royal Family, or even her liaison with Dodi Al Fayed and the long-lingering involvement of his father, Mohammed in the years following her death. The film doesn't even look into the questionable events of that fateful evening, let alone attempt to analyse the lasting after-effects it had on Great Britain and its people.

Instead, Diana is the story of a relatively innocent romance between a very private, professional and unassuming Pakistani heart surgeon, Haznat Khan (Naveen Andrews), who just happened to attract the attentions of the world's most famous woman during the most tumultuous period of her short life. The details of their courtship are pretty unspectacular, confined to late-night rendezvous in London parks or hospital waiting rooms, and the film tries desperately to play things out like a marginally less amusing version of Roger Michell's Notting Hill. She may be loved by millions, but she's still looking for real romance.

The big problem here is by largely sidestepping the major, publicised events in Diana's life, the film is forced to make things up. Nothing outrageous, simply the conversations, the courtship and the excruciating pillow talk between a straightlaced surgeon and a hell-on-wheels celebrity trying desperately to be perceived as a normal person. The result is a series of mundane, trivial and stupefyingly redundant exchanges that not only reduce the characters to lobotomised sock puppets but make you question the integrity of Andrews and Naomi Watts, two top class performers who almost always deliver first rate work and really should know better. (Read more.)

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The Unfinished Life of N.

The Unfinished Life of N. by Micah Cawber is the debut novel of Wiseblood Books, a press dedicated to publishing works of high literary quality, both old and new. Like the strokes of an Impressionist's brush, the author paints rather than tells the story of Nafula, a troubled young woman struggling for a seemingly elusive redemption. The fractured narrative takes the reader inside the heroine's tormented mind, as she struggles to make sense of the senseless cruelty and pointless misery which she experiences. From the Wiseblood Weblog:

 In the tradition of Flannery O'Connor, Micah Cawber's Th­e Unfinished Life of N. scrutinizes the quiet ambitions of normal people, their everyday fictions concerning others' and their own humanity and goodness, as it follows Nafula, the innocent but not naïve protagonist, from the backwoods of Wisconsin to AIDS-stricken regions of Africa, and, at last, through a rehabilitation program at a Mental Health home. Nafula is the granddaughter of a local-celebrity preacher whose church-without-a-church religion plays a large part in propelling her into a "missionary" existence. As does that same grandfather's sexual abuse. Soon her work in Africa confounds her self-identification as a “helper.” In the novel's final turn, Nafula must reckon with the terrible speed of mercy.

Her parents do nothing to prevent the abuse to which Nafula is subjected as a child; it predisposes her to seeing herself as an object to be used. Her on-going sexual experiences result only in a growing disgust and self-loathing; she nevertheless keeps attempting to reach out for God and His goodness in her own lost way. The book exposes Nafula's grandfather's ephemeral church-without-a-church which, based upon pietistic sentimentality, is incapable of dealing with the real problems of human suffering. It holds the Incarnation at arm's length and thus offers no redemption for the flesh. As her African ordeals shatter her already fragile psyche, Nafula is helped by Benedictines, who are able to grasp the battle of good and evil which has seized her deeply wounded being. It is in seeing the image of the Heart of the God-Man that Nafula realizes that Christ has been suffering within her, and she has been suffering in Him.

The brilliant aspect of the story-telling is that amid the confusion of Nafula's life it is illustrated how mental illness and diabolic possession can mingle and overlap. On the deepest level Nafula is indeed an innocent, retaining the heart of a child in spite of losing her childhood to a depraved old man. She is ultimately a victim soul. The most powerful message of the novel is that judgment does not belong to us, but only to the Lord.

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Blessed Rolando Rivi

Italian Communists on a murderous rampage killed and tortured a young boy in 1945 because he wanted to be a priest. To quote:

“Tomorrow, one priest less,” said the political commissioner of one of the Communist Party’s “Garibaldi Brigades” of Monchio, a small town in the northern Italian province of Modena. Those words uttered in 1945 signaled the commissioner’s decision that seminarian Rolando Rivi had to be executed. Rivi was only 14, and now he is the Church’s first beatified seminarian.

Rivi’s beatification took place Oct. 5 in Modena, and it was a true “feast of faith.” Nearly 20,000 people attended the event, coming from the Emilia Romagna region of northern Italy, also known as “the triangle of death.”

From 1943-1949, approximately 4,500 people were killed in this region by communists. Among them were 93 priests, who were accused of several offenses, including collaboration with the fascist government, giving aid to fascist refugees or simply being priests or studying to become one. The latter was the case of Rivi. (Read more.)

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Charlotte Brontë vs. Jane Austen

From The Daily Beast:

It’s a fascinating oddity of literary history that the great Victorian novelist of romantic love, Charlotte Brontë, despised that other great British chronicler of love, Jane Austen, and could not quite comprehend why Austen was valued so highly by critics in Brontë’s time. This seems counterintuitive: after all, both appear regularly at the top of lists of favorites compiled by readers, especially female readers, who love classic novels and all things romantic....

As it happens, Charlotte Brontë’s perception of Jane Austen not only reveals much about Brontë herself but also highlights an important change in the evolving definition of romantic love in Western culture. Furthermore, this change foreshadows both D. H. Lawrence and our contemporary understanding of that malleable term “love,” a shift in meaning to which, I would say, Charlotte Brontë herself substantially contributed. (Read more.)

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A Satirical Engraving, Late 1780's

Maria-Theresia, Empress of Austria: - My daughter, what are you doing down there? What despair!
Marie Antoinette: - I was so thirsty of the blood of the French and I couldn't quench it, so in my despair I plunged into this well.

The lampoons against the Queen of France were relentless.

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Attacks on Christian Businesses

From Crisis:

In January, co-owner Aaron Klein had denied a request to bake a cake for a lesbian wedding. “The Bible tells us to flee from sin,” his wife and business namesake, Melissa Klein told a Fox News columnist recently. “I don’t think making a cake for it helps. Protests, boycotts, and a storm of media attention—much of it negative—ensued. The couple received death threats. Then, activists broadened the boycott: any wedding vendor that did business with Sweet Cakes would be targeted.

The final nail in the coffin came in August when the slighted lesbian couple filed an anti-discrimination suit with the state. “The LGBT attacks are the reason we are shutting down the shop. They have killed our business through mob tactics,” Klein said. His wife added: “I guess in my mind I thought we lived in a lot nicer of a world where everybody tolerated everybody.”

Christian Wedding Vendors Under Attack
In 2006, a noted advocate for traditional marriage, Maggie Gallagher, warned that the legalization of same-sex marriage would lead to constraints on religious freedom. Writing in the Weekly Standard, Gallagher saw the end of adoptions services by Boston Catholic Charities as a foreshadowing of things to come. (To retain its license, Gallagher explained, the agency would have to abide by the state’s anti-discrimination law, which had been extended to married same-sex couples.) She couched her warning in the form of a question:

This March, then, unexpectedly, a mere two years after the introduction of gay marriage in America, a number of latent concerns about the impact of this innovation on religious freedom ceased to be theoretical. How could Adam and Steve’s marriage possibly hurt anyone else? When religious-right leaders prophesy negative consequences from gay marriage, they are often seen as overwrought. The First Amendment, we are told, will protect religious groups from persecution for their views about marriage. So who is right? Is the fate of Catholic Charities of Boston an aberration or a sign of things to come?

Seven years later, we have the answer: as of this writing, there have been at least 11 instances of wedding vendors and venues facing some form of recrimination—threats, boycotts, protests, and the intervention of state or judicial authorities—because they denied services for gay nuptials because of their faith. (Read more.)

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Myths about the First Crusade

Rivers of blood? From Medievalists.net:

Many medieval chroniclers described the Christian conquest of Jerusalem during the First Crusade in 1099 and their words have been repeated ever since without much scrutiny. As horrible as the carnage was in the mosque and in the rest of the city, it could never be enough to sustain the reports of streets of blood that are heard so often today. These are fantastical descriptions, clearly impossible. Modern descriptions of crusaders wading through streets of blood turn a historical massacre into little more than a cartoon. The blood that was spilled in the massacre of Jerusalem was real; the rivers of it that course down the pages of modern newspapers and popular books are not. (Read more.)

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Margaret of Austria

Margaret of Austria in white mourning

Has anyone ever written a novel about Margaret? Hers was an astonishing life. Like Katherine of Aragon, she was an aunt of  Emperor Charles V. From Susan Abernethy:

Charles began to realize he had lost his wisest councilor and asked Margaret to return to the council in 1517. After a few important members died, Charles allowed Margaret to sign all state papers and to control the finances. He also gave her an annuity of twenty thousand pounds. She eventually regained the title of Regent. A campaign was begun to name Charles Holy Roman Emperor. Margaret cajoled and bribed the Electors. In January of 1519, Margaret’s father Emperor Maximilian died. By June, Charles was elected Holy Roman Emperor as Charles V. Margaret was now his deputy. She had to deal with insurrection, lack of funds and war. She did her best to keep the Low Countries out of costly conflicts. She had to deal with the Protestant Reformation and its consequences. All the hard work and loneliness had taken its toll on Margaret’s health, mind and body. She was having some trouble with her leg and had to surrender some of her authority to other councilors. (Read more.)

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Art Vandals, Past and Present

There is a bizarre show at the Tate which celebrates art vandalism. From The Guardian (Via Stephanie Mann):

Two images haunt me from Tate Britain's survey of attacks on art in Britain since the Reformation. One is a painfully realistic, lifesize stone figure of the dead Christ, eyes closed, chest emaciated, body taut. This terrifying portrait of death is a radical and dangerous work of art. It was carved by an unknown sculptor in the early 16th century then apparently buried, as an idolatrous object, just a few years later when Henry VIII rejected the Pope and dissolved Britain's monasteries....

Tender depictions of the Virgin Mary and harrowing visions of the sufferings of Christ abound in the first few galleries of this show, in stone and wood and stained glass. All have been damaged, many almost beyond recognition. There are illuminated manuscripts with pages torn out. A painting of the inside of Canterbury Cathedral in 1657 looks innocuous until you see little Puritans patiently, precisely smashing out its stained glass windows.

These rooms offer a truly eye-opening revelation of how much great art was lost when the Protestant Word erased the Catholic image – sometimes literally, as when a painting of the Man of Sorrows had a Biblical text written over it.

But none of this has anything to do with the studiously ambivalent, pretentious way the rest of the show explores modern attacks on art. The casting down of Catholic art in the Reformation did not make that art more "interesting": it is loss, pure loss. Countless things have gone forever. Others survive as battered husks. Their destruction is tragic, to be mourned. (Read more.)

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