Race With the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love

Race With the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love.  By Joseph Pearce, Saint Benedict Press, 2013.

 

Joseph Pearce has written acclaimed literary biographies of G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Oscar Wilde, Roy Campbell, and William Shakespeare, but now he as written a book about the life of a man that only he could have written– his own memoir.  Joseph Pearce as a teenager and twenty-something was an incredibly different man from the thoughtful, religious man who would study the some of the most important Christian literary figures of the twentieth century.  As a youth, Joseph Pearce was involved in radical white supremacist politics, and he would not move away from hate groups until after he fell under the influence of reading G.K. Chesterton in jail while serving a prison sentence for inciting racial hatred.  Pearce’s memoir opens with stark and detailed prose describing his mental and physical state during his time in jail, as well as his personal and spiritual transformation. 

 

“I sat in a cell in London’s Wormwood Scrubs prison on the second day of a twelve month prison sentence…

 

In those days I had been an idealistic fanatic, and I considered myself a political prisoner of an anti-British tyrannical state… I saw myself as a political soldier and a political prisoner who needed to emerge from jail in better shape physically and mentally for the renewal of the struggle…  I was at war with Britain’s multi-racial society, working tirelessly to bring it to its knees through the incitement of a race war from which the National Front would emerge, phoenix-like, from the ashes.  Such was the strategy which had animated my actions and which had led to my imprisonment…

 

As I looked despondently at the unmentionable abyss of time that the following twelve months represented, it was as though I were descending into a tunnel from which the light at the end was not yet visible.  I did not know it but I was entering the dark night of the soul of which St. John of the Cross speaks…

 

The previous day, the first full day of my sentence, had been the feast of St. Lucy, patroness of the blind.  It was a singularly appropriate date for one so blinded by bigotry to begin his dark night of imprisonment and his journey towards the light of liberation that it would signify.  I was indeed a blind man, oblivious of the saints’ days on which the miracle of conversion was being wrought, ignorant of the intercession of the saints of whose presence I was unaware, and unable to see the hand of Providence in these coincidences.  I had no light in my inner darkness except for the desire for a light I could not see.”

 

Anyone who is familiar with Pearce’s work is bound to ask, “Who is this man?  I don’t recognize him.  The man described here is nothing like the author I know from his biographies.”  There are few character arcs more complete, more thoroughly transformative, than Pearce’s personal journey.  Throughout the book, the scholarly, thoughtful Pearce interposes himself into the narrative, reflecting on how distasteful he finds his old opinions, how radical politics wrecked people’s lives, and the various regrets he has about the way he lived his life before his conversion.  Here and there, the contemporary Pearce reflects upon how certain people’s lives went in directions that he would never have expected, or how his becoming a better man was not due to a conscious effort on his own part to purge himself of his prejudices, but instead was caused by the intervention of the Holy Spirit.  Over the course of the book, Pearce’s anger and bigotry fall away, and it’s clear that he wasn’t trying to be converted, but it happened through his reading and re-examining his life.

 

Pearce’s entrance into racial politics seem to have been influenced in part by his father’s opinions, though it seems that it would be unjust to denounce his father as a hate-filled bigot, though it appears to be fair to make a comparison to Archie Bunker.  Pearce speaks warmly and affectionately of his father, a man who frequently expressed bias against certain groups of people, yet who was occasionally close friends with individuals who were members of those groups.  

 

“My father, Albert Arthur Pearce, had his own childhood rudely interrupted by the eruption of the Second World War… he left school at fourteen, having never really excelled as a student, and became a carpenter… he used to quip somewhat mischievously that there was only ever one good carpenter and that He had been crucified for His labors.

 

He grew up with all the pride and prejudice of a child of the British Empire, devoted to the pomp and circumstance of British imperial tradition, and was embittered by witnessing its dissolution and decay during his own lifetime.  His own father had been born during the reign of Queen Victoria, when the Empire was at its zenith and when it was said quite correctly that the sun never set upon it.  The emasculation of Britain in the twentieth century was a bitter pill for my father to swallow.  He held on to the romantic vision of the Empire long after it had ceased to exist in reality.  He proclaimed with bombastic bravura that there were only three types of people in the world: Englishmen, those who would like to be Englishmen, and those who didn’t know any better.  I always felt a little uncomfortable at the arrogance of such a statement but I embraced the belief that the British or the English (the words were always used interchangeably and synonymously) were somehow a chosen people, a people set apart.  We were somehow better than everyone else.”

 

The portrait of postwar, postcolonial England is not a particularly flattering one.  The religious faith of Anglicans is depicted as generally a nominal one, and his family’s religious practices were practically non-existent.  Christmas was a time for presents and Easter was for chocolate eggs, and about the only times when they went inside a church was for weddings or funerals.  Pearce’s family was not antireligious, or even particularly disbelieving, just disinterested in religious services.  He writes:

 

“Religious indifference, with its inherent tendency towards agnosticism, is, however, not synonymous with an antagonism towards religion.  Whereas atheists are antagonistic towards religion because they are anything but indifferent towards it, my parents saw Christianity as being good and benign, even if it shouldn’t be taken too seriously.  As for atheism, I’m sure that my parents would have seen it as mean-spirited, the creed of killjoy Scrooges who refused the brotherhood of man implicit in the spirit of Christmas.”

 

Today, there are numerous forces in the British government, arts and culture, education, and society that would like to see all forms of religion purged from the public sphere, and even the private sphere.  Pearce’s biographies stand as cogent arguments as to the relevance of religion to literature, art, and society.  Race With the Devil is filled with references to the vestiges of a religious culture, such as a forest named after the Virgin Mary, where neither Pearce nor any of his friends knew the true background of how the forest got its name.  For many of Pearce’s friends, racial warfare took the place of religious faith. Pearce’s book is not just a tale of his own religious journey, it is also a depiction of the spiritual state of England.

 

“Flannery O’Connor wrote of the American South that it was “hardly Christ-centered” but that it was “certainly Christ haunted.”  It would be equally true to describe England as Christ-haunted, though in England’s case it would be truer to say that the ghost of Christ is considered an unwelcome guest, a shade or shadow of the past who refuses to go away.  Thus it was that the faded figure of Christ overshadowed my own childhood, although, as with so much else, I did not know it at the time.  The shadow of His presence and the presence of His Church was everywhere, though in a form that had been grotesquely distorted by the defamation and deformation that was the consequence of England’s break from Rome.  It might, in fact, be truer to say that Christ’s faded presence was itself overshadowed by the fading presence of the English Reformation and the anti-papist propaganda that it spawned.  This, at least, is the impression that emerges as I survey the cultural landscape of my childhood, eyeing it with the wisdom of hindsight across the abyss of years that separate me from it.”

 

This is a painfully revealing book.  Pearce does not shy away from depicting his own flaws, ranging from his involvement in despicable political organizations to a failed relationship.  While he is very open about his own issues and development, he is quite right to be reticent about protecting the privacy of his other family members– this is not really an autobiography, but rather a memoir centered around his spiritual transformation.  The redemptive power of God’s grace is at the center of this book, and it can serve as helpful reading for individuals who are trying to be better people, as well as for fans of Pearce’s who may shocked and inspired by how he became the man he is today.

 

 

–Chris Chan

How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization

How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization.  By Mary Eberstadt, Templeton Press, 2013.

 

When studying Western society and culture over the past couple of centuries, nearly all researchers, commentators, and observers have noticed that religious observance has declined in Europe.  Religious people have watched these developments with trepidation and sadness, while some secular people have glorified in the de-churching of the West. Secularization is indeed a trend, but the extent and continuation of this trend may be not be as certain as some people believe it to be.

 

While most researchers believe that secularization is widely occurring, they disagree widely as to why this process has happened so suddenly, so extensively across the West.  In How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization, Mary Eberstadt, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, writes extensively on society and religion.  Due to her topics of interest, the problem of secularization is very important to her.  In the introduction to How the West Really Lost God, Eberstadt writes that:

 

“Most books have their origin in some kind of enduring mental distraction that has grown so large and ungainly in the author’s mind that only hammering it out at book length will fully exorcise the thing.  The volume you are reading on your screen right now or holding in your hands is no exception.  The particular puzzle that started this effort happens to be– at least to some people– one of the most interesting questions in all the modern world.  It is this: How and why has Christianity really come to decline in important parts of the West? ”(p. 3).

 

Certainly many people have come up with reasons why the West became less religious.  Marx and Engles, for example, argued that secularization was a natural and irrevocable process in civilization.  Other prominent figures have argued that the World Wars crushed the spirituality of Europe, that a more comfortable standard of living sapped people’s interest in a hereafter, or that modernization, changing culture, scientific advances, and other forces affected the religious beliefs of a continent.

 

Eberstadt treats all of these factors in a way similar to the fable of the six blindfolded men and the elephant, where each man touched a different part of the elephant and came to a different conclusion about what the animal looked like.  One man touched the elephant’s ear and thought the creature looked like a fan, another the leg and believed an elephant looked like a tree trunk, another the trunk and claimed an elephant was snakelike, and so on.  Eberstadt believes that all of the commonly cited theories for secularization have some truth to them, but she argues that all of these factors need to be taken as a whole, and there is another crucial factor that has long been overlooked.

 

“It is the contention of this book that just about everyone working on this great puzzle has come up with some piece of the truth– and yet that one particular piece needed to hold the others together still has gone missing.  Urbanization, industrialization, belief and disbelief, technology, shrinking population: yes, yes, and yes to all those factors statistically and otherwise correlated with secularization.  Yet, even taking them all into account, the picture remains incomplete…  It is as if the modern mind has lined up all the different pieces on the collective table, only to press them together in a way that looks whole from a distance but still leaves something critical out.

 

This book is an attempt to supply that missing piece.  It moves the human family from the periphery to the center of this debate over how and why Christianity exercises less influence over Western minds and hearts today than it did in the past…

 

Its argument, in brief, is that the Western record suggests that family decline is not merely a consequence of religious decline, as conventional thinking has understood that relationship.  It also is plausible– and I will argue, appears to be true– that family decline in turn helps to power religious decline.  And if this way of augmenting the conventional explanation for the collapse of Christian faith in Europe is correct, then certain things, including some radical things, follow from it, as we shall see.” (pp. 5–6).

 

The idea that faith and the family are linked is an intriguing one, and Eberstadt makes an excellent case for why the two should be inextricably linked.  Family life is integral to society.   The more strong and vibrant the family is in a culture, Eberstadt argues, the stronger and more vibrant religion tends to be in society.  Where the traditional family is shattered, so is the religious structure.  Divorce, broken or never-together families, and children growing up without siblings all affect the strength of the family in society.  Secularization is not a natural and inevitable progression of civilization’s development, as many atheists insist, but instead is connected to the basic unit of society: the family.  As Eberstadt argues, more family equals more God.  Eberstadt expands upon her theories, pointing out that her family thesis changes how we may view the commonly-observed “falling-away of religious youth” phase, where teens raised in religious homes stop practicing their faith during college, and often do not resume until they get married and have children of their own.  Eberstadt suggests that the separation from their families may be a pivotal factor in the cessation of religious observance.

 

“Like the collapse of Christianity in many of the same places, the collapse of the natural family has reshaped the known world of just about every man, woman, and child alive in the Western world today.  For years now, secular sociologists have debated the meaning of the changes that have diminished the hold that the natural family once had over an individual’s life.  Divorce, single parenthood, widespread use of contraception, legal abortion, the sharp drop in the Western birthrate: these are just some of the prodigious transformations in family structure on which experts train their sights.  And while scholars as well as nonscholars take sides on the question of whether these are good things or bad things for society, no one seriously suggests that radical family change hasn’t happened across the Western world.  Obviously, it has.”  (p. 11).

 

Throughout her analysis, Eberstadt addresses numerous aspects of the process of secularization, and notes that many people’s assumptions are wrong.  One particularly important point that Eberstadt addresses is the falsity of the ubiquity of Christianity across Europe for approximately a millennia and a half.  It is true that at certain points in the Middle Ages that the vast majority of Europeans were nominally Christian, but it is impossible to tell just how devout the average person was.  There is a very strong possibility that at various points over the centuries, significant percentages of the population were religious in name only.  Though Eberstadt does not refer directly to this, for much of America’s early history, many settlers had limited access to organized religion.  Secularization, therefore, ought not to be viewed as a sudden process that started relatively recently in the wake of over a millennium and half of unquestioning, blind, religious faith.  Religion, in Eberstadt’s view, has frequently been on the decline, but it has also made numerous resurgences, and there is nothing to prove that Christianity will not make a comeback in the West.  In order to explain why religious influence ebbs and flows, it is important to understand the causes of the process.  There is, however, a lot of controversy as to why these cultural shifts happen, and Eberstadt makes a compelling case as she addresses and critiques the potential causes of secularization.

 

Once the “unquestioned religious homogeny” viewpoint is discounted and the perspective of shifting bull and bear markets for religious practice is adopted, it stands to reason that the current trends of secularization may not be permanent.  Indeed, Eberstadt produces numerous examples to indicate that in some cases, the state of Christianity in Europe is getting stronger, even as many powerful public figures are increasingly, violently antireligious.  Additionally, the increased Muslim population in Europe is affecting approaches towards religion from numerous perspectives.  The future of religion in the West is uncertain, but if history is any guide, there may be many surprises as to what might happen.  If Eberstadt is correct in her analysis, in order to revitalize religion, believers will have to revitalize the family.

 

 

–Chris Chan

Bakhita: From Slave to Saint

Bakhita: From Slave to Saint.  By Roberto Italo Zanini, Ignatius Press, 2013.

 

Roberto Italo Zanini’s book Bakhita: From Slave to Saint is a biography of Saint Josephine Margaret Bakhita, (ca. 1869–1947).  St. Bakhita is not one of the best-known saints from the twentieth century, but Zanini’s work will hopefully contribute to making more people aware of her heartbreaking and inspiring life story.  After a happy childhood in northeastern Africa, St. Bakhita was kidnapped when she was very young and sold into slavery.  After suffering unimaginable torments, she was rescued from a life of forced servitude and torture, and eventually came to Europe, where she converted to Christianity and entered religious life, where her simple yet joyous existence and her unshakeable faith served as inspirations to many people.

 

Zanini opens his book with a brief overview of St. Bakhita’s life:

 

“Bakhita, the first saint from Sudan, was an African woman who was beaten and tortured as the slave of a powerful Arab merchant and of a Turkish general.  Ransomed in Khartoum at the end of the nineteenth century by the Italian vice-consul and brought to Venice, she worked as the family nursemaid and was baptized.  She joined the Canossian Daughters of Charity founded by Saint Magdalene of Canossa and became a saint, living for fifty years in the convent on Via Fusinato in the town of Schio, in the Italian province of Vicenza.

 

Kidnapped as a child by slave traders, Bakhita was bought and sold five times over, as are many children in Africa and across the globe even to this day.  Of her family Bakhita remembered nothing.  She did not remember the name her father and mother gave her.  She remembered only the Arab nickname the slave traders gave her as a sort of backhanded compliment: Bakhita, that is, “Lucky.””

 

There are many paths to sainthood, but Bakhita’s was particularly painful, though the traumas she endured do not appear to have done any sort of harm to her spirit and faith.  Indeed, despite enduring a grave injustice and a horrible extended abuse, Bakhita was indeed lucky, far luckier than many of the other people who are victims of the modern slave trade.  Many people think that slavery died out by the end of the American Civil War, but though slavery has been made illegal throughout the West, slavery continues to exist in many parts of Africa and Asia, and different forms of slavery particularly in fields such as the forced sex trade, occur all over the world, even in the U.S.  The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution drove human trafficking underground, but untold numbers of people, especially children like Bakhita, continue to suffer.

 

Bakhita left numerous letters and writings about her life and spiritual experiences.  They are told in spare, true language and even though her prose is unadorned, her words have tremendous power.  In one particularly beautiful scene, she describes the emotions she felt when she touched a little silver crucifix for the first time.  Bakhita writes:

 

“As he gave me the crucifix he kissed it with devotion, then explained that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, had died for me.  I did not know what a crucifix was, but I was moved by a mysterious power to keep it hidden, out of fear that the lady would take it away.  I had never hidden anything before, because I had never been attached to anything.  I remember that I looked at it in secret and felt something inside that I could not explain.”

 

A striking stylistic choice made by Zanini is to present Bakhita’s trials and tribulations simply and without anger, indignation, or ornamentation.  The horrible conditions she endured are described without embellishment or editorializing.  Much of Bakhita’s life as a slave is too awful to reproduce here, but one particularly cringe-inducing scene, where Bakhita and some of her fellow captives were forcibly tattooed, is described in stark and gripping prose, told simply but with unmistakable power.

 

After escaping slavery, Bakhita eventually entered a convent, where she spent the rest of her life living quietly and inspiring people with her faith and her warm and engaging personality.  Zanini describes the endearing effect that she had on those around her, writing that:

 

“Bakhita is a friend, someone with whom you can share your disappointments and failures, someone you can ask for advice.  Why?  Because a woman who has survived the oppression of slavery does not set herself apart from anybody.  Because listening to the whispers of suffering mankind continues to be the role most consonant with a woman who was the portress of the Canossian house in the town of Schio, Italy, who for years counseled and helped mothers worried about their children, who took countless little orphans by the hand, who aided fathers of families in finding work, who helped shelter soldiers in the convent, which was transformed into a hospital during the First World War.  She, the “Little Brown Mother” who spoke the dialect of the people of the Veneto region in northern Italy, is ever close to those who might feel a little inadequate or tongue-tied speaking to the saints.”

 

Bakhita: From Slave to Saint is a fast and easy read, and this book can do a great deal to spread her story around the world.  Bakhita is presented without a single character flaw, but in Zanini’s presentation, Bakhita is not the kind of perfect alabaster saint that one can admire but never live up to in life.  Instead, Bakhita comes across as a source of warmth, kindness, and sweetness that someone can easily want as a friend or mentor.  

 

Faithful people around the world are being touched by her life.  Zanini observes that:

 

“Devotion to Bakhita has spread in an astonishing way in India, Brazil, and the United States (especially among African Americans), to name but a few places.  Today Bakhita “sails” on the Internet, where many websites dedicated to her have sprung up.  The black nun from the Italian province of Venesia hears prayers in many different languages, for people are not ashamed to open their hearts to someone who, as a slave, once stood on the lowest rung of the social ladder, beyond the pale of any caste system of hierarchy.”

 

A particularly touching scene comes at the beginning of the book, as the simple room where Bakhita spent most of her life as a nun is described, as are the emotions Zanini felt when entering her small bedroom.  By the end of her life, Bakhita’s only possessions were a crucifix and a rosary.  She had given away most of her books as her eyesight failed, and at the end of her life, she met death with gentle acceptance and joy at the prospect of coming closer to God. 

 

Bakhita’s later decades were filled with quiet, peace, and prayer, and it seems like her traumatic years as a slave may have left innumerable scars, but good can come out of evil, and Bakhita’s story may serve as a comfort and a rebuke to many people.  The tribulations of Bakhita’s youth make most people’s daily problems seem downright paltry and ridiculous in comparison, and the way that she overcame her horrid early years and spent the rest of her life with strength and faith is truly inspirational.

 

 

For more information on organizations that seek to expose and eliminate human trafficking and to help the victims of modern-day slavery, an extensive but not exclusive list of the many groups addressing these atrocities can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_opposing_human_trafficking.

 

–Chris Chan

Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians

Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians.  By Paul Marshall, Lela Gilbert, and Nina Shea; Thomas Nelson (Publishing House), 2013.

 

The average American is bombarded with news, yet most people are woefully under-informed about what is going on in the world.  There are multiple reasons for that.  A lot of people just don’t care about the news.  Others do not have the time (or at least believe they don’t) to read the newspaper or news websites, or to watch television news.  Others choose not to, simply because they find the content too depressing.  Other people, like myself, follow the news closely in a variety of media, but find themselves sadly under-informed nonetheless.  Most of the news is filled with misleading advocacy journalism, shallow puff pieces, frivolous “celebrity news,” and in any case, most newspapers and television news shows have neither the time nor the space for in-depth coverage of many subjects.  Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians tells the shocking stories that the major media outlets almost never see fit to cover– the widespread anti-Christian violence around the globe.

 

G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “When the real revolution happens, it won’t be mentioned in the newspapers.”  That sentiment holds true for some of the most grievous human rights abuses around the world– millions of people are suffering and enduring terrible indignities, but the mass media has chosen to ignore it.  Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians seeks to fill a very large gap in Western society’s collective psyche.

 

The book opens with the following dedication:

 

“We dedicate this book to the great principle of religious freedom, known to Americans as the “first freedom,” both because of its placement as the first clause of the First Amendment in the US Constitution, and because it is the core freedom, essential to the fulfillment of other rights and freedoms, as well as to the preservation of human dignity and the flourishing of the person.  This freedom, in all its fullness, includes, but is not limited to, the freedom to worship.  It encompasses the freedom to choose one’s religion, and the freedom to manifest one’s religion– either alone or in community with others, and in public or private– in teaching, practice, worship, and observation.”

 

Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians goes around the world illustrating the areas of the world where Christians face major dangers to their lives and safety.  In the Western Hemisphere and Europe, Christians tend to be in the majority and have legally protected freedoms (though recent court rulings and government actions in these regions are cause for concern), but in certain parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, being a Christian means doesn’t mean wearing a cross on one’s chest so much as wearing a target on one’s back.  This book focuses on how the remaining Communist countries see Christians as a threat to their existence, how the former Communist nations continue to attack all manifestations of Christianity within their borders, how certain religious groups in South Asia seek see Christians as aliens who have no place in their society, and how being a Christian means forever being consigned to second- or third-class citizen status in sharia law-ruled Muslim nations.  Many Americans falsely assume that their freedoms are universal, when in fact the American First Amendment rights are the exception globally, rather than the rule.

 

“Western Christians enjoy numerous blessings of religious freedom.  Our rights, while sometimes challenged, are many.  We speak freely about our faith, our churches, our denominational preferences, and our answered prayers.  We treasure, read, and write comments in our Bibles, and share our beliefs with others without fear of danger.  Our churches can have religious schools and broadcasts.  We wear crosses around our necks, and our bishops, priests, ministers, monks, and nuns dress in a broad array of distinctive styles.  Our Christianity doesn’t require us to keep looking over our shoulders, unsure if we will be arrested for praying or attacked for having a Bible.”

 

The authors have managed to hit precisely the right tone in writing this book, making the reader feel extreme sympathy for the victims and distress over the hostile environment they live in, while never crossing into stridency or harshness.  This is a report, not a screed.  Longer and more exhaustive tomes might be written focusing on the atrocities in a single country, but this book is meant to serve as a guide and overview to the matter, particularly for people who are currently unaware of the extent of the problem.

 

“Our book focuses on an underreported fact: Christians are the single most widely persecuted religious group in the world today.  This is confirmed in studies by sources as diverse as the Vatican, Open Doors, the Pew Research Center, Commentary, Newsweek, and the Economist.  According to one estimate, by the Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community, 75 percent of acts of religious intolerance are directed against Christians.”

 

In many forms of mass media and discourse, Christians are viewed as the de facto villains and aggressors.  Granted, there have been numerous instances throughout history where Christians have not been any credit to their religion, but to whitewash the fact that Christians are being deliberately targeted for discrimination and repression around the world is to turn one’s back on the major human rights abuses of our time.  Geopolitical pundits frequently also fail to understand the increasing role of Christianity in the developing world as a social, cultural, intellectual, moral, and political force.

 

“Many people are unaware that three-quarters of the world’s 2.2 billion nominal Christians live outside the developed West, as do perhaps four-fifths of the world’s active Christians.  Of the world’s ten largest Christian communities, only two, the United States and Germany, are in the developed West.  Christianity may well be the developing world’s largest religion.  The church is predominantly female and non-white.  While China may soon be the country with the largest Christian population, Latin America is the largest Christian region and Africa is on its way to becoming the continent with the largest Christian population.  The average Christian on the planet, if there could be such a one, would likely be a Brazilian or Nigerian woman or a Chinese youth.”

 

The following is a lengthy quote, but it is quoted in its entirety due to its ability to describe some of the various forms that persecution takes, as well as put a human face on some of the people suffering today all over the world.  The following bulletpoints provide brief profiles of four of the most infamous cases of people who have been targeted for no reason other than their Christianity:

 

“Unfortunately, most of the world’s Christians don’t share these circumstances.  Their experiences are not just dissimilar to ours; they are unimaginably different.  Clearly we needn’t feel guilty for our religious freedoms, which are God-given.  But sometimes we have to be reminded about what life is like for Christians in other countries, whose everyday lives bear so little resemblance to ours.  These men, women, and children of courage and faith are scattered in large numbers all across the globe.  Even now, as these words are being written:

 

•A Christian pastor sat in a squalid prison cell in Iran for three years.  Day after day he waited for the final word to come down from the authorities: “Tomorrow morning you will hang.”  The pastor was condemned for converting to Christianity from Islam, called apostasy in Iran, and sentenced to death.  Still, he did not recant his Christian faith.  Under international pressure, Iran finally acquitted him of apostasy, sentencing him to the lesser crime of “evangelizing Muslims.”  Released on September 8, 2012, the loving father and husband remains at mortal risk from Islamist death squads.  His name is Youcef Nadarkhani.

 

•In Pakistan, a woman awaits the day of her execution.  She is ill, weak, and weary, and she misses her five children intolerably.  She, too, has been sentenced to death because of her Christian faith.  She has been tried and convicted of blaspheming the propher Muhammad– a capital crime in Pakistan.  Her name is Asia Bibi.

 

•In China, friends and loved ones await word of an elderly Roman Catholic priest who was abducted, never to be heard from again.  He is frail but faithful to his beliefs and his church.  But in his faithfulness, he has offended China’s Communist Party regime.  No one is sure whether he is dead or alive.  Nearly eighty years old, his name is Bishop James Su Zhimin, and he is known to all as Bishop Su.

 

•In Nigeria, surviving Christians can still smell the smoke and the burning flesh in their village.  At least eleven worshippers were burned to death when terrorists firebombed a church in early 2012.  More than twenty others were horribly injured.  Christians in the surrounding area are running scared, even while wanting to be courageous and faithful.  They are well aware that they also are targets.  There are so many victims in Nigeria that only local people know the names of the dead.”

 

The Afterword to the book is written by the Most Reverend Charles J. Chaput, who declares that “we are living in an age of intensifying anti-Christian persecution.”  Some pundits in the mass media sneer when Christians complain of persecution, and indeed, some of the hostility the Western World’s Christians face pales in comparison to those of other cities, but as this book proves, there are many believers in the world who have to live in a state of permanent fear.

 

The one disappointing aspect of this book is that it does not provide any information as to how concerned people can do something to help the millions of persecuted Christians around the world.  There are many organizations that seek to protect these people, such as Christian Solidarity Worldwide (http://www.csw.org.uk/home.htm), and websites that report information about the sufferings of Christians, such as Asia News (www.asianews.it).  Unfortunately, there is little that can be done to help these suffering Christians aside from regime change and reformed societal attitudes, other than educating more people about what is going on around the world.

 

Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians performs a crucial public service by educating its readers about the many atrocities being committed around the world today.  The book is sad, but also scary, not just because so many horrible acts are being committed around the world, but because so few news sources deign to report this disturbing news. Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians tells its readers that something is desperately wrong with the world. Now all concerned people of good will need to band together to do something about these grievous violations of human rights around the globe.

 

 

–Chris Chan

Shakespeare on Love: Seeing the Catholic Presence in Romeo and Juliet

Shakespeare on Love: Seeing the Catholic Presence in Romeo and Juliet.  By Joseph Pearce, Ignatius Press, 2013.

 

Joseph Pearce started his literary career focusing on the Christian authors of the twentieth century, but in recent years he has directed much of his focus to the career and religious beliefs of William Shakespeare.  His first major study of the subject, The Quest for Shakespeare, confronted the long-held belief that Shakespeare embraced the Anglican break with Rome, as well as the common assertion amongst contemporary scholars that Shakepeare was an atheist or agnostic, whose skepticism permeated his plays.  Pearce argues from the historical evidence that Shakespeare was in fact a Roman Catholic throughout his writing career, and that his plays reflect his faith.  As such, Pearce argues that it is necessary to view Shakespeare’s work from what we can now glean about his worldview.  In a follow-up book, Through Shakespeare’s Eyes, Pearce analyses a few of Shakespeare’s most prominent plays, stressing the religious significance of the Bard’s themes.  Now, in Shakespeare on Love, Pearce turns his attention to understanding the religious themes of Romeo and Juliet.

 

“This book rests on the solid conviction that William Shakespeare was a believing Catholic.  The evidence for such a conviction has been given in my two previous books The Quest for Shakespeare and Through Shakespeare’s Eyes.  In the first of these volumes the solid documentary and biographical evidence for the Bard’s Catholicism is given; in the latter the evidence for his Catholicism is gleaned from three of his most celebrated plays, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and King Lear.  It should be stated from the outset, therefore, that these other books should be consulted for the definitive proof of Shakespeare’s Catholic faith, whereas the present volume will simply offer further corroboration of the conclusions reached in the earlier volumes, based on the evidence that emerges in Romeo and Juliet, his most popular play and perhaps the most famous tragedy ever written.”   (Note: Through Shakespeare’s Eyes was reviewed here in October 2012).

 

Pearce clearly views Romeo and Juliet primarily as a tragedy, rather than as a romance, first and foremost.  Pearce observes that the story of the doomed relationship was not Shakespeare’s original creation.  The story had been told before by a few authors, sometimes attacking certain segments of society, often imposing different morals on the story than Shakespeare did.  Many of the alternative tellings have been lost today, and none of them were told with the same level of poetry as Shakespeare.  Pearce argues that Shakespeare’s plays have an added facet of beauty and poignancy due to their moral compass, which stems from his religious faith.  Pearce explains, writing that:

 

“The point, however, is that Shakespeare was a believing Catholic when he wrote his plays, Romeo and Juliet included, and, as such, we should expect to find the presence of the faith, philosophically and theologically, in the midst of this greatest of love stories.  Seeing the tragedy unfold through Shakespeare’s Catholic eyes enables us to see it in a new and surprising light.  The following work is an effort to see the play through the eyes of the playwright so that we may be enlightened and surprised by what we see.”

 

Shakespeare on Love is more than just a critical work on a legendary play, it is a criticism of literary criticism.  A popular recent quip (the precise origins of which are unclear), states that “Romeo and Juliet is not a love story.  It’s a 3-day relationship between a 13-year-old and a 17-year-old that caused 6 deaths.  Sincerely, everyone who actually read it.”  Pearce’s critique is far less blunt and snarky, but on practically every page he stresses that there is far more to the tale than the all-too-common view of the play as an innocent youthful romance marred by unavoidable tragedy.

 

“Romeo and Juliet is perhaps the most famous love story ever written.  Its cultural influence is so profound that Shakespeare’s “star cross’d” lovers have become synonymous with the very meaning of romantic love.  But what exactly does the world’s greatest playwright have to say about the world’s greatest lovers?  Does he sympathize with their plight?  Does he consider them blameless, or are they at least partly responsible for the tragedy that awaits them?  Is the love story about fatalistic forces beyond the control of the protagonists, or is it a cautionary tale warning of the dangers of unbridled erotic passion?  And what does Shakespeare have to say about the relationship between romantic love, or eros, and the greatest love of all, the love which God has for man, which manifests itself in his giving his only Son as a willing sacrifice for man’s salvation?  What relationship is there between eros and caritas, between the romantic love between a man and a woman and the love of Christ for humanity?  What is the connection between the most famous love story ever written and the Greatest Love that there is?  These questions are asked and answered in the following pages as we endeavor to see Romeo and Juliet through Shakespeare’s devoutly Catholic eyes.”

 

The first chapter is titled “Creative Revision and Critical Misreading.”  Here, Pearce explains how Shakespeare put his own unique stamp on the quasi-familiar story, and he also explains why he finds so much of the existing scholarly analysis of Romeo and Juliet so wanting.

 

“Broadly speaking, it seems that there are three ways of reading the play.  The first is the fatalistic reading in which fate or fortune are perceived as omnipotent by blind and impersonal forces which crush the “star-cross’d lovers,” and everyone else, with mechanical indifference.  In such a reading, free will, if it exists at all, is utterly powerless to resist intractable Fate.  If the fatalistic reading is accepted, nobody is to blame for the events that unfold throughout the play because there is nothing anyone can do to alter them.”

 

This approach to reading the play is morally facile.  According to this perspective, there was nothing that anybody could do to prevent half a dozen deaths.  The choices the characters made had nothing to do with the tragedy.  It was all Fate, inescapable, unavoidable, and remorseless Fate, a power that brings forth doom and negates all human responsibility.  It’s all very sad, but no more representative of human sin and folly than a tornado or a hurricane.  Fate becomes a whitewash for the consequences of foolish or malicious actions.  Pearce convincingly argues that to view the play through such a lens is to become a moral imbecile, and that intelligently understanding Romeo and Juliet means applying Catholic morality and theology to a reading of the play.

 

“The second way of reading the play is what may be termed the “feudal” or romantic reading, in which the feuding parties are held to blame for the tragic fate of the doom-struck and love-struck lovers.  In such a reading, the hatred and bigotry of the Capulets and Montagues are the primary cause of all the woes, and the lovers are hapless victims of their parents’ bloodlust who are nonetheless redeemed and purified by the passion and purity of their love for each other.  In our day and age, this is perhaps the most widely accepted interpretation of the play’s overarching morality or deepest meaning, harmonizing as it does with the ingrained romanticism and narcissism of the zeitgeist.  Such a reading allows our contemporary epoch to moralize about “love” and “hate” without the imposition of conventional moral norms.  It is the morality of Lennon’s “All You Need Is Love,” a “love” which is rooted in the gratification of desire and which has its antecedents in the romanticism of Byronic self-indulgence.”

 

This interpretation is a bit more sensible, but once again, it fails to provide a thoroughly nuanced and appreciative perspective to the play by scrutinizing the actions of the titular characters.  Pearce is blunt and unyielding in his analysis of the shortcomings and foolishness that Romeo and Juliet indulge in over the course of the play.  Romeo is headstrong, impulsive, and rarely thinks through his actions or emotions.  Juliet views Romeo in a practically idolatrous manner.  The adults also get their shares of recriminations, though Friar Laurence, who often gets a hefty share of abuse from some critics for his role in the tragedy, receives a chapter of his own from Pearce, where he freely faults the Friar for not following his own advice on patience and careful thinking, though Pearce winds up viewing the Friar more warmly than the other erring adults, quoting the Prince’s opinion that “We still have known thee for a holy man” in the title of the chapter based on Friar Laurence.  The point Pearce makes in this study is that in Romeo and Juliet, no character is sinless.  He explains this perspective, writing that:

 

“The third way of reading the play is the cautionary or moral reading in which the freely chosen actions of each of the characters are seen to have far-ranging and far-reaching consequences.  In such a reading, the animosity of the feuding parties and its consequences are weighed alongside the actions of the lovers, and those of other significant characters, such as Friar Lawrence, Benvolio, Mercutio, the Prince, and the Nurse.  Each is perceived and judged according to his actions and the consequences of those actions on others, and each is integrated into the whole picture so that the overriding and overarching moral may emerge.  It is surely significant, for instance, that Romeo and Juliet was probably written at around the same time as The Merchant of Venice, a play that is preoccupied with the whole question of freedom of choice and its consequences.  Clearly such questions were at the forefront of the playwright’s mind as he grappled with the hateful or besotted choices of his Veronese protagonists as they had been when he grappled with the choices facing his Venetian heroes and villains.

 

In spite of the misreadings of many modern critics, it is clear from Romeo and Juliet itself, and from its place within the wider Shakespearean canon, that the only correct way of reading the play is the third way.  It is, however, not the present writer who affirms this as an opinion, but the play itself that insists upon it as a fact.”

 

Shakespeare on Love is a moral treatise stressing that all people need to take responsibility for their own actions.  Appealing to a culture saturated with sappy high school soap operas and teen death songs, Joseph Pearce attempts to inform readers that the true moral of a story can easily be lost in maudlin emotion or careless sentimentality.  In Pearce’s eyes, the great literature of Shakespeare is not just drama, it is also religious allegory.

 

 

–Chris Chan