{"id":2018,"date":"2016-12-27T09:32:43","date_gmt":"2016-12-27T14:32:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/?p=2018"},"modified":"2016-12-27T09:34:16","modified_gmt":"2016-12-27T14:34:16","slug":"of-silence-saint-death-and-saint-john","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/?p=2018","title":{"rendered":"Of Silence, Saint Death and Saint John"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"silence\"<\/a>Feel free to peruse<\/strong> an article I just finished on Shuasku Endo’s controversial novel Silence<\/a>, pusblished in 1966, and now soon to be released as a major Hollywood production.\u00a0 The book follows a Jesuit missionary, Sebastian Rodrigues, forced to choose between apostasy, and saving a whole group of people being tortured.\u00a0 The tale analyzes the nature of \u00a0faith, evangelization and love.\u00a0 The ‘controversial’ bit is that Endo seems to imply that apostasy can in fact be the deepest form of faith and ‘love’ for others.\u00a0 Hmm.\u00a0 I would, and do, argue that the Church thinks most emphatically otherwise.\u00a0 Give it a read, and let me know your thoughts.<\/p>\n

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On that note, I read with interest <\/strong>this morning on the rapidly growing cult of Santa Muerte<\/a>, ‘Saint Death’, a bizarre belief in the ‘deity’ of death, with a disturbing similarity to the Grim Reaper, who brings blessings (usually of the material variety) galore.\u00a0 This devotion, which apparently counts millions of adherents in Mexico alone, is syncretized with traditional Catholic devotions, but without some of the, well, moral strictures. One of the most significant sentences in the article was the following: (Saint Death) is (m)ore forgiving than the Catholic church \u2013 she is said not to punish traditional sins \u2013 she grew popular in Mexico\u2019s prisons.<\/em> \u00a0In other words, a talisman, a good luck charm, perhaps even a demonic influence, guiding one to worldly success and a lax conscience, a wide and easy road to, well, who knows where? \u00a0As the article goes on:<\/p>\n

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These actions have only further incensed the Catholic church, which already viewed the folk religion as a blasphemous threat to its standing in Mexico. Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican\u2019s Pontifical Council for Culture, has declared the faith the \u201cdegeneration of religion\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

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Not quite the message of Our Lady of Guadalupe, whom Santa Muerte<\/em> now rivals in popularity.\u00a0 We can only hope that fair Mother of God, the defeater of heresy and idolatry through the ages, will triumph over ‘holy death’, for death, really, is the result of sin, and Christ has defeated both by His own death and resurrection.<\/p>\n

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And speaking of Christ, today is the feast of Saint John the Evangelist<\/strong>, also called the ‘Beloved’, as the one closest to the heart of Our Lord, likely the youngest, who lived to ripe old age, writing his Apocalypse (Revelation) towards the end of the first century.\u00a0 He is the only Apostle not celebrated as a martyr, witnessing to his faith in other ways, by his life and writings, and in his exile by Emperor Domitian to the lonely, barren isle of Patmos in the Aegean Sea, where tradition has it that he composed his treatises.\u00a0 His Gospel follows a different trajectory of Christ’s life from the other three ‘synoptic’ Gospels (literally, with the ‘same eye’), which all follow more or less the same events.\u00a0 John sees things from a more theological perspective, eternal, heavenly, with the greatest emphasis and clarity on Christ as the pre-existent Logos<\/em>, always ‘with’ the Father (which is why his symbol is the eagle).\u00a0 But Saint John also portrayed Christ in His full humanity, the ‘Word made Flesh’, to deny which, as he declares in his first letter (4:3), is the very spirit of the Antichrist (shades of Silence?).\u00a0 So let us pray to the Apostle today, that we may see things from just such a perspective, far above the passing travails of this world, as time and history move ever onward to the end of the 2016, and, in a broader sense, to whatever personal or worldwide apocalypse we all must face, one day.<\/p>\n

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Feel free to peruse an article I just finished on Shuasku Endo’s controversial novel Silence, pusblished in 1966, and now soon to be released as a major Hollywood production.\u00a0 The book follows a Jesuit missionary, Sebastian Rodrigues, forced to choose between apostasy, and saving a whole group of people being tortured.\u00a0 The tale analyzes the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,6,2,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2018"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2020,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018\/revisions\/2020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}