For some wacko reason, popular culture (you know what I mean—talk shows, movies, plain old bar and workplace chit-chat) portrays the ministers of God as prigs and bluenoses forever trying to snuff out honest desire while making others, idealistic young people in particular, as unhappy and guilt-ridden as they themselves.  Nobody would say such dreary folk don’t ply their trade in this church and that one.  A more truthful, as well as useful, thing to say is that the stereotype has things backward and inside out, most of all when the topic is America’s Mainline churches.

Condemnation, the wrath of God, patterns of personal holiness—for mainliners, meaning Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Congregationalists, and the like, such stuff has the penetrating odor of mothballs and cedar chests.  Sweet tolerance and gentle affirmation are the hallmarks of today’s mainliners.

If modern stereotypes overstate and distort the old pedagogical style of the churches, there indeed existed standards that churchmen thought worthy of holding up for emulation.  A few of these standards might be considered, let us say, less essential than others.  My late mother used to recount with a smile the strictures she faced as a small-town Methodist girl in the 1920’s: no movies on Sunday, no card-playing, certainly no unbecoming language.  And caution about boys.

No movies?  The notion needs time for absorption.  Yet the mainliners understood well enough the value of other prescriptions and proscriptions, not least those pertaining to the human-relationship questions that underlie what we call the holy estate of matrimony.  The delicate and sensible regulation of that volatile topic, sex, was—is—at the heart of the matter.  The mainliners understood what to say.  They had received their knowledge from Scripture and the tradition of the Christian community, as lived out over many centuries.

It would be going too far to suggest that 1960’s relativism and chaos pinned the mainliners’ ears back, collectively.  You can still get good doses of authoritative teaching in Mainline churches.  It’s a matter of hunting for it.  By and large, genial tolerance is the notion that holds sway.

Booze, cards, dancing, joyriding, unchaperoned dating—not many if any yearn for clerical fixation on such topics.  The wonder of the age perhaps is clerical and congregational apathy regarding norms that churches once protected with jealousy.  For instance, whereas you might get divorced, you weren’t supposed to.  If you did, you wiped your muddy shoes on an “honourable estate” (as the Book of Common Prayer expressed it) “instituted of God, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church . . . ”

Nor were you supposed to suggest or imagine there were viable alternatives to Christian marriage, such as cohabitation, an unholy estate known to many Christians as “shacking up.”  And no premarital sexual couplings: no sleepovers with your date.  Nor were young married couples to decide on their own authority that deliberate nonprocreation was fine for folks who didn’t care to subordinate their own desires to those of mere children.  What emphatically the mainstream churches, like the larger society, would have disallowed was the idea that people of the same sex would make an acceptable, perhaps even a commendable, married couple.

You didn’t fool around with family, in other words.  Family, according to God’s holy ordinance, was society’s foundational unit—the littlest of little platoons, yet the strongest and most crucial.  There were ways to do family, and there were ways not to do it.  The former led not only to the spread and perpetuation of the human race, according to God’s transparent design, but also—spats and tears and disillusionments notwithstanding—to the couple’s joy and lifetime fulfillment.  The second, alternative way, characterized by obedience to impulse, whim, and short-term preoccupation, led to disintegration.  We live, to an extent once deemed unthinkable, in the day and era of the second way.  That religious assent fortifies willingness to live in the second way is the shock and grief of our times.

Here are a few random items for digestion.

In 2003 the Episcopal Church consecrated as bishop a practicing homosexual who had left his wife and daughters to live with a male lover.

The chief lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals told National Public Radio last December that, whereas he once opposed same-sex marriage, he now thought it was time to “give the biblical view a different slant.”

In July 2008 the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) General Assembly voted to ask that presbyteries drop the constitutional requirement that clergy observe “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or chastity in singleness . . . ”

Sixty-nine percent of white Mainline Protestants (according to the Pew Research Center) say abortion “should be legal in all/most cases.”

The United Methodist Church, in 2004, came out for therapeutic cloning using spare embryonic stem cells from in vitro fertilization.  Around the same time, the Episcopal Church endorsed the use of embryos not created specifically for destruction.  The Presbyterians said stem cells could be used to help those suffering grave illnesses.

A Presbyterian researcher found that divorced ministers who work as denominational leaders are about half as numerous as married ministers.

A poll by the Barna Group reported that 34 percent of Protestant Christians have been divorced.  George Barna, who directed the study, observed: “There no longer seems to be much of a stigma attached to divorce; it is now seen as an unavoidable rite of passage.”

And so on . . .

It is fair to note that not all movement along the religious mainstream is from “right” to “left”—from family morality of the old-fashioned sort to what Barna describes as “a new moral code in America.”  United Methodists, for instance, at their General Conference in 2008 voted—albeit by a mere 84 votes out of 918 cast—to stipulate the monogamous and heterosexual character of Christian marriage.  As many as 100,000 theologically conservative Episcopalians have officially seceded in recent years from an American church far gone, they contend, in commitment to nonbiblical norms, or anyway in apathy toward the growing cultural acceptance of those norms.

Well, so what?  Does anything we see here fail to resemble the ongoing splits in American life at virtually every level, and in virtually every institution?  The answer plainly is no.  But here’s the “what” that follows the “so.”  Religion alone, by appeals to an Authority Who easily outranks the poor, jumped-up authorities of the secular world, underwrites the norms that make social life possible.  I know from experience what follows from that assertion.  To their feet rise nonbelievers and even a few mild (but gently tolerant) believers, saying, Phooey and baloney!  Being good without God is a breeze; just look at us!

I am looking.  Care to know what I see?  I see a variety of human egos swirling about, fighting over claims that arise not from transcendent authority but from individual calculations, often as not incomplete, hastily considered, hardly ever debated, owing as much to musings on immediate opportunity as to considerations of long-term advantage.  And devilishly difficult to hang on a moral framework.  Such a framework doesn’t just magically appear.  Inspiration and revelation, over the centuries, give it form, beauty, and permanence.  The extended reasonings of a Christian body turn out in practice to have general and lasting applicability.  If, for instance, no-fault divorce wasn’t a really cool idea in the tenth century, it’s likely not much of an idea now.

The atomistic morality of the late 20th century, and for now at least the 21st century, is no guide to anything, save to the inner mental workings of the individual actor.  He’s the one in charge.  Or so he maintains.  As Barna puts it, “The consistent deterioration of the Bible as the source of moral truth has led to a nation where [sic] people have become independent judges of right and wrong, basing their choices on feelings and circumstances.”  He adds, a little darkly, “It is not likely that America will return to a more traditional moral code until the nation experiences significant pain from its moral choices.”

Or until the mainliners figure out why it was they formerly understood so well the protective as well as worshipful aspects of marriage—the “for better, for worse” and the “forsaking all others” parts; the mutual plighting of “troth,” meaning fidelity; the vow of lifelong commitment, each partner to the other one.

Certain discerning Anglicans of my acquaintance put the same-sex “marriage” uproar in perspective.  We wouldn’t have gotten to this, they note, discerningly, had we not given up on the notion of true marriage and true family life as lived “in accordance with God’s holy ordinance.”  In other words, if their church had taken with greater seriousness the entirely countercultural teaching of one heterosexual marriage for life; had the church held that teaching high, secure against cultural pollution, then marriage doctrine would never have become subject to individual ratification.  Marriage outside the Christian norm—same-sex unions are the obvious example—would have been a contradiction in terms, a nonstarter, a cultural unicorn, sparkling only in the radiance of rhetoric.

Instead, Mainline clerics chose to sit still while the culture preached to them.  Too often, instead of pushing back, they found themselves nodding in agreement with this or that cultural point.  Take the famed English bishop John A.T. Robinson, whose best-selling tract, Honest to God, found a large and appreciative audience in the United States.  “[T]here can for the Christian,” Robinson wrote, “be no ‘packaged’ moral judgments—for persons are more important than ‘standards.’”  Even Christian standards?  That was Robinson’s point, as it was the point of liberated clerics and theologians throughout the West: It was the duty, as well as the privilege, of modern people to work out for themselves the questions whose answers used to come from religious muckety-mucks claiming to speak in the Lord’s name.  We were done with the old nonsense.  We understood better.  The Church might counsel and console.  She certainly wasn’t going to throw her weight around.  This complicates things for those Christians who decide a little theological weight in the scales might be just what we need as the idea of normative family life fades from recollection.  Conditioned to affirming rather than challenging do-it-yourself theology, too many Mainline ministers of the Gospel find themselves out of their depth, and sinking.

Accordingly, the Mainline churches—not fully understanding their job description, which is basically to connect members with the God who created them—fare less and less well in the 21st century.  Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans—all have declined sharply in membership over these past few wonderful decades of liberation.  The Episcopal Church, my own shop, has fewer adherents than the Mormons—not least because, whatever it is Mormons believe, they really believe it.  The Episcopalians—especially the baby-boom bishops, priests, and theologians who run the national show—don’t merely move the theological goalposts; they depict goalposts in general as unmodern, what with their rigor and fixity.  Just kick, they admonish—it’s fine with the Lord.

That’s not all of us, I hasten to add.  Not by any means.  It’s enough certainly to remind Christian mainliners of every description that the standards of modern culture make considerably less sense than the culture’s high priests let on.  If the old family norms were so stupid and backward, why was their heyday better for marital longevity, better for the care and rearing of children, than the normless present has proved?  Riddle us that one.  And while we await the answer, dare I suggest we might actually want to pray?

This article first appeared in the March 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The unease did not abate as Aaron Wolf and I watched a webcast later that morning of the press conference held by U.S. District Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.  The assembled reporters danced around the obvious questions, and Fitzgerald followed their lead.  What is the actual federal crime of which Blagojevich is accused?  Is there one?  Aren’t Blagojevich’s transgressions, both those named in the criminal complaint and those for which he will probably never be indicted, state matters?  Isn’t this a bit like prosecuting Al Capone for income-tax evasion, the main difference being that income-tax evasion was a federal crime, and Capone was guilty of it?

If there were an actual federal crime involved, that might be one thing; but the two counts leveled against Blagojevich stretch federal law so far as to make it meaningless.  Or, rather, they stretch it so far as to make it absolute—any crime committed by an elected official of a state, and virtually any crime committed by a mere citizen, could be covered under their penumbra.

The first count alleges that Blagojevich and John Harris, his chief of staff, “did, [sic] conspire with each other and with others to devise and participate in a scheme to defraud the State of Illinois and the people of the State of Illinois, of the honest services” of Blagojevich and Harris.  It is easy to see how this could be a state matter, but it only becomes a federal crime through a subordinate clause: “in furtherance of which the mails and interstate wire communications would be used,” in violation of various sections of Title 18 of the United States Code.

The second count alleges that the governor and his chief of staff “corruptly solicited and demanded a thing of value, namely, the firing of certain Chicago Tribune editorial members responsible for widely-circulated editorials critical of” the governor, in exchange for which they allegedly intended to provide

millions of dollars in financial assistance by the State of Illinois, including through the Illinois Finance Authority, an agency of the State of Illinois, to the Tribune Company involving the Wrigley Field baseball stadium.

This is certainly worthy of state prosecution, but why should it be considered a federal crime?  Because Blagojevich and Harris are

agents of the State of Illinois, a State government which during a one-year period, beginning January 1, 2008 and continuing to the present, received federal benefits in excess of $10,000.

In a line sure to send a chill down the spines of evangelical dispensationalists and rad-trad Catholics, this second count notes that these actions violate “Title 18, United States Code, Sections 666(a)(1)(B) and 2.”

In the end, though, the Blagojevich arrest and indictment present a more mundane, yet perhaps more far-reaching, concern than the coming of the end times and the rise of the Antichrist.  As contributing editor Clyde Wilson noted on the Chronicles website, “the idea of the FBI arresting a governor is disturbing” and “a very bad precedent.”  The U.S. Constitution has long been a dead letter; federalism exists today in name only; yet it is hard not to sense that a broader principle even than the traditions of the American political system has been violated here.

In the Catholic tradition, we call that principle subsidiarity—the idea that a larger, higher, or more centralized authority should not usurp the rightful duties and responsibilities of a smaller, lower, or decentralized one.  The framers of both the Articles of Confederation and the U.S. Constitution did not use the term, but the systems of federalism established under both documents adhered to the principle, each in its own way.

Subsidiarity is poorly understood.  Many Catholics who claim to support the principle characterize it as the idea that higher authorities should never step in unless lower authorities fail to fulfill their responsibilities.  I once had a debate with a Catholic traditionalist who argued that, under subsidiarity, overturning Roe v. Wade was not good enough, because some states would fail to protect the unborn.  Therefore, nothing short of a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution was acceptable.  Similarly, leaving the regulation of marriage to the states was out of the question, now that some states have legalized “gay marriage.”  Their failure to exercise their responsibilities in accordance with Christian teaching on marriage meant that the federal government not only could step in, but must step in.

Since vocal Catholic “defenders” of subsidiarity make such arguments, it is not surprising that another common misconception, especially among those who are skeptical of the influence of the Catholic Church on politics, is that (in the recent words of one European journalist) subsidiarity means “that the power rests at the top . . . but the power at the top will let some of it trickle down as it sees fit.”

Both sides are wrong.  The most cogent summary of the principle of subsidiarity is found in Pope Pius XI’s 1931 social encyclical, Quadragesimo anno.  Building on the work of his predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, in Rerum novarum (1891), Pope Pius writes (paragraph 79):

As history abundantly proves, it is true that on account of changed conditions many things which were done by small associations in former times cannot be done now save by large associations.  Still, that most weighty principle, which cannot be set aside or changed, remains fixed and unshaken in social philosophy: Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.  For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.

Phrases such as “fixed and unshaken,” “gravely wrong,” “injustice,” “grave evil,” and “disturbance of right order” do not allow for a whole lot of wiggle room.  Even more important, however, is the Holy Father’s choice of verb to describe the responsibilities of subsidiary organizations: He speaks of what they “can do,” without qualification.  He does not go on to say that if they deliberately fail to do that which they can do, it is no longer “a grave evil and disturbance of right order” for a larger, higher, or more centralized authority to usurp the power that rightly belongs to a smaller, lower, or decentralized one.

This isn’t sloppiness on Pius XI’s part, nor is it a deliberate attempt to hide some dark Catholic belief that power flows from the center and is held by families and local governments and other intermediary institutions only at the whim of the centralized state, which owes its power to the Supreme Pontiff.  Rather, it is a classic statement of the traditional Christian understanding of moral and social order: There is a place for everything, and everything in its place.

The proper authorities in the state of Illinois could have handled the Blagojevich problem, as the impeachment proceedings in the Illinois General Assembly prove.  They chose not to.  And the citizens of Illinois, who could have demanded that their elected officials fulfill their sworn responsibilities to uphold the Illinois constitution, chose to look the other way, too.  Neither failure represents an inability to carry out their responsibilities, and thus neither justifies the “grave evil and disturbance of right order” of a federal intervention.

Pius XI wrote Quadragesimo anno at a time of unprecedented centralization and destruction of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” that are “the first principle . . . of public affections . . . the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind.”  Today, to quote the typically pithy assessment of Burke’s latter-day disciple Russell Kirk, the situation is “much worse.”  Subsidiarity, Pius XI saw, was the key to the return to right order, which would mean the limitation rather than the expansion of the centralized state:

When we speak of the reform of institutions, the State comes chiefly to mind, not as if universal well-being were to be expected from its activity, but because things have come to such a pass through the evil of what we have termed “individualism” that, following upon the overthrow and near extinction of that rich social life which was once highly developed through associations of various kinds, there remain virtually only individuals and the State.  This is to the great harm of the State itself; for, with a structure of social governance lost, and with the taking over of all the burdens which the wrecked associations once bore, the State has been overwhelmed and crushed by almost infinite tasks and duties.

Should Governor Hot Rod be convicted on federal charges, I won’t shed a tear for him—he deserves far worse than a few years lounging around a federal country club, with a weekly “Get Out of Jail Free” card to meet his family and political cronies on Saturday morning at a local restaurant for breakfast.  But the successful prosecution of a governor who was indicted while still in office would set, as Dr. Wilson rightly stated, a very bad precedent.

While the American constitutional order may have all but crumbled into dust, subsidiarity, as a broader principle, still stands—for the moment.  Defending it, even in—or perhaps, especially in—distasteful situations such as the strange case of Milorad Blagojevich, is the first step toward restoring a sane political order in the United States.

And think of the delicious irony if a reinvigorated federal system were to spring forth from the Land of Lincoln.

This article first appeared in the March 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

In Valkyrie, screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie and director Bryan Singer tell the story of Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, the aristocratic German Catholic who led the conspiracy that almost assassinated Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944.  While considered a national hero in Germany, Stauffenberg is not nearly as well known in America.  So strong is the propaganda coloring America’s understanding of what happened in Europe from 1933 to 1945 that many of our citizens tend to think of all Germans as Nazis.  In the popular imagination, Germans are either the monocled, heel-clicking sadists on display in Casablanca or the buffoons of Hogan’s Heroes.  It’s just this kind of historical caricaturing that Stauffenberg sacrificed his life to prevent.  He agreed with his fellow conspirator, Henning von Tresckow, who said that they had to kill the Führer “to show the world that not all of us are like him; otherwise, this will always be Hitler’s Germany.”  They failed, and thus many in our overeducated, underinformed land think Hitler and his circle were the German norm in the mid-20th century.

Singer has fashioned a strong, convincing portrayal of the events leading up to and immediately following the attempted assassination.  Spurning the usual excesses of big-budget war films, he gives us an admirably restrained account that’s wholly convincing in every detail.  Despite the foreshortening and simplification inescapable in a two-hour film, he never misleads the audience in any substantive way.  At the film’s conclusion, I was left elevated the way one is after an effectively staged tragedy.  I had witnessed the passion of a man of principle who had courageously chosen his fate in the full knowledge that he would as likely fail as succeed.

The film begins in Tunisia with Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) writing in his diary of his disgust with Hitler and the Nazis.  “I’m a soldier, but in serving my country, I have betrayed my conscience.”  Moments later, his brigade sustains an aerial attack during which he loses his right hand, two fingers of his left, an eye, and a good deal of his hearing.  Sent back to Berlin, he makes contact with like-minded officers and joins the plot to assassinate Hitler and put the government under the leadership of Carl Goerdeler, a conservative Prussian statesman who shares their dedication to saving the German people and Europe from further destruction.  But how will they accomplish this?  Listening to a recording of Wagner’s Die Walküre one evening, Stauffenberg gets his inspiration.  He will use Hitler’s own defensive emergency plan, code-named Walküre, to wrest the reigns of power from the Nazis.  Hitler had taken precautions against possible coups by keeping the army reserves stationed in Berlin in constant readiness.  Should he or his administration be attacked, the reserves were to lock down the seat of government and protect it at all costs.  Stauffenberg plans to kill Hitler, announce the assassination was perpetrated by high-ranking members of Hitler’s bodyguard, the Schutzstaffel (the SS), and then invoke Walküre.  The plan sounds convincing enough, but as one of the conspirators warns, “Just remember: Nothing ever goes according to plan.”

Once the operation is begun, the film accelerates toward its foregone conclusion.  Although we know Stauffenberg will fail, Singer somehow manages to ratchet up the suspense to such a degree that the audience with whom I saw the movie were rooting for the conspirators to succeed.

Summoned to a high-level meeting at Wolfschanze (Wolf’s Lair), Hitler’s bunker in the Goerlitz forest east of Rastenburg, Stauffenberg arrives with his lieutenant and two bombs.  Several things go awry, but the operation still has a chance.  With astonishing sang-froid, Stauffenberg places one of his bombs near Hitler and leaves the room just before the explosion.  He bluffs his way out of the compound and flies back to Berlin where he finds his allies paralyzed by uncertainty.  The news from Wolfschanze has been sketchy.  Not knowing whether Stauffenberg had succeeded, they have waited for his arrival.  Had they kept their heads, they would have realized that it didn’t matter whether Hitler was dead or alive.  The confusion following the attack had given them the opportunity to put Walküre into effect, round up the SS, and take over the government.  After all, they had nothing to lose.  Their complicity in the assassination—successful or not—would certainly have emerged.  “If only,” we’re left pondering.

Some commentators have faulted the film for portraying Stauffenberg as a noble patriot driven by humanitarian concerns.  They either claim or insinuate that he and the other conspirators had acted to secure their leadership in the Germany that would follow the war.  Some have openly mocked the idea that Stauffenberg had any concern about the persecution of Jews or the mass killings of other unfortunates.  They note that by 1944 the German army had been routed in the battle of Stalingrad, and it had become obvious that Germany would lose the war.  They also quote an unflattering comment Stauffenberg made in a letter to his wife about the Jews and Slavs he encountered in Eastern Europe.  How, they ask, could a person of Stauffenberg’s background be anything other than a self-serving antisemite?  Well, here’s how.  As documented by many serious historians, including Peter Hoffman, Stauffenberg concluded in 1942 that Hitler had to be overthrown.  This was well before Stalingrad and Normandy had presaged Germany’s inevitable defeat.  Second, while he may not have held Slavs and Eastern European Jews in the highest regard, Stauffenberg never gave any sign of subscribing to the Nazi race madness.  Several of his closest friends were German Jews.  Furthermore, his brother Alexander had married a woman of Jewish descent whose family had suffered because of the Nazi proscriptions.  While it’s true that, like many aristocrats, Stauffenberg subscribed to a theory of class distinctions and suffered from an advanced case of noblesse oblige (now anathema in the West), he also subscribed to a politics that called for honoring a natural aristocracy based on demonstrable merit.  And, finally, there’s this.  At his end, he looked the members of his firing squad in their eyes and shouted “Long live holy Germany!” as they pulled their triggers.  Valor this staunch is too scarce not to be prized.

Detractors have also ridiculed Tom Cruise’s performance.  Cruise has garnered enemies far and wide.  He jumped on Oprah’s couch; he became a Scientologist; he impregnated Katie Holmes.  Some claim he’s a closeted homosexual.  And on and on.  Let’s leave it at this: Actors generally are childish; it’s nearly a career qualification.  After all, they pretend for a living.  The only thing we should expect of them is that their pretending convince us of the truth of their characterizations.  At this Cruise has usually done reasonably well—and in Valkyrie, exceptionally well.  Here he conveys the quiet authority of a good man who recognizes that his social position requires that he live up to a code of honor that transcends himself.  This is nowhere more evident than in the way Cruise has his character respond to those in inferior positions.  He’s always courteous, even when they exasperate him.  When making his escape from Wolf’s Lair, he’s stopped by a guard.  Without raising his voice, he appeals to the man’s sense of honor to convince him to let him and his lieutenant through the gate.  Later, once the coup has failed and his Berlin office staff are walking out on him, an adoring secretary looks up at him with tears in her eyes.  She’s not going to leave.  He looks at her gently and, in the quietest voice imaginable, implores her to leave.  It’s a wonderfully tender moment in a film otherwise characterized by masculine brusqueness.

As for the other performances, Singer probably didn’t have to work very hard.  Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, and Terence Stamp are all superlative as usual.  And the lesser roles are filled out by equally competent actors.  Even Eddie Izzard is convincing as a reluctant conspirator.

Of all 2008’s films, Valkyrie is one of the most satisfying, by reason of its sincere ambition and realized artistry.  Singer, the Jewish kid from Jersey who made the Man of Steel a comic-book savior in Superman Returns, has arrived on the international stage with a fully grown-up film about a genuinely human savior.

Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire is anything but grown up.  It’s a kid’s kaleidoscope of exploding colors celebrating the irrepressible energy of its underclass characters, desperate youths who find themselves caught up in a wildly monstrous and thoroughly romantic fairy tale.  Based on the popular Indian novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup, this British-made film concerns the experiences of three throwaway orphans: two brothers and Latika, the girl they meet during their travels.  Just barely surviving against a background of nearly unimaginable poverty, they become aimless tricksters and petty criminals living hand to mouth.  But when the brothers become separated from Latika, the younger, Jamal, discovers his life’s mission.  He’s fallen in love with Latika, and he’s determined to find her again.  After years of searching, he discovers she’s living as a reluctantly kept woman in Mumbai.  There’s only one thing to do.  He gets himself onto the Indian version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? and begins to pile up winnings.  For such impertinence, he’s arrested and tortured to confess his scam.  But it isn’t a scam.  This uneducated kid doesn’t know that Gandhi appears on the 1,000-rupee note, but when asked who’s on the American hundred-dollar bill, he confidently answers “Benjamin Franklin.”  Why?  An American tourist aghast at his poverty once gave him one.

As Jamal explains how he knew the answers, the film flashes back to each revelatory incident in his life.  In so doing, the narrative becomes a quest montage, with Jamal the courtly hero undergoing a series of ordeals to win his lady love.

Out of this unlikely material, Boyle has constructed an astonishingly joyful film, one part sociological horror, one part romance, and the third, delirious comedy.  How to explain this?  I could bore with discussions of his montage, camera angles, and palette.  But, finally, there’s only one explanation: cinematic genius.

By the way, I noticed this morning an advertisement for a wholly Indian-made action film opening in American multiplexes.  For better or for worse, the subcontinent has arrived, and its billions want in on our millions.  Boyle is just ahead of the curve.

This article first appeared in the March 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

“Si direbbe che persino la luna si è affrettata stasera—osservatelo in alto—a guardare a questo spettacolo.”

(“One might almost think that the moon—just look at him up there—hurried up tonight to see this spectacle.”)  These were words that Pope John XXIII extemporaneously addressed to the crowd gathered in Piazza San Pietro on the moonlit evening of October 11, 1962, the opening day of the Second Vatican Council.  The blessed pontiff spoke warmly of his expectation that the council would conclude “prima di Natale,” which being interpreted is “before Christmas.”  On this point at least, “Good Pope John” was not a prophet.  But how could he have thought otherwise?  Everything had been meticulously prepared; the documents were all ready, expounding the Faith and refuting modern errors with vigor and copious footnotes.  Well, no, as the saying goes, “the Rhine flowed into the Tiber,” and by Christmas the carefully worded schemata were practically all gone (except the “easy” one on liturgy: another less-than-prophetic but, in this case, collegial, not papal, surmise), and the council’s work indefinitely to-be-continued.

January 25 of this year marked the 50th anniversary of the surprise announcement of Pope John XXIII that he intended to convoke a general council.  From 1959 to 1962, the soon-to-be-jettisoned constitutions and decrees that would have been discussed were composed by preparatory committees of eminent Roman theologians.  Among these is one document that is remarkable for its keen prescience and consequent pastoral anxiety.  It never even made it to the floor of the council.  Its full title was Schema Constitutionis Dogmaticae de Castitate, Matrimonio, Familia, Virginitate.  Yes, there was a separate dogmatic constitution on chastity (marital, familial, and virginal) and every word of it now reads like a prophecy—not a Delphic utterance, but as clear-sighted as Daniel.  Reading the rejected schema, one cannot help but be struck by the sharp focus and clarity whereby chastity and all that opposes it in the modern world were confronted.  Nor can one deny—without questioning the value of the many other matters treated by the council—that in the face of all that has come to pass in the meantime this precision and firmness would have been the greatest thing the council might have offered to the world.

Practically every moral threat in the realm of human sexuality is addressed.  It deals with homosexuality: “It is most evil to hold that the most filthy affections for persons of the same sex are in fact a privilege of a higher level of culture.”  It deals with surgical sex changes: “Utterly wicked are those attempts to change one’s proper sex when it can be sufficiently determined.”  Genetic manipulation: “In no case can a right be given . . . to introduce into the human body procreative cells of another species, or the inverse, or to unite human cells from either sex in a laboratory . . . even if only the progress of science be intended.”  Sex education: “[T]hat kind of instruction is to reprobated which is in the presence of boys and girls together.”  Feminism:

The Synod reproves that evil form of emancipation by which the proper nature, function, and role of a woman are defiled, be she daughter, or wife, or mother, on account of the introduction of a false opinion of her equality with man . . . and moved by a false exaltation of freedom.

Immoral politicians: “The Synod most severely condemns those who directly assist or formally cooperate in establishing unjust laws regarding marriage and the family.”  The intrusion of civil government in education: “The Sacred Synod condemns as well all theories by which in whatsoever way the rights of the church and of the family regarding the education of children are denied or whereby the primary right in this matter is attributed to civil authority.”  The impeding of procreation by artificial means and the discouraging of fruitful families:

The Sacred Synod while it most insistently exhorts all that each one should according to his ability effectively assist families bearing a large number of children, at the same time severely reproves the recommending or spreading of immoral means of contraception for the limiting of children.

The objective origin and nature of marriage itself:

In the first place this Holy Synod takes up the duty to condemn all the radical errors of those who maintain that marriage in its order and establishment is a merely social phenomenon in continual evolution without any natural or supernatural weight, and that it does not come from God, nor is it subject to the Church.

The prohibition of civil dissolution of marriage: “Married persons are gravely forbidden from seeking a civil divorce as though it were properly a dissolution, as if a bond valid before God could be dissolved by civil authority.”  Legal sanctions against adultery: “It is erroneous to assert that the civil authority in no case enjoys the power of punishing both men and women adulterers.”  Contraception: “All means and techniques whereby in the use of marriage the procreation of offspring is impeded by human industry must be held to be intrinsically and gravely evil.”  Procured abortion: “It is illicit after the accomplishment of the conjugal act to interrupt the process of conception whatever stage it has reached, or to cause the direct destruction of the fetus not yet born, by which action they sin gravely against the commandment of God.”  Unnatural relations: “The chaste fidelity of spouses demands that in the mutual rendering of the marriage debt nothing should be done which is against the law of God, even if this imposes real acts of heroism.”  And finally, the mass media of entertainment:

With supreme aversion this Sacred Synod acknowledges how many and how great are the detestable traps set today against chastity . . . even though they are offered under the pretext of play, recreation, art, and information whereby souls are every moment and in every place, even at home, incited to evil, nay rather dragged to it.

These are only a selection of quotations.  There was much more.  The language is strong, precise, and formal, and most evidently not devoid of that note of indignation which commonly characterized the magisterial reproofs of days gone by.

What the council did finally say about marriage is to be found a chapter of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.  The tone of this document, in contrast to the original, is hortatory rather than definitive, using personalistic descriptive affirmation rather than essentialistic formal definition and condemnation.  In so doing, it clearly decries abortion and divorce, and mildly opposes contraception, but only refers in passing to the objective order of nature, while preferring to emphasize the experiential and contextual aspects of conjugal morality.  Given that the two documents do not contradict each other, what is the key to understanding the difference of outlook and—if I may deal in mere, alas, futuribilia—of outcome?  I was puzzling over this, until I came across some prohibitions in the “condition contrary to fact” schema that really struck me for their amazing foresight, and which regarded, not the various moral monstrosities condemned above, but rather opinions held by pious Catholics.  Here is an error, but a telling one: “The Sacred Synod reproves also the opinion of those who assert that the use of marriage is a specific means of attaining that perfection whereby truly and properly Man is the image of God and of the Most Holy Trinity.”
But isn’t this practically what many today teach?  That the marriage act itself, and not the married state or the bond of sacramental marriage, is a direct sign of the end of human existence: ecstatic union with God?  Do we not hear that the Song of Songs is not “just” a mystical allegory, but rather a description of how to get union with God by means of sex, albeit marital and chaste?  Are not marital relations sometimes referred to by preachers as the supreme and privileged signs of God’s love?  Isn’t this so much the case now that it almost sounds unchristian to assert otherwise?  Haven’t the dour strictures of Saint Augustine and Saint Alphonsus been surpassed?

Then I came across another passage just as telling: “The opinion is false and erroneous which holds that a marriage may be declared invalid or be dissolved on account of lack of love alone.”

I am sure that such a lack would, if attested to before a diocesan tribunal in the United States today, almost infallibly obtain just such a (fallible) declaration of nullity.  The reader is asking: “You mean to tell me that love is not a necessary condition for the validity of a marriage?”

Now I would be the last to deny that there may be some individual cases in which these two prohibited opinions could be taken as true, but their condemnation here is aiming at the common good, not at individual exceptions, which can be dealt with individually.  For example, the first proposition was true in a sense before Original Sin, and the second could be true if lack of love meant deceitful malice.  But there was a Fall, and there is such a thing as a minimum requirement for a valid marriage that has nothing to do with . . . romance.

There!  I found it.  Here is the problem within the fold, which has practically furnished the enemies of sound morality with a weapon to turn against us: the romanticization of marriage and procreation.  This is the vulgar version of the personalist approach to sex, which has its undoubtedly orthodox incarnations, but which is unable to take up arms against the enemy it is so eager to convince of the deeply fulfilling, richly complex experience of marital love.  The enemy is at the gate, and instead of aiming at him from the safety of your turrets and routing him, you attempt to show him what a lovely, serene, and productive city he is about to destroy.  In order to do this you must let him inside the gate.  If he is clever, he will ask you to let his companions in also, and so they occupy the city without a fight.

The teaching of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World on marriage and the family is sublime and true, but, in view of the evils in the modern world and the undoubted “signs of the times” evident in the moral state of our society, it hardly met the challenge.  The enemies of Christian morality are relentless and cruel and brook no resistance, and we are trying our best to reassure them that we are not mean, or uptight, or hateful; that we have a “positive message”; that it is all so beautiful, if they only knew.  It is as though Lot should have passed out happy-face buttons to the men beating down his door, or Joseph should have tried to sit down and have a heart-to-heart talk with Potiphar’s wife.  The effect of this is that our opponents do not change a bit, but rather those on our own side begin to view the robust expression of our teachings with suspicion.  Let’s be honest: Were we not just a bit troubled by the unapologetic tone of at least some of the affirmations given from the original schema on chastity, marriage, family, and virginity?  And how many Christians were and are and surely will be very quiet about their reservations regarding so-called same-sex marriage, lest they sound like they do not respect the attachment and warm feelings and needs of such couples?

What is at the root of this?  We still believe that the acts prohibited in the original schema are wrong, but we are ill at ease when these acts are reprobated in a certain manner.  This is because we have romanticized sexuality.  Here are the words of a dissenting voice at the council when the new schema on marriage, the one that was ultimately approved by the council, was being proposed in place of the original.  Archbishop Djajasepoetra of Jakarta in Indonesia complained—in Latin—at the council’s third session in 1964:

The schema is too Occidental . . . You in the West find it quite natural for those in love to marry.  But you are the exceptions if humanity as a whole is considered.  Our people love one another because they are married, which is not quite the same thing.  We differ from Westerners in that our marriages are contracted not out of love but by the will of the parents or tribe.  We marry to continue the race.

The romanticization of sexual love in marriage has led to the subordination of its objective cosmological role in the procreation of the human race to human desire and personal need.  “Our people love one another because they are married.”  This is a love of the common good of the family, or the tribe, or the nation, or of the whole human race.  On this view marriage is as much a matter of the common, public good as warfare, or capital punishment, or a stable means of exchange.  Of this perspective we have great need, and there are signs that it is being gradually recovered, if not with the rotund reprobations of the preconciliar age (these are now reserved only for certain offenses judged to be worthy of condemnation by the media), at least with the clear, essentialist thinking that looks unflinchingly and unromantically at the nature of things.

Just this past December the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued an instruction on certain bioethical issues, among which was found the resolution of the question of the “prenatal adoption” into the womb of frozen embryos that would otherwise never be carried, the so-called “snowflake babies.”  Very much to the dismay of some (but admittedly not all) personalist moralists, the Holy See came down decidedly against this apparently merciful “saving” of a fertilized ovum, a human life.  Why?  Because not even the praiseworthy intention of saving a single life can justify an unnatural means of procreation outside of the marriage act.  The document contains this amazing statement: “All things considered, it needs to be recognized that the thousands of abandoned embryos represent a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved” (emphasis original).  Analogously, the Holy See has also resolutely opposed the adoption of children already born by same-sex couples, and Catholic adoption agencies have ended their services in places like the United Kingdom where the state will not allow them to refuse to place children with such couples.  The good pro-life Christian may not see the analogy, but both are attempts to remedy an injustice or misfortune by immoral means.  In short, a romanticizing ethic absolutizes personal human desire or need; the ancient cosmological ethic accepts the limitations of human life and does the best it can in order to serve the common good.

The moon that looked down on the spectacle of the council is, after all, in ancient and medieval cosmology the immediate cause of the bodily dispositions needed for procreation.  Omnis motus geniturae fit a luna: “Every movement of the generative faculty is from the moon,” said Albert the Great.  The lunar connection was inferred from women’s monthly cycle.  Just this last Epiphany, in speaking of the star of Bethlehem, the star of the greatest of procreations, Pope Benedict made this observation about the ancient, cosmological Weltanschauung: “There is a special concept of the cosmos in Christianity which found its loftiest expression in medieval philosophy and theology.”  May the lunar star pointed out by Pope John at the opening of the council be at last a genuine prophecy and sign of a return to the order of things, the visible cosmos of the Creator, of which we poor men born of woman are but a part, albeit the noblest.  And then, perhaps, men will love their wives because they are married to them, and that will be something for the moon—in our hemisphere at least—to hurry up and see.

This article first appeared in the March 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Self-Evident Lies
by Thomas Fleming

VIEWS

Mainline Marital Mélange
by William Murchison
When the culture preaches to the church.

Immigration and Marriage in America
by R. Cort Kirkwood
Beyond definitions.

Moonstruck Morality Versus the Cosmos
by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.
Romancing the self.

NEWS

School of Rape
by Beverly K. Eakman
From health class to hotties.

REVIEWS

Romancing the Skull
by Jack Trotter

John Carroll: The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited

plus

John Lukacs on George W. Liebmann’s Diplomacy
Thomas Fleming on Christopher Duggan’s The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy Since 1796

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Ukraine: Life in the Borderland
by Matthew A. Rarey

VITAL SIGNS

Conservatism: City Mouse, Country Mouse
by John Willson

COLUMNS

Sins of Omission
by Roger D. McGrath

Under the Black Flag
by Taki Theodoracopulos

Breaking Glass
by Philip Jenkins

The Rockford Files
by Scott P. Richert

European Diary
by Andrei Navrozov

In the Dark
Valkyrie, Slumdog Millionaire
by George McCartney

The Hundredth Meridian
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY

A Paid Engagement and
Downy Woodpecker, Up Close
by Maryann Corbett

ON THE COVER

Cover art by George McCartney, Jr.
Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.