Wonderful Matters

My latest home page piece was largely about the film Spotlight , and I wanted to blog a bit about finally seeing the film. My webzine remarks were based on knowledge I already had about the Catholic Church scandal and standard considerations of journalism's role in society, so seeing the film didn't alter anything shared in the piece. What I did find more striking than I'd previously thought was how well the film was made -- so I want to give it credit for that -- but I was also taken by the breadth to which people live in a state of denial about the most wretched things. Even though there are so many of them . And the breadth of that denial is so harrowingly large. If you think about it, the films Spotlight and another terrific film I'd just seen, The Big Short , are exactly the same. Really, they are. Both tremendously engaging because they're both all about the courage, wisdom, and fortitude required to shine the "spotlight", if you will, on th...

I happened to come across this interesting story , buried deep in the bowels of embarrassing things the Maecenaen sworn expounders don't like shared but still end up making Caesar look good. It was in the New York Times , so it is official, but it was in some arts blog. Turns out the Academy Award winning film Spotlight  did a little fiddling with the story to evoke a bit more dramatic effect, making an actual person seem like something he wasn't. The Roman operative, an educational institution trustee, was portrayed as working on the cover-up, when in fact he was more of a supportive force for making things clean and right with the church. What the story does is degrade the perception of the righteous Boston Globe reporter gallantry in valiantly exposing the Catholic Church's priest-sex abuse situation, but ironically it does so by making Rome's heroes appear even more courageously wholesomely victimized. How pukifying. The truth is Rome's ecclesia actually...

You may want to catch Maureen Mullarkey's piece about the Catholicist Nation in The Federalist . You can learn a lot about truthful matters from a true-believer Catholicist. The first half of her piece is a scathing review of Catholic Church loathing throughout U.S. history. How evil has all that evil loathing been, let's make sure Catholic victimhood is firmly entrenched in the Americanist mentality. The second half is a lucid justification for such a perspective. Guh? Yes, I'm sure Mullarkey's purpose is to say, essentially, "Look at all this Catholic-things revulsion, how rotten, yet now the Pope and the Church are doing things that are genuinely really bad, so we must be afraid of the neo-haters." The Federalist is a fine webzine articulating the benefits of conservative-oriented policy. But Mullarkey as much as confesses a vibrant bewilderment about this current state of affairs. The Pope is now all about opening the borders and prosecuting cli...