Watching: I finished my rewatch of Mad Men last night. Skipping most of the Betty stuff – except for the end-series developments which were well-done and moving, I found it just as satisfying this time around. As much as Mad Men annoyed me, there were certain elements that worked almost perfectly. In particular the trajectories of the Joan and Peggy characters afforded great ways to explore the ways that women’s roles changed during the period. What’s unique, I think, is that both characters forge new paths and break through ceilings, but do so, not from an ideological or political grounding, but because they have talents and they’re determined to put them to use – and if Weiner did anything well in this series, it was showing how organically this can happen in a person’s life, at least with these two characters.
Joan Holloway begins the series as a very competent, if off-putting head secretary, quite comfortable in using her sexual presence to intimidate, put down other women and get what she wants. Ten years later, she’s changed. She’s still aware of her own power, but she’s paid a price for the ways she’s used it in the past, she’s seen the limits of it, and she’s run straight up against workplace sexism in a different way – and she’s no longer willing to accept it as a barrier. And so we see her, as the series ends, at the beginning of what’s probably going to be a fabulously successful career building her own production company, using every bit of experience she’s had in advertising and in just – life. It’s the way it works for people who are paying attention and have a sense of both their own agency and their limitations.
And even though the very end of the series made me roll my eyes – hard – on first viewing years ago, even at the time I had to grudgingly concede – yeah, it fits. And last night, I couldn’t disagree – with myself. It does fit. And I watched that whole ending montage three times – it’s very satisfying to see characters find themselves in good places, and places that make sense.
And yeah, I’m still waiting for The Campbells of Wichita – I’d spend money to watch that, for sure.
Reading:
No new novel right yet. Something will turn up today.
So when in doubt – read some academic journal articles on obscure moments in Catholic history!
I accessed these via my local public library’s website. If you’re connected to a college or university, of course you have this kind of access, but if you are not, do check out your community public library’s online portal. You might be surprised what’s available to you.
First up was Rural Seigneurs and the Counter Reformation: Parishes, Patrons, and Religious Reform in France, 1550–1700.
This article examines the role of lay seigneurs in religious change in the French countryside in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during the Catholic Reformation and a period of socioeconomic change in land ownership and exploitation. The focus here is on middling and lesser lords—the rough equivalent of the English gentry, who held land in a single province or even pays and had a frequent presence in their parishes—rather than the great nobles who operated at a national level. Brittany is used as a case study, for it was a province rich in rural lords and because relatively good source material survives. It is argued that seigneurs were important patrons of religious innovation in the countryside, particularly in the parish church. They were rarely innovators themselves, but they lent support and resources to the introduction and maintenance of new devotional practices. Lords worked closely with clergy, sharing their aspirations and ideas. Four areas were particularly prominent in eliciting their support: appointment of clergy, support of missionaries, new devotional practices, and funding of building projects and liturgies in parish churches. These combined family strategies of enhancing social status and individual means to salvation which were indivisible in the world of the lay rural nobility. It was from a traditional understanding of lordship that patronage of religious reform stemmed.
Contemporary Takeaway: Laity involved in church structures and decision-making.
We might have an image of the past in which the laity did nothing but pay-pray-and-obey. This was, of course, not true. Those with civil power in Catholic cultures played vital roles in church structure and polity. In fact, a recent article in First Things argued that this reality actually, in the past, functioned as a check on episcopal power:
Due to various historical developments since the mid-nineteenth century, the Church today is structured in some ways as a kind of worldwide, bureaucratized nation-state—but without hard, institutional checks and balances from “below” to allow salutary pushback against projects imposed by the central planners. Traditionally, some laypersons and lower clergymen possessed rights and oversight powers with respect to the Church’s “internal affairs.” Today, lacking a “college” of their own, entire classes of lay and clerical members of the Church are at the mercy of episcopal authority. Even where some laypersons and lower clergy lead thriving Catholic organizations, the bishops may pick and choose which among them can act freely and fundraise within their dioceses. Though they constitute the mass of the “People of God,” the laity and lower clergy are disenfranchised in what has become a veritable papal-episcopal oligarchy.
….There can be no doubt that the Church needed to reconstitute herself to ensure her liberty in the modern age. But recent evolutions of the papal and episcopal offices have had the unintended effect of exacerbating conditions in which sexual predators and their protectors in the hierarchy can get away with their corruption. The same evolutions have erected structural barriers, too, which make it almost impossible for concerned laypersons and rank-and-file clergymen to hold Church leaders to account for wounds they inflict on the Church’s body. In our so-called Age of the Laity, many laypersons—Mass-going stalwarts who volunteer time and resources; parents of boys who might become priests; even prominent lawyers, businessmen, intellectuals, and media professionals with connections in the hierarchy—are powerless before churchmen’s stonewalling, tone-deafness, and worse. Efforts toward accountability face jurisdictional and canonical hurdles to their timely realization. And in the rare instances when barriers can be overcome, many faithful men and women scrupulously hesitate to act, because they have been formed by the Church of the last century to view popes and bishops alone as the divinely ordained authorities over the Christian people’s corporate existence.
Yet we need something more than investigations led by politicians who may regard Church-bashing as career-advancing. We need a change of attitude. Laypersons and even clergymen under episcopal authority need not confuse filial deference to bishops and popes with uncritical, docile acceptance of all the forms of power the hierarchy currently wields. Some of these powers are new in the history of the Church and are concentrated by happenstance in the hands of the hierarchy, due to the historical conditions of the Church’s self-preserving self-extrication from modern political regimes. Faithful and informed Catholics have filial duties to their mother—the Church herself—not only to their clerical fathers. They should call attention to problems and propose solutions, mindful that by virtue of holy baptism and confirmation, they have been gifted by the Holy Spirit not only with piety and fear of the Lord, but also with wisdom, understanding, knowledge, counsel, and fortitude.
Catholics also need to think freshly about Church governance. After the destruction of Christendom, the popes and bishops absorbed many powers over the common life of the Church that historically were wielded by lay rulers and social elites. Catholics today need not dream of restoring Christendom and its tightly woven fabric of clerical and secular rule. But perhaps the sexual abuse crisis serves to remind us that it was traditionally the duty and right of the laity to protect the physical, temporal body of the Church—to safeguard her orphans, widows, and all manner of persons endangered by malignant forces prowling about within the corpus Christianum, as well as outside of her.
This article examines a little-studied work by Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167): his tractate on the miracles of the saints of Hexham—referred to here as Miracula—composed for the feast of the saints’ translation in 1154/1155. While Miraculahas been incidental to the prolific scholarship on Aelred, this article brings it back to the center of Aelred’s life and thought. It describes Miracula in some detail, putting to rest any speculation that Aelred was not the text’s author through a careful treatment of the surviving manuscripts. It then explores Aelred’s sophisticated notions of who the saints were, how they inhabited Hexham, and what he and his audience expected the saints to do on their behalf. Finally, it demonstrates that Aelred intentionally combined local traditions about the saints with his own modern Cistercian concerns about spiritual life to produce an innovative meditation on saints, miracles, and veneration. Miracula allows scholars to see Aelred not only as a preeminent reformed Cistercian thinker but also as someone formed by and committed to the ongoing cult of the local saints
Contemporary Takeaway: First, a glimpse into this period of transition in English church history as a married clergy gave way to reforming religious orders. Aelred came from a family of clergy, but became a Cistercian. Secondly, an exploration of how people in the past understood the roles of saints in their communities.
Both are in the March 2018 volume of Church History.
Also read: My son on a few movies:
(Yes, I gave him the Criterion Collection Bergman set for Christmas….)
The story itself revolves around three people, Pina, a pregnant widow ready to marry an underground printer, Giorgio, an underground engineer on the run from the Gestapo, and Don Pietro, a local priest who is using his status as a shield from the Nazis and fascists to aid the local underground.
As a portrait of life in the underground, the movie is utterly convincing. It’s not just the production design (which really does feel like they filmed around Rome and nothing more), but the performances from the actors and non-actors alike. There’s a despair that’s evident in every Italian on screen for everyone, even the children, had just lived through several years of privation and war. The story reinforces all of that.
I’ve seen this film – and highly recommend it – and I thought I’d written about it, but can’t turn anything up. Oh well – go watch it, if you can.