Catholic Mother Research Articles

Selections from Thomas Verner Moore's “Religious Values in Mental Hygiene” (1933)

Thomas Verner Moore (1877-1969) was one of the most prominent Catholic psychologists and psychiatrists of the first half of the 20th century. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, to a Presbyterian father and a Catholic mother, and raised as a Catholic, he entered the Congregation of the Missionary Priests of St. Paul the Apostle—the order called the “Paulists”—in 1896 and was ordained in 1901. The Paulist novitiate, located on the campus of the Catholic University of America, founded in 1887, provided Moore with the opportunity to study the “new psychology,” that is, experimental psychology, with Edward Aloysius Pace (1861-1938), who was a priest, a psychologist, and a Thomistic philosopher of renown. After Moore earned a doctorate in psychology in 1903 under Pace, he studied with Wilhelm Wundt, a leading light in experimental psychology, in Leipzig. Moore began teaching at the Catholic University in 1910. He met with the psychologist Lightner Witmer to discern how to establish a child clinic. To do so, he needed an MD, and he returned to Germany to study with Emil Kraepelin, the “grandfather” of the DSM. He also studied with Oswald Külpe, another leading experimentalist. The outbreak of World War I cut his stay short. Upon his return to Washington, he completed an MD under Adolf Meyer, at Johns Hopkins University. Moore then opened a clinic at Providence Hospital, Washington, in 1916. He served in the Armed Forces in World War I as a psychiatrist. In the 1920s, he left the Paulists and established a Benedictine Abbey, St. Anselm's, in Washington. He was a friend of Charles Spearman, who developed factor analysis, and Moore did statistical studies, including those investigating psychiatric categories. He taught several generations of graduate students, many of whom went on to establish psychology departments at Catholic colleges. When he retired from teaching, he entered the Carthusian order. He died in Spain in 1969.

Wer war Fritz Mandl: Waffen, Nazis und Geheimdienste by Ursula Prutsch

Reviewed by: Wer war Fritz Mandl: Waffen, Nazis und Geheimdienste by Ursula Prutsch Jacqueline Vansant Ursula Prutsch, Wer war Fritz Mandl: Waffen, Nazis und Geheimdienste. Vienna/Graz: Molden Verlag, 2022. 303 pp. If Fritz Mandl is known to readers, it is most likely as Hedy Kiesler Lamarr's tyrannical first husband. But Mandl was much more than that—among other things, he was one of the wealthiest men in Europe as well as a major player in the munitions industry. Although of Jewish heritage he was labeled a Nazi agent by American intelligence during World War II. In fourteen gripping chapters, Ursula Prutsch places the life of this fascinating if somewhat unsympathetic figure within a larger historical context, beginning with the story of the emancipation of the Jews in Austria-Hungary and its meaning for Mandl's ancestors. She views his personal life and business dealings through the lens of turbulent events of the twentieth century and documents both unethical and illegal practices in the munitions and weapons industry. Fritz Mandl was born in 1900, the son of a wealthy atheist industrialist of Jewish heritage and a Catholic mother. Mandl's parents did not marry until he was ten, and his "illegitimate" birth plagued him growing up. At the same time, he enjoyed all the advantages of wealth, which may have helped him remain in school despite poor grades. At the age of 24 he assumed the directorship of the Hirtenberger munitions factory that was in dire financial straits. Proving himself a shrewd factory owner, he often promoted his business transactions by circumventing the laws and selling munitions to third parties, who then sold them further. Trading with warring sides became a trademark practice of Mandl's. An admirer of Mussolini and an Austrian patriot, Mandl viewed Italian-type fascism as the means to protect Austria from the National Socialists. After an unsuccessful putsch attempt by the leader of the Styrian Heimwehr, Walter Pfrimer, in September 1931, Mandl reached out to the Italians for armed support. Having supported the Heimwehr and its leader, Graf Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, financially for many years, he worked behind the scenes to get them better armed. Before the Anschluss Mandl had the foresight to diversify his holdings, which placed him in a much more favorable position than many other exiles. Having transferred 440,000 Pounds sterling from the factory to a private account in Switzerland, the magnate forced the National Socialists to negotiate with him to buy the factory, a rare occurrence indeed. In the hope of building up new business interests, Mandl settled in Argentina, [End Page 93] where he soon fell under the surveillance of the North and South American intelligence agencies. Prutsch points to the 1944 article "Poison from Austria," in which the American journalist Francis Rufus Bellamy labels Fritz Mandl "one of the most sinister figures of the Western Hemisphere" and "Menace No. 1 to the peace of the Americas" (210). The man who had to flee Austria because of his Jewish heritage was now labeled a Nazi. The Americans placed him on a blacklist, which limited his travel and froze some of his assets for years. Although he had done business with Nazis in the past and was not disinclined to work with Nazis, Mandl certainly was not one. However, Juan Perón used the rumors to his advantage after Argentina declared war on the Axis to imprison Mandl as a Nazi sympathizer. After being taken off the blacklist, Mandl was allowed to return to Austria and regained control of the Hirtenberger factory in 1957. As a major employer in Austria, he was able to have the government look the other way when again he engaged in unethical and illegal practices. The scandals surrounding his firm did not cease with his death in 1977. Prutsch closes with the infamous Noricum affair in the 1980s when the Hirtenberger factory, then a subsidiary of VOEST-Alpine, was involved in the illegal sale of weapons to Iran. Prutsch convincingly argues that Mandl's life story is compelling for many reasons. Indeed, this biography covers more than the life story of a major player in the munitions industry, who distanced himself from his...

A Review-Reflection

A Review-Reflection Leonard Swidler Rebecca Moore, A Blessing to Each Other: A New Account of Jewish and Christian Relations. Pearl River, NY: Crossroad Publishing Co., 2021. Pp. 293. $32.95, paper. Rebecca Moore, A Blessing to Each Other: A New Account of Jewish and Christian Relations. Pearl River, NY: Crossroad Publishing Co., 2021. Pp. 293. $32.95, paper. This book is the work of a Christian scholar about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. First a word—or several—of self-disclosure. I was born of an Irish-American Catholic mother, Josephine Marie Reed, and a Jewish Ukrainian father, Samuel Swidler. I had twenty-two years of formal Catholic education, with a B.A., M.A., and S.T.L. from Catholic institutions of higher learning—including the fifteenth-century Roman-established Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Tübingen—and a Ph.D. in "Intellectual History" from the then reputedly "godless" University of Wisconsin, at Madison. My father became an active baptized Catholic at age forty-five. My mother was one of fifteen children raised Catholic. I grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Despite being the home of the world-famous professional football team, Green Bay Packers, it had only a population of 35,000 then. Moreover, it could not muster the needed ten adult male Jews to form a formal Jewish religious community. Being born on January 6, 1929, I grew up as a Catholic "Great Depression Baby" until my mid-twenties, when I lived, studied, and taught for several years in 1950's Germany. Starting then, I became increasingly deeply aware of Judaism, the Holocaust, and interreligious dialogue. That led me—and the rest of Western Civilization, as well as the rest of the world—through the over three-quarters of a century since Adolf Hitler became the "Herr Kanzler, Sieg Heil!" of Germany in January, 1933. The world took a decade and a half to begin to recover from the blood lust of the 1930's and early 1940's. It redirected itself through the turmoil of the 1960's to a new consciousness and new vision. Vatican Council II (1962–65) [End Page 455] dramatically dragged the Catholic Church out of the seventeenth century into the twentieth. Deep in the heart of that Vatican II renewal—both Catholic and catholic—was the revisioning of the largest and most structurally organized religious body in the world. Hence, Catholicism—with its current 1,350,000,000 members of the world's 7,500,000,000—has an effect far in excess of its being eighteen percent of the world's population. Vatican II Catholicism has reoriented itself from a closed-fortress mentality to an open, dialogically directed one. At the foundation of that structural redirection has been a structural reunderstanding of itself. That meant rethinking itself and its relation to the rest of the world from its very beginning coming out of first-century Judea and the 6,000,000 monotheists then living in the Roman Empire (at that time within a total population of 100,000,000). The Vatican II dialogic self-understanding significantly affects the way Catholicism understands itself and the world—that is, in dialogue—and acts accordingly. Dialogue becomes a fulcrum to "lift the world" benignly. I long ago decided to use that fulcrum to my maximum ability. Now, to the book at hand! Moore does the contemporary world a great service. She carefully and with sensitive surety of current scholarship and research outlines for the reader whence came currently designated "Christianity" and "Judaism." She clearly describes the broad outline of their respective developments and interrelationships up to the present. Today, it is a much more benign relationship than in the prior grim centuries. The relatively positive relationship of the two monotheistic bodies in the Roman Empire of the fourth century deteriorated subsequently, so that, by the High Middle Ages (1200–1600), it deteriorated badly. However, in the wake of Vatican II, the relationship has dramatically improved so that it now has significantly surpassed in positivity even that of those earlier relatively benign centuries. Moore carefully lays out the positive developments in research and rethought and provides an excellent roadmap for...

'I think I'm agnostic because I have a Muslim father and a Catholic mother'. Religious transmission to children from interfaith unions in Barcelona

ABSTRACT Based on an ethnographic study conducted with in-depth interviews, this study shows how the children of interfaith couples whose members were socialised in the Catholic and/or Muslim faiths, respectively, internalise the religious and/or cultural values that their parents transmit to them. We furthermore point out that the negotiation processes of both transmission by the couple and inheritance by the descendants are often conditioned by social and contextual factors, including the gradual process of religious secularisation. We shall analyse the consequences that this factor, increasingly common in Barcelona, has on these interfaith negotiation, transmission and inheritance processes.

Without Ceasing to Be a Christian: A Catholic and Protestant Assess the Christological Contribution of Raimon Panikkar by Erik Ranstrom and Bob Robinson

Reviewed by: Without Ceasing to Be a Christian: A Catholic and Protestant Assess the Christological Contribution of Raimon Panikkar by Erik Ranstrom and Bob Robinson Jyri Komulainen Erik Ranstrom and Bob Robinson, Without Ceasing to Be a Christian: A Catholic and Protestant Assess the Christological Contribution of Raimon Panikkar. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017. Pp. 249. $79.00. Raimon Panikkar (1918–2010) was one of the most intriguing thinkers in the field of the theology of religions. He was born in Spain to a Catholic mother and a Hindu father. Regardless of this inherently multicultural background, he was brought up in a society imbued with pre- Conciliar Catholicism. It was only later in his life that he visited India, his father’s land of birth. In effect, Panikkar’s mature vision of Christianity drew from many Occidental and Indic sources, becoming so wide-ranging and inclusive that it prompts many questions regarding the limits and the possibilities of Christian theology. There seems to be continued interest in Panikkar’s legacy. For instance, an ongoing project aims to publish his multivolume Opera Omnia in multiple languages. In addition, there are some academic studies published recently. One of these publications is the theologically creative and shrewd book under review here. I find it very fitting that Panikkar’s multifaceted theology is analyzed in ecumenical dialogue by two theologians with different backgrounds: Ranstrom is an American Catholic, and Bob Robinson is a New Zealand Anglican with an Evangelical tint. The book sheds light on Panikkar’s thinking from two complementary denominational angles. In practice, the ecumenical approach means that the chapters are written individually by both authors, with the concluding chapter bringing together some themes in a form of discussion. Even though the authors come from different theological traditions, both are very ecumenically minded and hold the “Great tradition” in high esteem. In their use, this term denotes “that broad and ever expansive stream of Christian tradition common to the oikumene and marked by the profession of the faith of the apostles through canon, creed, and council that Jesus Christ is Lord” (p. xviii). Mirroring Panikkar with the Great tradition proves to be a rewarding starting point. With their sympathetic reading, Ranstrom and Robinson show lucidly that Panikkar’s christological musings are well- grounded in the Christian mainstream tradition. Especially in his earlier writings in the 1950’s and 1960’s, Panikkar made a bold and innovative effort to recognize revelatory aspects of Hinduism from a robustly Catholic perspective. In fact, Ranstrom makes a valuable contribution when drilling into the Spanish writings of Panikkar’s lesser- known period in Opus Dei, thus unsealing this early chapter of [End Page 154] his oeuvre for the English- speaking audience. His interpretation of Melchizedek as a kind of prototype of the Cosmic religion forecasting Christ is especially worth reading. Ranstrom also tries to contextualize the evolution of Panikkar’s thinking in major shifts in his life, one of which was the above- mentioned acquaintance with India. Even though it seems hard to pinpoint when and why Panikkar amplified his thinking to his later phase of “radical pluralism,” dispensing ultimately with the concept of God, there is no doubt that something happened in his thinking. Ranstrom suggests quite plausibly that one of the major shifts in Panikkar’s intellectual evolution occurred when he moved to the “post- Christian” milieu in Santa Barbara, California, in the early 1970’s: “It is quite possible that Panikkar, discerning the academic and spiritual contexts where he was living and working, decided that he must undergo a kenōsis into the traditions and life of peoples that were outside of the church, in order to keep pace with the cultural movement of global humanity” (p. xiii). Surely, the same applies also to Panikkar’s earlier relocation from Europe to India. Eventually, Panikkar’s method of self- emptying results in a very idiosyncratic interpretation of the Great tradition that upholds High Christology but, at the same time, yields “a de- kerygmatization of Christianity” (p. 111), to quote Robinson’s expression. Both authors make critical observations about Panikkar’s proclivity to sever Christ from Jesus of Nazareth, whose meaning almost disappears from his thinking...

Tracing the Transnational: Scaling (neo)imperial realities through the body in Chris Abani’s fiction

Current thinking in materialist postcolonial and world-literary studies shows the realities of empire to be ongoing and mutable, and the local–global interface to be among the most vexed issues in these discussions. What has been overlooked thus far are the ways in which the body has reemerged in cultural production as a receptor to and cipher for these frequently abstracted planetary vectors. This essay analyses the construction of “transnational bodies” in and across a selection of Chris Abani’s fiction, highlighting how the artful embodiment of his globalized protagonists facilitates a scaling from global (neo)imperialism to its intimate bodily effects. The protagonists of Becoming Abigail, GraceLand and The Virgin of Flames trace routes between Lagos, London and Los Angeles. In Becoming Abigail (2006), Abigail’s ritualistic scarification of her body is read as an act of reclamation in response to her experience as a victim of international sex-trafficking from Lagos to London. Her trauma and embodied reaction are discussed alongside GraceLand’s (2005) Elvis, a resident of Lagos’s Makoro slum, who dresses up as his namesake to entertain foreign tourists. Finally, the essay turns to the protagonist of The Virgin of Flames (2008), Black, a cross-dressing mural artist in Los Angeles, who is the child of a Catholic Salvadoran mother and atheist Igbo father. Comparing these protagonists, I emphasize how their bodies index both their relation to the global system and their resistance to it through imminent bodily inscriptions and costume, arguing that Abani’s “transnational bodies” illustrate the multiscalar forces of (neo)imperialism as well as envisioning various strategies of intimate self-assertion.

Memories of a Penitent Heart by Cecilia Aldarondo

Reviewed by: Memories of a Penitent Heart by Cecilia Aldarondo Milton R. Machuca-Gálvez Aldarondo, Cecilia, dir. Memories of a Penitent Heart. Good Docs. 2016. Film. Memories of a Penitent Heart is a personal documentary produced, directed, and written by Puerto Rican-born filmmaker Cecilia Aldarondo. This is her first feature-length film: 72 minutes long, in English and Spanish with English subtitles. It is about her quest to find out who really was Miguel Dieppa, her gay uncle, who died when she was only 6 years old. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016. Miguel Dieppa left the island for New York City at some point in the 1970s, lived there, and died in 1987. His relocation was not conflict-free; saved family letters reveal a man haunted by religious beliefs from his upbringing, who was at times alienated from his own relatives—especially his fanatical Catholic mother, Carmen (Aldarondo's grandmother)—and, to a lesser degree, his sister Nilda, Aldarondo's own mother. In the end, the documentary becomes the symbolic exhumation and complication of Aldarondo's uncle. "[M]ás nunca yo hubiera pensado en sacar … un … un … Una cosita que pudiera mancillar la familia. Yo no lo haría …," are the very first lines heard in this film, a stern warning uttered by Titi, a family's female friend, commanding Aldarondo to stay away from digging up family secrets. Aldarondo ignores Titi's admonition and actively takes the audience on her quest for the real Miguel Dieppa, rhetorically asking, "If we only remember the good things about people we love, what do we lose?" If Aldarondo were to rely on the official version of family history her grandparents wanted to remember—Carmen's embellished scrapbooks and grainy images from 8-millimeter home movies, the Dieppa's past would be a rosy, perfect one: family gatherings, happy outings, angelical smiling children, gorgeously dressed women, well-behaved people. Examining other [End Page 480] material—old family photos and slides, and letters—and asking her mother and family friends makes Aldarondo aware that there was more to her uncle's story. Did he really die of cancer or of AIDS? Did he really repent for his homosexuality on his deathbed, or did Carmen push him and/or fantasize it? Who was and what happened to his partner, who disappeared after Miguel died? Miguel is gone, and so are his parents. There are a few friends of Carmen, who characterize her as a santa, and wholeheartedly stick to the Dieppa official narrative; Nilda only remembers Miguel's lover's first name. Aldarondo faces a dead end. If it were not for Aldarondo's efforts to get to the bottom of the story, Miguel's death would be remembered through the sanitized version. Nonetheless, in her detective-like approach, she eventually finds Robert, who was Miguel's lover, who is now a Franciscan priest, whose name is now Aquín; he still cherishes Miguel's memory, and has saved every Miguel-related document he could; he remains pained by Miguel's family rejection and the marginalization he endured during his illness and death, welcoming the opportunity to give Aldarondo his side of the story. She also meets a group of Miguel's friends from when he lived in New York City whose interviews speak of a very different person from the family portrait, and for whom he was Michael, not Miguel. Aldarondo does her own voice-over narration—blending in the voices of family members and other informants—making the documentary a distinctly personal and compelling story. The viewer never gets to see her face, however, and, although Aldarondo claims ownership of her voice through the use of personal pronouns, she remains a disembodied narrator. She does include her own complicated feelings and thought process in her narration. Why is it important to tell the story of a young Puerto Rican gay man, a casualty of the AIDS epidemic, almost thirty years after his death? The film effectively evokes the 1980s, when so many precious lives—many of them people of color—were lost, the grief exacerbated by moralistic religious discourse, the stigmatization of the sick, and homophobic...

Books on Utopia Published in Italy in 2016 and During the First Semester of 2017

Books on Utopia Published in Italy in 2016 and During the First Semester of 2017

Mrs Helena Aylward: A British Catholic mother, spouse and businesswoman in the Commercial Age (1705–1714)

Mrs Helena Aylward, as a Catholic merchant and investor, enriches the literature on both female Catholicism and on the Atlantic-Mediterranean trade. Recent historiography has stressed the importance of women in business, but Catholic women have been overlooked in the mercantile world and in the British fiscal-military economy. I contend that female Catholics were accustomed to their husband’s dealings, and after bereavement, took financial responsibility for the family’s business. Helena was proactive and did not limit herself to the exchanges already established by her husband. She moved independently and diversified her trade with financial investments. Mrs Aylward’s involvement in business challenges the prevailing image of Catholic women as wives, patrons or nuns. She suggests a new economic role for British female Catholics: entrepreneurs that succeeded in a Protestant and patriarchal maritime world.1

‘Familiar friends’: Catholic mother–daughter narratives

The main theoretical and practical focus of this paper is on the Catholic mother–daughter relationship, and how connections between women shape, and are shaped in, and through this nexus. It is contended that it is imperative that we begin to understand different representations of connections among, and between women, including that of mothers and daughters, as they compose part of the changing yet continual dialect of our (religious) feminine identities. The intent is to embrace the contradictions and polarities, which are apparent in these inter-generational relations. This article is set in middle class suburban Melbourne Australia, and spans the period from the early to late twentieth century. Conversations between an Anglo-Saxon Catholic mother and daughter act as a catalyst to discuss the matrilineal pedagogical dimensions that mark female relations within social and religious discourses.

Catholic mothers and daughters: Resilient conversations

In this paper, conversations between a group of white, middle class, adult Australian mothers and daughters are examined to disclose the symbolic dimensions that mark girlhood, womanhood, motherhood and the mother–daughter dyad within Catholic discourse. In their conversations, women unravel and produce understandings of themselves as women, and as mothers and daughters that operate at both a symbolic and real material level. The women in their intergenerational dialogue depict a visceral account of Catholic desire, guilt, pleasure, piety and anger. They offer insights into the curious patriarchal religious rituals; logic and superstition that shaped their Catholic upbringings and that still permeate their adult lives. For it becomes evident that they are still affected by, and living out, the intensity of this religious force. By constructing traces of the Catholic mother–daughter nexus which relates back to women's conversations, the intention is not to construct a closed off space but, rather, to construct a place in which women actively talk, listen and read, and by so doing come to a better understanding of their own social gendered embodied selves

Children's Experiences in War Zones

6 worldliteraturetoday.org It should go without saying that children bear the brunt of war as a nation’s most vulnerable citizens. Yet Graça Machel’s 1996 UNICEF report on the impact of war on children was new in both scope and topic. Why have we neglected this issue? In my own explorations, I’ve been struck by how exile is a universal experience of young people who spend all or part of their childhood in a war zone. Exile is both literal —leaving behind a country, family, or home—and emotional—leaving behind the person they once were or could have become. The following list of books features child or teen protagonists whose strength is revealed within the midst of war, a strength that comes via great sorrow, loss, and sacrifice. Adult Song for Night Chris Abani In this lyrical novella narrated by a child soldier, we travel across a West African country as fifteen-year-old My Luck searches for his platoon. His journey takes him to places that haunt him because of the things he did and the atrocities he witnessed. Meanwhile, he exorcises the demons from his personal past as well: My Luck’s split identity (growing up with a Muslim father and Catholic mother ) mirrors the bloody conflict in his country, a conflict that has made him an orphan with no place to call home. We Need New Names NoViolet Bulawayo Ten-year-old Darling and her family have been victims of the state violence aimed at dissidents who agitate for change in Zimbabwe. Darling and her friends reenact the violence they’ve experienced and witnessed in brutal games that startle reporters and NGO workers. As the aging and increasingly paranoid Mugabe holds onto power, young people leave the country in droves. The second half of the novel details Darling’s experiences as a teenager in exile in America—her cultural dislocation, the distant war in Afghanistan where her US-born cousin is a soldier, and her growing emotional distance from the tragedy in Zimbabwe. Young Adult Between Shades of Gray Ruta Sepetys Fifteen-year-old Lina loves boys, drawing , her cousin, and her father, a professor in Soviet-occupied Lithuania. Then one night, in 1941, the Soviet police come. She has to leave everything she loves behind, clinging only to her mother and brother as the train takes them north to a forced labor camp. Loss piles upon loss in this coming -of-age story set in a Siberian gulag. Sepetys paints Lina’s experiences in delicate, layered strokes, revealing the humanity of both prisoner and prison guard in unique and subtle ways. Picture Book Mali under the Night Sky: A Lao Story of Home Youme Landowne For nine years during the Vietnam War, the United States conducted a bombing mission every eight minutes within Laos. In Mali under the Night Sky, a true story, a young girl named Mali flees her beloved home in Laos, seeking safety on foreign soil. Like many refugees, Mali ended up in a Thai jail. But even in prison, she doesn’t give up hope, finding solace in memories of home. J. L. Powers (jlpowers.net) is the awardwinning author of three novels for young adults (The Confessional, This Thing Called the Future, and Amina) and is editor of an anthology of personal essays, That Mad Game: Growing Up in a Warzone. She is editor of The Pirate Tree: Social Justice and Children’s Literature (thepiratetree.com) and co-collaborator of Mother, Writer, Mentor (motherwritermentor.com). She teaches English and creative writing at Skyline College in San Bruno, California. What to Read Now Children’s Experiences in War Zones J. L. Powers notebook ...

SS (Malaysia) v Secretary of State for the Home Department: [2013] EWCA 888: Court of Appeal (England and Wales) (Civil Division): Moore-Bick, Rimer, and Underhill LJJ: 18 July 2013

Immigration – Asylum – Child – Malaysian father converting to Islam while six-year-old boy in United Kingdom – Child likely to be brought up as Muslim and circumcised, contrary to Catholic mother’s wishes, if returned to Malaysia – Mother appealing against Tribunal’s refusal to grant asylum for self and child – Whether return would amount to a flagrant breach of mother’s right to respect for private and family life or freedom of religion – Whether return would be in child’s best interests – European Convention on Human Rights, arts 8, 9

Writer's statement

My maternal journey, like others’, is complicated. I come from an immediate matrilineage that bears witness to disrupted maternities. Mothers leaving their children, children sent away in the wider context of poverty, loss, abuse and trauma. I was one of six children, the second child born to teenage Irish parents – a Catholic father and Protestant mother in the mid-1970s. My maternal journey started with my own mother, a relationship that, although primary, has been at best consistently fraught, at worst destructive or nonexistent.

Daytripper by Gabriel Bá

reviews The title of Engel des Vergessens (Angels of forgetting) refers to pictures of two guardian angels that the Catholic mother of the childnarrator had hung up over her bed for divine protection. The narrator’s visits to concentration camps and former Nazi prisons reinforce her insight into experiences that traumatized her people. The tragic stories of neighbors and relatives are embedded into the seasonal flow of village life. Haderlap chooses the German language to create a protective distance from her material, a “Schutzschild” (protective shield) and a “Denksprache” (a language of thinking). She is often brutal when dealing with Nazi persecution, which she contrasts with lyrical passages describing dreams, fantasy, and nature, having a mystical quality. She notes that the pace of the novel reproduces the rhythm of remembered walks with her father. The family history, interwoven with the destiny of an ethnic group exposed to war, fanaticism, brutality , and discrimination, reverberates strongly in our world. It mirrors on a small scale our global problems. Maria Luise Caputo-Mayr Temple University Alexis Jenni. L’Art français de la guerre. Paris. Gallimard. 2011. isbn 9782070134588 Alexis Jenni won the 2011 Prix Goncourt for the epic narrative L’Art fran- çais de la guerre (The French art of war), his first novel. Some sections are told in the first person by an unnamed narrator, a young man who looks at the news on television, tries to avoid work, and whose life has nothing to do with the military. In other sections, the narrator relates the life of Victorien Salagnon, an artist from whom he takes lessons. As an adolescent, Salagnon fought with the maquis during World War II, where he met Eurydice, a nurse who arrives with North African troops during the liberation of France. He married her years later, after fighting in Indochina and serving as a parachutist during the Algerian war of independence. The novel is partly an adventure story, written as an explanation of French wars for a younger generation that lacks respect for soldiers. The fighting in both Indochina and Algeria is described graphically and with attention to the psychological tensions of the soldiers, who justify torture to gain information, but whose bravery is real. Salagnon retains a measure of humanity during the horrors of war by continuing to draw pictures of his comrades and of the landscape, even on scraps of paper from ammunition boxes. Years later, in France, Salagnon cannot reject a man whose racist political views he disapproves of because that man had carried him, risking his own life, when he was wounded by the Viet Minh. The novel is also an analysis of how France’s colonial history has shaped contemporary social and political movements, the use of armed columns of police in the suburbs , the country’s obsession with race, and its refusal to accept the Muslim population as French. The division between “us” and “them” continues in the contemporary debates about who has a right to a French identity card. When the narrator asks Salagnon if he ever tortured his opponents, he replies that the army did worse: “We created a world where, according to the shape of a face or a way of pronouncing a name, one was considered a subject or a citizen.” If there is any way of truly being “French,” the narrator decides, it is in the ability to speak the language: “the word is the true blood of the French nation. The language is our blood.” Moral issues, however, are never clear-cut. The Viet Minh and the Algerian Arabs, like the French, resort to torture. Salagnon takes Eurydice away from a violent hell as the French withdraw from Algiers. In an allusion to a famous comment by Albert Camus, her father says, “I prefer the life of my daughter to justice.” Adele King Paris Fábio Moon & Gabriel Bá. Daytripper . New York. Vertigo. 2011. isbn 9781401229696 Daytripper is the rarest of graphic novels—a work meeting all the expectations of great literature that somehow emerged from the grinding gears of the American mainstream comics industry. Written and drawn 68 | World Literature Today Imagine Africa Pirogue Collective Island Position The search for humanity through imagination...

Engel des Vergessens by Maja Haderlap

Willis Barnstone Café de l’aube à Paris / Dawn Café in Paris Sheep Meadow Press This bilingual poetry collection captures the nostalgic feelings of love and everyday life. First written in French, Barnstone then translated his compilation into English. He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry four times. Akira Arai A Caring Man Vertical A striking debut and winner of the prestigious Golden Elephant Award, this riveting novel weaves a tale of mystery, intrigue, and misplaced devotion. Arai explores the political tensions of world terrorism and investigative journalism in this thriller centered on modern Japanese society. Nota Bene hires an inexpensive contractor to paint a few rooms in his house. Luke, the head contractor, is strict with his two illegal Mexican employees, constantly berating them and allowing them to take their lunch break only when he’s on-site. The narrator , already feeling self-conscious about being a successful Latino who hires Mexican painters because they’re cheap, sees this treatment as demeaning. Why should there be a social hierarchy, the narrator thinks, based on which side of a border you were born on? In the collection’s opening story, “please, thank you,” a father of two grown children is in the hospital after having a stroke. As he goes through the arduous process of physical and speech therapy, the narrator begins to feel discouraged about how the simplest of tasks—showering, bending your leg—has become a difficult chore. While resting in his bed, the narrator is asked for advice by one of the janitors, a Mexican immigrant who was verbally attacked by a white woman while shopping. The narrator , uncertain as to what to say, suggests that she move on. “Why dwell on that ugliness?” he says, in many ways reflecting how he feels about his rehab. For Gilb, the personal and the political are intertwined—there is no aspect of Latino life that doesn’t involve politics. Armando Celayo Norwich, United Kingdom Maja Haderlap. Engel des Vergessens . Göttingen. Wallstein. 2011. isbn 9783835309531 Engel des Vergessens is a first novel by a Slovenian-Austrian author from the southeastern corner of Carinthia, bordering on Slovenia. This bilingual and bicultural area rarely appears in current Austrian literature, despite having been in the limelight of political-ethnic controversy. Maja Haderlap, a native of this region, registers through her first-person narrator, beginning as a child and then as a maturing young woman, what happened during the Third Reich. Known as a Slovenian poet and translator, she studied theater at Vienna University and worked for fifteen years as chief literary manager (Dramaturgin) at the city theater Klagenfurt (Celovec); she also teaches at the Alpen-Adria University. The book (winner of both the 2011 Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and the German Ravensburger Bookprize) is both a biography and a political/cultural history of the author’s people in the valleys around the village Lepena; it is a gripping document of unresolved issues confronting this minority. It presents above all a long overdue account of the historic and heroic role of the Slovenian partisans during the Nazi period in Austria, who were regarded as enemies of the state and fiercely persecuted together with their families and friends. The book can be considered a memorial to their “forgotten” sacrifices: the torture, beatings, hangings, deportation to concentration camps, devastation of their homes, farms, and lives. The author’s grandmother was a survivor of Ravensbrück and remembered as a strong matriarch and a sort of family historian through her letters and memorabilia, her Lagerbuch (camp diary), and documents from her life, which were preserved by a neighbor. Haderlap felt compelled to write to reach clarity for herself and to connect the fragmentary information into a coherent picture. march–april 2012 | 67 reviews The title of Engel des Vergessens (Angels of forgetting) refers to pictures of two guardian angels that the Catholic mother of the childnarrator had hung up over her bed for divine protection. The narrator’s visits to concentration camps and former Nazi prisons reinforce her insight into experiences that traumatized her people. The tragic stories of neighbors and relatives are embedded into the seasonal flow of village life. Haderlap chooses the...

Barbara Ward—Lay Woman Extraordinaire

Barbara Ward—Lay Woman Extraordinaire Jean Gartlan Barbara Ward articulated the great issues of the twentieth century often with a prophetic voice. Analyzing the economic crisis of postwar Europe, she argued for a western association of nations (precursor of the European Union), and very early on her writing chronicled the facts of Soviet hostility. Her most resounding and even revolutionary contribution to socio-economic policy became her signature theme—the obligation in justice of rich nations to share with poor nations. And, again prophetically, she was one of the first international figures to speak out on the necessity of caring for the environment. She was a keen observer, often close to major political figures of her time. But most important to her enlightening and often challenging vision was her deep religious faith. Born in England in 1914 to a Catholic mother and a Quaker father her faith perspective was unusual from the beginning. Raised as a Catholic and a faithful one all of her life, her sense of justice surely had Quaker inspiration. Her upbringing was also unusual for the time in that her father insisted that she have the equivalent education of her older brother. Thus, in her teens she attended a lycee in Paris. She later studied at the Sorbonne and Oxford. My biography Barbara Ward—Her Life and Letters 1 is based on her own writings: her thirteen books, countless articles for The Economist and other publications and, importantly, her letters. The letters, deposited in the Georgetown University Archives, were written to family and close friends. Many were personal but also contain a running chronicle of her public life and her thinking on issues of the time. It is the latter which are quoted. Commentaries on some of her books are included along with boxed quotations from articles or books. Often provocative when written, many are remarkably relevant today. Although she began writing while still a student (an article while at Oxford discussed the place of women students with humor and irony), her writing career began [End Page 9] in earnest with the publication in 1938 of her first book, The International Share-out 2 that dealt with issues of colonialism. It foreshadowed her lifelong concern with developing nations. The following year she joined the staff of The Economist where she remained fulltime for eleven years but never totally severed her ties. Click for larger view View full resolution Barbara Ward, approximately 1945 when she was foreign editor of The Economist. Her first on-the-ground experience of a developing nation came in October 1952 when the Indian Government invited her and her husband, Robert Jackson, to study and assess its "five year economic plan." To this task, Robert brought administrative and development skills, and Barbara went as observer and writer. The following year Robert was appointed chairman of the Volta River Project, a hydroelectric scheme in the Gold Coast, so they would now be living in a colony on the cusp of independence. It was not an assignment they had sought, chiefly because of the difficult climate, but they went determined to do a good job. That same year I began as a volunteer with the Catholic Mission in Accra, the Gold Coast capitol. By a happy circumstance I was invited to stay with the Jacksons the first weeks I was in Accra and returned to their home from time to time during the year so I was able to get to know and observe this brilliant, yet unassuming, woman. One conversation I never forgot. At tea one afternoon she remarked that she found the "parable of the talents" one of the most frightening in scripture. I wondered why someone as accomplished as she was would even bother to reflect on the passage much less find it frightening. It was, I believe, because she was a woman of deep faith with an extraordinary capacity for profound and even unsettling insights. [End Page 10] At the time she was working on Faith and Freedom 3 which she termed "one writer's attempt to wrestle with the angel of history." It is a panoramic view of human history, from ancient times to the present, an account of human...

No Universalizing Deductive-Nomological Explanations, Please; We're Irish: A Response to Thomas A. Tweed's Crossing and Dwelling

Reading Thomas A. Tweed’s Crossing and Dwelling reminds me of a repeated scolding I got from my Irish Catholic mother when she felt that her son’s attendance at an Ivy-League school might imperil the Old World manners she had sought to instill. My mom would say: “you’re getting this fancy education and you can’t even be polite.” Implicit in her scolding was an anxiety that an overvaluation of intellectual life could inculcate a sense of superiority and condescension to

Basil Hume: The Monk Cardinal (review)

Basil Hume: Monk Cardinal. By Anthony Howard. (London: Headline Book Publishing. 2005. Pp. 342. £29.) In February, 1976, Pope VI reached over heads of all his bishops in England to select Basil Hume, then Abbot of Ampleforth, to be Archbishop of Westminster. In profile of Hume published shortly thereafter, I compared appointment to selection of Father Theodore Hesburgh of University of Notre Dame to be Cardinal Terence Cooke's successor as Archbishop of New York. Something unthinkable in United States became reality in England. Anthony Howard, author of three previous political biographies and self-described wistful agnostic ,describes behind-the-scenes maneuvering which led to Hume's selection as Patricians' Revolt. Calling Hume the very quintessence of Englishness, this official biography is itself quintessentially English: breezy, fast-paced, and often funny. It is above all good read. Where but in England could one find man like Herbert Byrne? For twenty-four years Abbot of Ampleforth (and deeply hurt when, at age 78, his community refused to reelect him for another eight years, and turned to Hume instead), Byrne responded to novice who announced that he needed to leave monastery for wider horizons by asking: What's her name? And could there be more delightfully English countenance than that of Father Neville, Headmaster of Ampleforth School from 1924 to 1954, known to generations of schoolboys as Posh Paul (his photo says it all). What I am is what you have given, Hume told packed Abbey church in his farewell sermon before leaving for Westminster. The gap between what is thought and expected of me and what I know myself to be is considerable and frightening. There are moments in life when one feels very small and in my life this is such moment. It is good to feel small because I know that whatever I achieve will be God's achievement and not mine. One cannot read these words today without recalling Pope Benedict XVTs words day of his election about cardinals' choice of a simple, humble worker in vineyard of Lord, and his confidence in God's ability to work even with insufficient means. Priests of that caliber seldom get miters. son of nominally Anglican Scots doctor and devout French Catholic mother, Hurne's first experience of non-Catholic religious service was his father's Church of England funeral in 1960. Yet as archbishop and cardinal he preached in most of England's ancient cathedrals, never sharing his co-religionists'feeling of having been dispossessed, but simply rejoicing in what, for him, was shared religious and architectural heritage. More important, for first time since Reformation Hume put Catholic Church in England on map, in effect annexing it to British Establishment. To appreciate this achievement, one must know that as recently as 1935, when Hume's predecessor Cardinal Hinsley twice sent King George V loyal address from his Catholic subjects sovereign's Silver Anniversary, envelope was both times returned from palace unopened and stamped Not received .Hume dissipated this Establishment hostility by combination of personal charm and deep spirituality. At his death June 17,1999, Hume was universally acknowledged to be Britain's leading moral authority. Rupert Murdoch's daily Sun, normally replete with sex and scandal, bore front page headline: Farewell our Beloved Basil: Friend who touched all our hearts. Howard portrays above all public man. He describes his subject's cordial but never close relationship with Pope John II, marked contrast to that which Hume enjoyed with VI. Always remain monk, pontiff told Hume at his appointment. And when he returned to Rome shortly thereafter to be made cardinal, Pope said: Above all, dear Father, be yourself. Hume emerged from that audience in tears-behavior which, when exhibited when he was first elected abbot, had caused stiff-upper-lip contingent in monastery to murmur about their new leader's Gallic temperament. …

With Bound Hands: A Jesuit in Nazi Germany: The Life and Selected Prison Letters of Alfred Delp (review)

Well known in Germany, where numerous streets and schools bear his name, the German Jesuit, Alfred Delp, is known in this country chiefly through Thomas Merton's now largely forgotten collection of Delp's Prison Meditations, published in 1963. Delp was born in 1907 to an unmarried Catholic mother and a Protestant father (they married shortly thereafter). He was raised as a Protestant, receiving Lutheran confirmation in 1921. After a quarrel with his Lutheran pastor, the headstrong teenager sought refuge with the local Catholic priest, who prepared Delp for first communion and confirmation in the Catholic Church. He entered a minor seminary the year following and, at age eighteen, the Society of Jesus.