Sense and Sensibility

And You Thought ‘The Magdalene Sisters’ Was Bad

I wanted to be furious at “Angels and Demons.”

I wanted to be angry because I was tired of the hoary anti-Catholic hokum that Dan Brown and Ron Howard keep spewing to captive audiences. I couldn’t understand why audiences would rather gobble up convoluted conspiracy theories than nibble on a few facts. It isn’t like the Roman Catholic Church was bereft of juicy indignities. (Renaissance Rome, anyone?)

But Brown’s incense-and-intrigue Gothicism was beginning to grate. First, because it inflamed what historian Arthur Schlesinger once called “the deepest bias in the history of the American people,” anti-Catholicism; and second, because its slipshod approach to history is one too many Americans accept as Gospel.

I was actually finding myself in sympathy with the tetchy William Donahue of the Catholic League, who accused Ron Howard, director of “The DaVinci Code” and “Angels and Demons” of “smearing the Catholic Church with fabulously bogus tales.”

And then the report came out.

The report is the “Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse,” a 2,600-page Gothic saga of depravity, dread and shame that rivals anything Brown could produce. It lays bare 60-years of appalling abuse by priests and nuns on tens of thousands of children placed in their care.

The report, nine years in the making,  details a climate of terror “created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment,” rampant in institutions for the destitute and unwanted. These were the places you were sent if you were poor, or your parents were ill. These were places you to which you were dispatched if your mother committed adultery or beat you with a broom. These were the places you were sent to be helped.

These were the places that would erase your shame.

What happened in these foul institutions? According to the report:

 Nuns stripped children naked and beat them with pokers. Children were punched, flogged and set upon by dogs, according to the report. They were routinely forced to perform oral sex. One of the more than 1,000 anonymous victims reported being “tied to a cross and raped whilst others masturbated at the side.” Girls were molested in confessionals – one, even on an altar.

The abuse, which the report characterized as “endemic,” occurred with the collusion of the Irish Department of Education, which the report authors’ condemned as “toothless.” One of the members of the report’s investigating committee resigned, accusing the education department of stonewalling.

The release of the report, which covers a period between the 1930s and the 1990s, was fiercely debated. The Christian Brothers, the largest provider of residential care for boys, filed a successful lawsuit to suppress the abusers’ names. We don’t know their names But they sound something like this: Monsters. Criminals. Rapists. Hypocrites.

I want to be angry at Dan Brown but his silly contrivances and pallid “illuminati” conspirators seem like cartoon characters compared to the clerics of Ireland. Apologists will haul out their calculators and tell you that the percentage of abusive priests isn’t any worse that garbage collectors, or paralegals or newspaper columnists.

But the people who should speak up loudest about this anathema are not the atheists or the Darwinists or the secular humanists. They are Catholics – specifically Irish-Catholics, like myself – who cannot help but be revolted, incensed and humiliated by priests, brothers and nuns who gutted the childhoods of Irish children and left them unable to tell  whether these men and women of God were angels – or demons.

Farrah Fawcett’s unseemly death watch

Last night, I got to see Farrah Fawcett dying.

It was a ghastly experience, but Fawcett seemed to believe it important that I and others watch it, and so we did. All 9 million of us. The unflinching documentary, filmed by Fawcett pal Alana Stewart, was the highest-rated show on television May 15 among viewers between the ages of 18 and 49 and 25 and 54, The New York Times reported. NBC was so tickled with the documentary’s success that it is said to be considering another Fawcett special. It will have to move fast. Fawcett, diagnosed with anal cancer in 2006, is in her final hours.

If you have had cancer, or have watched someone you love endure the lethal, degrading, de-humanizing “treatment” we now prescribe for its patients, you are likely to have found Fawcett’s story resoundingly familiar. Suffering, regardless of one’s “support system” is a stark, isolating business. To have that mirrored by a familiar, iconic face has to be a chilling, but somehow consoling experience. To that end, Fawcett’s candor can only be beneficial.

But what on earth motivates a 61-year-old woman to share her most intimate hideous moments with 9 million ogling strangers? Fawcett insists that hers was a humanitarian gesture, intended to open viewer’s eyes to alternative treatments (which, in her case, failed) and to address issues of patient privacy [Dash] a segment I must have missed. But as Alessandra Stanley noted on the New York Times ArtsBeat Blog, nowhere in the two-hour documentary are screening procedures or risk factors for anal cancer addressed.

For the record, The American Cancer Society estimates that 5,000 Americans were diagnosed with anal cancer last year and 680 of them died. If caught early, it has an 82 percent survival rate.

Risk factors for anal cancer include anal infection with the human papillomavirus (HPV). Some 85 percent of anal cancers are associated with persistent infection with the sexually transmitted virus. Other risk factors include being over 50, having many sexual partners, anal intercourse and smoking. Most victims are men, but after age 50, the cancer is slightly more common in women.

Among the unanswered questions that may have been helpful to her audience include how quickly Fawcett sought treatment for her symptoms and of what that treatment consisted. The touching, tender portrait of a woman dying [Dash] particularly a woman with whom we have the illusion of intimacy [Dash] is touching but ultimately prurient.

The one lethal blow Fawcett struck was to the parasitical paparazzi, who ghoulishly stalked her through cancer treatments. “I always thought that the National Enquirer was as invasive and malignant as cancer,” Fawcett says in a voice-over narration. “But now I realize that it just runs a close second. The main difference between them is that the tabloid will try to destroy your life with bold-faced lies in front of the whole world.”

So Fawcett snatched the cameras from their clutches and did them one better; she showed them the raw truth of cancer’s pitiless ruin, insisting, at one point, that Stewart film her projectile vomiting.

Perhaps the real malignancy here is celebrity, whose poison is so venomous that its victims believe they are only worthwhile under a camera’s lens.

I don’t know what perverted version of altruism Fawcett thought she was practicing when she invited viewers into her private anguish. But I suspect O’Neill and Stewart are more to blame for compiling a documentary that focused more on the hellish ordeal of their loved one than on a missed opportunity to provide a valuable service to Americans. Perhaps by being so long the victims of the voyeuristic paparazzi themselves, they have been infected by its salacious perspective.

Flannery O’Connor and Moral Blindness

In the summer of 1955, after the publication of her seminal collection of short stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor received a fan letter from a clerk working in a credit bureau in Atlanta. The clerk had taken issue with The New Yorker’s negative review of O’Connor’s book and asked O’Connor whether these stories were really “about God.”

As insights go, this one was not especially keen. Since the publication of her novel, “Wise Blood,” which O’Connor later described as “comic novel about a Christian malgré lui” the Georgia author had been labeled as a Catholic writer, writing with a confrontational brutality many readers found unendurable. Her misfits, murderers, perverts and pious Christians were forever pulverized under her castigating, and often self-righteous glare. Why was O’Connor so cruel to characters who so patently needed redemption? Couldn’t she, as her imperious mother pleaded with Robert Giroux, write about “nice people?”

What Hester identified was O’Connor’s scorching conviction that there really were not “nice” people, only the saved and those in need of salvation. O’Connor’s stories relentlessly flay conscience toward often-imperfect revelation. Weighty, weird, wondrous and cruelly ironic, O’Connor’s fiction may have been the last gasp of a literature that engaged with the supernatural world.

A new, workman-like biography of O’Connor, “Flannery: A Life,” by Brad Gooch has been published and it is long overdue. What it reminds us of is not just the searing prose and daring parables of this Southern Catholic writer. It also reveals of the paucity of good literature that is fearless in its use of religious allegory.

The biggest rise in publishing in the past few years has been the increase in spiritual/religious books, although the line between spirituality and self-help tends to be too slender for my taste. O’Connor would have recoiled at any moniker other than “writer,” but she wrote with a cudgel-like insistence on mortality and grace. If that meant that a simple doctor’s visit by a good Christian woman could result in that woman being set upon by a stranger, lunging at her throat and calling her an “old warthog from hell,” so be it. As O’Connor said, “Grace changes us and change is painful.”

O’Connor’s acid sense of humor, which often derived from clueless characters oblivious to the overwhelming promise made to them, leavened her stories with mirth that seemed a little naughty for a devout Catholic.

Although I first discovered O’Connor in a high school anthology, it wasn’t until I was in my early 20s, living alone in a rented room in the eastern part of this state, that I appreciated the emphatic ferocity of her faith. Violence might be the opposite of  grace, but O’Connor was unafraid to use it as a vehicle. That marvelous line that the misfit utters after he has just murdered an imploring grandmother, “She would have been a good woman if there had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” – could pretty much suit all of us.

O’Connor, who didn’t own a television until a congregation of nuns gave her one in 1961 said she wrote these gothic stories to shock a morally blind world. As she said, “To the hard of hearing you shout and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”

Most of O’Connor’s stories were written in the 1950s, those halcyon days of peace and good manners to which many would have us return. It’s harrowing to conjecture what she would have made of the more apocalyptic drone of today’s violence – the Columbine shootings, the Virginia Tech slaughter, or the annihilative tendencies of ex-lovers to blow away those they professed to love.

In 1960, reading from one of her more popular speeches, she wrote, “We live now in an age which doubts both fact and value, which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions.” As a writer, O’Connor was on a quest for the “redemptive act,” the shattering act of horror that gives humanity “the chance to be restored.” At the end of her life, she asked for prayers to send her “the kind of grace that deepens perception.”

In 1964, O’Connor died of lupus, the disease that has claimed her father. She was 38. Her book, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” a line drawn from one of her heroes, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, was published posthumously. After her death, one of her fervent admirers, the Trappist Thomas Merton wrote “when I read Flannery O’Connor, I do not think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles.”

Though 21^st century readers hardly lack for horror in literature, it is often gratuitous horror of the Brett Easton Ellis/A.M. Homes variety. O’Connor never apologized for her horror nor did she ladle it wantonly. “The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism,” she said once. “When I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.”