Patrick T. Brown

I'll share my favorite excerpts from Pope Francis' new exhortation to proclaim the Joy of the Gospel soon, but John Allen's as-always trenchant interpretation bears sharing: "Francis is once again trying to do the same thing, uniting two bodies of reflection and energy usually associated with very different constituencies. In his case, they're "New Evangelization," meaning the effort launched under John Paul II to relight the church's missionary fires, and "Social Gospel," referring to Catholicism's engagement on behalf of the poor, immigrants and the environment, as well as its opposition to war, the arms trade, the death penalty and so on...

Archbishop Charles Chaput is the very smart and politically-active  shepherd of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. At a recent conference in Mexico City, His Excellency gave a talk about the New Evangelization, recognizing that the time of continental drift, to use his analogy, is over. This is a time of earthquakes, of tremors and upheavals, and if the New Evangelization is not a method to speak to this time of "civilizational change that throws down the old and elevates the new with indifference," the project will fail. The whole talk is highly readable and highly recommended . I excerpt some choice selections here - all emphasis mine:

It has become  de rigueur  in some circles to lament the " comic-book movie's Hollywood hegemony " and the diminishing marginal returns of the superhero industrial complex. I write in support of that movement, not to bury it. And while the endless lineup of Supermen, Wolverines, and Avengers by the bucketful cascade  across our screens unleashing unfathomable destruction on major cities and then tidily cleaning up by movie's end, there is something to be said for the sort of escapist charm that the Marvel franchise has seemingly perfected - big-name stars, endless green screen, a plot that holds together with gum and shoestring and banter clever enough to give the appearance of wit. The trend is continued in a smooth and efficient divertissement that takes us from Asgard from Norse mythology to the halls of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. (It is nice, for a change, to see a 2nd-tier city be the one ravaged by extra-terrestrial invaders - and in fairness, with ...

The Catholic internet world, particularly reactionary corners of it, went into a tizzy last month when an interview between Pope Francis and a notorious atheist Italian journalist was deemed to fall short of the standards of, as Mark Shea would say, the Real Catholics[TM] . A line that merited particular scorn was the Holy Father's reported quote of: “ The most serious of the evils that afflict the world these days are youth unemployment and the loneliness of the old." Of course, later details that emerged showed that the interview was, in the finest traditions of continental journalism, reconstructed after-the-fact by 89-year-old Eugenio Scalfari. Realizing the loose interpretation of the Pope's sentiments were being willfully misinterpreted, the Vatican decided to take down the link to the interview on its website.

“We all have bosses,” Captain Richard Phillips tells the Somali pirates trying to outrun the U.S. Navy to the coast of Somalia in a bright orange lifeboat. From the moment they boarded Capt. Phillips’ ship, things had gone further and further from their plan. Abduwali Muse, played with energy and verisimilitude by Barkhad Abdi, is the leader of a band of Somalis whose small-scale success in hijacking ships off the coast of their country didn’t prepare them for the difficulty of hijacking a U.S.-owned tanker ship and holding the crew for ransom. As the title character, a respectably-goateed Tom Hanks, asks Muse why he doesn’t satisfy himself with the $30,000 on board the ship and release his hostage, the Somali tells him that’s he gone too far to turn back. “I have bosses.”