Denver, Colo., Apr 25, 2019 / 03:51 am (CNA).- Do you remember the last poem you read, or heard?
Statistics suggest it has probably been since high school that the average American took the time (or was forced by a teacher) to read a piece of poetry. The rise of the internet and the correlating decline in the number of people who say they’ve read a poem in the past year has fueled an ongoing debate among those who still care: is poetry dead? Whether it is dead, or dying, or not, should Catholics care?
“Yes, emphatically they should,” said Joseph Pearce, the director of book publishing at the Augustine Institute in Denver, and editor of The Austin Review and of the Faith & Culture website.
“Up until relatively recently in the history of Christendom, poetry was the main form of literature that people enjoyed and read,” Pearce said. “The best-selling works of literature up until Shakespeare’s time were poetry…so you can’t talk about the legacy or the heritage of Christian literature and leave poetry out of the equation without doing violence to what Christian literature is.”
What happened to poetry?
Poetry used to be memorized in schools and was a central, normal part of people’s literary lives – something they would just “bump into” on a regular basis.
“I can remember growing up…we would get Reader’s Digest at home and it would have poetry in it, so would the newspapers, and The Christian Science Monitor…there were a lot of places where you would just bump into it,” said Tim Bete, who serves as poetry editor for the website Integrated Catholic Life (ICL). ICL is a website that provides articles, spiritual reflections, blogs and resources that strive to help Catholics better live lives of faith, according to its description.
So what, exactly, has contributed to its decline?
Pearce blames the so-called “death” of poetry on the “rather pathetic culture in which we find ourselves,” with decreased standards of literacy and decreased attention spans brought on by technology.
“The thing about our modern culture is that most of us spend most of our time wasting it in the dust storm and the desert of modern secular social media,” he added.
Dana Gioia is a Catholic by faith and a poet by trade, and has served as the Poet Laureate of California since 2015.
Gioia spent much of his career as a poet in the secular world, but told CNA that he has become an increasingly vocal Catholic, as it has become harder to be a Catholic in the world of poetry and literature.
The decline of Catholic poetry in the United States, for example, is in part because of Catholicism’s “very complicated position” in American literature since the beginning of the country, he said.
“Catholics were initially banned from coming to the U.S., and then they enjoyed very little rights where they were allowed at all for a long time,” he told CNA. “And there persisted to be – persists to this day – a kind of anti-Catholic prejudice in the U.S. for a variety of religious, cultural, economic and political reasons.”
“American Catholics largely represent poor, immigrant communities from Europe, Latin America and Asia, and to this day if you go to most Catholic Churches you are sitting among the poor,” he added.
For these reasons, there was no “significant” Catholic American poetry (that is still being read today) until the 20th century, Gioia said. Then suddenly, around the 1950s, there is an explosion of Catholic literature in the United States, he said.
Writers such as Robert Lowell, Flannery O’Connor, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Walker Percy, William Tate and Brother Antonitus were leading the way (many of them converts from Protestantism), Gioia said, and Catholicism was being taken seriously for the first time in American cultural life.
“You have a huge list of these really significant thinkers who reshaped American intellectual life…a moment in the 1950s when Catholicism is part of the conversation of American literature,” he said.
But by the early 2000s, that was already gone.
“By 2000 it had fallen apart. In 2010, Catholics are marginalized in American literary lives,” he said.
The reasons for this were several, Gioia suggested: firstly, as Catholics became accepted into American society, they became increasingly secularized. Secondly, the world of art became increasingly anti-Christian, and finally, Vatican II caused “schisms” in the Catholic Church in America, turning her focus to internal debate rather than to an external, unified identity.
“I’m the uncomfortable truth-teller in the room,” Gioia added as an aside. “The contemporary Catholic Church in America, and everywhere, lost its connection with art and beauty.”
“For centuries, millennia really, the Church was a patron of the arts, and understood that beauty was an essential medium for its message,” he said.
“Now the Church is so caught up with practical necessities, that it considers beauty an unaffordable luxury. But beauty is not a luxury, it is a central and essential element of the Catholic faith. And we know this, because if we have anything at all to say about creation, it is that it is beautiful – nature is beautiful, the world is beautiful, our bodies are beautiful. So we’ve lost this essential connection because we’re so busy funding the parish school, keeping the homeless center running, and paying the mortgage on the church – all good things, but useless if the message of the Church is not heard among its own congregations and secondly in the modern world,” he said.
It’s a problem that has been identified by many in the Catholic Church who are concerned with the New Evangelization – Fyodor Dostoevsky’s maxim “beauty will save the world” has become the battle cry of many Catholics who want to reconnect the Church and the arts.
But “healthy” Catholic culture has two cultural conversations going at once, Gioia said – one internally, and one that reaches out to the world – “and both of those conversations have become greatly diminished in the last half-century.”
What poetry has to say to Catholics
The thing about being Catholic, Bete noted, is that if you’re going to Mass and reading the Bible, you are probably are more immersed in poetry than you realize.
“About 30% of all scripture is poetry,” Bete said. “Even (Catholics) that say oh, I never read poetry, well, if you’re praying the Divine Office (a Catholic form of prayer centered on the Psalms), it’s almost all poetry.”
“We’re hearing poetry preached at Mass every week,” he added, and so becoming familiar with all kinds of poetry “helps you understand scripture better because it gets you in tune and trains you to think about metaphor.”
“So much of (scripture) is poetry but I think we kind of race through it sometimes and we don’t really kind of appreciate it for being poetry,” he said.
“In my mind, one of the reasons that there’s so much poetry in there is it’s so difficult to define who God is, and God is so much greater than any author can put down on paper, but poetry…it provides a different type of truth.”
Bete added that poetry is often the fruit of silence and prayer, and vice versa – one can lead into the other. An example of this in scripture, he said, is the Canticle of Mary, when the pregnant Blessed Virgin Mary is visiting her cousin Elizabeth and bursts into poetic song about how God has blessed her by calling her to be the mother of Jesus.
“When Mary really has to explain to Elizabeth what is going on, what does she do? She speaks in poetry. It’s very powerful…and so one of my hopes is that if people read current poetry, it trains them to look at things differently and will translate back to scripture and really help to bring the scripture alive for them,” Bete said.
Pearce said another reason Catholics should engage with poetry is because God himself is a poet.
“The word ‘poet’ comes from the word ‘poesis’ which means to make or to create,” he said.
“So when we are being poets in that broader sense of the word of being creative…it’s God’s creative presence in us, so we’re actually partaking in the divine when we write poetry or read it and appreciate it.”
Many great works of literature, from Beowulf to The Divine Comedy to The Canterbury Tales and the works of Shakespeare, are works of Christian and Catholic poetry, Pearce said.
Many saints, too, have written great works of poetry, Pearce said, such as St. Patrick’s breastplate poem or St. Francis of Assissi’s Canticle of Brother Sun.
Bete, a secular Carmelite, said he loves to read poetry by Carmelite saints – “it’s actually hard to find one who was not a poet,” he said.
“Elizabeth of the Trinity, Therese the Little Flower, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, they all wrote poetry,” Bete said, including some that was prayerful and some that was more lighthearted.
“Almost always it came out of their prayer life,” Bete added. “I think it has to do with the closer that you get to God, especially if you’re a writer, I think it just comes out.”
“I would say poetry is like going to Mass or saying your prayers,” Pearce said. “The writing of it and the reading of it is time taken and not time wasted, its something which is worth doing in its own right, as is prayer.”
Poetry 101: How can Catholics start a poetry habit?
Pearce has made it easy for Catholics who are looking for an introduction to Catholic poetry, with his book “Poems Every Catholic Should Know.”
“That book is very popular, and I think it’s popular because people are very aware that they don’t know poetry very well, because they haven’t really been taught it, and they are perhaps intimidated by it or they have misconceptions about it,” he said.
“So they see a book called ‘Poems Every Catholic Should Know’ and they think well, I should at least own one book of poetry and perhaps this is it,” he added.
The book goes through 1,000 years of Christian poetry, from the year 1,000-2,000, Pearce said, from both well-known and lesser-known poets, and it includes short biographies of each poet and how they fit into the broader context of the Christian poetry and literary world.
“A personal favorite of mine is a 20th century war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, who was a convert to the Catholic faith, so we published some of his post-conversion poetry in the book which I’m very fond of,” Pearce noted.
It was because of the sharp decline in the reading and writing of poetry that Bete pitched the idea for Integrated Catholic Life to start publishing poetry, to provide a new opportunity for visitors to the site to once again “bump into” poetry.
“The response has been great,” he said. “I think it just goes to show that when people see…beauty, and they see something that is of interest to them,” they respond, he said. “It doesn’t take a huge time commitment. It’s not like reading War and Peace or anything.”
Bete said he thinks it’s important for Catholics to come up with new and creative ways to reintroduce people to Catholic poetry.
“On Instagram where you’re seeing some of these Instagram poets who are up and coming, and I haven’t seen any Catholic ones yet, but I think what they’re doing is they’re putting poetry where people already are,” Bete said.
Another innovative concept that brings poetry to the people is the “Raining Poetry” project in Boston, Bete said, which paints poetry on the sidewalk with clear paint so that it only shows up when it rains.
“And I love that as a concept. Where are people, and then how do we find ways to get poetry in front of them? And I don’t think we’ve been very good or innovative at that.”
Gioia said the most important thing Catholic creatives can do is to create communities for Catholic artists.
“This country is full of Catholic writers and artists who feel isolated,” Gioia said. “If we can create communities for them, they will understand their own art and its possibilities much better. We are stronger together than we are alone.”
Pearce, Bete and Gioia all said they have been heartened by what seems to be the start of a Catholic cultural revival, in which Catholics are talking more about the need for the Church to reconnect with beauty and the arts and to create great Catholic art again.
“I find this very encouraging,” Pearce said. “One of the things I’m doing with ‘Faith and Culture’ at the Augustine Institute and with the magazine The Austin Review…is to try to engage this new Catholic revival in the arts that we see going on. Certainly there’s a Catholic literary revival going on, so there’s an increase not just in the quantity, but more importantly in the quality with Catholic literature written today in the 21st century.”
Gioia said that while he’s encouraged by these movements, he would also caution against the notion of “homemade” culture.
“I worry that they sometimes have a kind of homemade version of culture that needs a shot of energy and perspective you only get by studying masterpieces, especially contemporary masterpieces,” he said. “Any serious writer must engage with the broader literary culture.”
“So I think one of the things to do is we need to identify the very best contemporary writers. What that doesn’t mean is saying here’s a list of 65 writers. It’s – who are the three or four best fiction writers? Who are the three or four best poets?”
“If we had a (Catholic literary) community, we’d invite everyone in, because that’s the right thing to do,” he said. “But when we write about literature we have to be ruthlessly discriminating, because the best work is what will speak most loudly. That’s what a critic does, that’s what an editor does, that’s what an anthologist does. Right now we do not have enough anthologies, or magazines; we do not have enough Catholic writers conferences. We need to build the infrastructure.”
Gioia started the first Catholic Imagination Conference for this reason – to bring together serious Catholic writers as a community.
“Four hundred people came, and they looked around and they were astonished and heartened by how many serious writers they saw in the same room,” he said. “Each one is bigger than the one before, and some of the people who came to the first conference created magazines, book clubs, discussion groups, and so once again, we’re stronger as a community than we are separately.”
The third such conference will be held at Loyola University this fall.
Ultimately, Gioia said, while he is concerned about the state of Catholic poetry and literature in the U.S., he has hope.
“I believe that our Church and our tradition embodies in it a great central truth of existence. And so if you believe that, how could you not be optimistic?”
[…]
The Catholic Thing, Dec, 9 – If one is right, the other is wrong.
Former Catholic doing what she does best: using her elected office in government to destroy all that the Catholic Church believes and teaches. I suspect that Nancy studied at the feet of William Tecumseh Sherman. Good work, Nancy.
Sherman did not destroy all that the Catholic Church believes and teaches. Sadly, although he was baptized and raised by an adoptive family that was strongly Catholic, after some years he did not practice the Faith and disagreed with the Church. But his wife was extremely devout and active and the children were all sent to Catholic schools. One of his sons became a priest, though that caused Sherman some bitterness, bit he never sought to destroy the Church’s beliefs or teachings.
Kindly don’t insult him by comparing Pelosi to him.
Yes. He was instrumental in defeating the Confederacy and ending the Civil War after all. That’s kind of a big deal. His biographies are interesting reading.
What I always find interesting is the contemporary southerner women shrieking, “He’s a beast and a monster!” and yet you see story after story about how they mouthed off to him, and lived to tell the tale. Some monster.
Yes, I agree about his biographies. They are very interesting.
There is a charming story about his meeting 4-year-old Juliette Gordon Low in Savannah at the end of the war; her father was a captain in the Confederate army, and her mother’s brothers were serving in the US Army. Sherman was a friend of one of them and went to see Mrs. Gordon to give her messages from her family. Juliette and her sister had been curious about seeing “Old Sherman” in the march through Savannah the previous day, and their mother told Sherman so, while the little girls each protested that it was the other who had called him that. Sherman laughed, and then talked to and entertained the little girls for hours.
And before the war Sherman was in charge of what later became Louisiana State University. In one battle one of his former staff members was captured, and Sherman introduced him to someone as “This is (whatever the name was); he thinks he’s a Confederate officer but he’s really my professor of ancient languages.”
General Sherman may not have destroyed all things Catholic but he sure left a path of misery and destruction behind him.
I think his son who became a Catholic priest is buried in Grand Coteau, Louisiana next to a close relative of the Confederate Vice President.
We read: “Nancy Pelosi, a Catholic, called the act a ‘historic step forward in Democrats’ fight to defend the dignity and equality of every American.’”
Nice touch, that. This “historic” step in the most recent microseconds of human history! For talking heads, the notion now that some states can impose their rites (vs “rights”?) on other states, and even on the real rights of individual citizens (“equality of every American”) of other states? Constitution, what Constitution?
Wondering here if Her Majesty has witlessly teed up the ball (so to speak) for the inevitable Constitutional court case? Recalling not only Justice Thomas, but also Chief Justice Roberts in his earlier dissent to Obergefell v Hodges (2015): “Do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.”
We might as well notice, too, whether the issue is no longer fenced-in to the redefinition of “marriage”? (And, such an insult to all members of the human race by insinuating an equivalence to interracial marriage!)
So. . .Is the real issue now about the redefinition of the nation-state, itself? The “state” now mutated into a lapdog in the Pavlovian hands of an unnatural mindset in all of its slippery-slope mutations? Does the redefined state now exist simply to salivate over and ratify a full range of possible redefinitions (“fatwas”?): gay marriage, but also polygamy, and then polyamorous block parties, and eventually even beastiality?
Pelosi’s open-ended redefinition of marriage, butt now especially the “state”: the tail wagging the dog?
It’s a very sad state of affairs where this has gone and of course Biden will sign since he’s a Catholic in name only, like Pelosi. But don’t worry, God is not mocked and what’s coming to America will show that you do not mess with God and His commandments !
I’m sure Biden will not sign since he is a devout Catholic….it would go against everything he has been taught since his youth and am sure he sought the advice and counsel of the Pope.
At the very least, Biden is at this moment consulting with his bishop (Washington or Wilmington????) about what a FAITHFUL Catholic ought to do. I’m certain that his episcopal advisor will show him the moral high road to take. We are all in good hands when we first consult our bishops when faced with weighty moral issues.
My Eposicial adviser is from Germany!
Didn’t his mother threaten/tell off a nun because of something that happened at his school, or do I have that story mixed up?
He always talked about taking Trump out behind the school gymnasium.
Opening a pandora’s box.
Pelosi conflated this bill with the decision in Dobbs, as if the two were related. Oh, wait, they are related. Both cases promote immorality. Once again, Cardinal Josef Ratzinger comes to mind. Later voted Pope Benedict XVI, he stated, “Truth is not determined by a majority vote.” No matter how many people think something is right, it doesn’t make it so.
Maybe someone in her family will utilize, possibly……………………
If the hierarchy had gone all-in on the promotion of NFP, especially in their hospitals systems, then they might not be where they find themselves.
Is NFP conscious, deliberate birth control? Just asking.
It depends on how you define “birth control.” NFP is not contraception, unless you want to consider abstaining from sex contraception.
.
Observing a women’s fertility signs and then making a decision about whether to engage in, or not engage in, procreative activity does not offend the Church’s (God’s) prohibition on contraception
NFP is not contraception.
Marriage is the union of a man and a woman – yesterday today tomorrow – forever, and the nonsense which the ‘catholics’ and their pals in the house and senate insist in indulging in will NOT change that.
The ‘respect for marriage act’ – what a mockery.
“Whatever I tell you in the dark, speak in the light; and what you hear in the ear, preach on the housetops. And do not fear those who would kill the body for they cannot kill the soul. Instead fear Him who is able to destroy both the soul and body in Hell.” The fact that Americans no longer fear the Lord will lead to the destruction of this nation from within and without in one years time.
Some years ago as Vice President Biden performed a gay”wedding” ceremony – with scarcely any response by the bishops. For decades, politicians have trumpeted their Catholic identity while vigorously promoting abortion and same sex marriage. Few have faced any consequences from the Church. They continue to receive Communion and are virtually immune to any correction from the Church. The Archbishop of Washington is notably reluctant to uphold Church teaching in these areas.
And when Pelosi, Biden, et. al. die,they can expect an elaborate Catholic funeral as Ted Kennedy, Mario Cuomo, etc. received.
I cannot help wondering if our bishops simply prefer peace, unity (and perhaps popularity) to the truth. Or, do they not believe the teaching of the Church themselves?
Looking everyday that the “Catholic Church” may not be the true church it claims to be. A modern day synagogue of satan as Jesus would say.
If the Catholic Bishops would only become politically vocal on the moral issues of the day instead of cowardly shying from the public square this country could be turned around in short order. I blame the Catholic Bishops, not Catholic politicians ignorant of the Faith, for the passage of this same sex marriage bill.
Half the annual budget of the USCCB comes from the Feds. “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”
Honestly, if the Church lost her 5013c tax status and lost her ability to get federal funds, that might be one of the best things to happen to her
Does the ‘Respect for Marriage’ law say as to whether or not it is going to ‘discriminate’ against man-boy-lovers, marriage to animals, or marriage to inanimate objects?
I can clearly see the legal problems with the ‘Respect for marriage’ law. Let us take a look at the pregnant 41 year old school teacher having sex with her 15 year old student. Even in jail for doing so, she now would have a right to marry her 15 year old lover, “to put the family back together”. The ‘wolf in sheeps clothing’ Progressive, Liberal, Socialist, Marxist Democrats next step is to help her fight ‘unconstitutional’, ‘age discrimination’, Federal laws which stand in the way of her ‘right’ to marry the one she loves.
After the school teacher wins her battle for her “rights”, it will be 50 year old male man-boy-lovers wanting to marry their 5 year old lovers.
https://youtu.be/ZnKB9NzgD4k
Florida teacher charged with having sex with student, 15, is now pregnant
https://nypost.com/2021/10/11/florida-teacher-pregnant-after-being-arrested-for-having-sex-with-student/
What ever happened to the sanctity of the sacrament of Matrimony?
Agreed. If the Catholic Bishops cannot be vocal on moral issues, what really is their purpose?
All these silly little people will someday be called to account, and they will have much to answer for.
The Church is the moral compass for Catholics—not the Federal government. The Church defines marriage for Catholics—-not the Federal government. Whatever happens in Washington DC never changes the teachings of the Church. Church leaders do not make policy in the Federal government and politicians do not make policy for the Church. Anyone who thinks the Church and the Federal government are equals are creating a golden calf. Catholics only pledge allegiance to God and nobody else. The Federal government should be ignored because it never dictates how Catholics are to live their lives.
People listen to the government because they keep writing out checks.
Government money is certainly a large part of this. That and human respect.
What will matter in the end is the question as to whether or not our church leaders have a spine. Or will they all simply cave in, in a heap as they did when it was demanded they close our churches for covid? ( Note: I am almost 70, have experienced covid twice. Clearly, I am not dead!) My point being, the feds can pass any law they want, fine you however much they want. In the end, they cannot FORCE you to do anything against your will. Unless you fear their penalties more than God. Pick your side. The disgusting and poisonous DEMs, or God. It really is that simple. If we lose our tax status, so what? A smaller church might be a better, more devout one. Close the catholic hospitals and schools if we must and see how easily the govt fills in the gap. If they can. What to do if we are sued in an effort to force the hiring of sexually inappropriate folks to become Catholic school teachers and church employees?? Say no. If indeed they shut us down, what can be done? Well, I think if I write a weekly invitation to my priest to celebrate Mass in my PRIVATE home ( as in the days of the old church in Rome)I will invite my friends too, and nobody else. What can they do about that? Nothing. End of story. There are ways to accomplish anything. All it takes is a spine and a will, and willingness to stand up for what you believe no matter WHAT the talking pin-heads are saying.
Amen, LJ!
I wish our bishops had the spirit, the faith and the love of our Lord Jesus that you do!
I don’t mean to be “digging at” the Holy Father. The Holy Father did say to legalize homosexual “civil union” and he has not retracted it. He hasn’t even said if the video of that, that was released, was made public with or without his permission or if it is a fraud in some manner.
What is to be made of it?
Man does not have power to legalize unnaturalness and abominations and the Pope has neither the power as Pope nor mandate for any such thing.
“Minutes before the vote, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Catholic, called the act a ‘historic step forward in Democrats’ fight to defend the dignity and equality of every American.'”
Nancy Pelosi isn’t a Catholic. She is a heretic.
“DOMA, which the bill would repeal, is a 1996 law signed by President Bill Clinton that defined marriage federally as the union of a man and a woman, reserved federal benefits to heterosexual couples, and permitted states not to recognize same-sex marriages contracted in other states. DOMA was already effectively nullified by the 2013 and 2015 Supreme Court decisions United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states.”
The government (including the courts) has no power or authority to redefine marriage. Marriage is a matter of nature and was defined and instituted by God and is regulated by God and His Church – i.e. the Catholic Church.
To be validly married not only words, but also consummation is necessary. This is a matter of divine and natural law. It should be obvious that consummation is only possible between a physically mature male and female.
As far as I can tell, government is becoming more evil as time goes on. The rot is very deep and much of it appears to be very well hidden (e.g. not publicized) – and it is not confined to the federal government.
The Democrats – and some Republicans – have blood on their hands. They will be held accountable before God.
As Catholics ought to know, those guilty of unrepented mortal sin will go to Hell.
“Nancy Pelosi isn’t a Catholic. She is a heretic.”
She is a baptized Catholic. By all indications, she’s a very bad Catholic who holds to heretical views about life, sexuality, the human person, etc.