Three (unrelated) tidbits: On intrinsic evil, Anglicans and the new National Liturgical Architecture and Art Board, respectively

Firstly, Happy New Year!, and I hope that you had a merry Christmas. Now in his latest Making Sense Out of Bioethics column (which I read in the Sydney Catholic Weekly recently), The Rev. Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk gave an interesting quotation:

Bioethicist Paul Ramsey put it well in suggesting that any man of serious conscience, when discussing ethics, will have to conclude that, “there may be some things that men should never do. The good things that men do can be made complete only by the things they refuse to do."
[http://64.105.206.27/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=1021]

An interesting fact regarding the so-called Church of England was related in a recent British Daily Telegraph article (which I found first at Fr. Zuhlsdorf’s blog):

The Revision Committee for women bishops, after all, dropped proposals for legal protection for them in the wake of the Pope’s initiative.
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/6792671/Dr-Rowan-Williams-taking-a-break-from-Canterbury-travails.html]

The “them” refers to Anglicans opposed to ladybishops, and the “initiative” is, of course, Anglicanorum coetibus and its related provisions. Now the choice confronting Anglican traditionalists could no longer be any starker; surely this move by the Revision Committee would have to disabuse traditional Anglicans of the notion that Anglicanism can somehow accomodate those who uphold the doctrine of a male-only hierarchy.

Finally, the News from the November 2009 Plenary meeting of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference (December 4, 2009) mentioned the following:

On other liturgical matters, the Bishops voted to approve the establishment of a National Liturgical Architecture and Art Board which will concern itself with researching and advising Bishops and others who request assistance on the matter of ecclesiastical architecture and sacred art.
[p. 8,
http://www.catholic.org.au/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=935&ItemId=158
(P.D.F. document)]

It will be interesting to see whom the Bishops appoint to this Board.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Circumcision of Our Lord, A.D. 2010

More on the discovery of the world’s only formal portrait of Lucrezia Borgia

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24756827-28737,00.html

The Weekend Australian had some more information on the work involved in verifying the provenance of a painting in Victoria that seems to be the world’s only-ever formal portrait of Lucrezia Borgia. And in this case the report challenged the outlandish claims of the black legend that has consumed Lucrezia Borgia with the passage of time:

The myths that surround Borgia cloud our thinking about this work.

How could the seemingly virtuous, pious noblewoman in the portrait be the murdering, scheming, politically ambitious woman who was said to have had an incestuous affair with her brother? In recent years scholars have rejected these stories, blaming Victor Hugo's 1834 novel about Borgia, and Donizetti's opera that premiered the same year, for themisinterpretation [sic].

How welcome it is to see a bit of balance for a change instead of the usual character assasination and demonisation, with its anti-Catholic subtext.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
9.XII.2008 A.D.

Discovery in Australia of the world’s only extant portrait of Lucrezia Borgia?

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,24704370-5001028,00.html

From the Sydney Daily Telegraph:

A MYSTERY painting held by the National Gallery of Victoria for 43 years is being hailed as a "revelatory" portrait of the infamous, incestuous [???] Italian Renaissance woman Lucrezia Borgia.

Note, however, that the article’s reference to the ‘historical record’ is not necessarily accurate.

Reginaldvs Cantvar

28.XI.2008 A.D.

Mr. Marr still doesn’t get it

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/brush-with-henson-becomes-rush-to-change-porn-laws/2008/10/26/1224955851147.html

Mr. David Marr’s latest piece in The Sydney Morning Herod on the Henson controversy indicates that he still does not understand that children should not be made to pose naked for the cultural gratification of the arts community. Again, his focus is on the artistic merits of the product rather than the means by which they were produced. Once upon a time it might have sufficed to point out that the end does not justify the means, and therefore it is the means that is the primary issue. But even if we are to debate the matter according to the secondary issue of ‘art vs. pornography’, Mr. Marr’s assertion that “all the authorities who looked at Henson's controversial pictures agreed they were not remotely pornographic” is far from satisfying, since those authorities presumably judged the photos on a presumption of innocence, asking themselves whether Mr. Henson intended those photos for the titillation of prevents. Perhaps Mr. Marr should pay a visit to the isolation wing of Long Bay Gaol and ask certain of the inmates whether they regard it as art or pornography?

Reginaldvs Cantvar
27.X.2008 A.D.

On the Henson controversy

So Mr. Bill Henson is in the news again, with a book on the controversy surrounding his ‘artworks’ in May to be published today. Extracts from the book (written by homosexual activist Mr. David Marr) appeared in The Sydney Morning Herod’s Good Weekend magazine on Saturday. Now no-one can suggest that Mr. Henson intended to produce child pornography i.e. that he intended to produce photographs for titillation, but child pornography was what he produced nonetheless, and so these creepy pictures should be consigned to the Bonfire of the Vanities.

But the bigger issue here is not the ‘pornography vs. art’ debate that dominated the mainstream media, but whether it is moral to make children pose naked for photographs, regardless of the end for which the photographs were intended. It is perhaps an indictment of how deeply utilitarianism pervades mainstream discourse that no commentators that I am aware of picked up on this. The only person I know of to have noted this in the media was a letter writer to the Herod; her Christian name was Lucy, though I cannot recall the surname. She pointed out that it was not primarily a question of whether the photographs should have been displayed, but whether they should have been taken in the first place. That is: suppose that Mr. Henson’s photographs were art, even great art; does this justify the means to this end? Of course it doesn’t.

Mr. Marr alludes to this, presumably unwittingly, when he writes that

Kids may be resilient and able to pick a phoney at 40 paces, but can they assess the impact of being his model? Won’t their naked images haunt them all their lives? Henson offers no clear-cut answer to this. He doesn’t claim that growing into adults will give these kids the complete disguise of age. He acknowledges they may be recognised, but argues that the “strangeness” and strong abstraction of his work makes it unlikely.

So Mr. Henson has no ‘clear-cut answer’, even with hindsight, but he did it anyway?! What moral bankruptcy. I suppose this is what to expect from those who fancy themselves as having ‘outgrown bourgeois morality’ or whatever pompous slogans they affect. As far as I can tell the only situation in which nude child photos might (and I stress might) be justified is when it involves capturing events as they unfold. The only three examples that I can imagine satisfying this criterion would be family ‘happy-snaps’, photography during a medical examination or surgery, or journalistic photography e.g. the famous photo of a young Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack. But even in these cases I am open to being persuaded that it is still unjustified.

Episodes like this, as well as the utter rubbish that one sees every week in the broadsheets’ art pages, make me wonder whether it is time to reclaim a term from the Nazis. That term is ‘degenerate art’. But I suspect that that has about as much of a prospect for success as reclaiming ‘gay’ from the sodomites.

Reginaldvs Cantvar