da TAP.

Wolf Hall - os lobos na televisão também mordem.

título original: "Wolf Hall" and Upmarket Anti-Catholicism"
in First Things | 22.04.15 | George Weigel

Wolf Hall, the BBC adaptation of Hillary Mantel’s novel about early Tudor England, began airing on PBS’s “Masterpiece Theater” Easter Sunday night. It’s brilliant television. It’s also a serious distortion of history. And it proves, yet again, that anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable bigotry in elite circles in the Anglosphere.

The distortions and bias are not surprising, considering the source. Hillary Mantel is a very talented, very bitter ex-Catholic who’s said that the Church today is “not an institution for respectable people” (so much for the English hierarchy’s decades-long wheedling for social acceptance). As she freely concedes, Mantel’s aim in her novel was to take down the Thomas More of A Man for All Seasons—the Thomas More the Catholic Church canonized—and her instrument for doing so is More’s rival in the court of Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell.

Hillary Mantel does not lack for chutzpah, for Cromwell has long been considered a loathsome character and More a man of singular nobility. In the novel Wolf Hall, however, the More of Robert Bolt’s play is transformed into a heresy-hunting, scrupulous prig, while Cromwell is the sensible, pragmatic man of affairs who gets things done, even if a few heads get cracked (or detached) in the process. All of which is rubbish, as historians with no Catholic interests at stake have made clear. Thus the president of the U.K.’s National Secular Society, historian David Starkey, finds “not a scrap of evidence” for Mantel’s retelling of the More-Cromwell tale; Mantel’s plot, he claimed, was “total fiction.” And as Gregory Wolfe pointed out in a fine essay on Wolf Hall in the Washington Post, historian Simon Schama has written that the documentary evidence he examined “shouted to high heaven that Thomas Cromwell was, in fact, a detestably self-serving, bullying monster who perfected state terror in England, cooked the evidence, and extracted confessions by torture.”

So why did Hillary Mantel win Britain’s most prestigious award for fiction, the Man Booker Prize, not once, but twice, for Wolf Hall and its sequel,Bring Up the Bodies? Because the books are terrific novels. Because well-crafted novels that make a hash of history for the sake of defaming the Catholic Church and one of its English icons are, in today’s literary culture, quite all right, thank you very much.

And because Britain’s literary high culture is still in thrall to the Whig view of British history, and seems oblivious to the deep transformation that’s taken place in English Reformation studies since Eamon Duffy’s extraordinary book, The Stripping of the Altars, was first published in 1992. There, Duffy demonstrated beyond cavil what Simon Schama alluded to in his Financial Times article on the BBCversion of Wolf Hall: that Henry VIII was a proto-totalitarian who, with his Protestant heirs, imposed his version of Christianity on England against the will of the great majority of plain folk, who stubbornly clung to the old faith until the overwhelming power of the state extinguished most of English Catholic life, and “anti-popery” got set in cultural concrete as modern nation-building went forward in Britain—often funded by expropriated Catholic properties.

Protestant anti-Catholicism in the U.K. has long since been superseded by secular anti-Catholicism, but the cultural afterburn remains virtually identical: to the Hillary Mantels of 21st-century Britain, Catholicism is retrograde, priggish, obsessive, fanatical, and, well, un-English. Where all this could lead was made clear in the run-up to Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Great Britain in 2010, when just about every hoary anti-Catholic bromide in the playbook was dusted off and deployed in the media—and with a few notable exceptions, the British Catholic hierarchy proved itself incapable of rising to the defense of the Church and the pope, a task that was left, in the main, to laity. Which is fine, but was unhappily reminiscent of the English bishops’ performance under Henry VIII, when all but John Fisher truckled to the spirit of the age and joined in declaring Henry “Supreme Head of the Church in England.”

Thus Wolf Hall, while bad history, is also a cautionary tale for today.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Arla Skyr - The Messenger.

via Adweek.com

P4. Ferrari.

Pousa o telefone e levanta o copo.

Em que amigo pensas quando vês este filme?
Posted by Super Bock on Friday, April 17, 2015

Shinola - Smart Enough.

A maior chacota da nossa democracia.

A maior chacota da nossa democracia é Camarate não ter um ponto final.

Dez comissões de inquérito. Dois autores confessos. Nada acontece. Tudo em aberto.

E a banda vai tocando, o cortejo vai passando. Vai-se andando que isto também não é para entusiasmos.

Bonito.

good looks will get you anywhere.

A Simone de Beauvoir não ia gostar nada desta frase. Já a Joana Amaral Dias não se deve importar nada..! É curioso quando ela bebe do mesmo "património político" daquela filósofa.

Alguém acha que ela e o partido dela que já tem “centenas… hum… sim já somos centenas”, de militantes teria mais do que um suspiro de cachorro pachorrento de atenção se ela não tivesse aquele ar de hot-gauche?

Ela é Grandes Entrevistas, artigos vários e análises à lupa: 

Isto não é o partido da Joana. Ou é? O Agir, liderado por Joana Amaral Dias, tem um acordo de coligação com o PTP. E na lista de candidatos deste partido já houve de tudo: um "Bill Clinton", um "homem da luta" e até um "ninja cantor". História contada à lupa pelo Miguel Santos.

O mais divertido é que parece que ela, nos tempos de Coimbra era monárquica, depois foi PS e agora anda nas aventuras da esquerda radical.

Imagino que tenha guilhotinado a coroa quando percebeu que o namorado era monárquico e não monarca… ou que ela não ia ser condessa ou assim.

Cenas que nos lixam…

Jacobinite persistente.

Teima no laicismo à portuguesa uma jacobinite persistente, essa bactéria estrangeira que veio dos gauleses - os da guilhotina, não os da poção, por Toutatis!

O sintoma mais saliente costuma ser a ideia de que no espaço público a religião não entra, para que ninguém fique de fora. Coisa esquisita, uma bactéria actuar como um antibiótico. Ora se a religião não entra, ao contrário do objectivo teórico da medida, fica de fora, de facto, toda a coisa religiosa, toda a gente religiosa, quase toda a nação portuguesa.

Isto convém à jacobinite - mais do que pessoas e comunidades concretas, gosta de grandes ideias teóricas sobre o que o Estado Iluminado deve ou não deve ser e fazer, apesar e independentemente dessas pessoas e comunidades.

Iniciativas como esta, em que a Fé entra pela Cidade dentro, são o remédio tão precisado neste nosso canteiro à beira-mar plantado.

O támuitabom, no pequeno da sua acção, aplaude e apoiará sempre esta santa terapia.

Eucaristia.

no Catholic Memes