Putting Learning Against Learning: According to Tupper Saussy

From Rulers of Evil, at pp 69 - 72

Riding the crest of humanist exuberance following Loyola’s canonization, Jesuit Priest Athenasius Kircher (1602 – 1680) contributed powerfully to Jesuit theatre as sensory experience. With his megaphone, which enabled the voice of one to reach thousands, Kircher invented broadcasting. He also fathered modern camera theory with his perfection of the lanterna magica. The magic lantern projected sharp images through a lens upon a screen, giving audiences the illusion of burning cities and conflagerations. Kircher’s work influenced the creation of the phenakistroscope (1832), the zoetrope (1860), the kinematoscope (1861), the kinograph (1868), the praxinoscope (1877), and finally, Thomas Alva Edison’s kinetograph for filming action to be projected onto a screen through the kinetoscope (1894). Edison had a pet name for the tar papered studio in West Orange, New Jersey, where all his prototypical films were made. He called it “Black Maria”, a term that aptly described the image to whom Inigo de Loyola dedicated his life in 1522 – the Black Madonna of Montserrat. ...

Using cinema and radio to unite Catholic laypersons with the Roman hierarchy was the main purpose of “Catholic Action.” Catholic Action was inaugurated in 1922 by Pius XI, those two confessors, Fathers Alissiardi and Celebrano, were Jesuits. The first pope to install a radio station in the Vatican (1931 and to establish national film review offices (1922), Pius XI Pius XI ordered Catholics into politics. In the letter Peculari quadam (“Containing the flock”) he warned that “the men of Catholic Action would fail in their duty if, as opportunities allow it, they did not try to direct the politics of their province and of their country.”

Pope Pius XI

Wlodimir Ledochowski

The men of Catholic Action did try. Their first main effort was to employ Black Pope Vladimir (Wlodimir) Ledochowski’s strategy of bringing the Catholic nations of central and eastern Europe together into a pan-German federation. To head the federation, Ledochowski required a charismatic leader charged with subduing the communistic Soviet Union on the east, Protestant Prussia, Protestant Great Britain, and republican France on the west, Ledochowski chose the Catholic militarist Adolph Hitler, who told Bishop Bernind of Osnabruch in 1936 that there was fundamental difference between National Socialism and the Catholic Church. Had not the church, he argued, looked upon Jews as parasites and shut them into ghettos?

“I am only doing,” he boasted, “what the church has done for fifteen hundred years, only more effectively.”

Being a Catholic himself, he told Berning, he admired and wanted to promote Christianity.

To promote Christianity as taught him by Roman Catholicism, Hitler appointed Leni Riefenstahl to create the greatest fascist films ever produced. Her deification of Hitler and romanticization of autocracy in spectacles like Triumph of the Will are, in themselves, the history of German cinema in the thirties and early forties. In print, Ledochowski’s pan-German manifesto took the form of Hitler’s autobiographical Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), ghostwritten by the Jesuit Father Staempfle and placed beside the Bible on the altars of German churches.

After WW II, during September 1957, Pope John XXIII gave Jesuit theatre even broader horizons with his encyclinial Miranda prorsus (“Looking Ahead”), saying,

They must become socially minded. These technical arts (cinema, sound broadcasting, and television) can achieve this aim far more easily then the printed word (Italics mine]. The Catholic Church is keenly desirous that these means be converted to the spreading and advancement of everything that can be truly called good. Embracing, as she does, the whole of the human society within the orbit of her divinely appointed mission, she is directly concerned with the fostering of civilization among all peoples.

To Catholic film producers and directors, Miranda prorsus delivered

A paternal injunction not to allow films to be made which are at variance with the faith and Christian moral standards. Should this happen – which God forbid – then it is for the Bishops to rebuke them and, if necessary, to impose upon them appropriate sanctions.

Pope John XXIII

John XXIII urged that Pius XI’s national film reviewing offices

Be entrusted to men who are experienced in cinema, sound broadcasting, and television, under the guidance of a priest specially chosen by the Bishops… at the same time We urge that the faithful, and particularly those who are militant in the cause of Catholic Action [Jesuit and their protégés], be suitably instructed, so that they may appreciate the need for giving to these offices their willing, united, and effective support.

In 1964, Pope Pius VI amplified Miranda prorsus with the decree Inter mirifica (“Among the Wonders”), saying

”it is the Church’s birthright to use and own the press, the cinema, radio, television and others of a like nature.”

How Rome Put Learning Against Learning: According to Encyclopaedia Britannica Online

Jesuit Drama

Encyclopædia Britannica Article

			Page 1 of 1

program of theatre developed for educational and propagandist purposes in the colleges of the Society of Jesus during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Cultivated as a medium for disseminating Roman Catholic doctrine, drama flourished in the Jesuit schools for more than 200 years, evolving from modest student exercises to elaborate productions that often rivaled the…

Jesuit drama... (75 of 416 words)

GC 35 Concludes

posted by: jrogers@jesuit.org on Friday, March 07, 2008

By Cindy Wooden Catholic News Service

ROME (CNS) -- The Jesuit General Congregation concluded two months of work by approving five decrees, including one on obedience, and a separate document reaffirming the Jesuits' allegiance to the pope and fidelity to church teaching.

The 225 Jesuits elected to represent their almost 20,000 confreres around the world marked the end of their meeting with a March 6 Mass of thanksgiving in Rome's Church of the Gesu, site of the tomb of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the Jesuit founder.

Meeting reporters March 7, Father Adolfo Nicolas, who was elected superior general of the Jesuits in January, called the meeting an experience of "the union of hearts, the union of the society" and of its "union with its head, who is the Holy Father."

The congregation approved formal decrees focused on the Jesuit mission in the modern world; Jesuit identity; collaboration with those outside the Jesuits; internal governance; and obedience, to one's superior as well as to the pope.

The decrees will be translated and distributed to Jesuits before they are released publicly.

In addition to the five decrees, the congregation approved a formal declaration titled "With New Fervor and Dynamism, the Society of Jesus Responds to the Call of Benedict XVI."

In a January letter, Pope Benedict asked the Society of Jesus "to affirm its fidelity to the magisterium and the Holy See," Father Nicolas said.

The new superior said the delegates approached the question "with interest and enthusiasm and also with joy."

"The Society of Jesus was born within the church, we live in the church, we were approved by the church and we serve the church. This is our vocation," he said.

Unity with the pope "is the symbol of our union with Christ. It also is the guarantee that our mission will not be a 'small mission,' a project just of the Jesuits, but that our mission is the mission of the church," Father Nicolas said.

Promising fidelity to and union with the pope is not and never was seen as a limitation for the Jesuits, he said.

"This tradition of obedience ... has never stopped us, not in theological research, not in apostolic creativity, not in proposing new ways to live the Christian faith," he said.

The superior general said, "A serious, enthusiastic and joyful obedience to the Holy Father does not reduce in any way the ability of the society to reflect, to create, to continue moving forward in a dynamic service to the church."

However, he said, being called to look again at the traditional relationship of unity with the pope "was a good occasion for becoming aware that we need a bit of humility, something for which the Jesuits are not famous."

"We need the humility of knowing that we are not God," and that listening to others and being challenged by them is a source of spiritual and intellectual growth, even when the challenge is posed by the Vatican's doctrinal congregation in the face of a Jesuit theologian's work.

Questioning and challenging "is creative for us and for the church," Father Nicolas said, which is why the congregation members approved the document urging all Jesuits "to take up again our tradition of fidelity to and affection for the Holy Father and the Holy See."

Father Carlo Casalone, the Jesuit superior for Italy, told reporters that the congregation members insisted that "obedience is not conformity, but a shared search for the will of God."

It is not a denial or sacrifice of freedom, but a willingness to use one's freedom to respond to the call of the order and of the church, "a freedom for commitment, to make ties, not break them," he said.

The first Jesuits saw themselves as modern apostles, and since the apostles were sent on a mission by Christ, modern apostles must be sent by the vicar of Christ, the pope, he said.

Father Nicolas said the creativity needed to minister effectively in the modern world and particularly on "the frontiers" of dialogue with science, cultures and other religions -- areas Pope Benedict asked the Jesuits to focus on -- obviously carries the risks of being misunderstood or of straying too far from tradition.

But "the only way to respond to reality today is creatively. It's the only way. I am afraid when I find a young Jesuit, or someone who comes to consult with me, with a reduced, narrow frame of mind," he said. "This person is not able to grow. To grow we need to go beyond the framework we have intellectually, spiritually and humanly."

The new superior said, "I encourage young Jesuits to study in a way that is creative, opens horizons, helps them see other points of view, other frameworks."

The congregation, he said, affirmed the importance of Jesuit work in the field of education, especially in Asia and other places where the majority of people are not Christian.

The Jesuit focus on the education of their members and of others is not so they become great scholars, he said, but so they can "build bridges between our lives, our faith, the Christian tradition and other cultures, traditions and religions that have a depth and experience to share."

END

03/07/2008 2:14 PM ET

How Rome Put Learning Against Learning: According to Tupper Saussy

Rulers of Evil at p 67



The faculty of Munich College praised the way Jesuit theatre captivated Protestants, especially the parents of school aged youngsters:

"There is no better means of making friends out of heretics and the enemies of the Church, and fulfilling the enrollment of the school than good high-spirited playacting."

Rome's Response - To Put Learning Against Learning - According to Tupper Saussy

From Rulers of Evil, p 23

Niccolo Machiavelli

Pope Clement VII

Cardinal Thomas Wolsey

Just as Leo X's corruption had ignited Luther, Clement VII's shrewdness determined how the Church would deal with the proliferation of Bibles, Clement was personally advised by the cagy Niccolo Machiavelli, inventor of modern political science, and Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Chancellor of England. Machiavelli and Wolsey opined that both printing and Protestantism could be turned to Rome's advantage by employing movable type to produce a literature that would confuse, diminish, and ultimately marginalize the Bible. Cardinal Wolsey, who would later found Christ Church College at Oxford, characterized the project as "to put learning against learning."

The Free Spread of the Word Breeds Protestants

Gutenberg and Luther: The Rise of the Press and of the Protestants
What put an end to the Middle Ages?

According to historian William Durant

Before Gutenberg nearly all education had been in the hands of the Church. Books were costly; copying was laborious and sometimes careless. Few authors could reach a wide audience until they were dead; they had to live by pedagogy, or by entering a monastic order, or by pensions from the rich or benefices from the Church. They received little or no payment from those who published their works; and even if one publisher paid them they had no copyright protection, except occasionally by a papal grant. Libraries were numerous but small; monasteries, cathedrals, colleges, and some cities had modest collections, seldom more then 399 volumes; the books were usually kept inside the walls, and some were chained to lecterns or desks…

As schools multiplied and literacy rose, the demand for books increased. The business classes found literacy useful in the operations of industry and trade; women of the middle and upper classes escaped through reading, into a world of contemporary romance; by 1300 the time had passed when only the clergy could read. It was rising demand, even more than the increased supply of paper and the development of an oily ink, that led to Gutenberg. Moslems had brought paper manufacture to Spain in the tenth century, to Sicily in the twelfth; it passed into Italy in the thirteenth, into France in the fourteenth; the paper industry was a hundred years old in Europe when printing came. [this is analogous to computers and internet versus typewriters and telephones] In the fourteenth century, when linen clothing became customary in Europe, castoff linens provided cheap rags for paper; the cost of paper declined, and its readier availability co-opted with the extension of literacy to offer a material and market for printed books. (Durant, p157)

In 1456 Gutenberg, with borrowed funds, set up another press. From this he issued, in that year or the next, what has been generally considered his first type-printed book, the famous and beautiful “Gutenberg Bible” a majestic folio of 1,282 large double-columned pages. In 1462 Mainz was sacked by the troops of Adolf of Nassau; the printers fled, scattering the new art through Germany. By 1463 there were printers in Strasbourg, Cologne, Basel, Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Ulm. Guttenberg, one of the fugitives, settled in Eltville, where he resumed his printing. He struggled painfully through one financial crisis after another, until Adolf gave him (1465) a benefice yielding a protective income. Some three years later he died.

Doubtless his use of movable type would have been developed by others had he never been born; it was an obvious demand of the times; this is true of most inventions. A letter written in 1470 by Guillaume Fichet of Paris suggests how enthusiastically the invention was welcomed: “There has been discovered in Germany a wonderful new method for the production of books, and those who have mastered the art are taking it from Mainz out onto the world … The light of this discovery will spread from Germany to all parts of the earth.” But not all welcomed it. Copyists protested that printing would destroy their means of livelihood; aristocrats opposed it as a mechanical vulgarization, and feared that it would lower the value of their manuscript libraries; statesmen and clergy distrusted it as a possible vehicle of subversive ideas. (Durant p 159)

Martin Luther and the Growth of the Press

He was the most powerful and uninhibited controversialist in history. Nearly all his writings were warfare, salted with humor and peppered with vituperation. He let his opponents elaborate superior Latin to be read by a few scholars he wrote in Latin when he wished to address all Christendom; but most of his diatribes were composed in German, or were at once translated into German, for his was a nationalist revolution. No other German author has equaled him in clarity or force of style, in directness and pungency pf phrase, in happy – sometimes hilarious – smiles, in a vocabulary rooted in the speech of the people, and congenial to the national mind.

Printing fell in with his purposes as a seemingly providential innovation, which he used with inexhaustible skill; he was the first to make it an engine of propaganda and war. There were no newspapers yet. Battles were fought with books, pamphlets, and private letters intended for publication. Under the stimulus of Luther’s revolt the number of books printed in Germany rose from 150 in 1518 to 990 in 1524. Four fifths of these favored the Reformation. Books defending orthodoxy were hard to sell, while Luther’s were the most widely purchased of the age. They were sold not only in bookstores but by peddlers and traveling students; 1,400 copies were brought at one Frankfurt fair; even in Paris, in 1520, they outsold everything else. As early as 1519 they were exported to France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, England. “Luther’s books are everywhere and in every language”, wrote Erasmus in 1521; “no one would believe how widely he has moved men.” The literary fertility of the Reformers transferred the preponderance of publications from southern to northern Europe, where it has remained every since. Printing was the Reformation; Gutenberg made Luther possible. (Durant, p 368)

Luther’s supreme achievement as a writer was his translation of the Bible into German… Hence his translation had the same effect and prestige in Germany as the King James Version in England a century later: it had endless and beneficent influence on the national speech, and is still the greatest prose. In Wittenberg, and during Luther’s lifetime, 100,000 copies of his New Testament were printed; a dozen unauthorized editions appeared elsewhere; and despite edicts forbidding its circulation in Brandenburg, Bavaria, and Austria, it became and remained the best selling book in Germany. The translations of the Bible shared, as both effect and contributory cause, in that displacement of Latin by vernacular languages and literatures which accompanied the nationalist movement, and which corresponded to the defeat of the universal Church in lands that had not received and transformed the Latin tongue. (Durant p 369)

The popularization of the printing press gave Luther an advantage that Jan Hus - religious thinker and reformer who was condemned as a "heretic" and burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic Church in 1415 -- lacked a century earlier.