{mosimage}TORONTO - The serenely modern Catholic Church of St. Joan of Arc, on Bloor Street West in the High Park neighbourhood, was one of Toronto’s earliest post-Vatican II ecclesiastical settings designed to accommodate the reformed liturgy initiated by the council.

{mosimage}Editor's note: John Bentley Mays, an award-winning journalist, art and architecture critic and author, presented the 7th annual Henry Somerville Lecture on Christianity and Communications on Oct. 18 at the Newman Centre in Toronto and Oct. 19 at St. Jerome's University in Waterloo. His title was “The Creative City: the Future of Christian Urbanism.” Below is the entire text of his speech.

At the present time, the cities of the global West are enjoying a remarkable moment in the sun. In Toronto, the city I know best, architects, urban planners and social theorists who learned their lessons about liveable cities well from Jane Jacobs have come of age and occupy positions in city bureaucracies, the design professions and the universities.

The year comes to an end with what may well be one of the most significant political admissions in recent history. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair stated that even if he had known Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction he would still have declared war on Iraq. In other words, the WMD casus belli is, as many of us assumed, utterly bogus. It also seems likely that Blair never believed that there were any such weapons and that intelligence experts had told him and U.S. President George W. Bush this for months before the invasion.

It’s particularly important in the case of Blair because, unlike Bush, he still enjoys enormous international prestige, has a thriving political career and is known to be a highly sophisticated man. He was also received into the Roman Catholic Church with little scrutiny or apparent formation by a notably liberal British hierarchy. He had led Britain through a period of infamously anti-family, anti-marriage and anti-Catholic legislation and has never shown any contrition for his failings.

Toronto artist Peter Alexander Por is an angry man.

As I found on a visit to his controversial show of paintings and sculptures at Toronto’s Bezpala Brown Gallery (which ended Feb. 25), Por is angry, in a general way, with the mostly 20th-century tyrants who have killed millions of people and made life miserable for many millions more. Most of the 30 canvasses on display are crudely sketched portraits of Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot and other modern political monsters, emblazoned with the numbers of those who, Por claims, died as a result of their wars and persecutions. Though we have heard such statistics before, these numbers still have the power to stagger and amaze: Mao (4.5 million dead), Ayatollah Khomeini (700,000), Rwandan leader Theoniste Bagosora (one million), Pol Pot (two million), and so on.

“What were you expecting?” the veteran demon-fighter Fr. Lucas (Anthony Hopkins) asks his young apprentice Michael (Colin O’Donoghue) after an uneventful exorcism in The Rite, now playing in movie theatres across southern Ontario. “Spinning heads? Pea soup?”

At those lines, you could almost feel a satisfied smile go around the audience. The vivid allusion, everybody knew, was to The Exorcist (1973), Hollywood’s first and best attempt to do a film about Catholics casting out devils. It was director Mikael Håfström’s heavy-handed way to remind movie-goers of what was already, by that point, perfectly obvious: that The Rite is meant to be a serious contribution to that horror sub-genre, the demon movie, created by The Exorcist almost 40 years ago.

It isn’t, but certainly not for lack of trying.

The Great Pavement in Westminster Abbey is one of the most beautiful and significant architectural decorations to survive in England from the Middle Ages. Designed and executed by Italian craftsmen in the 1260s by order of King Henry III, this splendid mosaic consists of myriad cut sections of coloured stone and glass set in abstract geometrical patterns into a dark limestone base. The materials are sumptuous: purple porphyry, green serpentine, yellow limestone, pieces of which had been salvaged from ancient Roman buildings and sculptures and brought to England specifically for this project.

Everything about this royal commission speaks of its high importance. Its position is immediately before the abbey’s high altar, the key liturgical focus of the church. Its design, a series of interrelated orbs and triangles, was clearly intended to be, and is, an artisanal masterpiece.

When the message is displeasing, shoot the messenger. That old saying came to mind when I was reading Fr. Raymond de Souza’s final Catholic Register column (Dec. 26) for 2010.

The messenger who got shot, in this case, was Globe and Mail correspondent Michael Valpy, the lead author of a five-part series on the “future of faith” in Canada that ran in the newspaper before Christmas.

Hollywood has long been looking for a new blockbuster magic series to rival the commercial successes of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the string of Harry Potter movies. When C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe came to the screen in 2005, many observers thought that the studio bosses had once again hatched a winning idea for a long-running fantasy franchise.

Each year at this time, Advent seems to get lost in the shuffle.

The weeks before Christmas are bustling with things to do. We shop for presents, make trips to visit friends and relatives, attend concerts of seasonal music, put in appearances at the usual round of office parties and other sociable events. There is only one thing wrong with this happy round of activities: It inevitably distracts us Christians from engaging creatively with the wonderful truth of Advent as the Catholic Church has traditionally understood it.

Political Islam in the Middle East and western Asia comes in numerous colours.

On the peaceful, moderate end of the spectrum are groups such as Turkey’s parliamentary Justice and Development Party. The more culturally radical Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is officially banned in Egypt, but its anti-Western message still manages to garner great popularity at the grass-roots. Farthest out of the moderate Islamist mainstream are such movements as Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda throughout the Arab world, which advocate the violent overthrow of Muslim-led moderate governments and terrorist acts against them.