{mosimage}Understanding globalization, and how we should act in the face of it, are tasks every thinking Catholic must undertake. My experience of trying to sort out these matters suggests they are not easy topics to tackle.

In the first place, the word globalization is awkward, abstract and impersonal, and it comes burdened with the connotation of a vast force free of human agency — something too inexorable even to think about. Also, there’s the daunting complexity of the phenomenon and the fact that its worst manifestations seem to be coming at us all at once: the near-death of international banking and capital markets last year, the ongoing flight of manufacturing jobs from the old lands of the Industrial Revolution to emerging economies on the fringes of the West, social conflicts erupting as huge movements of people from the developing world into the traditional bastions of Western culture take place — the list goes on and on.

Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate is a remarkable attempt to grapple with, along with much else, the threats and opportunities that have come to us all as results of international capital integration. The long letter is also a highly imaginative application of Christian thought to a matter that is very timely.

We feel the touch of the globalization Benedict speaks of when we buy some product — anything with a computer chip in it, a children’s toy, even food — that was once made in Canada or the United States, but that now comes to us from some remote spot in Asia. We see it in newspaper headlines announcing some new domestic plant closing and the transfer of the means of production to cheap labour zones elsewhere in the world.

The shock-waves set in motion by Pope Benedict’s invitation to Anglicans to convert en masse, bringing their legacy of spiritual thought and worship with them, continues to ricochet throughout the world.

Some Anglican prelates, most notably in the large churches of Africa, have dismissed the call out of hand. At least one sizable group of dissident Anglicans — the Australia-based Traditional Anglican Communion, which claims some 400,000 adherents worldwide — has announced its eagerness to “swim the Tiber,” as Anglicans say, as soon as possible. But at the time of this writing, no observer or Anglican leader is in a position to make any move, since the Vatican has yet to announce the terms and time frame of its surprising offer.

Only this much is really clear at the present time: Married Anglican male clergy who convert will be eligible for ordination and ministry as Catholic priests in the new ecclesiastical structures, which will take the form of non-territorial dioceses. It is not clear, however, whether these married priests will be allowed to serve outside that structure, in “ordinary” Catholic parishes, or whether Catholic laypeople who did not come over from Anglicanism will be welcomed in the new Anglican rite parishes. (I think it likely that both things will eventually happen: the first, because of the shortage of priests in Latin rite parishes; the second, because of the fluidity of parish affiliation that already exists in Catholicism.)

{mosimage}Earlier this autumn, the Oratorians who operate Toronto’s St. Vincent de Paul Church, my liturgical home base, decided to make the principal Sunday service, at 11:30, a celebration of the 1962 Latin Mass.

At first, I was dismayed by the strangeness of it all. The Mass in English had always seemed entirely reverent and otherwise satisfactory, at least the way the Oratorians do it; and it surely is a satisfactory way to thank God for His many blessings. (I have fortunately never witnessed one of those eccentric vernacular Masses the fervent Catholic bloggers complain about.)

{mosimage}In the enormously rich drama of dynastic Egypt, the pharaoh Tutankamun played a very minor role. He was born around 1343 B.C., a century after the traditional date of Israel’s Exodus from Egyptian subjugation and during the period when the People of God were settling in Canaan. He assumed the crown of his politically troubled empire at age nine, and died when he was just 19. During his short reign, Tutankhamun (“living image of the god Amun”) appears to have backed a restoration of Egypt’s elaborate polytheism, which had been forcefully suppressed by his father, the pharaoh Akhenaten. If so, Tutankamun was still never forgiven for being the heretic Akhenaten’s son: His statues were defaced after his death and his name was largely written out of Egyptian history.

But despite his long obscurity, no ancient Egyptian is more popular today or more familiar to us than this royal young man. We know his serene and handsome face from the portrait-casket of solid gold that enclosed him in death. We know the games he liked to play, the beautiful wooden boxes he handled, even the bed he slept on. We know Tutankhamun so well because, in 1922, the British archeologist Howard Carter broke the seal on his tomb and found its treasury of grave-goods unplundered. The discovery of this trove of household furniture, jewellery, statuary and much else — interred for the king’s use in the afterlife — made headlines around the world. It also set in motion a wave of Egyptomania that persisted through the 1920s and, in some sense, has never subsided to this day.

{mosimage}Whatever you think of the current U.S. president, one thing is beyond dispute: Barack Obama certainly makes life interesting for the Catholic right.

The latest kafuffle started with the appearance in early December of a New York Times profile of White House social secretary Desirée Rogers. In this piece, we learned that the Obama family had toyed with the idea of breaking with White House tradition and not putting up an antique manger scene in the East Room of the executive mansion. (A White House official later confirmed that there had indeed been a discussion of whether to make Christmas more “inclusive” — apparently by excluding the crèche.)

I first heard black gospel singing in the fields of my father’s cotton farm, deep in the American South. No sound was more Southern: slow, serious and melancholy, like the lives of those hard-up blacks who worked in the cotton patch.

In one sense, this sad, unforgettable music was foreign to a white child spending the day with his father in the fields. Yet in another, it was close, familiar: for Southern rural religion in those days, whether black or white, was very much a matter of supplicating the beloved Jesus for deliverance from the sorrows and tribulations of life. It probably wasn’t exactly orthodox, this near-exclusive adoration of Jesus and corresponding neglect of the remote Father and ungraspable Spirit. But such religion sprang from a true place in the heart, especially the hearts of rural black Southerners, and found expression in their sincere and devout melodies.

The economic downturns in North America over the last 100 years, paradoxically, have often been times of strong creative upsurge in the arts. American painting, poetry, theatre and music flourished in the 1930s, despite the crushing Great Depression. In the midst of financial turmoil in the 1970s, the Canadian non-profit parallel gallery movement covered the country with incubators for visual artists who would later go on to national and international careers.

Such innovation in difficult moments has traditionally been made possible by active public-sector investment, without which the many small-scale artistic enterprises that dot the cultural landscape would languish. Since the Second World War, Canada has believed that this public investment in new art, film, theatre, music and the other arts is an important contribution to building a national artistic fibre strong enough to resist the powerful cultural influence of the United States. But this long-standing conviction has become old hat in the Harper government’s ruling circles, if Ottawa’s recent changes in magazine funding policy are anything to go on.

{mosimage}For centuries of Western history, Christian churches were the outstanding expressions of the architect’s art and craft. There are many reasons why this is no longer the case. Among them is the widespread decline of church-going and revenues, and the opinion that churches should occupy a more low-profile place in the urban fabric, and, not least important, an attitude of alienation (if not hostility) on the part of the church-going public toward the accomplishments of modern architecture.

But as long as new churches continue to be built, the opportunity of making them excellent and beautiful remains open. Catholics surely should not settle for second-rate church buildings in the Toronto archdiocese.

In the developed industrial societies of the West, superficiality is among the great scourges of the age. Our prosperity and freedom, and the best values we have inherited from the past, are blighted by a mass culture that trivializes everything, from politics and entertainment to sexuality and social morality.

Movies, TV and advertising constantly reinforce the notions, for example, that sexual licence is just a normal part of growing up, that living together outside the exclusive terms of marriage is even desirable in the circumstances of our era. The bombardment of highly eroticized entertainment hollows out the personal depth and resonance that can come with sexual commitment.