July 2023 Print

Reviewed by Brendan D. King

                    Annibale Bugnini
                    By Mark Amorose
 
In Rome they should have known him by his name:
The enemy descending with his brutes.
But to our guardian’s eternal shame,
The harried faithful know him by his fruits.¹

In his 2019 essay “Beauty in the Face of Indifference,” which was prompted by the reading of Dana Gioia’s “The Catholic Writer Today and Other Essays,” Joseph Pearce lamented,

The renewal of Catholic literature is happening before our very eyes through the efforts of many very good Catholic writers. The problem is that our eyes are closed. We do not see the glorious fruit of this literary revival because we are not looking for it. Our eyes are elsewhere, focusing on things far less worthy of our attention. As Mr. Gioia says, the “work of writers matters very little unless it is recognized and supported by a community of critics, educators, journalists, and readers.” Why are works of contemporary Catholic literature not being critiqued in the Catholic media? Why are they not being taught in Catholic schools and colleges? And, most important of all, why are they not being read?²

The answer to these questions, as far as Traditional Catholics are concerned, is actually quite unnerving. There is not only a deeply ingrained distrust of living writers, but also, to paraphrase what Solzhenitsyn famously said about the American secular media, “In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the Traditional Catholic press: it is contrary to its nature. The press merely picks out sensational formulas.”³

Therefore, we see in the Traditionalist Catholic press an extremely strong belief in the age-old hacksaw, “Raise hell and sell newspapers.” With this in mind, they seek to keep their Traditionalist Catholic readers perpetually enraged and forever trapped in a deeply ingrained sense of eternal victimhood. What is worse, negative reviews, which warn Traditionalists away from bad books, music, and films, are far more prevalent than reviews which instead point their readers towards more worthwhile alternatives.

There is clearly considerable financial profit in “Bergoglio bashing,” paranoia, and negativity, or articles filled with all three would not continue to dominate the Traditionalist press. But, when one considers that Traditional Catholics have before themselves the task of rebuilding an entire civilization, pretending that fellow Traditionalists who seek to re-evangelize the culture through literature and the arts do not exist provides a rotten and unstable foundation. For this reason, this essay will focus upon positively reviewing the latest collection by Mark Amorose, who Joseph Pearce named as one of the best living American Catholic poets in the above quoted essay.

The title of Mark Amorose’s collection, “City under Siege,” is drawn from an enclosed sonnet which pays tribute to St. Joan of Arc. But it also constitutes a pun, as it draws attention to the fact that Western Civilization, which St. Augustine famously termed the City of God and which is the creation of the Catholic Church, is now and always has been under siege from the culture of death.

Amorose’s choices of poetic themes and subjects, which always seem to expand upon the themes of the collection’s title, are carefully thought out and erudite, which is a priceless skill in a broken culture which, as Dana Gioia recently reminded us, is fast becoming an ignorant culture. Even more importantly, the whole collection alternates irate poems filled with ironic and cutting cultural criticism with poems revealing light and even hope.

A sonnet comparing the modern horrors of legalized abortion with the pervasive child sacrifice in ancient Carthage is followed by a sonnet which expresses the joy that Amorose and his wife felt upon seeing their unborn daughter for the first time in an ultrasound. Sonnets about the persecution experienced by Catholics under the domination of Arian heresy, President Plutarco Calles, or the House of Tudor are alternated with sonnets that remind us that as long as even a few Traditional Catholics are left, the culture of death has not won.

It is often said that those who will not learn history are doomed to repeat its mistakes. It is just as often said that those who do learn history are doomed to stand by helpless and watch as everyone else repeats its mistakes. Amorose, however, deserves our gratitude for reminding us that that we do not live in the first age that the culture of death has seemingly won and that we almost certainly are not living in the last such age either.

Christian civilization is now and always has been on the verge of collapse and has been rebuilt over and over again from the ashes. This is because, as G.K. Chesterton reminds us, we as Christians pray to a God Who knows all too well the way into the grave and back out of it again. The last word is best left to Amorose himself:

                    Gates of Hell
 
Napoleon has come; the sentries sound
The tocsin. Battlefields are strewn with dead.
The Pope is doomed—But what is this? Like lead,
The revolution’s guns fall to the ground.
“Pius the Last” was only the beginning:
Six namesakes later, Stalin looks and sneers
At Peter’s might. Then Stalin disappears.
Now ask the latest tyrant who is winning.
“On,” Kephas, Petros, “Peter, on this Rock—
I build My Church, forever to remain.
I give this promise, pestilence and pain
Will wrack her, but She will withstand each shock;
And when it seems most certain She will fail,
Then most, the Gates of Hell shall not prevail.”⁴

Endnotes

¹ Mark Amorose (2017), “City under Siege: Sonnets & Other Verse,” Angelico Press, p. 34.

² Joseph Pearce “Beauty in the Face of Indifference,” Published on the website for “The Imaginative Conservative,” June 28, 2019. Freely available to read online.

³ Paraphrased from the text of the 1978 Harvard Address, as found in Alexander Solzhenitsyn (2006), “The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings 1947-2005,” ISI Publications, p. 568.

⁴ Mark Amorose (2017), “City under Siege: Sonnets & Other Verse,” Angelico Press, p. 26.