Friday 8 August 2014

Letter to The Catholic Herald

How to deal with an intolerant arts establishment

Piers Paul Read (Charterhouse, August 1st) is right to highlight the politically-driven intolerance and incipient authoritarianism at the core of the UK's arts and education sectors. This 'totalitarianism of thought' - where Christianity's marginalisation is not only accepted, but actively encouraged and celebrated - has become a weapon of choice in the Devil's arsenal, playing a key role in the ongoing dissolution of the moral and intellectual fabric of the West.

Rather than subside into an impotent, defensive rage, I would like to recommend a study of the life and works of the great Soviet film-maker, Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986). Working under levels of surveillance and harassment unimaginable (so far) in Britain, Tarkovsky crafted a luminous, prophetic body of work, charged with Christ-centred profundity and shimmering with the light of the holy. In films such as, Andrei Rublev (1966), Nostalghia (1982), and the incomparable Stalker (1979), he shows that a censorious official climate need be no barrier to the religiously-minded artist.

Quite the reverse. God's gift of imagination runs far deeper than that. It turns obstacles into opportunities, shines light in darkness, and reveals to ourselves and those around us the 'height and breadth and depth' of God's dynamic, ever-creative presence at the heart of our world.

That is where we artists place our faith. This is the best and only response we can make to the would-be commissars of our day.

Yours faithfully,

John Fitzgerald,
Manchester.

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