We are marked from the day of our birth with an end date; all is indeed vanity. To forget our mortality is thus to lose something human, to become inhuman.
Greek Prime Minister Mitsotakis said Constantine II had lived an “eventful life” which “marked and was marked” in turn by turbulent moments in Greek history.
An outspoken traditionalist, the Australian cardinal was known to ruffle the feathers of secularists and the Catholic Church’s progressive wing in equal measure.
The Vatican had warned that it would be a “simple” ceremony. The hearts of the many faithful present were heavy after the death of the holy man who, in his silence and retirement, had remained a reference point of faith and wisdom for them.
What started as an allegedly rare and ‘kindly’ way to ease the suffering of the terminally ill has ballooned into a government program offering death as an escape from loneliness, depression, or even poverty and homelessness.
Today, it is all too common to prize self-sufficiency as a virtue—a virtue by nature inaccessible to the sick and to the disabled, to pregnant women and to the elderly, and to children of any age.
Whilst I’m reluctant to trivialise the many mental health illnesses and anxieties that modern people claim, I suspect that much of their emotional confusion is just what everyone normally feels. The difference being, however, that the young modern was told that such feelings had been—or would be with the next cultural revolution—banished by Progress.
The death of Jean-Luc Godard marks the end of an era of filmmaking. Celebrated for his early contributions to the French Nouvelle Vague, his later work stayed true to his political activism and the self-referential Zeitgeist of the 1960s.
