A Boston College blogger reports that the Jesuit university held a panel discussion on the “V Monologues” this year at which, they report, a faculty member said the play is “so holy that it should be shown on Good Friday.”
Now that faculty member, theology professor John McDargh, defends the Monologues and denies saying what he’s quoted as saying.
The critiques of the play braced me for a production that might be shocking or offensive. They did not prepare me for what I personally experienced as perhaps the most moving and memorable evening of theater in my 25 years at Boston College. Nor was I prepared to find the play as I did then, and did again last Friday, to be deeply meaningful, and indeed, to use a perhaps old fashioned word, edifying.
I have spent two years trying to understand what it is about the play that, for me at least makes it so powerfully, religiously evocative.
[…]Finally, though my sole Lenten reference was to Ash Wednesday, and not Good Friday as reported, I must say that no Christian can listen to the stories of the Bosnian survivor of gang rape, or the elderly Korean women who survived their sexual torture as “comfort women” - and not think that these are very parables of the kind of innocent suffering and shaming with which God shows radical solidarity in the life, passion and death of Jesus. So perhaps The Observer in misreporting is wise after all, if unintentionally. Perhaps indeed we might consider meditating upon those passages during the week we call Holy.
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