| A scene from Alice's Pop-up Theatre Book by Nick Denchefield (Macmillan Children's Books, Great Britain, 2000) a gorgeous pop-up version of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The Queen of Hearts is declaring 'Off with their heads!' (repeated all over the backdrop), with reference to Alice, and probably all her subjects. It is remarkable how testimonies of ex-members of the Focolare Movement from people all over the world who have had no contact with one another are so similar. This confirms the theory that its problems are systemic rather than specific to individual members or, in cases of abuses of power, leaders. I was impressed and heartened by this when I published The Pope's Armada, nearly 30 years ago. All the readers who have written to me over the years have pointed out that my personal experience and concerns about Focolare's teaching and methods was identical to theirs - from such countries as Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, France, the United States as well as the United Kingdom. But of all the Focolare slogans that recur in these testimonies, the most frequently cited is the term 'Cut off your head'. If members or aspirant members were to mention doubts or problems regarding the doctrine of the Focolare Movement, or question any aspect of its teachings or practices, this was the simple response: 'Cut off your head', that is 'Stop thinking'. It only just struck me recently that ironically, this is also the slogan of the Queen of Hearts (see picture above), the comically ruthless character in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland, whom Carroll describes as 'a blind fury'. It is also that queen's answer to every problem and every opposition: 'Off with their heads!' She meant it in the physical sense - i.e. decapitation - but the Focolare sense is also brutal in its own way. Of course the movement's founder and fount of all knowledge (including slogans), Chiara Lubich, would probably have been unaware of her amusing similarity to Carroll's Queen of Hearts given the fact she once said that as a child she was never interested in fairy tales 'becasue they weren't true'. I wonder what three of the twentieth century's geniuses Carl Jung, Bruno Betelheim and Stephen Sondheim would have made of that? The first two, as psychoanalysts, saw fairy tales as a vital means of of understanding the human psyche and Sondheim wrote Into the Woods, one of the most popular musicals of the late twentieth century on stage, as a film and in school performances all over the world, a masterpeice of the genre, which also showed the universal relevance of fairy tales in human relations. Sadly the humour of the comparison between Lubich and her movement, and 'Wonderland' would be lost on her and her followers. But this example of the 'Cut of your head' slogan, small though it may be, shows the importance of the arts in bringing perpective - often through humour - to all forms of extremism, religious or otherwise. Indeed, as a whole, there is an interesting comparison to be drawn between the Wonderland of Lewis Carroll and cult-like communities such as Focolare. By showing howin Wonderland, the Queen of Hearts is constantly inventing ridiculous laws on the spur of the moment, Carroll satirises the whole concept of laws in human society. In the case of an organisation like the Focolare movement, however, in which one person actually did invent all the structures and doctrines willy nilly, we have an example of a real-life Wonderland. Perhaps this is why, 30 years after starting a serious study of the movement and almost 50 after leaving it, the more I get to know about Focolare, the more I find myself saying, just like Alice, 'Curiouser and Curiouser.' |
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