The National Catholic Register portal (July 15, 2026) publishes a commentary by Brendan Towell, Director of “Spirituality and Mission” for the conciliar Archdiocese of Philadelphia, enthusing over Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film The Odyssey. Towell praises the “cultural moment” of Greek mythology, citing the atheist Stephen Fry’s retellings as a “genuine cultural service,” and constructs a parallel between the pagan heroes Odysseus, Sisyphus, Oedipus and St. Augustine, concluding that myth “awakens longing” which Christianity “fulfills.” This article is not an exercise in Catholic apologetics but a manifesto of the nouvelle théologie‘s immanentist heresy: it baptizes pagan naturalism, relativizes the supernatural order, and reduces the Church’s mission to a cultural chaplaincy for the City of Man.
The Conciliar Functionary as Propagandist for the “Cultural Moment”
The byline reveals the ecclesial provenance of this error: Brendan Towell, “Director of Spirituality and Mission for Secondary Schools and Schools of Special Education in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.” His declared interests — “Augustinian Studies, Ressourcement Theology and the theological legacy of Pope Benedict XVI” — are the shibboleths of the neo-modernist establishment. Ressourcement, the theological engine of Vatican II, seeks to “return to the sources” not to preserve the depositum fidei intact, but to subject it to historical-critical dissolution and existentialist reinterpretation. That a functionary of the conciliar structure, formed in the school of Ratzinger and de Lubac, should find “value” in the atheist Fry’s sanitization of Greek myth is not incidental; it is the logical fruit of a theology that has replaced extra Ecclesiam nulla salus with extra cultura nulla evangelizatio.
The article opens with the admission: “I do not share Fry’s atheism, but his work performs a genuine cultural service.” Here is the laicism condemned by Pius XI in Quas Primas (1925): the Church’s authority to teach and govern is denied, and the Christian religion is “equated with other false religions and shamelessly placed in the same category.” Towell does not condemn Fry’s atheism as a damnable error (error damnabilis); he instrumentalizes it. This is the hermeneutic of continuity in practice: continuity not with Tradition, but with the world.
Baptizing the Demonic: The “Noble Pagan” Heresy Revisited
The core of the article is a tripartite exposition of Odysseus, Sisyphus, and Oedipus as “enduring figures” who “speak to something enduring in the human heart.” Towell writes: “These stories speak to something enduring in the human heart. They dramatize universal experiences of struggle, longing, courage, pride, fate and failure.” This is the language of naturalism, not grace. The Council of Trent anathematizes those who say that man can know and fulfill the moral law by his natural powers alone (Sess. VI, Can. 2). Greek mythology is not a “preparation for the Gospel” (praeparatio evangelica) in the patristic sense — which acknowledged the logoi spermatikoi while condemning the mythoi as demonic fictions — but the very fabulae daemonum against which the Fathers warned.
St. Augustine himself, whom Towell claims as an ally, condemns these very myths in De Civitate Dei (Book I, Ch. 3; Book II, Ch. 5-6). He exposes the turpitudines of the gods, the crimina of Jupiter, the libidines of Venus, and declares: “Quae si mala sunt, cur in ludis sacris celebrantur? Si bona, cur a bonis viris vituperantur?” (If they are evil, why are they celebrated in sacred games? If good, why are they blamed by good men?). Augustine attributes the poetic fictions to daemones who delight in such spectacles. Towell, by contrast, presents them as “visually spectacular, morally serious and emotionally compelling” stories that “allow modern audiences to explore suffering, heroism and destiny without demanding belief or conversion.” This is the analogia entis inverted: being is analogized to the demonic, and grace is reduced to a “fulfillment” of natural longing.
Odysseus, Sisyphus, Oedipus: Icons of the City of Man, Not Types of the Saint
Towell’s exegetical method is purely immanent. Odysseus is “the Clever Wanderer” whose “story resonates because it reflects the dignity of human effort.” Sisyphus represents “restless striving without a destination,” an image “eerily modern.” Oedipus is “the Seeker Destroyed” whose tragedy raises the question: “Is knowledge enough?” Nowhere does Towell mention that these figures are damnati in the theology of the Fathers. Odysseus, the polytropos man, is the type of the prudens carnalis (Rom 8:6), whose “cleverness” is the wisdom of this world, “foolishness with God” (1 Cor 3:19). Sisyphus is the icon of the homo superbus who “attempted to cheat death and outwit the gods” — a figure of the final impenitence of the reprobate, not a sympathetic victim of “spiritual homelessness.” Oedipus, the parricide and incestuous, is the manifestation of fatum — the pagan denial of Providence — whose self-blinding is the just penalty of hybris.
Towell writes: “St. Augustine would later describe lives like this as belonging to what he called the ‘City of Man’ — those lives shaped by earthly goals and human striving, even when those goals are noble.” This is a falsification. Augustine’s Civitas Terrena is not composed of “noble” strivings but of amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei (love of self unto contempt of God). The “nobility” of pagan virtue is vitium, not virtus, because it lacks the finis ultimus: Deus. As Augustine teaches in De Civitate Dei XIX.25: “Nam qui non credit, iam judicatus est” (He who believes not is already judged). To present the damned heroes of paganism as “universal” types of the human condition is to deny the distinctio between nature and grace, the very error of the nouvelle théologie condemned by Pius XII in Humani Generis (1950).
The “Restless Heart” Truncated: Grace as Self-Help
The article’s climax is the invocation of Augustine’s famous dictum: “Our heart is restless until it rests in You.” But Towell immediately empties it of supernatural content: “His journey is not from ignorance to knowledge but from self-reliance to surrender. Where myth celebrates heroic striving, Augustine discovers humility. Where myth often ends in tragedy or exhaustion, Augustine points toward conversion and redemption.” This is Pelagianism dressed in Augustinian vocabulary. “Surrender,” “humility,” “conversion” are here psychological states, not the gratia sanans and gratia elevans infused by the Holy Ghost through the sacraments of the Church. There is no mention of baptismus flaminis, no mention of the Sacrifice of the Mass, no mention of the Communion of Saints, no mention of the Church Militant. Augustine’s “rest” is found in the Civitas Dei, which is the Ecclesia Catholica — not in a vague “encounter with the living God” accessible through cultural osmosis.
Towell concludes: “Christianity does not erase those questions; it fulfills them. It offers not just a compelling story but communion, not just meaning but a Savior.” This is the language of the new evangelization: Christianity as a “better story,” a “fulfillment” of human aspirations. But the Gospel is not a story; it is Verbum Dei, Potentia Dei ad salutem (Rom 1:16). The “communion” offered is not the Communio Sanctorum in the Body of Christ, but a vague spiritual fellowship. The “Savior” is not the Rex Regum who will judge the living and the dead, but a therapeutic companion for the “restless.”
The Areopagus Deception: Paul at Athens vs. Towell in Philadelphia
Towell invokes St. Paul at the Areopagus: “Like St. Paul at the Areopagus, Christians can recognize that these ancient stories point toward genuine human questions. They gesture toward truths they cannot fully grasp.” This is a deliberate perversion of Acts 17. Paul did not “recognize” the Athenian myths as pointers to truth; he declared them ignorance (agnostō) and commanded metanoia (repentance) because God “now commandeth all men every where to repent” (Acts 17:30). He did not say the altar “to the unknown god” was a “genuine human question”; he said it was a superstition (deisidaimonesterous). Paul’s method was confutatio, not dialogue. Towell’s method is the dialogue of the conciliar sect — the colloquium that replaces praedicatio, the encounter that replaces conversio.
Symptomatic Diagnosis: The Neo-Church as Cultural Chaplain
This article is a symptom of the systemic apostasy of the conciliar structures. The “Director of Spirituality and Mission” for a major American “archdiocese” spends his public platform promoting a Hollywood blockbuster, praising an atheist popularizer, and reducing the Doctor of Grace to a life-coach for “spiritual homelessness.” The Quas Primas encyclical, which instituted the Feast of Christ the King, warned: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” Towell’s article is the ecclesiastical ratification of that removal. The “Kingdom of Christ” is replaced by the “cultural moment”; the Social Reign of Christ the King is replaced by “myth as cultural service.”
The silence is deafening: no mention of the Most Holy Sacrifice, the Sacraments, the Four Last Things, the necessity of the Church for salvation, the damnation of the impenitent. This silence is the gravissima accusatio. As Pius XI taught: “The more the sweetest Name of our Redeemer is omitted with unworthy silence in international gatherings and parliaments, the more loudly it must be confessed.” In the conciliar “parliaments” of culture, the Name is not merely omitted; it is displaced by Odysseus, Sisyphus, and Oedipus.
Conclusion: The Odyssey of Apostasy
The article is not a commentary on a film; it is a confession of the conciliar sect’s religion: a syncretistic humanism that baptizes the City of Man and calls it evangelization. Brendan Towell, functionary of the “Archdiocese of Philadelphia,” exponent of Ressourcement Theology, admirer of “Pope Benedict XVI,” has produced a text that could have been written by any secular humanist — save for the pious veneer of Augustinian quotes stripped of their dogmatic spine. This is the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place: the paramasonic structure occupying the Vatican’s former outposts, using the language of the Fathers to preach the gospel of Nolan and Fry. Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? The true Church, the Ecclesia Militans, rejects this pseudognosis and cries out with the Psalmist: “Non credidi, quia locutus sum: ego humiliatus sum nimis” (Ps 115:10) — I believed not, because I spoke: I was humbled exceedingly. The “Odyssey” of the conciliar sect ends not in Ithaca, but in the outer darkness.
Source:
Seeing ‘The Odyssey’ Through the Eyes of St. Augustine (ncregister.com)
Date: 15.07.2026