Essays in Idleness

Christmas is coming: did you know? … (Gentle reader is instructed to hold that thought, while he considers what follows.)

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The last message in the combox of this Idlesite, when I removed it some months ago, said something to the effect, “You have cut off your nose to spite your face.” It was a variation on Van Gogh, I suppose, to disallow Comments. By several experts in our aging “new media,” I was told that they are the key to building an audience: people enjoy reading their own stuff, and everyone likes to watch a mudfight. I was also taught, even before I started this thing, that it must have photographs and videos to catch attention; and that I’d be a fool not to take advertisements, or to go fussy about what kind to accept, or how they popped up or blared out. Twitter, Facebook, and other googaws were earnestly recommended. Too, I was informed that donations through PayPal would only become significant if I did frequent and highly visible begging campaigns.

“Statistics” come with the dashboard of a blog, and though allergy prevents me from consulting them often, I did notice that my “dailies” took a big hit after the combox closed. They’ve been crawling back since, but PayPal donations have not recovered. The good news, on the other hand, is that in shutting down an increasingly time-consuming and vexatious distraction (for me), I also closed the principal channel for spamming and DOS attacks; my remnant may have noticed that these Essays in Idleness have not been taken down for a while by the Evil Hacker Fairy, or fairies. This I would count as the blessing.

But clearly, I must do something to improve revenue, for I continue penurious. From the start of Advent, I began posting every frigging day — and intend to persist, whether or not I have something to say. That certainly seems to help the numbers a bit.

And today, I think it is time to try cat blogging.

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A reader remembers “Puddy Cat” (1981–97), her favourite pet from a Catholic childhood in rural Quebec — preferred even to a collie-shepherd dog named Monchou, and a quarter horse, named Gentle Ben. Taken in as a stray kitten, Puddy Cat was also adored by Monchou; and the horse, too, was enchanted by the little fur ball.

Once grown, she (the cat) slept all day, out of view except when eating. The other exception was when she (my correspondent) was saying the Rosary with her father. The cat disdained the saying of it at the dining table. Nor would she join them on the sofa for any general conversation. But when the Rosary was said on the sofa, by father and daughter from opposite ends, the cat would infallibly set herself in the middle between them — and this, from the minute they began the Creed.

(Sometimes she would bat at the dangling beads, but usually curl in sublime contentment.)

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We have, up here in the High Doganate, a very large inventory of cat stories — larger, perhaps, even than the Russian or Chinese inventory of nuclear missiles. And let me fairly warn gentle reader, that if PayPal donations don’t step up, we are prepared to use them.

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Another dangerous, arguably post-conciliar novelty that I contemplate, as a bait for cash, is the “Command Performance.” For the modest sum of fifty undervalued Canadian dollars, gentle reader may consider that he has paid, as it were, a “subscription” to my ramblings for a full year. But for Five Hundred Dollars, I will entitle him to assign me a Topic for one of these daily effusions, and promise to belabour it for at least five hundred words. Now surely, that is an offer which will appeal to every right-minded person, and only those less monied than I will be able to refuse.

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Did you hold that thought right to the end? Well, if you didn’t, fear not, I will remind you: Christmas is coming!

I see that the Curiosity Rover has been detecting little burps of methane in the Martian atmosphere. Cue the tabloids to announce, “Life on Mars!” Biomethation (methane production by microbes) is one possible explanation of the burps. There are a few hundred known alternative explanations.

Our wee mechanical toy landed on the bed of what was, long ago, a crater-formed Martian lake. There are indications of erosion, down the slopes of Mount Sharp in the middle of this crater, and along the crater walls. Thus, no surprise to find water molecules bound into the fine powdery soil. I gather there are a couple of pints in each cubic foot, though it might cost more than the USA could be sold for, to develop technology that could suck it out.

No fish skeletons, yet.

But let us pretend, for the sake of argument, that life is eventually found on Mars — even traces of the humblest microbes, extinct for a billion years. That would do, to surprise me. I would then expect to find signs of biological life, all over the universe.

That “intelligent life” (i.e. creatures who could appreciate Bach) would still not be found, might go almost without saying. For if life truly “evolves” by happenstance, as the Darwinoids do vainly preach, something approaching to human smarts would have appeared here and there many millions of years before us, wherever conditions were favourable. Indeed, given the speed at which humans suddenly “evolved” here, we could ourselves have appeared on Earth, millions of years before we actually did.

We are extremely recent, in geological terms; have been here less than two seconds, if the history of the planet were scaled down to one day. We’ve come a fair technological distance ourselves, since the last Earth ice age, a mere twelve thousand years ago, and the pace appears to be accelerating. Imagine what we could do given, oh, another million years, or hundred million. I daresay we’d finally figure how to get out and about.

The Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, did this thought experiment before 1950. He realized that we did not need expensive, incredibly sophisticated tools, to detect extraterrestrial life. If it was there, it would already have got here. He reasoned that, even if it could not defeat lightspeed, a sufficiently advanced material culture could send self-reproducing probes to colonize its home galaxy in a blink of exogeological time, then leapfrog galaxy to galaxy in all directions. It would transmit messages that could not be missed.

Any mathematical extrapolation of the number of planets in the universe that could, possibly, “evolve intelligent life,” is reversed by Fermi’s Paradox. The more possibilities there are, the less likely it has ever happened.

But of course, physics advances, and we now have a second indefatigable argument against ET. It developed from the “anthropic principle” in cosmology, which holds, tautologically enough, that the structure or “design” of the universe must be compatible with the existence of the conscious sapient creatures who observe it from within. (We would be they.) Over the last few decades we have come to understand that life on Earth absolutely depends on such an extraordinary number of extremely tight conditions, operating together at levels of coincidence that so stretch the odds, that the chance of finding another Bach-appreciating planet — even within something so large as our universe in space and time — is inconceivably remote.

Or to put this another way, it appears dead obvious that the purpose of the universe was to make us possible.

It would follow that our lives must be in some strange way — beyond any passing subjective enthusiasm — worth living. For, Someone went to a lot of trouble to put us here.

Whether He also planted microbes on Mars for us to find, in our season, is an open question. I can’t see why He would, but then, I am not privy to all of His intentions; only the ones He has told us about.

Hypocrisy, as we all know, is the homage vice pays to virtue. I dislike it very much, especially when I find it in myself, and realize that it will have to be confessed. It is bad, bad, bad. But there are worse things than hypocrisy, sometimes, and I’m inclined to wink at a little hypocrisy when the alternative is some ghastly catastrophe from which, it might seem, no one will recover. But then I find that the winks may also need confession.

A certain Miss Fleming, who was Principal in some (deliciously) backward school I once attended — faced with a proposal to break a Rule, to prevent something terrible from happening — replied in this way: “We never break the Rules! We only bend them.” She further explained that having bent them, we then bend them back the way they were before.

But this is not the preferred method. It leaves your ruler all dimpled and irregular, no matter how you try to hammer it flat. (I imagine a metal ruler for this analogy. A wooden ruler would require steaming; a plastic one would almost certainly crack.)

Should it come to that, my preferred method is rather that of Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson, which is to say, turn a blind eye. For among humankind, there are circumstances in which the spirit of the law is in conflict with the dead letter, and action cannot be delayed. Prudence might, conceivably, recommend this course: to tolerate, as it were, the lesser evil. But Prudence, the ranking Cardinal Virtue, would then feel badly about what she had recommended, and work at finding a path that requires no sin at all; and might therefore be acceptable to all three of the higher, Theological Virtues.

I am thinking of Rome, once again, for some reason. For two generations, or has it been eighty, clever people have been suggesting that we bend the rules, or even change them, to eliminate this or that inconvenience. At the Family Synod, recently, we had some ripe examples.

Given the fact, the plain fact, that a very high proportion of Catholics are not only breaking the rules on the sanctity of marriage — starting with the little matter of contraception, then going the rest of the way — shouldn’t the Church (“just slightly”) adjust the rules to make them — you know, more “realistic.” I mean like, yeah, “nobody” is following them, why don’t we move the line in the sand back a yard or three? And hey, look around. The people who are breaking the rules are getting away with it anyway, haven’t you noticed? … (“Hypocrisy, hypocrisy!”)

Now, fact-check, plenty of people I know personally are doing their level best to follow the rules, often to the point of personal sacrifice, and public embarrassment; and often, too, they are treated like neanderthal body odour by their “progressive” priests. (Anecdotes will not be supplied; there’d be no end once I got started.) And these faithful are the very people who are undermined, who are filled with desolation, who are even in some cases broken, every time some clever clergy suggest bending the rules to accommodate the legion who have nothing but contempt for the rules, anyway.

Beloved Cardinal Burke — so brilliant as well as stalwart in defending the Canon Law, yet recently removed from the Signatura — has repeatedly explained, in words not hard to understand, for anyone who happens to be listening — that Church teaching and practice are married. It would be monstrous if the Church taught one thing, and practised another. Verily, it would be hypocritical. And as the teaching itself does not come from any Pope or Council or Synod, but from Christ, it cannot be amended. It can only be more, or less, understood. To propose little adjustments in “pastoral practice,” to keep up with the times, is not helpful. It is instead unambiguously Evil.

The Church, from her beginning, has been at war with “the times.” She has, as I think those acquainted with Church History will affirm, never been at peace with them.

Now, fact-check, those who attend Mass may indeed notice that, every Sunday, the great majority of pew-sitters — almost all — go up for Communion. (This was not the case fifty years ago.) They may also observe that they are seldom, if ever, warned of the consequences — to them — of approaching the altar in a state of mortal sin. In other words, one is witnessing the terrible disorder in which we find, at present, our poor Church.

First, one goes to these little booths, to confess one’s sins. Which isn’t a simple matter of fessing up, if one is living in a state of mortal sin, and has every intention of continuing to do so. For then the sin cannot be absolved, and any absolution one may have obtained by lying, will be the opposite of valid. One will have to fix the mess one has made, before proceeding to the rail. (If the devils have not removed the rail and kneelers.) Unless: one wishes to call attention to oneself, by humbly approaching said altar for the pastoral blessing, as a divine “get well” encouragement. For that would require guts, moxie, pluck, daring, cojones, gallantry, fortitude, Courage.

For contrition invariably requires Courage (another of those Cardinal Virtues). Every decent priest in those booths knows this; the heart of every one goes out to help an honest sinner — who has slipped, fallen, on the demonic ice (adapt for latitude), … and must now get up. For that is exactly what Christ did, and Christ would do. He was a gentleman like that.

One’s obligation, as a Catholic, to attend the Mass on days of obligation, does not cease because one is not in a state of grace. But not being in that state, one compounds one’s sin — and very seriously compounds it — by taking Communion. And that is simply how things are, and have been for the last twenty centuries, and will be for however many more.

There are priests, alas — there are innumerable priests — who, in the current sorry state of the Church, will turn a blind eye. The worst of them will try to justify this, by claiming that they are being “merciful,” when what they are showing is the opposite of mercy. For they are helping people to compound their sins — they are doing their bit to ice the slide to Hell for these people. That is not merciful. That is flat-out Evil.

So what is the Church to do about this? The answer suggests itself: uphold the rules, with constantly improving rigour and vigour. Do everything in her power to make the people understand them. And live with the consequences, whatever they may be.

That is what Our Lord did, for our example: what He had to do. And then He accepted the consequences. That is the meaning of the Crucifix one may find still hanging, here and there — “the kind with the little man on it,” as some shop clerk once put it with unwitting genius, in a Catholic supplies store.

It is that very example that has through the centuries, paradoxically enough, attracted millions upon millions to conversion, even while scaring the cowardly away. For our Lord does not turn a blind eye. His “pastoral policy” is to make the blind see.

Gaudete! … Gaudete in Domino semper! … Iterum dico, gaudete! …

As a once-Anglican; nay before that, as an unreligioned boy who became utterly entranced by the Bell Anthem of Henry Purcell, I cannot look upon the Latin words in this morning’s Introit without the sung translation pealing forth, in my mind’s ear:

Rejoice in the Lord alway, / and again I say, Rejoice! / Rejoice in the Lord alway! / And again, again, again I say, Rejoice! / The Lord is at hand, the Lord is at hand!

Be careful for nothing, / but in everything / by pray’r and supplication of thanksgiving / let your requests be made known unto God;

And the peace of God which passeth all, all, all understanding / shall keep your hearts and minds / through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Rejoice in the Lord alway! …

All Catholics should know the drill. In the middle of Advent, a season of fasting and sobriety, of abnegation and renunciation, of penitence and preparation — for the Christ-Mass, the Nativity of our Lord — there is this sudden and seemingly unseasonal upswelling, of the Gloria. And the reason is, that we are half way to Bethlehem.

There is nothing more than that to say; but there is so much more to sing. It does not matter that the world is dark around us, and that it can expect only darkness, because it is without Hope. We, for our part, know what is coming; and our Hope is not for what might be, by some obscure intellectual postulation, but for what is, and has been always, and will always be.

And we can know that we are not abandoned: that in the pitch of darkness, cometh He.

Gaudete!

The world is full of blather. Some days I don’t want to add any more. I suppose the world has always been thus, but the blather wasn’t always copied and amplified. Gutenberg has a lot to answer for; but so do others.

In the New Yorker, or rather its website, I had just read a memoir of the Silicon Valley “CEO talk” that was given to writers and editors of the old American liberal magazine, New Republic. (Two-thirds of whom have quit, with their usual smug gestures.) The speech didn’t actually say anything, as I could judge from the excerpts. If I’d tried to write an old-fashioned précis, I’d be forever staring at a blank page. For it was just blather. Unwittingly, I’m sure, the Boss was “communicating”: that he had no interest whatever in the content side of his proposed new “vertically-integrated digital platform.” (Which means what? Turning the platform on its end?) But as his blather went on and on, his audience would have picked up a few hints. Chiefly, a patronizing insinuation that the way they’d been doing things, the last hundred years, was rather sweet, but must go into the trashcan tomorrow. For tomorrow, everything will be different. Executives like to talk this talk, when the troops are assembled. They are under the curious impression that it is inspiring.

And then, I followed a reader’s link to the Vatican website. There I found some kind of apostolic letter on the consecrated life, which I read with growing bleakness. For it was mind-numbing: page after page of “CEO talk,” in its current ecclesial form. Till I realized I should not be reading: it could only make one want to quit. (I see that the notorious Frenchman, Yves Daoudal, explains what is missing that should be present, and what is present that should be missing, here.) All the monks and nuns in the world were instructed, for example, to “go forth to the existential peripheries.” (If someone heard me say that, he’d know I was suggesting something rude.) Yes, it was all very sweet, that the Church had been praying in that outdated, pre-Vatican II manner, the last twenty centuries. Tomorrow we will all be tossed.

I should like to draught on this occasion some kind of apostolic exhortation, in six words. “Say the black. Do the red.”

My piece over at The Thing today goes back to China (here). I, as others going back perhaps to Matteo Ricci, if not to St Francis Xavier, see a natural fit between the Thomist account of heavenly things, and the Confucian account of things under Heaven. This link was explored and attempted, in the past, by the Jesuits of the China missions. For many explicable reasons, it failed. I am exhilarated to see that it seems to be under exploration again, however timidly and tentatively, now from the Chinese side.

It strikes me that my view of China is analogous to my view of the Catholic Church. I did not join the latter because I was impressed by its current activities. Far from that. Well before joining, and since, I have been under the impression that the Church is in a serious mess — one which may be traced to circumstances clearly preceding Vatican II; and one which can and will be righted only by divine intervention: by Christ. I was instead received, coming up to eleven years ago, with a view of the Church through all twenty centuries, and more fundamentally, in view of her Founder and His promise to sustain her. But let me, for the sake of my point, set that “more fundamentally” aside.

The China for which I have a consistent, very high regard, is the China of more than twenty centuries. This is a civilization whose achievements over time — even without the Revelation, and as it were, only by natural reason — have been extraordinary, and are in some respects greater than any other civilization known to history. China is gutted today; gutted by the worst effects of both the prevailing materialist ideologies, “socialism” and “capitalism.” Her own best traditions were abandoned in seeking false goods. Of course, many of the evils were done to her by vicious external agents; but much more by a destructive envy of foreign wealth and power. (So much of the damage to the Catholic Church has been, in a parallel way, self-administered.)

Yet she is not dead. To my mind (and no other rules this Idleblog), the magnificent positives of the Confucian tradition are still accessible to some men; still comprehensible to them. The possibility of recovery is not quite extinguished. And my sense is that this — not foreign, in the end, but universal — “Thomist” or Catholic account of “the things of Heaven,” is the very stimulant that could raise what is most admirable in that “Confucian” or Chinese tradition out of its apparent grave.

A Catholic Christian China would, in this sense, become more, not less, “Chinese.” Her own Confucian tradition, wise and penetrating the heart of man, would be appreciated more, not less.

For reasons any Punjabi would likely understand (and as a child of Lahore I claim some modest appreciation), pork curries are comparatively rare. But up here in the kitchen of the High Doganate, the problem what to do with your leftover fried pork-belly rinds arose last night, and I set about solving it in a characteristically Subcontinental way.

More candidly, I should admit that my approach was somewhat “fusion,” and that the product of my galley labour might be more accurately described as a “White Trash Pork Dal Masala.”

From greater India we get the spices (very cheap), and the patience to let things bubble away at very low heat. From America come ingredients that may be discharged from cans. We (in the sense of, I) drowned the rinds in a tin of Habitant pea soup, then simmered for an hour with whatever came to hand at half-attention: ground cumin, coriander, fenugreek, blackpepper, mustardseed, and turmeric to be sure; and little dollops of garlic and Naga chilli pastes. Oh, and a crushed dried lime leaf or two. All they need is time, to mingle.

That’s it. Serve in an elegant flat bowl, with store-boughten chapati, or better, fresh bread of one’s own manufacture. … (It was delicious.)

True, I cannot hope to compete with Father Zed as a culinary blogger — I am terrified of anything that requires French skills — but I’m struck by how well one can eat in relative penury, here in the Greater Parkdale Area, if one will muck about. I have no sympathy for these poor people, often with feral-looking kids, hanging about the hamburger franchises, when they could do much better at home for much less than half the price. And raise those children with memories of a family dinner table, and civil conversation, after the Angelus, and grace.

A Pennsylvanian correspondent reports that one must have the experience of a supermarket queue, behind a fat lady with food stamps on guvmint “pay day,” to properly appreciate the welfare state. “It cures one of tolerance for the whining of the poor.”

Surely part of our Christendom Restoration Project should consist of catechizing the impecunious on the art of good living, within their permanently limited means. We should also revive the distinction between the deserving and undeserving of our charitable ministrations, on which Saint Paul was clear.

The phrase in my heading is from the Syllabus of Errors, whose 150th anniversary we also celebrated, yesterday. It was published quite intentionally on the tenth anniversary of the Dogmatic Definition of the Immaculate Conception — tacked onto the encyclical, Quanta Cura, itself a magnificent condemnation of the whole, unqualified idea of “freedom of conscience,” and related “human rights,” “pluralism,” “democracy,” and so forth. It was a riposte to anti-clerical governments and movements that had been sweeping Europe. Outwardly, they triumphed, so that today, among the intellectually debilitated, incapable of thinking beyond popular cliché, the other side of the argument is invisible.

Yet the intent and actual arguments of the encyclical were misrepresented, then as now. Example: parents already had civil “rights,” and the idea that education should be secularized might conceivably be among them. If they wanted to found or support secular schools, they could. But this was not what the anti-clericals were doing. Instead they were seizing Church property, including Church schools, and forcibly secularizing them.

The exponents of the “rights of man” have always been totalitarians. As Christ taught, the Devil is not only the father of lies, but was from the beginning a murderer. It is no accident that the great revolutionaries and liberators of history were all dripping in blood: for all have served the Prince of This World, and all have been inhabited by demons.

Pius IX was a liberal, or at least, all Europe was convinced of this at his election in June, 1846: a “moderate liberal” in the political parlance of today. Many cardinals were absent, and the conclave was somewhat rushed, to make him Pope before vetoes could arrive from Milan and Vienna. He was the last Pope to serve as sovereign ruler over the Papal States in central Italy, and one of his first acts in that capacity was to empty the gaols of political prisoners. This was like closing Guantanamo: for there was no gratitude from the other side, and most of the inmates went right back into the field as subversives and terrorists.

Worse was to come. We may hold Pius IX responsible for the introduction of railways to central Italy, and the provision of street-lighting in Rome. He advanced many other “forward-looking” projects and institutional “reforms” in the districts he governed. This could only whet the appetites of the progressives.

Pius IX was also the convenor of Vatican I. (Broken up, as gentle reader may recall, when the jackboots of the Risorgimento marched into Rome, and made the Pope “a prisoner in the Vatican.”) And, the definer of the dogma of “papal infallibility” (which is to say, the Pope who drew its limits).

He was our longest-serving Pope (thirty-something years), which helps to explain why he’d acquired the reputation of a reactionary by the time he died. It is called on-the-job training. But long before the end of his reign, he had appalled many of his initial supporters by proving that he actually was a believing Catholic, with an obsessive regard for the salvation of souls, and no interest in compromising basic Catholic doctrine. He set his neck against the lies — both philosophical and theological — upon which opponents of the Church depended, both intellectually and spiritually. He was a very brave man.

The Syllabus of Errors, among my favourite papal documents of all time, condemns eighty propositions that “nice, liberal people” are inclined to take for granted, and gives directions in the literature to where they are confuted. There is a wonderfully masculine flavour to the thing: there is no shirking from plain fact and plain Latin. The document could perhaps be restated in the language of the present day, to expose a few more of the conceits of post-modern sloganeering; but there is nothing in the list that would need to be abandoned, nor anything essential that was overlooked. For the idiocies which govern the contemporary mind have been with us continuously since the Enlightenment, and were prefigured in the Reformation.

One of the remarks isn’t numbered. Between items 18 and 19 we find a blanket condemnation of “pests of this kind,” referring to socialists, communists, biblical societies, liberal clerical associations, and so forth. It is merely a reminder that there are cockroaches about, or rats spreading plague. The ideas they carry are the same as those enumerated through the rest of the document; but the passage adds a useful warning that they are vectors for these spiritual diseases in their most virulent forms.

Thanks to the triumph of secular education, current critics of the Church and her teachings — in media, academia, the law schools, bureaucracies, and elsewhere — may lack the intelligence of critics in earlier generations. But alas, so do many of her defenders. The revival of Christendom will require the reanimation of the battle of ideas which Pope Pius IX fought, so gallantly.

“To create Oneself out of nothing is an impressive accomplishment,” said an atheist friend, who enjoyed especially making fun of Catholics. “But to turn around then and create your own Mother, is flabbergasting.”

Not to my surprise, that man is a Catholic today.

It is the 160th anniversary of the Dogmatic Definition of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, by Pope Pius IX. And of course, a holy day of obligation, so if you haven’t been to Mass, get there now! … And if you are a United Statist, as many of the readers of this Idleblog seem to be, get there double-quick. Because, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Conceived Without Sin, is the patroness of your country. And was so proclaimed, from Baltimore, even before this dogma was formally proclaimed at Rome.

And was so, even before the proclamation of those United States, for she came north with the Spanish missionaries, and was embraced by the Indians of the Borderlands, singing the Alabado:

Y la limpia Concepcion
De la Reina de los Cielos,
Que quedando Virgen Pura,
Es Madre del Verbo Eterno.

Which makes her, of course, both Spanish, and Indian, as well as United States American; yet even more than that, for she is Queen of Sky and Earth.

Indeed the dogma, that our Virgin Mother was born sinless — free from the sin of Adam, free from original sin — was formally proclaimed long after — centuries upon centuries after — it had already been accepted throughout the Catholic world; and by the Church both East and West. It was not something Pius IX made up on the spur of the moment (as too many Protestants were taught to believe). Read, if gentle reader will, that Pope’s own explanation, in his apostolic constitution, Ineffablis Deus (which may be found here).

Those who do not think the dogma biblical, should go and read the Book of Proverbs, or better still, just go to Mass and have it sung to you. From the eighth chapter, beginning, Dominus possedit me:

“The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His ways, before He made anything, from the beginning. I was set up from eternity, and of old, before the earth was made. The depths were not as yet, and I was already conceived. …”

The United States, Canada, England, Australia and so forth — the English-speaking diaspora, “we” — were from our beginnings consecrated to Mary. Throughout Europe, in the later Middle Ages, England was known as the Marian land; and to this day it shows in the names of her parish churches. In the new (since 2011) Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, by which remaining faithful Anglicans may return to communion with Rome, along with their glorious liturgical heritage, this Marian tradition is again affirmed, restored and upheld.

To which I can only add: Ave, Ave, Ave Maria!

There’s a lovely cartoon somewhere, showing a policeman with a handcuffed Santa Claus, bent over the hood of a car. Saint Nicholas stands near, in full Byzantine episcopal regalia.

“All good, your excellency. I’ve arrested the man who tried to steal your identity.”

The original Saint (Bishop of Myra, within modern Turkey; born about 270 AD, died on the 6th of December, 343) was an exponent of tough love. His vermillion complexion came from beatings in the Roman prisons, under Diocletian’s persecution. His title, “Confessor,” means he kept the faith. He was among the surviving Christians, suddenly sprung under Constantine.

Nicholas was an orphan, but of wealthy parents carried off in a plague. Throughout his life he distributed his inheritance, discreetly, to persons in need. Most famously he learned of a single father, with three daughters and no money for their dowries, thus no prospect of respectable marriages, so that from sheer penury they were in danger of becoming prostitutes. Like a thief in the night, he came to the man’s window, and tossed in a bag of gold coins. (By another account, he dropped the bag down the man’s chimney.)

He gave presents to poor children. He would sneak his coins into the shoes of paupers while they were at prayer. He was very widely revered and adored.

Saint Nicholas (who “evolved” into “Santa Claus,” via his elided Dutch name, “Sinterklaas”) was present at the Council of Nicaea (325), where the Church disowned the Arian heresy. Arius himself was present to defend his rather complex, “simplifying” theological ideas. He was a rationalizer, heir to Gnostic thinkers who acknowledged Christ not as Very God, but as a kind of super-prophet, and who therefore declared the Trinity all bunk. (This would reprise as Islam, three centuries later.)

The doctrine of Arius was more subtle than that. He was trying to square the circle, or cube it, by making Christ the creator of the universe, but God the creator of Christ, thus “God the Father” the only full immortal, from the beginning. The Logos was not a person, Arius insisted, but instead the spirit of reason from this God, by which men could figure out everything for themselves. (This would reprise in the Enlightenment.)

Plus much more intellectual ducking and weaving, unsuitable to an Idlepost. In the Nicene Creed, we recite the formula by which Holy Church disowned not only Arianism, but all versions of Trinity denial, in a way that has now held solid through seventeen centuries.

But at the Council itself, back in the IVth century, a lot was on the line. While Arius was weaving his verbal and speculative tapestry, Saint Nicholas lost his temper. He went over to Arius in person, and decked him.

This was considered behaviour unbecoming in a bishop, and Nicholas found himself back in the slammer. He’d been stripped on the spot of his gospel book, and of his pallium (liturgical vestment), the two marks of his office.

We consult the Byzantine iconography to learn what came next. Notice behind Saint Nicholas the small figures of Christ, carrying the book, and of Mary, carrying the pallium. In the miracle, of which the Emperor Constantine must have been convinced at the time, Christ had come to Saint Nicholas in his cell, to ask him directly why he had behaved in such a violent way.

To which Nicholas had replied: “Because I love you so much.”

At which Our Lord and Our Lady restored to Saint Nicholas the marks of his office.

It takes a while, sometimes, for news to reach me from Kampala, Uganda. But a correspondent alerts me, this morning, to the result of the Review Conference of the International Criminal Court, declared on Saturday, 12th June, 2010. It is big news indeed: signatories have agreed to make starting a war into a grave international criminal offence. Henceforth, anyone who starts one goes straight to The Hague, to be disciplined for his improper behaviour. This means he could face years of hearings. Surely, knowing that will stop aggressors dead in their tracks.

How relieved one feels, to know there will be no more wars.

As my correspondent mentions, this may seem a small thing in the labour of ages. But it is a first step, a “baby step,” decisively in the right direction.

I entirely agree, and look forward to further efforts by the United Nations, on behalf of the ICC. For I think they should also have laws against earthquakes, floods, and tornadoes.

The Catholic Church is unique among institutions in the modern West, in taking women seriously — as women.

Parse that last sentence carefully and one will find less overstatement than one might have hoped for. I did not use “unique” to mean “exclusive”; and “modern” may be restricted to the last half-century or so. Focus, rather, on what is plainly intended: the italicized qualification after the long dash.

Many individuals, of both sexes, do in fact take women seriously (as women). In many jurisdictions, this is now against the law, but it happens all the same. Various other “faith groups” continue to recognize women as having their own distinct nature and identity — Orthodox Jews come first to mind, then Orthodox Christians. Lots of Evangelicals.

On the other hand, most mainstream Protestant congregations, so far as they have any members left at all, formally withdraw this recognition. Too, many “modern” or “liberal” or “recovering” Catholics (nominal ones who look upon Church teaching as merely quaint) reject the notion that women could be women. But the Catholic Church cannot always be held responsible for the views of those who contradict her. (Even if, in the long run, she probably can, as I argued here.)

Certainly, the post-Christian, post-rational “secular” authorities deny that women (or men) exist, and have gone to the trouble of eliminating “father,” “mother,” “son,” “daughter,” “brother,” “sister,” “uncle,” “aunt,” and any other terms that seem to imply a sexual identity, from all legislation — making much of it retroactively quite insane. Their attack on what they call the “traditional” (i.e. normal) family is unambiguous. For it was and remains highly sexed, whereas the new State-protected “alternative families” are invariably sterile. (Some wiggle-room is still left for “breeders,” however, pending the invention of new reproductive technology.)

A good test of this — fanatic denial of the blatantly obvious — may be conducted by using the word “priestess.” Those demanding female priests (an unCatholic notion if there ever was one) are likely as not to freak at the use of that word. They do not like the connotation, and will declare that it is “sexist.” They want females to be priests the same as men. It would defeat this intention to call them “priestesses,” as well as calling attention (among the historically informed) to the very conscious decision made by the early Church to avoid the cultural and spiritual implications of the priestess function within ancient and pagan religions. For priestess cults, and their reputations, were something early Christians wanted to get away from.

I would have to lose most readers, including possibly myself, with a fuller discussion of a matter not immediately relevant to the question of the irreducible identity of women. Which is to say, the womanliness of them. Suffice, it was long recognized — i.e. universally and for thousands of years, as opposed to by a shrinking, beleaguered minority in the last few decades — and would have been a point of agreement between, say, every kind of Gnostic, and credal Christians. The Gnostics today differ from the ancient Gnostics, by denying what is tangible. In other respects, however, the views of liberal and progressive Christians are identical with those of the heretics which the Church somehow survived in later, decadent Roman antiquity.

So perhaps “sexist” is the best term to bring out this distinction, or rather aggressive refusal to distinguish. A person, male or female, who takes it that women are women (and men are men) is today called “sexist.” This is, as I say, a concept that would leave our ancestors (including most early feminists) scratching their heads. There are two (2) sexes, and those who dispute this were long understood to be deranged. Even the concept of an hermaphrodite confirms this, for what is he or she but an unusual mixture of these two sexes? Similarly with such current initials as L, G, B, T, &c: for regardless of any self-assigned “orientation,” the actual persons are detectably male, or female, or some riff on those two basic themes.

That men and women may also have much in common — opposable thumbs come to mind — I take for granted. I like to contrast both male and female humans with other sexually-paired primates, though this is another distinction that is becoming controversial. God made them male and female, in my frankly religious understanding, but this does not mean He did not do the same for other species. It instead points to a deeper profundity: Yin and Yang created He them.

Let us not be distracted by pettifog in this matter. Those who oppose, or even propose to persecute “sexists,” themselves frequently maintain a distinction between the sexes, but it is glibly statistical, when not incomprehensible. Consider for instance an argument I heard recently, amounting to a complaint, that the ratio of male to female saxophone players is too high. Why would this be so? “Because we have a male-dominant culture, and saxes are traditionally associated with macho.”

Both statements are lies, the first in a boring, but the second in an interesting way. Adolphe Sax invented the instrument (around 1840) to fill a hole between the feminine woodwind and the masculine brass sections in an orchestra. It was only after the fact that this gender-neutral horn itself selected for male players. And even feminists — who are seldom quite as obtuse as they pretend — can see that a woman playing a sax is making a “statement” in which she is paradoxically accentuating her “female sexuality.” The suggestion that this should be cancelled by sex quotas is thus demonstrably batty.

We could extend this by considering different aspects of masculine identity embodied in the voices of soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones, and then broadening to draw comparisons across the wind range, through the historical development of the heteroglottal reed, but that would make our discussion too lascivious.

As “diversity” is much prized today, let me mention that I am a sexist myself. Or, if I’m not, nobody is. I share the unreconstructed view of my diverse parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and other ancestors, back to Eve and Adam, on the existence of, and distinction between, the two sexes. Only one of them can have babies. Only the other can impregnate. But let me add that this is not the only distinction, and moreover, a large field of distinctions would anyway follow if only from that elephantine biological fact.

Now, there’s a point to all this, and perhaps I’ll get to it tomorrow.

A gentleman in Texas continues to heckle my effusions, pretending to correct me in small matters, such as my opposition to “democracy,” Darwinism, technological progress, the electronic media in which I operate and indeed, the whole modern world. He is an exponent of “Tea Party” values, which I find unpleasantly populist and liberal. Too, he persistently defends the American Revolution, and displays a bigoted resentment of British institutions, including our Crown. He has some sort of Yankee fixation on “George the Turd,” long dead and buried. Lately he has taken to calling me a “Thirteenther.”

The term will have to be explained. It originated during one of my rare appearances on television, when another guest called me, “A Man of the Thirteenth Century.” I took this for the finest compliment I had ever received in a public place, and added it immediately to my collection of Honours, the way Henry Tudor did with “Fidei defensor.”

This morning the gentleman pings to me photographs of the British House of Commons in session. These included nine in which the members were debating important public issues, and in which the chamber was almost empty. Two more were attached, in which they were discussing MPs’ pay, and expenses, and in these the chamber was packed to the gills.

Needless to say, this could hardly surprise me. Gentle reader will be acquainted with my view of politicians, by which my views on “democracy” are explained. Democracy, or more precisely, crass demagoguery, will produce such results every time. It makes no sense whatever to put political power in the hands of those who want it, and will beg for it, and think they can benefit from it, when in fact worldly power is detrimental to their souls. It seems perfectly obvious, at least to me, that the public interest would be better served by inheriting Lords. Unlike “the people,” nature will not always select for charismatic head cases; and anyway, those who must take on solemn responsibilities should be properly apprenticed to their trade.

Thus I’m delighted to see my Chief Texas Correspondent coming round to my Thirteenther view of Parliament.

As a traditionalist, I’d be entirely opposed to abolishing such a venerable (and mediaeval) institution. But it should not be allowed to drift out of hand. The truth is that, today, we have considerable work to do, rolling back many generations of parliamentary “reform.”

To be sure, the House of Commons should meet, but not so frequently as to become tedious. And the sessions should be filled with pageantry, including long magnificent rituals in Latin or, if necessary, Greek. I have always been thrilled by the Opening of Parliament, but attendees should be restricted to those who look well on a horse, and there should be a matching Closing of Parliament, of at least equal splendour.

Too, the great majority of seats should be assigned to “rotten boroughs,” in which members are elected by very small cabals: a dozen or fewer old borborygmatics, who can be relied upon to return one of their own, or one of their flunkeys. The sort who will sneer and jeer at any proposal for innovation, and snore ostentatiously during debates.

And if they do manage to pass something clever in the House of Commons, it will be promptly crushed in the House of Lords.

And if it somehow gets past them, the Queen shouldn’t have to sign it. Or even read it, if she’s not in the mood.

And no member of either House should be paid. Rather, each will need a lot of money to pay his own expenses: for the ceremonial will be grand, and his clothes alone will cost him a caboodle.

My one concession to modernity would be ashtrays everywhere in the committee rooms. These rooms should be small, with low ceilings, and poor ventilation, leaving even the smokers choking and gasping for fresh air, singularly eager to conclude their business. And a very attractive, high-ceilinged pub should be set right across the street, with beautiful and flirtatious barmaids, and the press strictly banned.

On sober second thought, it might not be necessary to ban them, since most would be languishing in the Tower, out of sight and mind from the “working men of England,” who have lives, and families, and jobs to be getting on with.