Essays in Idleness

I am told that I will probably dislike Pope Leo XIV, by a person who generally knows what I will dislike, and that I try to be predictable. My preference doesn’t matter, however, because even if I did not approve, the world’s couple billion Catholics would have to live with the conclave’s selection. Pope Benedict XVI usefully explained that God does not choose the pope. This is a superstition, and I think not a very nice one, for were it true, man would not be free. (Think it through: the pope is not the Christ.) To contradict the late Pope Francis, God — and thank Him — is not in the habit of surprising us, and does not make a mess, yet He allows men to sink into disorder. But God may choose to be more or less active in the guidance of this and every other man, and we, for our part, are guided to bless and to love All Souls.

Pope Leo’s appearance with traditional name and vestments suggests he will return to where Pope Francis instinctively departed. That Leo XIV chose his name after Leo XIII, the author of that novel treatise, Rerum Novarum, is “interesting.” His promotion of the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and of Thomist scholasticism as the starch holding Catholic philosophy, theology, and schools together, in full integration, was signal. It is not “a system,” as every clever philosopher proposes one, but a Catholic system; his encyclical Aeterni Patris ought to be revived and refreshed. For not everything from 1879 is dated; faith and reason are still linked.

Nevertheless, his dress gives promise that we may rely on him to be more stable than his predecessor, thus more papistical, even though certainly with progressive swish. Like too many others, he was recently elevated to “the highest pay grade” — to the cardinalate, alas. May we at least hope to hear less about “Vatican II,” and more about the immortal Catholic doctrine? For this is what we need.

Probably, Pope Leo XIV will be a disaster, like Pope Francis. … But you know me: “Always look on the bright side.”

“There will always be an England,” my mommy and her friends used to sing, with tears in their eyes, and some may sing today, eighty years after the Victory Europe celebrations. Too, there will always be a France, &c — or the “Franks,” or “Franj,” as the Saracens used to call them, when, as Crusaders, they were trying to recover the most Holy Christian lands, between the XIth and XVth centuries. England, being afloat on an irremovable island, will not be overrun except by the ice, when the northern glaciation reasserts itself — whenupon France and England will once again be joined together, as the seas recede around Europe. But this is to look too far ahead. On present demographic trends they will much sooner be conquered by Islam.

Then, we may sing, perhaps, “There will always be an Anti-America,” even as the opposition to America from Europe dies away, to be replaced by something more forceful from the Ummah.

But it was seeing off the Nazis that we were toasting on the 8th of May, 1945.

My mommy, an unmarried nurse in Halifax at the time, had to be rescued from our allied drunken louts when she came off shift. (Our great Atlantic port was crawling with sailors from everywhere.) Without time to explain what they were up to, chivalrous Canadian military toughs threw my mother in the back of a truck, with other ladies, and drove her several miles out of town. Thanks to this precaution, she was not raped.

The Haligonian licker stores had been, as a further precaution, locked down tight. But they were all trashed and looted by the sailors and soldiers, in a memorable show of international solidarity.

Yes, there will always be an England, and a Canada too, and we will always win, unless we don’t.

Because he is a “populist” (i.e. give the people the stuff they want, which includes parades, incidentally), Mr Trump does not, and possibly cannot, grasp the appeal of “sovereignty,” or its expression in nationalism. This has already cost him, politically, outside of the USA and the anti-American forces at home. It is why Greenland, Canada, and now Australia have been going farther over onto their dark side, and making ruinous alliances instead with Red China.

One could go into those cases individually, but in Mr Mark Carney we see it most unambiguously. For the new Canadian prime minister is notoriously as pro-Sinitic as he is anti-carbon, and is willing to make huge sacrifices at the expense of Canada in order to line the pockets of his masters in Peking, and caress the pleasures and pretensions of the World Economic Forum. Nor is he entirely dishonest; he really believes in selling out. He also acknowledges the hard-left principle of universal multiculturalism, over against both nationalism and populism. His Liberal Party is filled, too, with traitors of that sort.

In order not to be a traitor, or some other kind of criminal fool, one must be loyal to something. This should not be to something arbitrarily assigned, but rather to principles rationally and viscerally true. In particular, we should pursue a foreign policy that combines all the higher allegiances — as Canada and Australia once did — and in which a civilized population (if one can be made to exist) will find its best features represented.

This is why I recommend that the Summa Contra Gentiles should be the basis of our foreign policy — not, perhaps, exactly as it was written in the XIIIth century by Saint Thomas, but updated in the same spirit. It gives, without directly depending on Christian revelation, a comprehensive view of the world, and of what is wrong with all non-Christian viewpoints. Our collective approach to this world must be founded in a natural theology, and this Summa, in its first three books, safely guides us to what that should be.

____________

POSTSCRIPTUM. — Sprayed by news from Washington this morning, in which (according to the CBC, &c) Carney says repeatedly, “Canada is not for sale.” Who, I wonder, was proposing to buy it? If someone is, I would at least like to look at their offer. Mr Trump certainly hasn’t mentioned a price, and he is too sensible a businessman to do so. I would guess his “51st state” blather is just positioning himself for when we break up, and the larger, chocolate pieces will be available for free.

The case becomes confusing in domestic politics, where virtually all the politicians lie, cheat, and steal — those on the left, such as Liberals and Democrats, much more than those on the right — and yet, it is painful to choose between one brand of fraudulence and another. My personal preference for the party on the right is because they need not lie, cheat, or steal necessarily; whereas, if you are on the left you have no choice. In this sense, we could afford to be more merciful to the diehard leftists, but of course, not so merciful that they will survive.

In diplomacy, the matter is more obvious. The choice is between basically normal, Westernized regimes, and their Imperial offspring; and ideological regimes. It is complicated only because ideology proliferates, when making compromises with the Devil. But there are regimes in which there is no compromise: for instance, Communist regimes. These do not sometimes violate diplomatic agreements. They always do. The Red Chinese economy, for instance, has been built entirely upon intellectual theft, and ugly forms of exploitation. The idea that “free trade” with them would moderate their commercial practices did not, and would not, prove true.

I was writing about this long before Tiananmen, in columns commonly received as radical and crazy. And yet, they were entirely correct. This is because Communists are communist: they have no morals, even in principle.

An intelligent person will not deal with those who are consistently dishonest.

Pietro, good to hear you are still alive, too. I continue to be unhealthy.

My chief source is long observation; I do not have any surprising contacts in contemporary Trumpland. But the humour with which that gentleman for instance sets up his old friend Carney! Yes, they’ve been an item for a long time, & they both use the globalist camp to advance their self-interests. Mr Carney will now usefully take credit for the final Canadian disintegration.

The joke was Mr Poilievre, successfully smeared in Liberal propaganda, was perfectly sincere in his opposition to the experimental Trump tariffs, as well as rather naïve and foolish. Carney, by contrast, is not sincere at all; his “outrage” at them was entirely a performance, which he knew he would discard right after the election. His continuing, belief-based but asinine support for “net zero,” advances both Carney’s & Trump’s agenda — by eliminating Alberta gas & oil, the Ontario auto industry, & general “free trade” Canadian competition. The rest of our economy will now move to the United States.

You just have to smile! … Of course Trump was pulling strings for Carney!

The First of May is called, wherever socialism has been imposed or there are aspirants to impose it, “Labour Day.” A milder version of this, in America, falls on the first Monday of September. A “Victims of Communism Day” has been shifted to May 1st from November 7th, in certain jurisdictions, as a formal memorial and rememberance of the (literally) tens of millions of human beings who were slaughtered by the various socialist and atheist regimes. To my mind, “May Day” is an appropriate occasion to torment the various socialists and atheists who persist. Most imagine glibly that they are merely “progressive,” but I do not think their vile ignorance ought to be accommodated.

On the other hand, “May Day” should be spiritually reversed, by re-establishing jolly mediaeval customs with flowers and fertility rites. While it is important that we punish socialists, and quasi-socialists such as environmentalists, we should declare a “Leisure Day” on which to celebrate our occasional flights from these tyrants. For genuine, productive, creative work has always been founded in philosophical leisure, and not in the marching orders of bureaucrats and slave masters. Remember, at least ninety percent of the “government work” for which taxes are collected and public debt incurred is not only absolutely worthless; it is evil, and anti-human. On Leisure Day, we should make it our habit to rebel.

Canadians, especially the Liberals, are governed like many of the stupidest people in the world, chiefly by spite. The same is true among Democrats in America, and Europeans of several sordid nations, where class envy is likeliest to thrive: human nature will tell us what we need to know. But ignore all these foreigners for the moment, for on Monday we had our election. (Australia gets one Saturday, poor Oz.)

It wasn’t a “final” election; it yielded a Liberal minority just a few weeks after the polls had been promising a Conservative blow-out. But by manipulating news about Trump’s tariff ideas, and concealing his marvellous sense of humour, our bought media and desperately corrupt political “insiders” were able to swing the election by 180 degrees. It was like the King-Byng affair of a century ago (see the Wicked Paedia): a memorable previous Canadian example of a sleazy, stinking political operator defeating a morally superior rival, by an emotional campaign against an irrelevant third person.

I could drone on for many, many pages, then would collapse. Ten years of misrule under Justin Trudeau is, after all, exhausting. Instead, I will just make a quick comment on the electorate of eastern Canada. They are like a woman who has been beaten too often by the same violent man, who for his birthday, thoughtfully presents him with a shiny, polished new cudgel.

____________

POSTSCRIPTUM. — One of my fellow citizens (it was Lord Jowls) shudders “at the regal Arthur (Meighen) being equated with plebeian Pierre (Poilievre),” and I might admit that I briefly hesitated. We once had a prime minister with real dignity. Now we almost had one with some dignity, but only in comparison with the abominable low-life embodied by Trudeau or Carney. …

“All things are a-changing / Sage Heracleitus says, / But a tawdry cheapness / Shall outlast our days.”

At the moment of writing, we do not have a pope, so I, at least, cannot name him, though as a hack journalist I am notorious for reporting the future.

We claim that it is somehow irresistible and necessary, that we should comment on the topic of the future, as we comment on every other topic, but of course it is not. For until this very moment, the future has always happened, whether or not its events were foreseen by the legion of scribblers. Why, then, should we be consulted?

Even the period of sede vacante, which may be over by the time this article is read, belongs to that regularity that most humans look for. “The lights stay on and the Swiss Guards get paid,” a Vatican observer assures me.

If I were a Trump, and had annexed the Vatican as well as Greenland, I would continue to pay the irreplaceable Guards but might revert to candles, thus saving a few scellini and centesimi.

Indeed, this transitional period between two popes will be preferred by many “traditionalists,” for when a new pope is elected he is sure to make statements and perhaps do things — whatever they will be — to which we are likely to object. This goes with almost any job. Only a completely insignificant appointment can hope to escape criticism, and in the case of a pope it will often be comprehensive and loud.

We should take a moment in thanksgiving prayer, that we, personally, are rather unlikely to be made pope (although we are qualified as a male), and thus put under terrible responsibility. (There have been 266 popes, plus or minus, and only Benedictines should worry, for they have been elevated seventeen times.)

The notion that it is not good to rise to a position of significance seems not to have been universally subscribed, apparently, for there seems always to be a selection of willing papabile among the cardinals of the Church, who may themselves already have risen too high. It is not just the risk of assassination. For your life will cease to be comfortably your own, and your workload may exceed that of any “servants of the servant.” Henceforth, though you may run, you will not be able to hide.

Worse, there is the season of campaigning. While “in theory” no papal candidate nominates himself, in practice this has been happening since time out of mind. While we, especially I, regret this unofficial ecclesiastical activity, it is a reminder that when the white smoke clears, the pope will be human, and not a successor to Christ in any biological sense. His need for prayer will therefore be quite urgent.

To our collection of mottoes from Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682), author of an investigation into the quincunx, which he observed everywhere around him in The Garden of Cyrus, we must add:

“All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematicks of the City of Heaven.”

We find this in one of the most penetrating books on “intelligent design” in nature, published outside modernity, where enquiry can be free. It approaches this topic from a direction that our contemporaries have failed to consider; that is, neither statistical nor chronological, theoretical nor empirical, but in itself, by the principle of ordination. We find it not at any beginning of any temporal series, but rather, wherever we look.

It was this Sir Thomas who said, “No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money-changer.” But everyone who claims to “follow the science” does this today.

One may see the temple of science in “the Palaces of Bees,” and in every other formation in nature — the mystical, and not “a mystery,” for it is never a mere puzzle or game.

“The finger of God” — who is not the Creator in any narrow sense — “hath left an inscription upon all his works, not graphical or composed of letters, but of their several forms. …” We, at our best and most obedient, must use all of our faculties to partially observe what is manifestly before us.

Yet we cannot observe a creaturely God, who is no Creature, except through Jesus Christ, who can only be observed within His own Creation.  We misunderstand Him entirely when we think of Him as an industrious intervenor, thus assigning Him a role, as we would assign a servant; He does not make things as we make things. He IS, we speculate, the essence of IS-ness — “I am that I am” — and did not come to be.

The triumph of Vulgarity and Ignorance — of the “mass man” as that learned Spaniard, José Ortega y Gasset, described him — or “progress,” as the vulgar and ignorant call it themselves, might also be considered, in conjunction, to be the pre-eminent sign of the times. Except, we must add Stupidity, by which force it has the power of confident interference. But within this revolutionary triangle of modernity — not liberté, égalité, fraternité, as it proclaims, but rather vulgarité, incapacité, stupidité — lies the structure of political life, our democracy. The people can’t be satisfied with anything they have. They cannot rest until they have made “the environment” — and everything in the world around it — over again in their own image.

It would be very easy to avoid wars of all kinds, and also to avoid every social problem, together, usually, with malnourishment and disease. But simple only if the great majority of persons would simply mind their own business, and not try to fix anything — especially by voting. Something approximating to a paradise on earth could soon be achieved, on the reactionary principle of letting things be, and not getting nonsense started. Of course we would still have death, and some unavoidable pain, but these become much easier to cope with when political distractions and systematic “cures” are not proposed.

Sometimes one may find trouble without having looked for it, I grant. For politics is not the only game that attracts violent, psychotic, disordered people. But elections are a sure way to encourage them, and summon their “peaceful” threats. Trouble then results from our own characteristic Stupiditas, when we engage though it was possible to ignore.

So, the paradox, that we need laws to protect the citizen against professional busybodies (i.e. “liberals”) who would homogenize them. As Ortega y Gasset explained, a human society must necessarily be aristocratic; what is not aristocratic is not an actual society. Equality is bullfeathers.

The true, and the most wicked, enemies of mankind, are the people who think they know what they are doing. Note that, the beginning of political wisdom is to know, with holy certainty, that you don’t know.

A close friend in Ottawa says, of our late Pope: “He was a man of his times, and a man for his times.”

And then, of course, he quotes Hamlet: “The time is out of joint.”

In Jerusalem, on the Dome of the Rock — situated on top of what is almost certainly the Holy of Holies, within the ancient Temple precincts — is an inscription, in their earliest angular Kufic script, on what was also the earliest monument the Arabs caused to be erected in a conquered land. It reads, in its most significant part: “Praise to Allah who begets no son and has no associate in power and who has no surrogate for humiliations.” The point is sustained by repetition, together with the contrary assertion that Mohammed alone can provide intercession on the day when the Muslim community alone is resurrected.

That is on the outside of the Dome. On the inside, there is a further long inscription, which mentions Jesus and Mary by name; states that Jesus was an envoy of Allah; that the religion of Allah is Islam; and that Allah will reckon with those who disagree.

Nearly fourteen centuries have passed since this challenge to the existence of Christianity was made; and indeed, we are still living in the fallout, not only of the Saviour who descended from Heaven to earth, but of the largest, most vigorous, and through all fourteen centuries, the most violent denial of Him.

Yet we have today, at least in the more progressive and nominal Christians of North America and Europe — most certainly including Catholics — the curious notion that Christianity is compatible with Islam. His Majesty King Charles III (the nominal head of the Church of England) gave voice to this betrayal in his Easter address this year.

He did not put Islam higher, but put Christianity lower, making it part of our “Diversity.” It was a betrayal of everything, reducing religion to something compatible with the Darwinian cosmology, and with frankly atheist materialism — using “faith,” “hope,” and “love” as throwaway terms.

To be candid, I am a Catholic. (“The worst kind, a convert,” as Marshall McLuhan used to say.) I get, or used to get, a lot of mail. And whatever our bishops and church bureaucracies may think they have achieved, in the way of teaching the Faith, I get to see their results.

For sure, some of the Catholics who write to me are well-educated and well-formed. But on inquiry, I find a large proportion of these are also converts; and that even among those who are not, most have learnt the Faith by their own efforts. Many of these are, as one can see by the way they phrase religious ideas, careful to avoid heresies.

But many other correspondents, declaring themselves to be “cradle Catholics,” are at no pains at all.

I often wonder what the Church is for such people. A nice venue for a wedding, to be sure; a bit of formal “closure” in a funeral. A building that may be worth including on an architectural preservation list, since no one is going to build another like it again. Beyond this, a vague expression of an ethnic identity.

“I was born a Catholic,” some reader frequently writes to me, “unlike you!” (Already in error: nobody is born Catholic). “Don’t you dare tell me what a Catholic should believe!”

The sense of some Catholic ethnicity — hyphenated Irish, Polish, or whatever — goes with other sentimental thoughts. But Catholic means “universal,” so there is a problem when we find nostalgic mush on both sides of the hyphen.

They may or may not dimly remember a cumbersome Catechism that they have never read.

But the whole thing may now apparently be reduced to a “bottom line.” It comes down to being nice to people, and trying (cursorily) not to notice if anyone is mean. It is about being open-minded, and accepting people as they are — unless they happen to be quite religious.

Indeed, whatever else Christ may have done, according to this very common view, He reduced all the Ten Commandments to just One Commandment: that “you mustn’t judge people.”

I wish that were a parody of what I’ve been told in email so often, by self-described Catholics — who then go on to judge me. Over the years, I’ve been told these things not only by the laity, but even by several “modern” Catholic priests, one of whom was clever enough to add the word “misogynistic” to describe my opposition to abortion.

“We should keep an open mind,” through which the wind may whistle. And we ought to look with especially open minds at those who chisel the words of Christ off public buildings; or who teach children in our public schools that the whole history of our Church consists of anti-Muslim Crusades, a Spanish Inquisition, and (let us never forget) the Trial of Galileo.

Likewise, we are asked to keep open minds toward those paragons of art and style who, say, put a Crucifix in a vial of urine, or display a statue of Mary smeared with cow dung. For these people are only “expressing themselves,” and ours is not to judge them — for Christ, I have been told condescendingly by a Catholic professional art critic, was all about “expressing yourself.”

There are quite a few places in the Gospels where Jesus says things that cannot possibly be squared with the smiley-face icon. But faced with any of the very numerous Gospel passages that will come as a surprise to the postmodern reader, he can always allow that Jesus had a right to His opinions. He was, as one “Catholic-born” atheist acquaintance put it, probably no more crazy than many of the people we see walking the streets these days.

There is quite a variety of points of view, and it has become policy in every progressive, formerly-Christian jurisdiction of which I am aware, never to insist upon one over another. For each is a valid statement of a “point-of-view.” And while the Catholic Church is evidently failing to inculcate its own “point-of-view,” the State has no difficulty teaching what it believes, and making us pay for it.

It simply is not possible — not humanly possible, and not possible in logic — to make every view equal to every other. So that if you have, as a governing principle, the proposition that “all points-of-view are equal” — in other words, the defining dogma of multiculturalism — you must perforce walk into the Hell in which that dogma is juxtaposed with the elementary facts of life.

I do not doubt that God will take care of this, and may even forgive, in the fullness of time. But for the foreseeable future, I would like to see some evidence that our bishops and bureaucracies lose sleep on the matter.

“O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark; … the vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.”

I remember the first time, trying to explain, to an astronomer who actually knew less about Christianity than I, that Catholicism is the supernal form of it; that the sacred is written in the stars. And he would just have to be patient, with those starry fires — for they could not be explained briefly, using this word in its modern sense, so that it means rather, “explained away.” It is, in several senses, more mysterious than that, and would take more than one biological lifetime. That is why Christianity is compelled to confirm an extra-biological eternal life. Too, that is why, or rather another “why” — it observes so many paradoxes, all of which come to a head on “Good Friday.”

Consider, for instance, birth and death, and then, ask the question, what is their opposite? Do not confuse immortality with infinity, as is frequently (and quite plausibly) done. For these are not opposites, either, let alone synonyms. Infinity is rather a mathematical conception, of something that doesn’t exist, because it cannot exist. Think this through.

Then, if you are ordinary (or tham-ma-daa, like my astronomer friend, who was Thai, incidentally), you must think it through again.

And far from providing an opposite, erasing the effects of birth and death will confirm the mundane. Like infinity, it will cease to exist. For eternally, if you live, you must die, in quaintly biological terms. It might be painful, but with luck, you will not be crucified.

We are, and in addition to having been, we are fated to will be. (Ironically.)

Of course this cannot be grasped, in the biological flicker of earthly existence. It requires more leisure than we can ever have here, and more horror. For, what is the flame we must pass through, on that starry night?

“The dripping blood our only drink, the bloody flesh our only food: In spite of which we like to think, that we are sound, substantial flesh and blood — again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.”

And you were in the market for ecstasy?