Essays in Idleness

“While Mr Trudeau is the product of two political families — his father was prime minister — he came to politics late, after working as a snowboard instructor.”

A friend in Washington ping’d me this webpage snip from the New York Times this morning, together with his condolences. It captures, perhaps, more adequately than the editors realized, the mindset of our prime minister-elect.

We are in a new political era, not only in Canada I’m afraid. I think of Obama in USA, Trump and Sanders rising; Corbyn across the water; the various “national front” and regional separatist parties now topping the polls in Europe; governments like Syriza’s re-elected in Greece.

What do they all have in common?

Ideologically, one might say they are all over the map. Moreover, self-serving malice and incompetence are normal in politics; it would be unreasonable to present either as an innovation. I am not looking for the kind of commonplace that applies to politicians in all places and times.

Yet we were once dealing with a class of political tradesmen who had clawed their way up the ranks. They arrived in office with some notion of how things work. In the case of Canada’s outgoing prime minister, there was some appreciation of economics, or accountancy. Much as I despised his Liberal predecessors, they also knew what a budget was, and could discern differences between large and small numbers. The elder Trudeau, genetically half-Scotch like me, was a notorious tightwad with his own money; his contrasting extravagance with the public purse showed that he was at least sharp enough to tell them apart.

By extension, these “old style” politicians were also mentally fitted out with clues to what other departments of government did, or tried to avoid doing. There was a certain “professionalism,” a painfully-acquired knowledge of the ropes, and how to pull them. Prime Minister Chrétien, for instance, I despised as a man, in a personal way, given dealings between us; but I could admire him as a political craftsman. Many others, likewise, including Harper most of the time. Cynical or sleazy they might be, but some knowledge of “the system” was de rigueur. The elder Trudeau had spent most of his adult life preying at the edge of the Dominion bureaucracy; he (alas) knew what he was doing when he went in to ravage Canada’s justice system.

Now we have “airheads.” The term is perhaps over-colloquial, but I think it best expresses the quality our new leaders share, wherever they might fall on the old left-to-right spectrum. While some (like the younger Trudeau, or Bill Clinton’s wife) come from political families, or have had (as Corbyn) a life-long obsession with madcap political schemes, the connecting bits are missing in their overview of governance. Mrs Clinton’s embarrassments with email make a good example. The shocking thing is not that she broke secrecy regulations that have landed lesser government officials in gaol. It is that she truly did not know any better.

The Trudeau boy is a generation younger. In addition to snowboarding, his experience includes nightclub bouncer, and teaching high school in Vancouver. To many (me for instance), his father was a devil in human flesh, his mother demonstrably insane, yet the lad was not really exposed to politics until it came into his head, or into the heads of Liberal Party organizers, that thanks to his family connexion, he could probably get elected to Parliament, in Montreal. This happened in 2007; he now has approximately eight years of bewilderment under his belt. His acceptance speech last night was sort-of sweet; it showed him still quite damp behind the ears.

I don’t think he is especially malicious. He has plenty of old-school party advisers to surround him like bodyguards along his way. Indeed, through a leak we discovered they were already dividing the spoils of government contracts, as victory in Quebec came into view. The lad himself has the media savvy of the selfie generation, and can more or less handle the bofferball questions from a sympathetic press. His sincerity shines when it comes to a small range of policy enthusiasms, such as the legalization of marijuana and brothels, and he is visibly convinced that peace is much nicer than war. His promises of “hope and change” may be content-free, for the time being, but I’m sure he “believes” in the drivel he is mouthing. I expect he will prove more used than using, as his government agenda falls into place.

Perhaps I should explain what I mean by “drivel.” I could write, “lies,” but these are only possible to those who have criteria for the truth. Drivel is what people talk who have no such criteria. “Bullshit” is the interchangeable term. The fact that what they’re saying may be true, or untrue, is of no significance to them. It is enough that it sounds plausible. The truthful man knows when he is lying; the post-modern neither knows nor cares. He can believe himself “good,” as drivellers will do, because truth doesn’t come into it.

The old-style politician told knowing lies. The new-style politician does not know what “lies” are. He uses the term rhetorically, against anything he does not want to hear. The old-style politician would back down when confronted with the truth. The new-style politician does not know what you are talking about. He assumes you are only trash-talking him.

“The people” believe in drivel, too, as they have just proved. As I’ve mentioned before, the overwhelming majority of the general, voting population have been morally and intellectually debilitated — “idiotized” is my preferred term — by post-modern media and education, and by spiritual neglect within (often broken) post-modern homes. Large vested interests can lead them by the nose, even while they imagine themselves victims of conspiracy.

For his very numeracy, the outgoing Harper seemed like a Machiavellian conspirator to them. He lacked the warm, mooshy qualities that the “compassionate” politician learns to fake on television. The media told them that Harper was a manipulator, a cold hard calculator, a baddie, a blue meanie trying to keep taxes down for his friends — even though he didn’t have any.

According to polls, only a tiny minority “trust” the honesty of the media; and yet almost everyone today is supersaturate with the products of that media and entertainment industry — in which our new political order is subsumed. Verily: the idea that the media can’t be trusted is a constant media meme. But again, the category of actual “lies” is absent. The people mean “untrustworthy” in another sense; in the sense of, “conspiring against us” — the black hats against the white hats, in that Hollywooden manner.

There are no conspiracies; or rather, none can be successful for long. Those with some knowledge of the world will appreciate the aphorism, that a secret can be kept between two people, only if one of them is dead. (Or if they are married: according to the traditional definition.) Conspiracies fade in the morning light; the perpetrators must fall back on armed tyranny, or nothing.

It only appears that there are vast rightwing conspiracies, or leftwing conspiracies for that matter, because an other-worldly conspirator is at work. He was known as the Devil in former Christian times. He is the primary exploiter of the idiotized — who do not even know he exists.

Two events to mention in the Greater Parkdale Area, today.

By far the most important, in the view of most citizens, will be the baseball game at the former Sky Dome (can’t remember what they call it now), between our Blue Jays and the strangely-named Kansas City “Royals.” As monarchists, we are pleased when any Yanquis genuflect, though puzzled given republican tendencies in the rest of that country.

On looking it up, I discover that the name derives from the American Royal, a livestock show and rodeo in that Missouri port, dating back to the nineteenth century. Now all I need to know is why they called that “the Royal.” …

Aha, goddit. … Rivalry was being offered to the (rather older) livestock show (less rodeo) of the (English) Royal Agricultural Society. … There is a “Royal Welsh Show,” too, which includes falconry and racing events such as four-in-hand that must resemble a rodeo; so why not also a “Royal American Show”? All my Loyalist ancestors approve.

I thought the Kansas City baseball team were called the Athletics, but silly me. That one apparently moved to Oakland, California, forty-six years ago. We all know what Gertrude Stein thought of Oakland. And now we all know that my own interest in baseball fizzled at the age of fifteen. My heart does, however, still rise to some results in “the insect game,” as my Chief Texas Correspondent calls it. He refers to the noble game of cricket: descended, I think (though nobody else does), from the old Roman Harpastum, played with something the size and density of a softball.

As we are reminded by the current Rugby (Union) World Cup, being played over there, the ancient Romans and Alexandrian Hellenists also played a masculine bladder-ball game, involving more gladiatorial collision. The description in the Deipnosophists sounds very much like rugby à quinze. Galen thinks it might be good exercise; Martial mentions it in an epigram; Cicero somewhere describes a freak accident when the follis (football) came through the window of a barber shop, surprising the barber, who then cut the throat of the customer he was shaving. (Well, I share Cicero’s taste for sick humour.)

Nothing is new under the sun, except, the prospect that the Blue Jays will be taken by the Royals in four straight, which would sadden my countrymen, but delight me, as it would prevent the Jays from winning or losing the so-called “World Series” — with all the riots and property damage that implies. Long story short: game three of the qualifying series happens tonight, and if the bat of our swaggering José Bautista (a legal Hispanic immigrant) isn’t swinging correctly, Toronto’s windows may yet be saved.

On the other hand, repairs after public violence and bloodletting are good for the GDP.

*

There is also a “federal” (i.e. Dominion) election today, which will give my fellow citizens something to do with their time while waiting for the big game to start.

Had the baseball match been last night, instead, I’d have been cheering fulsomely for the Jays, knowing that victory would make people feel good about themselves, and thus vote for Harper, swinging perhaps thirty close Ontario seats, and keeping the Conservatives in power. As it stands, the glumness and anxiety are likely to push them the other way, so that we wake up tomorrow morning with little Justin Trudeau (son of the Antichrist) elected to the prime minister’s office. Which would be all very well if you happened to live in another country.

No point in voting here in inner Parkdale, where the contest is only between the two Cloud Cuckoo parties, and no politician even partially sane (Rob Ford comes to mind, in the moments when he is off crack) will long flourish. Too, this is so in the heart of every modern Western metropolis, outside the USA, where there is no competition, and all the mental and material underclasses vote for one and the same godforsaking party. (I find it takes at least three to divide this constituency effectively.) The Trudeau child has already won the hearts of Canada’s sentimental female electorate, so the only question is how many men will be voting.

I could explain to gentle foreign reader how sad this all is, but hey, you don’t need to know. All I can do is express my envy for you, being at a distance; and recoil in my usual way from the poisoned fruits of “democracy.” Alas, they ask voters for photo-ID up here (unlike down there in the Natted States Merica), which makes stuffing the ballot box damnably hard.

Just before attaching him to the helium balloon, that will carry him eastward towards China, I should like to explain to some gentle readers why a certain beloved Pope Benedict, who knew a certain Cardinal Kasper to be an heretick, did not have him defrocked and excommunicated, but rather left him in position as a (prominent) bishop in Holy Church.

I have mentioned previously that in my humble, though authoritarian opinion, there are worse heretics that Kasper among the cardinals today. He has often boldly stood various orthodox Catholic red lines, which migrant liberals were trying to cross. That is a long footnote I am not going to write this morning, however. O Lord am I not.

One of the things I have come to understand by perusing Catholic media in Germany, Switzerland, the Low Countries, northern France — is that guys like Kasper are actually conservative, compared with their laity. I’ve seen polls to suggest that large majorities of nominal Catholics wanted stuff like gay marriage yesterday, and can’t imagine a reason for not offering communion to anyone who walks in off the street. Once-Catholic Ireland gave us a plain taste of this, when “same-sex marriage” was put to the vote there. Wail as we might about the failure of Catholic discipline and education, this is among the hard current facts of life.

Mafella Mercans should not take any comfort from an invidious comparison. As we know perfectly well, a substantial majority of nominal Catholics on this far side of the ancient western sea, think like the northern Europeans. The Nancy Pelosis and Joe Bidens and little Justin Trudeaus who serve as nominal Catholics in very public places are, moreover, not unrepresentative of these airhead masses. I have myself mixed with the effectively lapsed “nominariate” on many social occasions. When those liberals claim that they speak for the majority, they are, for a change, not lying. And of course Pope Francis is extremely popular with such people who, giving him only half attention, conclude that he is a “nominal” too.

Nor is this situation new. Long before, decades before, finally becoming a “Dogan” myself, I was vividly aware of it. Indeed, upon my own definitive conversion to Christianity, in 1976, this knowledge kept me from the Catholic Church. Every Catholic I knew was lapsed, back in that day — including each of the priests I consulted in England. It was why I found myself praying with the (beloved) high-church “Anglo-Catholic” fruitcakes, when not with the (beloved) low-church Evangelical nutjobs, in the carefully niche’d Anglican communion. A convert does not want, after all, lukewarm broad-church tea. (Soon after I discovered, however, that there were also some Catholics discreetly hidden within the Roman communion.)

I make this point at tedious length, because the full tedium must be appreciated. My fellow orthodox “holy rollers” tend easily to overlook the great white shark in our swimming pool. The masses in Africa may be drawn to the life-giving truth of the Catholic faith; the dwindling congregation in the modern West expect, when they whistle, that the faith will come to them. It is why the fatuous image of the “field hospital” rather appeals. It is the Holy Father’s way of saying, “I hear you whistling.”

Pope Benedict XVI, and John Paul before him, were not stupid men. They were trying to put a Church back together which, in “the spirit of Vatican II,” had all but fallen apart. The Hippocratic principle, first do no harm, was before them daily and Sundays. Both put up with a great deal of nonsense, that neither would have tolerated through breakfast in other circumstances.

Bishops like Kasper had to be endured, to avoid provoking open schism in such long-established Catholic realms as Bavaria and Flanders. Both popes worked with a “gradualist” strategy, in which the proclamation of a new and orthodox Catechism played an important part. The idea was to resume actually teaching the faith, with ever-increasing precision and energy, and let the heterodox die out. Only in the most extreme cases, of open defiance, did the gauntlets go down. Hans Kung, for instance, was too much for them.

To be sure, these were judgement calls, within a whole strategy that was a judgement call. It was like the classic accounting strategy, of eliminating a deficit not by cutting expenses, but by constraining their growth while revenues grow faster. This requires not only delicacy but patience. Had we continued to get popes in the mould of Wojtyla and Ratzinger, it had some chance of working.  Instead we now have a pope in the mould of Bergoglio, whose basic instinct is to blow the bank.

But we will see what is coming. For the opposite strategy, unthinkable at the moment, in the way in which War is unthinkable, may in the end prove the only sensible course. It would be for some future, muscular pope, to lay down the law from Rome, in unmistakable terms, and save the Church as she was saved in the course of many previous centuries — by the kind of “reform” that is designed to cut all the rot away. Rather than “pastorally accompany” the nominals farther and farther from received Catholic doctrine in faith and morals, we would “pastorally accompany” them to the door.

Or to vary the metaphor yet again, save the ship by dropping the deadweight overboard. (See Matthew, 18:6.)

As I say, this is unthinkable — not to the traditional Catholic mind, but to the unmanly sentimentalism of the post-modern. “Shape up or ship out” is not what we say to our sensitive, delicate flower children in this age of effeminate degeneration — unless, of course, we want them to shape up.

I had better stop following the news from Rome, before I have an aneurysm. May I recommend the same to gentle reader: that we ignore the Synod, including the “backstories” now emerging about the Thirteen Cardinals, &c, Blase Cupich, &c, the “Shadow Synod,” &c, &c, and rather invest the time more worthily in telling our beads. To which end I have just deleted my draught of today’s Idlepost; because, frankly, it couldn’t do nobody no good. Those accustomed to a daily dose of David Warren Thought will find that two other essays of my composition are posted at other websites, today. (Here, and also, here.) Surely that will do.

Verily, I have just decided that, in future, I will take Sundays off. There will be no Idleposts on that day. I need to clear more space for prayer; and book-reading.

Too, my most obsequious apologies to the many correspondents awaiting replies from me. I have fallen several weeks behind the front edge of incoming mail, and cannot seem to catch up. God willing, I will find a way, soon.

Now, while this anti-blogue is not really designed as a medium for prayer and donation requests, I should like to make an exception for these friends in Chicago (see here), whose church has burned. Of course, churches are burning across the Dar al-Islam, and we can do little about it. But let us at least start rebuilding in Chicagoland.

Meanwhile, if thou canst still spare an Ave, say it for my elder son’s fiancée, struck down with a serious pulmonary embolism after they were mountain climbing in the Andes; currently recovering in a Greater Parkdale ICU. Nice Catholic girl; and indomitably cheerful.

Finally, a belated request to Saint Teresa of Avila, whose feast I failed to acknowledge yesterday. My favourite, even among the beloved Teresas. May she pray for us where her spirit must still reside, in the rugged outback of Castile; from that mystical interior bastion of hers; in Las Moradas:

— I saw an angel beside me toward the left side, in bodily form. He was not very large, but small, very beautiful, his face so blazing with light that he seemed to be one of the very highest angels, who appear all on fire. They must be those they call Cherubim. I saw in his hands a long dart of gold, and at the end of the iron there seemed to me to be a little fire. This I thought he thrust through my heart several times, and that it reached my very entrails. As he withdrew it, I thought it brought them with it, and left me all burning with a great love of God. So great was the pain, that it made me give those moans; and so utter the sweetness that this sharpest of pains gave me, that there was no wanting it to stop, nor is there any contenting of the soul with less than God.

How beautifully Spanish, and immortal.

The more I read about the Synod in Rome, the less I know, and the less I am tempted to make any prediction. Attempts to subvert Church doctrine I can see, along with attempts to subvert the law of non-contradiction. In neither case are they likely to succeed. The Synod is a talking-shop only, a purely advisory affair, of no doctrinal significance whatever. Nothing it decides can encumber the pope in what he decides after it is over. Our worries could therefore easily be misplaced.

Disputes over the writing up of any final relatio, as over the substance of the Synod’s instrumentum laboris, are indicators only of chaos. The draughting committee is stacked with known “reformers” and incompetents. Baldisseri and Forte made fools of themselves, tampering with the preparatory Synod last year; it is hard to imagine why their appointments were renewed. If the purpose of the Synod were to hear out bishops, it is hard to explain why the pope would substitute unrepresentative reformers for the men chosen by several of the bishops’ conferences. It looks so obviously a fix.

Because the discussions are conducted in unprecedented secrecy, and reported only through interested parties (including the Vatican Press Office, which seems to have doctrinal positions of its own), we work with rumour and surmise. The rules governing the discussions seem to change day by day, and have changed at least once by comprehensive papal intervention; the final voting process remains unclear, two-thirds of the way through. And so on. Surely, no plot could be so transparent.

For the Catholic faithful, as I know from my inbox, as well as by touring the blogs, this is very discouraging. Matters fixed for centuries seem up for negotiation every day. All need remember that Christ does not change, in doctrine or praxis. Therefore anything we view to the contrary can be only the confusion, malice, and ineptitude, to which humans are notoriously prone. Alas, the entire hierarchy consists of humans. If the Holy Spirit has any role in their deliberations — and we as Catholics will say that He does — there is a plotline we cannot possibly follow. Yet how often, in this universe, order has suddenly emerged from chaos.

The most positive, accidental effect I have seen is the bringing to the world’s attention of a score of cardinals who are solid and reliable in the faith, and courageous by disposition. Several now strike me as papabili. Only under these circumstances could they have been discovered. One could never expect such men to be a majority in any hall; to find so many in this one is remarkable. Should they remain fixed in their orthodox positions, the majority, who are anchorless, will begin to swirl around them.

It is possible, perhaps even likely, that we are witnessing not something right going wrong, but something terribly wrong being painfully corrected. My speculation is that by “making a lío” (Argentine slang for a “mess”) the pope has done, whether or not intending, just what God wanted: to expose the rot in the Vatican and hierarchy to universal public view; to make it so apparent that something will have to be done to claw it out. But of course we cannot judge the movement of wheels within wheels within wheels, and I am only speculating. We know that God does not work according to our schedule; that everything might be transformed in a day, or in a thousand years. Too, that He gives us, invariably, much better than we deserve.

The best way to make a lío, if one is in charge of almost any human enterprise, is to try to give everyone what he wants. While I have entertained the notion, I do not think the current pope is plotting to undermine the Catholic faith it is his duty to uphold. Nor do I think he entertains, secretly, any consciously heretical position. Given the right audience, he will, as he said in an aeroplane recently, recite the Creed correctly. But he will then tell another audience what he thinks they want to hear, fatally raising their expectations. In this sense, if he is unkind or unmerciful, it is to the “progressive” factions. He cannot deliver what they have been taught to expect, except by an error that will turn loose irresistible forces against him. And I mean this charitably: the “reformers” cannot understand this. For if they understood, they would desist.

I do not hate this pope, incidentally, and for the record, I do not even hate Cardinal Kasper, though he makes me angry. I think Kasper is invincibly wrongheaded, and capable of personal animus, of vanity and hypocrisy, like other men; but also that he sincerely thinks he is serving the Church by putting forward his “proposals.” Also, that as Cardinal Danneels and many of the other reformers, he is too old to change his views, formed not only decades in the past, but confirmed for him daily in the lay and ecclesial environments through which he has moved, wherein he is almost a conservative. From listening intently to him speak, I sense some real loyalty, some real faith, along with logical disorder, and perhaps even desolation. He seems a man who is caught in an elaborate trap of his own making.

The former Cardinal Bergoglio, who is now Pope Francis, I simply cannot read. Perhaps as a creature of “North,” he is too “South” for me. Each of the little theories I’ve constructed to explain him to myself, has been blown away by subsequent events. To say that I do not trust him would be not exactly right; rather, I have come to trust that he will contradict tomorrow what he says today. The only observation of which I feel certain is that he cannot know what he is doing; that he is not mentally well organized; that he is out of his depth, in an office to which he is unsuited. He may have an “agenda,” but it is not thought through, and no amount of cunning or charisma can compensate for the mental clarity, and genuine humility, that his two most recent predecessors brought to that high office.

All of which might — just might — make him the very pope we required, to slay “the spirit of Vatican II,” while trying to revive it.

Perhaps the word they are looking for in Rome is clemency. Or, clementia, should we wish to be late mediaeval about it. Merciful, if you will, with respect to Catholic doctrine, since it is mercy in itself. Imagine now, gentle reader, a full year in which the “we” of the Church (and any well-wishers) will be gentle, mild, and humane. I was thinking, especially towards faithful Catholics, who have suffered enough through the last couple of years, or rather, the last half century. Rome could let up on them for a while.

The pope himself might wish to spend the whole of the year, not saying anything. Let things pass. When asked, for instance, leading questions by the media, while aloft in aeroplanes — above 30,000 feet, where the air pressure might contribute to a certain dangerously giddy whimsicality — he could smile benignly. Let them mistranslate that. Bless them, perhaps: for they are so much in need of blessings, these poor journalistic souls. Smile, then put on headphones, and listen to Gregorian chant.

Or much better it would be, to stay out of aeroplanes; to stay home; for instance to relax at Castel Gandolfo. There are swans there, I understand: one might watch them glide on the Lago Albano. Or if no swans, surely other elegant birds. There are walks to take in the Alban Hills. There is even a golf course, I am told. And too, the remains of the Villa of Domitian to explore. Let us reflect, after all the cruelty of his first-century persecutions: that Domitian is dead. And that we have his Villa.

Too, we have the fine baroque collegiate Church of Saint Thomas of Villanova, designed by the sublime Bernini. It was this Saint Thomas who compared Our Lady’s Heart to Moses’ burning bush: alight, yet not consumed. Days could be spent contemplating that: a light that perpetually illuminates our darkness. The idea of Light, as opposed to noise.

No conferences, no “synods,” no talk to speak of. Rather than make new statements, we could focus on worthily re-publishing the old.

And the Curia going quietly about its business, looking for things lost under cushions, and at the backs of drawers. Let no one be fired for the entire Year of Clemency. Let the baddies be quietly identified, and simply eased out of any significant employments. Let them occupy their time doing Latin crosswords. Let all pause frequently for the Angelus: five times daily and a sixth on Fridays, in the gladdening tradition of Reconquista Spain.

Father Zed said recently that Pope Pius XIII will be so quiet, and make himself so invisible, the media will be circulating rumours that he has died. But why wait until his election? We have the technology to do this now.

Such rumours could be fed by transferring the Wednesday audiences away from San Pietro, to quiet corners in the Vatican gardens. Perhaps ask the Emeritus, beloved Benedict XVI, to resume his wonderful Wednesday “catechisms,” in his gentle, Peter Lorrie voice, expounding Scripture and the Lives of the Saints to little clumps of people who happen to be interested. And the Cardinal Vicar of Rome could be delegated to bless the small crowds of tourists and the faithful in Saint Peter’s Square, Wednesdays and Sundays. By such means, the Holy Father could be kept hidden away.

Of course the bishops of St Gallen would mutter and gripe, demand this, demand that, and possibly the other. But let us suppose no one is returning their phone calls.

Imagine for a moment our Holy Church less like a busy field hospital, full of carnage, and more like a chapel for pilgrims. Let those who wish to come, come; let those who wish to go, go.  As an act of clemency, or mere trial if you will, let us spend a whole year communicating, not by public gestures on the public stage, but through the bells, the bells.

Thanks to hydrogen fusion and chemo-synthesis, it will be possible by 1984, or soon after, to make food from rocks. Thanks to other technological advances, it will cost less to fly to the Moon, than to Australia. Human body styles will change with fashion, as genetic couturiers go in and out of style. Soviet socialism will bury American capitalism. Medical science will allow people to live for about two hundred years. …

Robots will take over simple manual tasks, and render the lower grades of humanity obsolete. Unnatural sex practices will become ethical, legal, and even socially accepted. The arbitrary barriers between men and women will dissolve, along with the arbitrary bonds of marriage. Universally available contraceptives and antibiotics will remove the fear of pregnancy and venereal disease. And meanwhile, we will be able to watch “the same old small-screen slop” on giant, high-resolution television screens. …

These predictions came from a panel of twelve celebrated science fiction writers, in Playboy magazine, in their July number of 1963. And thanks to the Internet (which none of them predicted), I was able to find the article in Flickr somewhere, by entering a few search terms.

I remembered it well, from childhood. My father bought a copy of this number from the Rexall Drug Store on Main Street, Georgetown, Ontario. He was spotted doing so, and as a consequence I was ragged by a nasty little mob of schoolboys, telling me that my dad was a “prevert” — a term they had apparently just acquired from their own parents. I furiously denied that my father would ever buy a pornographic magazine — and told him about the heinous accusation when I got home. Papa calmly said the allegation was true, and asked if I would like to see the magazine — after my mother, who was currently reading it. He mentioned the scientifictional panel, which he thought might appeal to me.

Robert Heinlein: “What will our children accomplish? Take the wildest speculation, square it, cube the result, and the answer still won’t be big enough to match the truth.”

Yes, the predictions were as fatuous as that, except, as gentle reader will observe, some of them came true. On revisiting that Playboy number, however, I was struck by a quote from William Tenn, the pseudonym of the expatriate British author, Philip Klass (1920–2010), a notorious Roman Catholic:

“I can think of no potentially great advance in technology or human relations which man won’t find a way to subvert into a historic step backward.”

This elitist writer is among the few “futurists” I can endure. (Walter M. Miller, Jr., and C.S. Lewis, probably complete the list.) His lovingly acid, high satirical humour turns the cheap genre into something resembling literature; his familiarity with human nature distinguishes him from the mere technophiles. Though as gentle reader may speculate, I have not read widely in the science fiction genre.

*

From the news this morning, I see that Playboy magazine still exists, that Hugh Hefner is still alive, and that he founded it in 1953, the year of my birth, not in the early ’sixties as I had supposed. Since pictures of naked women (in poses much crasser than Playboy ever dared) — are now available instantly for free, across the Internet, the magazine has changed its photographic policy. Henceforth, its models will be more generously clothed. With a paid circulation only a small fraction of what it had at peak in the ’seventies, it will try to retrieve its old reputation for faux sophistication.

A pop culture theoretician of my acquaintance is of the view that Playboy always offered “soft” pornography. From its first centrefold of Marilyn Monroe, apparently lifted from a contemporary gas-station calendar, its models were more “nude” than “naked”; it left the pervert’s obsession with lingerie until late in the day. Hefner’s babes all looked milk-fed and freshly bathed, as opposed to, say, weird, dirty, French, and too easily available. She was the girl next door in the American male’s fantastical imagination. This corresponded to the international idea of the American girl, and Playboy Clubs with the tuxedo rabbit logo — a mark of faux sophistication — sprang up all over the planet. Add in the interviews with famous people, background lavish interiors, and mildly naughty cartoons, and everyone could find an excuse for buying it.

The great secret of Playboy — and I tell this at considerable personal risk — is that women read it as often as men. For women are more interested than men in the female body (witness the contents of women’s magazines), and more curious about what makes the other sex tick (ditto). Men rule the world because we are much less competitive, more cooperative therefore (“teamwork”), and more interested in rule-based things like football and engineering. Too, our adolescent fascination with undressed women is more biological than cosmetic; more pneumatic than analytical. It does not consume scarce brainpower.

But that leads us towards another topic — the battle of the sexes in which the man’s superior size and strength have seldom proved a match for the woman’s psychological dexterity.

*

Instead, I wanted to address, this morning, the conventional view that Playboy was the flip side of second-wave feminism. The enterprising periodical, which would have been called Stag Party, had it not been for an early lawsuit from the publishers of a similarly-named men’s hunting magazine, gave its name in turn to a fashionable type of male “swinger.” Pierre Trudeau, for instance, was able to sweep to power in Canada in 1968, on the strength of his “playboy” charisma. His son, little Justin Trudeau, threatens to become prime minister next week, thanks to the same mastery of the women’s vote.

The popular belief that women are repelled by promiscuous male behaviour is false. Or rather, it is true only of a small minority of the unpleasant. Many women are scandalized by gratuitous male advances, but that is another thing. And the loss of that feminine self-possession is a feature only of the later, fin de siècle depravity. The women of my own youth — the “hippie chicks” I fondly remember — were still at least capable of situational chastity.

No: I deny that women (except a few of the shriekie sisters) hate to be loved or desired by men. What they do not want is for the men to diminish them by being jackasses about it, or otherwise to inconvenience them by their extravagant attentions. Most women I have met would not mind being quietly adored by innumerable men. This can even become a source of corruption.

A better argument for the morally degenerative effect of Playboy, on the female sex, would be that it presented the new “playboy” male, not as a “male chauvinist pig,” but instead as androgynous. The politics were always liberal, and where context required, consistently “sensitive.” These were men who cared a great deal about fashion and self-presentation; men who were successful in a rather feminine or feline way, striking poses and expecting to get things both ways. They could play at being smart polished “gentlemen” in one moment, and voyeurs in the next; and really they were both, and a few other incompatible things (always fake) in the same package.

James Bond was the ultimate exemplar. I think he got the tuxedo from the Playboy bunny, and not vice versa. He could be four years old, or forty, simultaneously; he could indulge childish wishes, and make them pay. And women would accommodate him, because he was so impossibly “attractive.” He knew all about women, in a way his male ancestors would have concealed. And he put what he knew shamelessly to work.

The notion that what is good for the goose, may also be good for the gander, takes hold from there. As we know from Chaucer, the female desire for “the soveraineté” is not new; it is a staple of literature in all times and places. The question has ever been, not whether they want it, but whether they can get it. The answer, not only in Western Civ, but in all the other higher civilizations, has been resistance, on grounds that when women do rule — not subtly behind the scenes, but overtly without restriction — the world goes promptly to Hell. As Doctor Johnson put it, “Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.”

So-called “second wave feminism” did not begin with the sick ravings of Betty Friedan, but with the existential hallucinations of Simone de Beauvoir. (Her 1940s book, The Second Sex, was translated into American in 1953, and published just as Playboy was first appearing.) Ms Friedan’s derivative bestseller, The Feminine Mystique, appeared a decade later, just as The Pill was arriving on the mass pharmaceutical market.

The idea that pregnancy, lactation, and menstruation should not deprive women of “equal rights” (invariably code for the soveraineté) was not the new thing at all. Instead it was the sudden collocation of ends and means. The Pill could “make women equal.” They could henceforth become androgynous themselves, and as it were, Playgirls, no longer constrained by the fear of maternity, nor the taint of prostitution.

Like the kind of man promoted by Playboy, they would never have to grow up. Everything in life would now become “an option,” and in the future, the options could only grow; science would guarantee that, and solve any of the technical problems along the way.

In this sense, the Sexual Revolution was not thesis and antithesis (feminism in reaction to masculine excess), but a synthesis from the start. What began “underground” in the 1950s, with such as Hefner and de Beauvoir, appeared overground in the Swinging Sixties. It was an explosive development, so that by 1968 — the year of Humanae Vitae — the whole idea of returning to the “traditional” order of civilization and human decency had become, for the young in body or in mental attributes, inconceivable. The outcry against that document, in America, was extraordinary. (There would have been none, ten years before.) Pope Paul was simply not James Bond, and that was sufficient ground to condemn him. “Civilization” and “repression” were now, as for Freud, interchangeable terms.

While the scientifictionists interviewed by Playboy may have been stunningly obtuse in considering the consequences of what they were predicting — as well as ludicrously optimistic on much of the “science” — I think they captured more exactly than the contemporary “social scientists” the tenor of that age. With the singular exception of Mr Glass, they were prophets of the new “liberation,” in which everyone could have everything all ways. And indeed, it was the very shallowness — its moral, intellectual, and spiritual vacuity — that made Playboy such a powerful instrument of the Sexual Revolution.

[There will be electronic silence through the Canadian Thanksgiving
weekend; the noise resuming on Tuesday, October 13th.]

*

There is, it turns out, a very easy way to reverse the plummeting birthrates in all the Western countries. It is to encourage Muslim immigration. Not only does this cause an immediate population rise, but as we have seen in countries such as France, England, Netherlands, Sweden, the fecundity of that population soon improves, swelling again to replacement levels, and overtopping the huge numbers lost to abortion. The poorer the Muslims the better, for alas, their own wealthy “middle classes,” not only in Europe but in the Middle East, will no more hesitate than our parents did to buy into the social and material ethic of the Swinging Sixties — the pill, mass baby-snuffing, “human rights,” total consumerism, satanic music, and quickie divorce — leading invariably to the disintegration of family and religious life.

Now, clever (as well as gentle) reader may spot a weakness in this plan. It seems to involve the Islamicization of what once was a Christian continent. And this is something which even post-Christians tend to look on as a Bad Thing. These latter may sometimes be more horrified than the surviving Christians, as we discover in French, Dutch, and other national political cultures, where the whole point of the populist opposition is to preserve the brothelization of public life against the threat of Shariah. They console themselves, however, with the thought that, thanks to their own contraceptive practices, they will not have horses in any future race. They will anyway not personally live to see and hear the blare from mosques in quite every direction; and with any luck, the pension schemes will hold up until euthanasia becomes, for them, the more comfortable option.

Christians tend to take a longer view. This is evident even in the discussions that leach out of the current Family Synod in Rome, where the conflict between the Catholic Christian, and post-Christian factions, reveals contrasting temporal orientations. Faithful Catholics all over the world look to the future of their own people, and beyond this to Futurity in the classical sense.

Whereas, the Danneels, Kaspers, Marxes, Baldisseris, Fortes and the like, in the party of decadence, hardly think about children, or Heaven for that matter. (If they did, they would mention these things sometimes.) Like other factotums of the Culture of Death, they need to be reminded that children even exist, or that the relation between sex and procreation is anything more than the hypothesis of a defunct ideology. The task as they present it is to return, even in their eighties, to that fondly remembered ’sixties era (“bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”); and more practically, to the spiritual equivalent of “palliative care.” They want their own sterile constituency to be made to feel as comfortable as possible in their last days, and therefore they demand a Church that will be more “welcoming” to adulterers, fornicators, sodomites, &c, as it finds them among the casualties of post-modern life.

Hence the attraction of “field hospital” as metaphor: the Church you need never go to, because it comes to you. Which applies soothing ointments to your various wounds, and whispers sweet words of encouragement in your ear as you proceed to the hereafter. All you have to do is lie there and bleed.

So far as I can see, from the evidence, there is no risk whatever that the Church will be suddenly taken over by an influx from the depraved secular culture, attracted because the Church will now permit them to do what they are already doing as a matter of course. On the contrary, the converts we find are looking for Christ, and take a view of sin that is oppositional. And in Europe, in the few places where parishes are growing, it is because these “brown people” are coming in: converts often from the Islamic folds, attracted uncannily to chant, and polyphony, and other outward signs of something that is beautiful, and good. They do not want less religion, but more; and have discovered a place where something unambiguously and transcendently religious (as opposed to worldly, political, and violent) is hidden.

They have found, in other words, the only part of contemporary Europe that is not foetid and worthless.

Likewise, the “old stock” European youth — the ones who turn out in their unexpected millions for World Youth Days and such events — are magnetically attracted to Sacraments, of all things; and seek precisely those “old fashioned values” that it is the cause of Church liberals to smear and destroy.

I am belabouring the obvious, as usual, in this Idlepost, because it is so frequently overlooked. We worry, perhaps, more than we should that the Catholic Church is falling into the hands of very devils. She is, at this moment, and our implacable resistance is required; yet we should always realize that, as in the cosmos at large, the Enemy is trapped in a holding action. For all the sound and fury, the hoof-clop of the Beast, he has no future, even in this world. And while I would myself prefer to see a few dozen “progressive” bishops defrocked and publicly excommunicated (the auto-da-fé having gone out of style), I am prepared to wait for this generation of vipers to die off, by natural processes. For they have made no arrangement to replace themselves, and what they now propose cannot save them.

The very provision of regular Synods of Bishops, and for the standing Vatican bureaucracy that supports them, was among the several catastrophic mistakes made by Blessed Pope Paul VI in the wake of Vatican II. Simple solutions are often the best, and I should think in a future papacy, the simple decision to eliminate these divisive and foolish Synods will be taken. This will save a lot of money, for the world media as well as for the Church, and more pointedly spare the Catholic faithful that unpleasant and unnecessary sense of betrayal that follows from listening to their bishops “debate” the Christian faith.

From what I see, there is actually quite a lot of money to be saved, if we follow the paper trails to many similarly unedifying “talking shop” operations, sponsored through the Holy See and the national episcopal bureaucracies; and I do not think that e.g. the good tithe-payers of Germany should have to bear such a disproportionate share in these destructive expenses.

Rather their interests and ours would be much better served if we put the cash into “outreach” instead. For there is a crying need, in America, too, but especially in Europe, to kindle mission among the Muslim migrants.

They are the future, after all; the sterile of Europe are the past, approaching extinction. We should shift our attention to growing once again, as we do in Africa wherever the true faith is proclaimed; and Mother Mary can lead us to the unprecedented opportunities emerging among peoples who have not yet turned their backs on children, family, and religious belief. They have come half way to us, already — to Europe, often at great risk — and ours is to “accompany them pastorally” the rest of the way into Holy Church, and to the feet of Mary’s Son, Our Lord.

That will be the Draconid meteor shower tonight, not poorly aimed Russian cruise missiles, streaking through the skies; so named because they seem to fall out of the constellation Draco. From the Latin for “dragon,” incidentally; as, too, the family name of Vlad the Impaler, but with the mediaeval diminutive; hence Dracula, “little dragon.” Trust me, these are important things to know.

Every year our planet passes, for a couple of days in early October, through this gravel debris of the comet Giacobini-Zinner and, weather permitting, we get a fine show. If we hit a dense patch, we might see dozens of bright meteors every minute, as we did twice in the last century. There was a nice spike in 1998, as I recall.

I could do with a little astronomical entertainment at the moment. The city glare mostly cancels the spectacle; on top of which we have rainclouds assembling over the Greater Parkdale Area. … Aheu. …

Really, we should turn the lights off sometimes. And should the sky cover and the winds howl, gather by the hearth with the books and the knitting.

An old lady — a neighbour of mine when I lived in London, years ago — recalled the Blitz from 1940. It was so beautiful, she said. Her most vivid memory was of standing on a balcony as hundreds, it seemed thousands, of German planes passed over. Bombers, most of them.

She had lost her fear because of the great beauty. First the city itself, in its stillness, with all the lights blacked out, etched in moonlight. The house was on a rise, she could see so much of it, like a vast abandoned stage set. But then, the drone of fate, with its metal hail approaching.

And now this stage set was illumined by incendiary bombs — their white glowings as they came down, their yellow flashes, and the rings of fire from the buildings they’d ignited. And the barrage balloons, shining bright and pink, in the clouds of pink smoke from artillery and flares. And the aircraft themselves, glowing pink, in their remorseless parade — giving the illusion they were close enough to touch. And through it all, here and there, an opening in this shroud, and a star twinkling; an old familiar star.

Seventy-five years ago; three generations. Here, you can mark them off with a ruler: 1965, 1990, 2015. And soon, not one living to remember. …

And the noise of the explosions, and the grinding of the aeroplane propellers, as if they were churning through the sea; the lady heard all this. Heard the sirens, the sirens, the sirens; heard the “all clear.” And everywhere the shouts of firemen, and of the working-class heroes in the cratered streets, dousing the flames with dirt and sand.

“It was so beautiful.”

From September to May, it was like this almost every night, and often in the daytime. It became a routine: “Oh bother, it’s the Luftwaffe again.” Fear was in the air, but compressed under boredom, and sometimes in the heat of it the fear went away. “How long can they keep this up?” Perhaps, forever.

One night, an odd thing happened. A row of old tenements came flopping down like cards, but one plumbing column remained standing. There was a man sitting on the toilet at the top, with his trousers at his knees. It was ludicrously comic. In the middle of all this pain and death, people saw him and chuckled. Somehow, eventually, he slithered down the pipes, leaping into arms as the column tilted over. Made a joke of it, the man did, when he saw his wife alive; said he was thinking about complaining to the landlord.

And people were emerging everywhere from the rubble — bloody and hurt, though patient and good-willed. Others digging, frenetically for the most part. Only names on their lips, but tears in their eyes; expecting to find corpses. “The bricklayer sounds,” the crunch of plaster, the creak of joists. But no screaming, with so much work to do. Ears being used as stethoscopes.

“We were all trying to be British,” the lady said. “One mustn’t get it started. One mustn’t be the first to wail.”

Bodies coming up from the ground; people suddenly standing. It was the end of the world, and she was watching the resurrections.

But of course, we are too close to events. The whole history of the last two generations, of the world corresponding to the time of my life, is too close to make much sense of. And things which are happening, “in the news” now, loom so large, that they are mostly invisible to us. That is why I instinctively ignore both religious and secular prognostications. If we do not know what is happening now, how can we know what will happen next?

This is more than a question of “information.” As I’ve learnt the hard way, again and again, in the practice of the rogue trade of journalism, we are working with unreliable information. Often, when everyone knows what has happened, everyone is wrong. The closer I’ve come to “breaking news” in my life, the more sceptical I’ve become that the circumstances have been, or could have been, correctly reported — especially by observers who could not write so much as an accurate précis of a Times leader to save their lives, because they were never taught.

More fundamentally, the “fog of war” lies thick upon all parties. Few men have the prophetic gift, to follow what is happening even in outline. It is a piece of luck when one of those happens to be a General. In peacetime, under conditions where politics are publicly disputed, and leaders command not from the tops of elephants like the sensible kings of Burma and Siam, but are carried on the shoulders of the seething mob, clear vision is unlikely.

Chastity is a virtue I have come to admire. I am left to enjoy it largely by myself. The mob thinks it applies to genital activity, if to anything. But it is universal, it applies to everything. No intelligent thinking is possible, and thus no intelligent decision can be made, without this virtue of chastity. One must extract one’s “self” from sin and situation, to make so much as a clean confession to a priest — to explain what one did without the usual syrup of excuses. Men who cannot accomplish that, will hardly outwit their own amour-propre, when they look beyond themselves.

Heroic chastity might take the form of declining to steer the willing wench into bed, but here I am considering the “high political.” And this includes the high political in humble stations of everyday life. The question, What is for the good? — aye, there’s a question. It is a masculine one, so that when a woman asks it she must play the man. (So much of mothering requires masculine decision.) But, par excellence, the father in the household must exercise a judgement in which his own interest is sublimated within the interests of his family. He must stand above himself to see what these are, and make painful personal sacrifice sometimes, without selfish whining or complaint. Or else, become a failure in the eyes of wife, children, and God.

And likewise, all leadership is in its essence chaste and masculine, whether the ruler be a woman or a man. The commander of the fleet — our Don John of Austria — has before him Victory in a holy cause, demanding all sacrifice together with the knowledge that he is in the service of Heaven. For all the private failures of his past, he must not fail now.

*

There is a distance from which some clarity is possible, perhaps; and then I fear a greater distance at which the subject shrinks and disappears. I am referring here to the Battle of Lepanto, whose 444th anniversary we celebrate today, in the Feast of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary.

The issue of that battle was not clear at the time. The fleet of the Holy League had destroyed the massed Ottoman fleet, but could hardly reconquer the eastern Mediterranean. The initial intention had been to recover Cyprus from the Infidel Turk, but this was impossible; and long after Lepanto the recovering Ottoman forces harried Catholic (chiefly Spanish) interests in the western Mediterranean. Tunis and Algiers resumed as centres of piracy, and long into the eighteenth century the European coast remained an open target for Muslim depredation. Indeed, as we were reminded on the 11th of September, 2001, the spirit of Islamic raid and conquest is far from quelled today.

It was only over time that the magnitude of the victory of Lepanto came plainly into historical view, as the most consequential naval engagement since the Battle of Actium — fought at nearly the same location, in 31 BC. In each, West prevailed against East, and had it not been so, the history of Europe would be much different.

True maritime skill, and the firepower of the new Venetian galleasses, played their part at Lepanto; but also the extraordinary morale, described by Cervantes (no dupe) who was present at the scene. For this was the last substantial naval engagement with rowed galleys — in which so much of the fighting was hand to hand on deck. In this, free Christians proved finally the masters of Turkish slaves, regardless of the numbers. The casualties were terrible on both sides, but far worse on the other; and our own were balanced by the many thousands of Christian slaves we freed.

I do not hesitate to refer to this battle in “us and them” terms. Consequential as it was, the war is not over. The same human facts remain in place; the low squabbling that undermined our unity; the broken alliances; the impulse under pressure to cut and run, as Don John’s southern flank almost did at the start of the engagement, until checked by Turkish galleys manoeuvring around them.

Yet that is part of the miracle, too: that the cowardice of a Genoese admiral (great-nephew of Andrea Doria) contributed directly to the sudden victory. He left the gap with the centre division through which Uluj Ali’s ships sailed — directly into the maw of the Holy League’s reserve, which chewed them up nicely.

It was a miracle that we prevailed, given the initial alignment of forces; and ingenious tactics are retrospectively admired. But the more I look at received accounts of the battle, the more I attribute to Our Lady; or an atheist might credit to “lady luck.” She levelled the watery field; the morale of the Christians tipped the balance.

The triple chaplet of the Queen of Heaven — the three rose crowns — are the mark of human homage it is our privilege to bestow. The term “Rosary” is derived from that. The banner of the fleet had been blessed by Pope Pius V (who supplied some of the ships); and before its setting out from the Kingdom of Naples, solemn reverence to Our Lady was offered. Across Catholic Europe, those in the know prayed their Rosaries for success, in what they knew to be no small adventure.

For long before the secular historians, the Church, through her faithful, did understand what was at stake: the preservation of Christendom. And long after the historians have decided that remembering the Victory is politically incorrect, the Church will recall it in her Mass. For she understood, and understands, that the issue hinged on an Act of Faith. And that our fate will always hinge on that.

For some deep, perhaps unplumbable reason, the term “happy gas” has turned up thrice in items forwarded to me this morning. It so perfectly describes what Catholics have been experiencing, in frequent ventral, or dorsal bursts, that I suspect some happy-gas asteroid has passed through our atmosphere, undetected by the sages at NASA. Perhaps their orbiting feelers have been set to detect carbon dioxide, exclusively, so that a chemical compound like nitrous oxide whiffs right by.

It comes from Washington, too, and Moscow, and elsewhere; not exclusively from Rome. But insofar as it seems to irrupt from ecclesiastical sources, my speculation is that the Devil has run out of sulphur.

Or maybe he hasn’t, but instead has discovered, by a patient empirical process, that happy gas works better than fire and/or brimstone, to put the Swiss Guards off their watch, along with everyone else in there, supposed to be minding the shop for us poor sinners.

This gas is known to have, despite its colloquial name, certain unhappy effects. It makes people say and do silly things, but the hard truth is that not all clowns are nice clowns. Still, we might give the benefit of the doubt, until the effects wear off. Assuming they do wear off.

For a time does come when the happy gas abates, even in pockets of intense concentration, and little bubbles of sanity may rise, even in the anhelous enclosures of a happy-gas convention.

Let me point, for instance, to the homily of Peter Cardinal Erdo, the Hungarian primate, to those assembled for the Family Synod at Rome. (Summarized, here.) It was so sensible that, as will be seen, the Vatican Press Office felt the need immediately to issue a disclaimer to the effect that he was speaking to only one session of this conventicle, when it was perfectly clear from what he said that he was speaking to the whole thing.

Indeed, the Vatican Press Office is like a bottomless cylinder of happy gas, and I often worry that Father Lombardi is going to explode. Or that Father Rosica has already exploded.

Pray, gentle reader, for all the victims of happy gas. Pray that it will dissipate quickly, and that the present trustees of Holy Church, at least, may receive enough pure oxygen to recover their synodic and conjunctive wits.

“Hinduism recognizes for each age and each place a new form of revelation, and for each man, according to his stage of development, a different path of realization, a different mode of worship, a different morality, different rituals, different gods.”

The quote is from Alain Daniélou (1907–94), the great French Indologist, musicologist, and convert to Shaiva Hinduism. He was curiously enough the brother of Jean-Guenolé-Marie Daniélou (1905-74), the French Jesuit, Cardinal, historian of early Christian doctrine, and author of extraordinary books including Scandaleuse Vérité (translated as, The Scandal of Truth, 1962). For much different reasons, I admire both men; the latter as likely a saint, and certainly one of the finest minds of the twentieth century. But let us leave him for some other day.

Alain Daniélou is, paradoxically, also an advertisement for Catholic or Western civilization, though he removed himself from it. The book from which I lifted the billboard quote was, Hindu Polytheism (1964), remarkable for both its range and penetration of Hindu mythology and iconography. It is not an apologia for Hinduism, quite, though the account is sympathetic; it uses all the methods of Western scholarship and inquiry to explain these products of the Indian mind. It is among the triumphs of that “Orientalism” which today is categorically condemned by the jackboot academic establishment, in the wake of the famous tract by Edward Said. (I allude to Said’s opus magnum of 1978, a “modern classic” of pig ignorance, and malicious lies.)

Perhaps too sympathetic, in light of Daniélou’s conversion. I think he lost his moorings (“went bush” as they used to say in the diplomatic corps) in a way that I can understand.

Though never even slightly tempted to become the adherent of an “Eastern Religion,” in my own footloose pre-Christian youth, my memory holds the experience of watching a loin-clothed Hindu adept, immersed to the waist in the mud waters of the Ganges, uttering his prayer towards the rising sun. It was beautiful, and I can reconstruct the moment in which I, too, felt at peace and in sympathy with myself and all India — an India not intelligible to, for instance, the Western hippies then on the road, reaching for superficial things. For this was not superficial.

I was witnessing a response to a religious calling, that was entirely sincere, entirely self-giving, entirely free of the smug puerilities that offended me, even then. I had nothing but respect for it; for this man standing in the heart of the sunrise. Yet all I could do was to take him in: to observe the integrity of another soul. Whom Jesus loves, as we can know for certain.

Even supposing we shared a language, to argue with him would have been impossible. To confront him from another intellectual, theological or philosophical position, would be to begin at the wrong place; for here was a “faith” that was undeniable, and obtuse to Western reasoning. To my mind then, and perhaps now, I was witnessing the religious impulse prior to the Judaic focus in monotheism; prior to that extraordinary “dialogue” that is represented in the Hebrew Scriptures, between God and His chosen people — different in kind from all the other religions of the ancient Near and Farther East. In other words, I could be watching a scene that had happened thousands of years ago, in Ganges, Indus, Euphrates, Nile; … Tiber, Thames.

Yet “Hinduism” (the very term is too confining) has its own reasoning genius, and as Daniélou explained in this book and several others, the ancient Indian philosophical teachings — which contain much moral wisdom, and theological insights that even a Catholic will recognize, and reasoning of an indisputably universal kind — are woven into the poetry of an incredibly complex, organic tradition. The “Vedanta” is not naive or primitive. It is often extremely sophisticated, and has repaid patient study.

Daniélou bought into it at a high level, both intellectual and aesthetic. It provided, for him, a different answer to the questions his brother also faced, the one in obedience to, and the other in rebellion from, the same upbringing. It was a very Western rebellion, complicated, in Alain’s case, by what seems like an innate homosexuality, from which he was also running. A brilliant man, and good and kindly from what I know, he was engaged, I believe, in a “great game,” of hiding from himself.

We should remember, however, by our own lights of Christian faith, that thinking cannot save us; that reasoning merely runs behind, even Krishna’s chariot. Christ alone can save; but when we say this we are not actually contradicting the truths in other faiths. For Christ is man and God. He is not a rational construct. His “being” lies infinitely deeper than that, and yet extends all the way to our surface. Presented not “rationally,” but instead as Son of God and Son of Man, He is the fulfilment not only of the Hebrew prophetic, but of all other religious traditions.

Looking back, it seems to me that there is a sense in which I glimpsed Christ standing in the Ganges — in something primaevally purified, and human. Something not looking back, but somehow leading forward to Christ standing in the River Jordan. In his own way, from some such experience, probably in the plural, I think this is what must have provided a “revelation” to Daniélou — looking, as it were, for Christ, in all the wrong times and places.

(Cardinal Jean, incidentally, said innumerable Masses for his brother Alain, and for all homosexuals; as well for pimps and prostitutes and all the “low life” of the modern city; for all those in flight from themselves, led astray by mysterious forces. His “liberal” enemies in the Church used this to tar him with scandal. His reputation was finally clouded when he happened to die, suddenly, while delivering money from his own pocket to a poor, forlorn, aging prostitute, who needed it urgently to bail her lover out of gaol. And brother Alain came volubly to his defence when the French tabloid press went to town with this, barracking the late Cardinal as a “found in.” Forty years later, the record still needs setting straight, in a world still full of pig ignorance, and malicious lies.)

*

So much for comparative religion, today. It is full of shoals, full of dangers. The man who does not know himself will be quickly lost in those waters. Even at that time, on the steps at Benares — I was then eighteen years old — I could not doubt that I was Western. Though not yet a Christian, I knew at least that I was formed, “culturally,” in a matrix unmistakably Christian; and there was much I could not surrender without also surrendering myself to incoherence, to madness.

That was then, this is now. I have come to realize that, even among people older than I, and arguably even some elderly Catholic bishops, this “mooring” has slipt off. It is more of a puzzle, looking back, that I still kept it. Much of my childhood was spent in Asia; my parents were post-Protestant lapsed. My “European” heritage was already “evolving” into something post-Christian, rapidly through the ’sixties and ’seventies; its finest achievements, disowned. The appeal of Eastern Religions to my hippie contemporaries spoke of this. Many were going to ashrams in India, unaware they were leaving “ashrams” behind, from our own Christian monastic past. They sought to replace something of which they’d been deprived by their own parents and schools and society: their own religious roots. Truly they were blowing in the wind, seeking the profound in the merely exotic.

Sometimes, they were even told by their gurus: “Go home. Learn your own religion, before you try to hash-smoke your way into mine.”

In trying to understand the immense catastrophe now overtaking the West, and within the Catholic Church that formed it, I return to the same scenes. We have lost not only the liturgical order that explicated Eternity to us, but also the reason that ran up behind it. We see everything we had, or rather, everything we were, outwardly dissolving around an irreducible core.

*

Return we then to that billboard quote. It was meant, by Alain Daniélou, as a brief, summary, rational explanation of the Hindu conception of the world; of how to live and what to do for those who are living. One might quibble with it, but in the broadest terms it might serve, too, as an explanation of other very ancient, polytheist, religious traditions. It is, to my mind, a description of a natural, plausible response to “the cosmos”; a way to be in harmony with it.

Indeed, this book by Daniélou provides a point of entry. One could read it and imagine how a “traditional,” unwesternized Hindu might account for our common world; how with as much native intelligence as we have — as any human has — he can “make sense” of it, from many successive angles.

Yet I also quoted it by way of trying to understand the demands now made in that “dictatorship of relativism” that Pope Benedict spoke to us about. It reads almost as a shopping list for the post-modern man, who does genuinely want religion, but wants it on his own terms. For I cannot believe that the “liberals” who insist on tampering with the teaching of Christ and His Church are insincere, in their longings for the “comforts” of religion; any more than they are insincere in their desire to avoid the discomforts of obedience. They only ask to have things both ways.

Positions of the Catholic Church, shared in the main by the Protestant congregations through the last five centuries (particularly on such vexed current issues as divorce and homosexuality), are not their current positions, alas; they want the teachings “mercifully” adjusted to their own passing requirements. The alternative would be to adjust themselves — unthinkable from the post-modern, consumerist point of view.

Yet for all I know, some of these are kindly and good men, by the reasonable standards of this world; and many appeal not for themselves, but for what they imagine to be the good of others. What can we do to please them?

The answer to this is, plainly, nothing — beyond quiet prayer, and works of charity invisible to the sarcastic crowds. The Catholic Church is what she is, and what she has been through the last twenty centuries. She is hardly going to be changed now; and her settled faith is not in the power of any synod, council, or pope, to alter. The “reformers” appeal to the wrong authorities; as men, only to their fellow men.

Perhaps these can be twisted; perhaps the “pastoral practice” corrupted, as it has been many times before. But only for a time, and never to ruination. The real dispute is of men, with God and nature. Even from the view within recorded history, they beat their heads against the Rock.

And yet they have an alternative: to leave the Church. We may not have free markets for goods and services, in the West any more; but we surely have a free market for religion.

There are other religions that may cater to their needs; that will let them have all that they desire, and without the “sticker shock” of Catholicism — new revelations for each time and place; new accommodations for each person, changing as they “grow”; new paths to “self-realization”; new moral schemes, and new rituals, as wanted; and whenever and wherever there is market demand, strange new gods and idols. Why complain about the prices in this shop, when the dollar store of spirituality is in such easy walking distance?

By all means, show them out with this promise: that everything they want is just down the street. And all over the world, too, for when they go on holiday. And everywhere: cheap, cheap, cheap!

And there is one more thing that in Love we can promise: that after they have had their adventures, they may always come home.

For this wasn’t a candy shop, after all; it was the domicile of Christ. And there will still be His Catholic Church, miraculously preserved without them.

The world is full of questions to which the answer must be, “I don’t know.” Perhaps this is especially so for the world of Christians, not in spite of faith but because of it. Through Scripture and Tradition, God has revealed as much of Himself as we are capable of assimilating, and provided the keys, the first opening, to many bottomless Mysteries. These are different in kind from the mysteries of the ancient pagan cults — Eleusinian, Dionysian, and Orphic mysteries; the cults of the Pythagoreans and neo-Pythagoreans; of the Cabeiri; of Isis and Osiris; of the Thracian sky-god Sabazius, of the Phrygian mother-goddess Cybele, of the Persian Mithras, and of the farther “mysterious East”; of various other gnostic and phallic worshippers, alongside the official Emperor cult. For these people had mysteries that only the priests knew, and guarded jealously, creating elaborate and “mysterious” rites of initiation.

Consider for instance the Boeotian cult of Trophonius, about which we read in Pausanias — the Baedeker of Greece in the second century. He who would consult the oracle took a cell in a building sacred to the spirits of Good Luck. He would purify himself with ritual cold baths in the river Hercyna, and make frequent (possibly cash) offerings to Cronus, Apollo, Zeus, Hera, Demeter and so forth; living off the leftovers of sacrificed meat. Eventually he would sacrifice a black ram of his own, into the pit of Agamedes. The priests would examine the animal’s entrails for indications of whether the supplicant should proceed, or go back for an additional shakedown. Finally, after drinking successively of the spring of Lethe, and the spring of Mnemosyne, he was sent into the cave, with instructions how to crawl through its various narrow and complicated passages. Something loud would then happen to scare him out of his wits; and if he managed to make his way back to the surface, he’d be sat or, if necessary, tied on a chair, so the priests could carefully transcribe his ravings. They would then call his relatives, to take him away.

Those first attracted to our Church, must often have assumed our mysteries were like this. As the latter part of the Mass excluded the unbaptized, they could freely imagine what went on there. Rumours are always rife, and malignant rumours always get a hearing. It was some work, explaining to the ancient pagans, what Christianity is all about; and in particular, the nature of our Mysteries, different in kind from those of the religious competition.

For we have Mysteries that anyone can be told, and rites that are explained in every missal. Once apprised, the gentle reader may spend the rest of his life contemplating these Mysteries of the Faith, theological in the sense that they are revelations of our Triune God, and of His Incarnation. They are things we know that we could not have learnt by rational empirical inquiry — such as that we are Loved, and must Love in our turn, truly and with utmost chastity.

Those who live entirely by the light of their own reason, refusing instruction in the Mysteries of the Faith because they can figure out everything themselves, were dealt with at e.g. the First Vatican Council:

“If any one say that in Divine Revelation there are contained no mysteries properly so called, but that through reason rightly developed all the dogmas of faith can be understood and demonstrated from natural principles: let him be anathema.”

This is an aspect of the Catholic teaching of which even Rome needs reminding from time to time: that we do in fact have dogmas, and that we have through the centuries in fact anathematized those who put themselves above them. And so we do for their own good, in the hope they may correct themselves before God corrects them.

Yet many of the straightforward moral teachings — similar to the teachings of all other civilized religions — can be reasoned through, with intelligence and patience. And they have been reasoned through, and the results of the reasoning have been confirmed again and again, in the face of innumerable challenges. For the kind of mind that puts itself above the mysteries of Divine Revelation, also tends to set itself against received instructions on the differences between good and evil.

*

The Family Synod is now meeting, and will be for the next three weeks. It strikes me that the agenda for this, and the rules imposed in the last few weeks, will provide the faithful with mysteries of a quite irreligious sort. For in the past, such meetings — whose purpose was not to discuss Catholic doctrine, but how to apply it in present circumstances — were quite open. We could learn, if we were curious, exactly what our bishops had said and were thinking. Our faith was not, or rather, is not, a mystery in that pre-Christian sense, subject to revision by oracles. The Holy Spirit is not a pagan god, who tells us new and startling things each time we go down into the cave.

Indeed, my beloved, deeply learned Benedict XVI — who since he retired has been praying for us — went repeatedly to trouble, to explain the foolishness of the idea that the Holy Spirit intervenes in all synods, councils, and conclaves, to steer the participants to the right result. An elementary acquaintance with the history of the Church will show us that bishops are quite capable of coming to decisions that no loving God could have countenanced.

Men, a species that includes bishops, are left with a certain radical freedom, which constant intervention by the Deity would cancel. We have been already provided with what we need to know in the Deposit of Faith. There is nothing that Christ absent-mindedly forgot to tell us. Our task is not to supply what he overlooked or failed to anticipate, or to “update” the teaching for a human condition which does not, itself, change. Nor is it to murkily redefine terms long since clarified. Neither popes nor bishops are above that Revelation.

It has become extremely obvious that, once again in the long history of the Church, fools and self-servers and very evil men are operating in the Vatican at the highest curial level. And since we are not going to be told, plainly, what is going on, or what will happen next — only tweets and sound bites of an oracular nature, addressed as if to children — our task is reduced to a simple one. We must fast and pray.

I mentioned Benedict because he was — again, I think very obviously — a good and reliable pope; a man of sound mind and habit, who could be trusted. He happens, in the course of “mysterious” events, to be still with us in this vale of tears, and to my mind we should pray consciously with him. And too, struggle to withhold our judgement, as he would, on things we cannot know, and cannot change. And thus, accept the pain that goes with not knowing what our shepherds are discussing and planning — like the pagan priests of old — behind our backs, as they did behind Benedict’s back.

We have a terrible, shameful, mess in Rome. But the chaos of this world is passing, and we can know that in the end, Christ will prevail.