Essays in Idleness

A recent visitor to the High Doganate — a woman, controversially enough — took out her omnicompetent hand-held device and began photographing the contents of my kitchen — cupboards, drawers, shelves, et cetera.

A man, I suggested, might have photographed my books. She smiled and agreed. Just as well, for one might be arrested for comments like that, today.

I was trying to make tea, and find something resembling “biscuits,” as the Queen calls them. But I had to keep standing out of the way, as this lady — who had begun by admiring my collection of hand-thrown pots, plates, bowls, cups, pitchers — in everyday use — went through the rest of the inventory. She claimed never to have seen anything like it.

“Really? I thought everyone did this.”

For she was struck by the Shaker-like fanaticism with which I had scoured all evidence of contemporary supermarket culture from my stores; as well as by the Christian-survivalist extent of them.

“You have too much time on your hands, David,” is what a man might have said, had he noticed. But women tend to criticize from other angles.

This one offered no criticism at all. She only wanted to take pictures. When I asked if she was finding everything in order, she said yes, it was like still-life compositions. That was why she was taking pictures, and might put them on her Facebook page.

Privacy is another concept conceived by men and women in different ways. But that, too, is an old observation, which long preceded my birth, and may thus be actionable today, in the zombie courts of political correction. Though not, I should think, for much longer.

“Do you wash the labels off everything?”

“No, sometimes I find a label so beautiful that I leave it on.”

“And the tins. How do you tell what’s in the tins?”

Easy. I own a pen called a Sharpie. It’s not as good as the Fisher Bullet Pen the astronauts use, which can write in zero gravity, underwater, through grease, on almost any surface, from any angle. But it costs considerably less, and can write on tins and bottle caps — quite elegantly, once one gets the hang of it.

I gave a demonstration. It was filmed.

She neglected to ask how I remove the gunk: labels that refuse to float off in the sink; splotches of glue still adhering; other irritations. The answer would have been, with a razor scraper, wire wool, and in extreme cases, lighter fluid or other efficient household solvents. For I will not be defeated.

Instead I was asked, “When did you start doing this, and why?”

Those were two questions, so I broke them down. I acquired the habit from my father in childhood. He liked to put his own labels on things. This unclutters a workshop, and makes everything easier to find. He did not impose this practice in my mother’s kitchen, however. Though he did have to restrain himself.

I do it partly for that reason, but mostly from hatred of loud advertising, and modern food labels are ugly and shout. Moreover, as argued Henry John Heinz (1844–1919, lord of ketchup and baked beans, though he began with horseradish), properly canned food looks good under glass. The customer sees the goods, not a field of wordy blather. They should not pain his eyes.

Verily, I remember this, too, from childhood: the beauty of my grandmother’s shelves in winter, groaning under the harvest, packed into preserves, all discreetly hand-labelled. The wonderful “ambiance” of the old summer and winter kitchens we had in Cape Breton, and in Upper Canada, prior to the triumph of Mass Man, and the occupation of our country by liberal-progressive robots. Indeed, one could find serene and homely kitchens, all over the world, before “labour saving” added so much to our labour.

Any fragment of those arrangements must be sustained. Anything, however humble, that can serve to restore a memory of the human, and of the sanctity in everyday life, should be done by intentionally acquired habit. The noise of commercialism should be muffled, when possible, the flash of salesmanship brushed away. Because it is vile.

It is the same reason I discard dustwrappers from books, but that is an Idlepost for another day.

Three score years and ten is long enough to see out most human lives. My throat catches this morning in remembrance of so many from the day — 8th May 1945. Now gone under the earth. Not everyone was on their best behaviour that day, understandably. But the Germans had capitulated, the West was Won, and the bells rang out from the church steeples. The moment was finally at hand,

When the lights come on again
All over the world,
And the ships sail home again
All over the world:
And rain or snow is all
That may fall …

Brian Stewart, one of the few Canadian journalists I genuinely admire, came out of his semi-retirement this morning to report from Apeldoorn for his old CBC. A very fine, brave, kindly and perceptive man — no fool — who has seen it all in war zones. I have taken my key point from him, for it echoes what I heard long ago: about “swaggering.”

It wasn’t only the liberation, but what our boys did after, in that devastated country. The Netherlands — but Canadians call her “Holland” — had suffered proportionally more than any other country the Wehrmacht had crushed and occupied, and would continue to suffer — famine — after their final defeat. The bastards blew the dikes to slow our allied advance. Breached, the lands flooded; … deaths heaped on deaths.

Victory is sweet, but there was no swagger, from the Dutch still mired in Hell.

And memorably, neither from our boys, who had liberated them. They didn’t swagger. Instead, they set down their guns and their helmets and went to work — spontaneously, voluntarily, on the enormous task of repair; of fixing the dikes and clearing the farms of salt-mud and debris. Of breaking the stones, and smoothing the roads, and shifting the rubble. The food bags, too, were starting to arrive, from Canada and the States — the tins and boxes; the cigarettes and medical supplies; and the candy, for the little children.

This wasn’t the Marshall Plan. It was three years before that. The Royal Canadian Air Force was dropping food from the sky, as fast as it could. (Our pilots read, “Thank you Canadians!” on rooftops.) Crates and drums were being discharged through the busted ports, wheat and flour from our Prairies. Yet thousands were still perishing from hunger.

And more: all the stuff sent by unorganized people, to wherever they thought it would do some good; to Germany as well as Holland; to wherever people must be desperate and starving. And back home our boys’ own families were throwing themselves into action, packing and shipping; and slipping in the letters of love and encouragement to strangers and new friends over the sea.

We were already hand-in-glove with the Dutch, from sheltering their royal family in exile. The magnificent Queen Wilhelmina, scourge of politicians (Churchill called her “the only real man” among all the exiled governors in London), no longer speaking in the nights, through the radio. For she had returned, to a rapturous welcome. And now, too, their little princess — Margriet Francisca — born in Ottawa Civic Hospital, in a maternity ward that had been declared Dutch sovereign territory for the occasion.

Every year, the tulips still come from Holland to decorate our Parliament Hill. And Dutch kids are still taught in school how to sing, “O Canada.”

Restoring the landscape, the buildings, the farms, after terrible war, was no comfortable task. But as I know from my father’s generation, our guys were well suited to it. Mostly they were … well, farmboys from Ontario, and Saskatchewan, and other flat places. They knew what work was, and how it was done. They’d done their child labour through the Depression, then grown up for War. They had attributes inconceivable to “the youff of today,” or to my own bourgeois-hippie generation. Their religion was serious, Protestant, practical, face value. (I have a tiny collection of the three-ounce New Testaments they carried, into battle and out.) They knew how to take their hats off, and when to grab an old lady’s arm. They were not complainers.

And the Dutch people they met, they loved; the more for sharing so many of the same traits, plus one that is truly divine. The Dutch were grateful. As Brian Stewart says, from his impressively broad experience, this is a rare quality in world affairs.

They haven’t changed, towards us. Seventy years later, a handful of these old nonagenarians of ours, walking a few paces if they can, taking lifts in old trucks when they can’t, for miles — are mobbed by schoolchildren with flowers. The anniversary parades at Apeldoorn, at five-year intervals over the years, meant everything to our soldiers. I think of one of those old Vets (now dead), who went there in 1995. The way he put it was, “We’re goin’ home to Holland.”

Of course, by now, there’s hardly a survivor who ain’t gone home for the last time; for one last loving look.

Very busy today, as gentle reader will understand, better if I don’t explain it.

But let me add, it isn’t necessary to stay up all night for the British election results (then all the next day too, if you live in Britain). The exit poll has been published, and I find that quite acceptable. Conservatives hold, a little short of a majority; Labour bleed to Nationalists in Scotland, and to UKIP in the North; Liberal Democrats wiped almost to extinction; Greens with maximum two seats. That is about the best I could hope for. …

Well, UKIP sweep Labour into third place would be better, but we must be reasonable in our prayers.

Better, anyway, than the election in Alberta, which we won’t talk about.

(It was a repeat of the Ontario election of 1990, when the Socialists fluked in here, after a similar Premier spent six weeks making “the people” want to hurt him. It hardly meant they had turned Left, as I explained to some excitables in the Wall Street Journal: “It takes more than six weeks to make a Socialist. It takes a whole unhappy childhood.”)

Besides, the best part of any British election is the comments. I recommend those at the Daily Telegraph website especially, but even at the Guardian they’re usually pretty good — and a lesson to Internet trolls everywhere, on how to be rude and obnoxious without sacrificing standards of wit and entertainment. Some of them are even informative, helping to walk the average voter through the procedural subtleties.

Such as: “They can’t give results until the votes are counted.”

My favourite picture so far, not obviously photo-shopped, shows a flyer distributed by some Islamic fanatic group. It sports quite alarming typography (in English), and warns Muslims not to vote for “man-made laws.” This would constitute the sin of shirk, a form of idolatry.

Were I on Team Tory I’d be tempted to print extra copies, to distribute in all the swing ridings.

On second thought, I might actually agree with it. Man-made law is the pits. (This, to my mind, would include Shariah.)

Indeed, Catholics shouldn’t vote, either. (This would further increase the Tory margin.)

Indeed, no one should vote: for as I’ve said all along, it only encourages the bastards. Leave the result to the backwood hicks — the ones who somehow didn’t get the message.

Perhaps the most irritating argument for “gay” is “changing public attitudes.” It is the chief argument used from liberal pulpits, in both church and media. It comes down to this: Once upon a time, people took slavery for granted, or cruelty to animals, or many other wicked things. We would justify them by the Bible, in the old days. But today we know better!

This is pure charlatanry, though to be fair, the people who make this argument sometimes believe it. And when they do, they may be extenuated insofar as they are invincibly ignorant — of history.

Opposition to, and voluntary rejection of, the ancient pagan institution of slavery, came in with Christianity itself. It was hardly new to the Age of the Enlightenment, seventeen centuries later. But to know this requires some familiarity with what is popularly dismissed as “The Dark Ages” — in fact arguably the most interesting period of history, for it was the time when by far the greatest of all historical civilizations was in bold and rapid formation.

A remarkable feature of the centuries of transition between what we now call “Ancient” and “Mediaeval” was the disappearance of slavery in the West, even in primitive material circumstances which outwardly should have favoured it. For Christianity itself presented a new understanding of the human being, as something radically separated from the rest of nature; of the human soul as having absolute value, and immortality. No human being could be looked upon as mere beast or personal chattel, no matter how low fallen in estate.

It was the completeness of the Roman collapse in the West that hastened this change in “public attitudes.” Christianity filled something more like a void; made converts among the hordes of invading Huns and Vandals who did not cling to the pagan Roman ways.

By contrast, in the more developed or sophisticated societies farther to the East, where old Rome had not entirely fallen, slavery took longer a-dying; and was then resuscitated within the realms the Arabs conquered. This is not meant only as a condemnation of Islam. It is almost a backhand compliment. Many of the attitudes we casually dismiss as “primitive” and “backward” in Islamic society are actually survivals from the ancient, highly urbane and metropolitan world of the pagan Greeks. This includes, for instance, the veiling of women, as well as taking the institution of slavery for granted.

Moreover, the revival of slavery in the West is a modern, very secular phenomenon — consistently opposed, in New World as in Old, by the priestly agents of Holy Church. Many do not realize this because they define modernity the way Philip Larkin did in “Annus Mirabilis”:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) —
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

Slavery, like sexual intercourse, is in fact rather older. It already existed in the New World. But in its “modern” form it came instead post-Columbus to the broader New World in which we have since lived — in the West that has transformed, but also been transformed by, the rest of the planet. (We usually overlook these latter phenomena.)

United States Americans fall more easily for the glib idea of “social progress” because their historical sense is the more tightly constrained by their own rather unusual, and entirely modern, national history. This America, like Brazil, began in plantations: enterprises requiring mass unskilled labour. Yet even within the New World, there are complexities.

Ontario takes pride in claiming to be the first jurisdiction in the world to formally and legislatively “abolish slavery,” soon after our founding as Upper Canada. But the claim is ludicrous. We may have been the first Protestant jurisdiction to do so, but slavery was quite illegal in, for instance, the Papal States of Italy long before that, and was extinct by custom throughout mediaeval Europe. Too, the North of North America was not plantation country. (The “wheat mining” of Ontario came later.) It was easy enough for us to do without the slaves we did not then need.

Even so, Governor Simcoe’s Act Against Slavery, passed in 1793, was not quite pure moral exhibitionism, for it was intended to prevent Loyalist refugees from the U.S. South from importing the institution of slavery with them. (There were less than twenty nominal slaves in Upper Canada at the time.) It was also phrased as a piece of unambiguously Christian legislation.

Through Europe slavery remained rare even where made legal. It was looked upon with intense distaste, in jurisdictions both Protestant and Catholic.

In Elizabethan London, for instance, there were hundreds, possibly several thousand “blacke moores” — from West Africa and as far afield as the East Indies. Many were employed as servants, but so were many whites; all were free men in the eye of common law, inherited from the Middle Ages. Others, curiously enough, found remunerative employment as musicians and strolling players — the idea that blacks make superior musicians goes back very far. Still others were successful businessmen and traders, and some rose to considerable height in society. In fact, the presence of Africans in parish records goes back to the earliest Tudor times.

“Theatre is a white invention, a European invention, and white people go to it. It’s in their DNA. It starts with Shakespeare.”

This typically bigoted statement, from a white liberal (Janet Suzman), belies the universality of theatre in all human culture. But coming from a Shakespearean actress, it also overlooks the two major characters in Shakespeare’s plays who are unmistakably black (Othello in Othello, and also Aaron in Titus Andronicus). They are hardly interchangeable.

We should take this in. We should also begin to grasp that Doctor Johnson’s disgust with the American “drivers of negroes” is not some new-found liberal pose. (Johnson was allergic to such canting.) It is classically Christian.

In the American Civil War, within the old South, as well as the caricatures of the South in the propaganda of the North, we find confusion between two features of Southern society that have melded. One is slavery, which often pricked the conscience of e.g. the Virginians, who hesitated to take the Southern side until, in effect, Lincoln forced them into it — for the very reason raised in the Virginia legislature: that slavery is no worthy cause. The other was the strongly aristocratic nature of Southern society. Having melded, these two features were tarred with the same brush. We deal today with the fallout in American public attitudes: an excessive and often hypocritical egalitarianism, that only pretends to be Jacksonian.

Virginia’s gentry felt guilty about the slaves, as we see in the writings of America’s Founding Fathers. But they were also appalled by the yobbishly democratic, Northern notion that they should be treated as socially equal to the “poor whites.” As indeed New England gentry would have been appalled, had the same oppression been visited upon them.

I mention this much not to close the argument, but to open it in all of its splendid variety. For the idea that history can be reduced to a linear progression of “public attitudes” is as moronic, as its application is evil. To be sure, public attitudes can change, as I in my own generation have seen all around me, in the form of descent via irreligion into moral squalor. It does not follow that they change consistently for the better; nor that the changes are unrelated to publicly-articulated philosophical or theological beliefs, whether deep or, as in our case, mudpuddle shallow.

The  modern opposition to slavery was unambiguously Christian. It had in fact been Christian all along. The modern liberal rides a Christian heritage, and claims what looks good to him as recent, and his own. But his claims depend on historical ignorance, and an accompanying incuriosity. In turn it requires, to be sustained among the larger public, the teaching of false and narrow history in the State’s schools, and the suppression through politically-correct hysteria of all intelligent debate.

It is the same with the social history of homosexuality. This is a vastly more complex, and also more interesting topic, than the moral and intellectual simpletons of liberalism can afford to allow.

The Church, I said yesterday, or strongly implied, is being bought off by moral exhibitionists, of the sort who lead the world not to Heaven’s Gate in Jerusalem Wall, but instead to the Mondawmin Mall in Baltimore. That is to say, we have clerics and apologists like politicians, eager to embrace progressive causes, and posturing on behalf of various political “clients” — the statistically poor, environmentalist neurotics, the sexually disordered, &c. It is a mercy game, in which a rudely unCatholic definition of “mercy” is set into conflict with the most elementary requirements of justice — which, in human affairs, can be determined only case by case, according to laws well established, because long universally subscribed.

“Class mercy” we might also call this: the idea that people should be forgiven for sins not of commission or omission, but with respect to their class, collectively, and whenever possible, in advance; that they should then be cast as “victims,” lionized, subsidized, encouraged and rewarded. For class mercy is progressive mercy. It is “an evolution of society.” What was conceded yesterday is inadequate today; today’s gifts will be inadequate tomorrow.

The correct word for this is “licence,” however; and the result of it, in 100 percent of cases, is the relaxation and confusion of all moral standards. For the recipients of largesse, acquired as if by right and entitlement, will never be satisfied with the amount, and will riot and loot for more, “progressively” — in whatever currency, from cash to new laws.

Our Nanny State was founded on this liberal interpretation of “mercy,” and will invariably reveal its heart, in the prosecution of a “justice” that is false mercy’s flip side. We have a system of politically-organized looting, in which charity has no place at all, and class beneficiaries are appointed to receive the goods of what they view as their class enemies, through invasive and eventually sadistic taxation. Every scheme to relieve “the poor,” or “the planet,” now emanating even from Rome, assumes the proliferation of immense and labyrinthine Kafkaesque bureaucracies to deliver “class mercy,” or enforce “class justice.”

And this a full generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The moral exhibitionists in the Church vie to board the bandwagons, and egg the liberal politicians along, in the direction they are already travelling. They speak in empty ideological abstractions (even while using “ideology” as a term of abuse to any who resist them).

But more than anything else they pose, in words and gestures, to show us how humble and selfless they are, how kind and generous, how open-minded and approachable, what “a breath of fresh air.” While inwardly they are ravening wolves, and behind their pretty façades, ruthless.

Fortunately, as I suggested, the Church is not the State. She is not for sale in the same way the State will always be for sale. A generation of vipers will pass, and Christ restores His own again, as He has done on all previous occasions, these last two thousand years — returning the Church to her proper business, in the salvation of souls.

This has always included the care of the poor, the sick, the disabled, the old, the tired, the hopeless, the doubting, the strayed. But all these tasks are one by one, and one on one. For God has created each living man ensouled, not as member of a class, as for example ants and termites, but as a class or universe in himself — each man, in body and soul united, an instance of “special creation.” That is, to my reasonably confident understanding, the teaching of Holy Church through all generations, and it is the reason why all genuinely Catholic eleemosynary institutions required voluntary, not legislated acts.

We, Catholics, all Christians, and verily all people are called to help each other when and where we can, and many of us to devote our lives to some focused service — as, for example, the Catholic sisters who invented and long dominated the profession of nursing. Not cash transfers, but service in kind — addressed to each specific need, and delivered with an absolute minimum of arbitrary and wasteful bureaucracy, and often none at all.

By increments, through the twentieth century, the Church in the West surrendered her most important worldly tasks to the State, or more often had them taken from her. And now, in the twenty-first, our own shepherds forget this magnificent heritage, and rather than try to resume it, they strike empty poses. “The State must do more, the State must spend more, the State must become more committed!”

But all the State provides is abortions, both literally and by analogy in every other field of its enterprise. For take away the motive of charity, which is not a scheme but an animation, and that is what remains: Procrustean “solutions” to everything that passes the State’s way.

Human sin, misfortune and misadventure, has never been a “class problem,” except insofar as all human beings belong to the same class — for all are sinners, and in earthly terms, all come to a bad end in death. The virtues associated with Mercy and Justice are facets of a Christian response — to itemized human sins, and uniquely experienced sorrows.

The cure of souls, as the cure of bodies, can only be done one soul at a time, and without Love it will canker.

The first thing to know about the Church, is that she’s not for sale. So, too, the principles upon which Western Civilization was erected. We aren’t in a “marketplace of ideas.” If they are true, they are not fungible; if they are false, they are worthless.

I don’t just mean, sold for money. Many currencies are used to obtain things in this world, and money is among the cleanest: it can be seen, quantified, and accepted or rejected. Most financial corruption is straightforward. There is no difficulty in discovering the motive. The people who do it may lead otherwise commendable lives. That is, if you think bourgeois is commendable.

And the poor often make good, honest thieves. I was reminded of this by a wallet thief in Parkdale, recently — or “cutpurse,” as we would have called him, a couple of centuries ago, when the craft standards in this trade were higher. All he wanted was the cash. The cards he couldn’t use: they were cancelled too quickly, and those with pictures on them a waste of his precious time. So he left the wallet where it was likely to be returned to its owner. I’m sure he thinks himself a fine, decent, conscientious fellow for having done this. The hippies always taught, “Take only what you need.” Though had he been more of an antiquarian, he might have realized the wallet itself was worth more than the cash it contained.

Violence is also a currency, as Messrs Daish, Qaeda, Boko Haram, &c, remind us every day. It can be more efficient than money in getting what you want, and is quicker than queueing, though like money it requires good management to get the best results. Which is just where psychopaths most frequently go wrong: they do not think ahead.

Even violence may seem clean compared to other twists. I have come to think moral posturing is the dirtiest of all currencies or persuaders. It has the largest fallout. By mimicking the good, and providing cover for bad behaviour, it spreads. Hypocrisy comes into this: most, if not all who present themselves as moral exemplars are hypocrites, indeed: but hypocrisies can be exposed and derided. Rather, I think, the moral exhibitionism is the primary evil. It invites applause, and with applause, imitation.

In the world of media and politics I have passed through, the biggest rewards were available almost exclusively to stuntmen (and stuntwomen) of this kind. Few of the most successful, it seemed to me, were in it for money alone; though few failed to see the main chances. Often, vanity got the better of them: they did not see the shoals in the course of self-promotion. For many, it was a short journey, to where something more mephitic came into play; something like a desire to be worshipped. Causes they might think they served, but they weren’t much moved by the consequences.

This is what was on display in Baltimore last week, and has been in many American inner cities. The looting and rioting is done by small people who “don’t know any better” when an opportunity comes to hand. The cost is much less in immediate property damage, than in the loss of order over time, which will be theirs to pay. They are not manipulators, but manipulees.

Like most inner cities, Baltimore has been governed by moral exhibitionists for generations, now. One may watch the city’s current progressive lords performing for the television cameras, delivering their scapegoats for prosecution and trial. It isn’t really necessary to name names, when one is referring to a whole political class, of progressive Democrats (and the occasional progressive Republican for variety) who create and keep the underclass in their places, cultivating their envies and resentments, and then directing them for use as voting fodder.

If these people — the looters and rioters — had genuine friends, they would be told to get a life, by adage and example. The lessons would correspond roughly with the Ten Commandments. They should be told that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; that God is not merciful with liars and thieves and other malefactors. That God is the worst enemy you can have; or should you choose, the most reliable friend.

They should be told a good start would be: cut yourself off welfare. I am not being empirical here: welfare is not extrinsic but intrinsic to the spread of crime. This is not only because it makes you fat and lazy, though it usually does that. It is instead because welfare is evil in itself: it is organized looting by political means. It is what keeps evil men in power.

Note that these prescriptions are moral, not economic. That they happen to be more consonant with economic nature, than the prescriptions they contradict, is hardly a coincidence — as will be seen from the moment that nature’s God is solemnly acknowledged, and begins to be obeyed. For in the end, they are His prescriptions, and in the end, they make sense.

*

As postscript, I feel the same disappointment in Michael Coren’s widely publicized defection from the Catholic Church, as I do in progressive politicians. He told us Why Catholics Are Right in a recent book, was a popular parish speaker, an effective TV host, and far my superior in the art of nurturing a sympathetic audience. But now he has “moved on.”

He will now tell a new audience what they want to hear: that acts like sodomy are “loving” and okay; that religious opposition to sins of the flesh, ranging from contraception to same-sex marriage, is mean and antiquated; that those who, often at great personal cost, still try to uphold received doctrines that have animated Christendom through twenty centuries, may be despised as “haters.” He rightly judges that the Catholic Church is set in her ways: that she will never change her principles. Therefore he goes to those who will keep their principles up to date.

To some, this stasis — this insistence on a moral and spiritual order that cannot be altered by men, nor by a God who is self-consistent — makes the Catholic Church a dead end. To others, it is actually liberating, to stand for the right, regardless of the numbers; regardless, finally, even of the cost.

Pray please for Michael, whom I have known for thirty years. Reliable Catholic he may not be, but he is sincerely God-haunted, for better and for worse. Pray also for those who put their trust in him.

And let us, too, with Saint Thomas More, pray that we may yet, “hereafter in Heaven, merrily all meet together, to our everlasting salvation.”

“Historic princess will be first to benefit from new succession rules,” it sez here, above the streaming headline in some tabloid somewhere, glimpsed via Internet. Did not read story; knew it already. Newspaper headlines today tell us things we already know, or more likely, things we already know to be false. But in this case: true enough. Except that the word “benefit” is a lie.

Welcome to Earth, HRH Princess X of Cambridge!

They should ask the kid’s great-grandmother what the benefits are of being Queen of England, or any other place. She’s a brick (in the good sense). She would never answer.

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” according to my friend Will Shakespeare. There are various other passages in which he reflects a mediaeval view of monarchy and power. It is true, there are men who would be king, who have the ambition for it. These are monsters whom we must keep away from power. Some of them might even be women. How perverse is that?

But even such monsters once knew better than to think kingship a slice of cake, a life of luxury. And few would be so foolish to seek it for that end. You might have every worldly pleasure it is possible to command, but you will not have a moment to enjoy it.

“It must be nice.” … This sordid, lower-class English expression is designed to convey the speaker’s envy for, and resentment of, his betters. My sympathies are immediately engaged with his betters. Some gamekeeper should be asked how the peasant was able to look over the wall.

Power is ugly, the powerful are ugly, but the people who want and envy power are uglier.

Mere wealth, to the contrary, can be relatively pretty. But as Our Lord averred, there is a problem even with that. This goes beyond its transactional value, for it is true that wealth can buy power, as I have been made many times aware. (And power can, of course, appropriate wealth.) “Offer it up,” is my self-advice, on occasions when I feel myself aggrieved; or as we say today, “suck it up.” The world has always been thus. People expecting justice in this place have landed on the wrong planet. (Anecdotes to follow.)

More fundamentally, however, wealth is a distraction, great wealth is a great distraction, and power is a positive vexation. Quite apart from any evil embedded within the desire, the person who lives for either is a fool. He cannot know what he is getting into.

The wet sea-boy, a-perch the mast, sleeps soundlier above rude wind and wave. “Then happy low, lie down!”

Hardly a month out from Easter — Queen Moon last night, nearly full in her sky, riding in her majesty past the gliding entourage of stars. And this is where we are. The most arrant nonsense printed in the tabloids, as if no one had learnt a thing these last two thousand years. … Pshaw!

Surely it is time for us to sing unto the Lord a new song; to Him who hath revealed His justice in the sight of the Gentiles, &c. (See Introit for Old Mass, Fourth Sunday in Easter, &c.)

There are three essential ingredients in a Chinese oyster sauce, so far as I can make out from the labels: oyster juice, sugar, and monosodium glutamate. Corn starch is needed to adjust the texture, but I should think rice or potato starch might serve equally well.

In the Chinatown grocery I most frequent, bottles of this delicious substance are available for around two dollars each. But I found one brand in a special section — marked in Chinese, I had thought, for a “sale” — that was six dollars. The label included a delightful wood-engraved depiction of an oyster, from which I guessed what the bottle must contain. It was set within classical Chinese typography (no simplified characters). Judge the book by its cover!

Now, don’t get me wrong. The venerable Hong Kong company, Lee Kum Kee, which has, over the last six generations, built a fortune on oyster sauce, and at least fifty-seven other popular sauces and condiments, so that it might be considered China’s answer to Heinz, makes a very acceptable oyster sauce for around two dollars. And for a fact I know it is bottled under hygienic factory conditions, or was when (as a hack business journalist) I once visited one of their plants. I will offer no criticism of this worthy commercial establishment.

And while I do not know this for a fact, I did once purchase a cheaper variety of oyster sauce, which could not have been made from oysters. Perhaps some more plentiful marine mollusc was inducted, to provide a “fishy” taste, but I doubt even that. From the aftertaste, I’d have guessed industrial by-products from some other Mainland source. It did prove an excellent toilet cleaner, but I wouldn’t use it on counters.

Never cut corners like this yourself, gentle reader! If the market rate for a substance is around two dollars, acclimatize yourself to the expenditure. Less will not be more — not in the world of food processing and packaging!

Conversely, I found the idea of paying six dollars for a bottle of oyster sauce too attractive to pass up.  My reasoning was, that if I could derive such pleasure as I had from the basic commercial product, what ecstasies might await at treble the price?

Too, this more expensive variety had been slipt to the shelves in an admirable way. The bottle entirely ignored Canadian labelling requirements, including the usual incomprehensible health and nutritional warnings, and made no use of either official language. It had to be good.

And it was, … and I am writing this only to express my lament that the bottle is now empty, and my regret that its fellows are now removed from display in Chinatown, perhaps by our NFG (national food gestapo), so that I have no idea where to find another.

There was indeed no list of ingredients on that bottle that I could discover — though my Chinese is imperfect — so I am left to speculate what the secret was. Here, if gentle reader will permit, is my theory of the matter.

It is that, the bottle contained oyster, and nothing but oyster, patiently reduced and carmelized, conferring an enchantingly natural sweetness, with nothing superadded except, of course, salts from the seawater employed in the boiling.

That, it had been made from intentionally selected, superior specimens of the beautifully elongated and large Crassostrea angulata — the oriental oyster par excellence — probably sun-dried in preparation.

That, there was no hurrying in the course of this preparation.

That, for the very love of a fine oyster sauce, a great deal of attentive labour had gone into the production, by men of skill and experience and indifference to competition.

Well, as they say, that’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it.

If I deviate from my admired R.S. ever or at all, it is because from my own “life experience” I cannot derive any pleasure from leftist twinkling. This is a slippage I have observed in many otherwise reliable dinosaurs. I attribute it to the drought of fashion. That is, we (dinosaurs) are always out of fashion. The twinkle comes when we see an opportunity to strike a transgressive, progressive pose, and therefore put ourselves in fashion with the smuglies, if only for a nanosecond. We seize upon it, as a dinosaur would, on something very small. But there is never much protein in the thing, and soon we must resume the hunt for something bigger and chewier.

I give initials, not a name, because examples are legion, and why should I pick on one guy who happens to be the most recent to annoy me? We see it in church pulpit as well as in politics: the soi-disant “conservative” who makes a spectacle of his one liberal view. If he lives in, say, Washington, and makes enough of it, he may still get invited to some parties. The Enemy will remember his little peep of statism or feminism or environmentalism or anti-Semitism or whatever it may be, and ignore everything else he says. He will be called, perhaps even to appear on television sometimes, but only to show that “even R.S. thinks we ought to” … euthanize our grannies, or what have you.

May Morning is when they all come out.

Had I not been criticized myself, for doing something of the kind this morning in my column over at Catholic Thing (here), I would perhaps not mention this. I stand accused (not publicly, just in email) of sympathizing with liturgical reform. I allowed that Pope Pius XII might have had good intentions, when he tried to appropriate the socialist May Day for Holy Church with his new feast of “Saint Joseph the Workman,” which replaced “Pip’n’Jim” in the missals for this day, back in 1955. That is, the venerable Feast of Saints Philip and James, Apostles, was displaced (to May 11th), to accommodate this papal wink to the labouring masses.

His Late Holiness ran that up the pole (“1st class – white”), but hardly anyone saluted. In the Novus Ordo it is now downplayed, but we’re stuck with it in the 1962 missal for the Extraordinary Form. … Aheu! … Father Hunwicke explains how to get around it, however, with a quick feint to Ordinariate usage (see here). … Bravo, bravo! …

In general, it is a mistake to play to anyone else’s agenda. Let them play to ours. Our agenda is transcendence and salvation. It is not global warming or “workers of the world.”

For as I tried to hint in my Thing squibble, there is no call for celebration of “workers,” per, as it were, se. They labour for cash, and for cash alone. Who would work on a production line, in factory or office, if he (or she, alas) didn’t need the wages? We may empathize with slaves, including wage slaves, but must stop short of celebrating the institution of slavery. The whole scheme of Capitalism and Socialism, of Management and Labour, needs to be reviewed.

And I say, godspeed to that, and by all means let Saint Joseph the Carpenter help us show the way. Work, in a necessary craft, out of one’s own house, making use no doubt of available child labour, is the ancient and honourable way to proceed. We could start by striking down all the labour laws and city by-laws that make this impracticable, trash the income tax and so forth. For note, that the surrogate father of Our Lord was not homogenized. A carpenter, perhaps even a joiner, and thus a guildsman, a craftsman; not a “worker” waiting for a strike. There was no lunchpail in that scene.

But we could think about all this some other day. In the meantime, give us back May Morning.

Upon being received into the Church, at the tender age of fifty, I took the Christian name of Anthony, after Saint Anthony of Padua. There was good reason for this, for as I looked back, he had been encouraging me to join for a long time. Of course the first reason was my alma mater, Saint Anthony’s School in Lahore, Pakistan, where I first came in contact with Catholic Truth. (The less fashionably I put that, the better.) But on two other occasions something happened in proximity to brick and mortar, and in both cases the church in or by which I was standing happened to be named for the same Saint Anthony. Both times I was spooked: call me superstitious.

Had I not felt this compulsion, to give Anthony his due, I would instead have taken the name Catherine. Indeed, I almost did, before some petty thinking got in my way. It was a small, unmanly, puritan hesitation at the prospect of “cross-dressing” in a woman’s name; along with some confusion about her life and times, mostly since cleared up. Other coincidences hearken from that side, too: we share a “birthday,” for instance.

Catherine Benincasa, or as we now know her, Saint Catherine of Siena, was then, and has grown since, among my greatest heroes; or I would write “heroines” except I wish to make clear she belongs in no sub-category. She is among the largest figures in Church history, but also in worldly, political affairs; a paragon for sanctity in absolute terms; a font of spiritual knowledge communicated in hundreds of extraordinary letters, prayers, meditations — and her Dialogue of Divine Providence, a formative work in the Tuscan vernacular. She stands astride the fourteenth century as a beacon to all ages: patroness of Italy (with Saint Francis Assisi), mystical counterpart to Dante, and angel of reconciliation across Christendom.

Yet more extraordinary, to us glib moderns: everything she accomplished remains within sight of the demonstrable historical record; everything witnessed with conventional human eyes, and surviving in evidence still physically available.

Were nothing holy allowed to her — nothing the agnostic historian will recognize as miraculous — she must still be admired for having, often single-handedly, by the boldest imaginable acts of persuasion, on the basis of no formal authority or title, achieved astounding things.

These would include healing the Great Schism of the fourteenth century; bringing the papacy from exile in Avignon home to Rome (with Europe-wide ramifications); negotiating peace between warring Italian states; quelling insurrections; reforming the incorrigible; and turning the whole worldly activity of the Church once again healthily outward — back on mission and crusade, after a period of institutional self-immolation almost as shameful to recount as our own times. And this before she died, “under the whole weight of the Barque of Peter,” at the age of thirty-three.

The twenty-fourth child of her mother, Lapa — and not the last — she was raised in the household of a cloth-dyer, in a city ravaged by the Plague. Alas, many of her siblings predeceased her, including the twin with whom she was born, quite prematurely.

Everything about her is larger than life, to the modern observer. By the age of twenty she had already cut a figure that might justify a footnote in the historical record, for she was also larger than life to her contemporaries, and the more so the closer they came to her. She was “possessed” by a will that could not be brooked, and the only question in the mind of those who met her was whether she was possessed by Christ or Satan. The answer, however, presently emerged.

“Build a cell inside your mind.” This was her advice, even as a teenager, to persons much older who sought her advice, including her own remarkable spiritual director, Blessed Raymond of Capua. Make it an impregnable cell of self-knowledge, to abide whether you should live in a cloister, or out on the highways. At her mystical marriage, to Christ, she was told to take the latter course: to go out into the world.

Her mystical visions began at age seven; she was often found in a state of ecstasy, throughout her life. Having vowed perpetual virginity as a child, she had renounced marriage and motherhood — cutting off her hair when her family tried to marry her off, and breaking out in an atrocious rash, that helped to conceal her sublime beauty. (It disappeared the moment they gave up.) Yet she also rejected the life of a nun, becoming instead a Dominican tertiary. To a modern witness she would seem a madwoman: speaking with familiarity to an invisible Saint Dominic, for instance, and various others residing in Heaven, as if it were nothing odd.

We might call her an anorexic, for she went long stretches without food, claiming the Host sufficient from daily Mass, finally confessing that the thought of eating disgusted her. She died of a stroke that a modern medical man might say was brought on by her peculiar mortifications. She did not herself have much use for doctors.

Her secret was of course to be recognized, by those who met her, from an early age, as an undeniable instrument of Christ. In an age still of faith, this was still possible: for even men notorious for their arrogance in daily life, will suddenly stop short from belief, when they truly believe Christ is “messaging” them.

Catherine could speak with an authority that made powerful men fall silent and think again through their actions; she could command obedience from the most unlikely malefactors; and walk straight into the most dangerous situations with a placid self-confidence that inspired unqualified trust. For she seemed to know not only what people should do, but how they should do it: to have a praeternatural understanding of the “realpolitik” in their situations, too; of how things actually work in the backrooms of Power. No threat or promise could deter her from a purpose; but more, no trick fool her into abandoning a cause. She is thus my model for the sort of “insolent woman” I have always admired, and also feared sometimes: the one who does not lie.

Yet in her correspondence, with great and humble alike, she can be as soft and gentle as the purse of rose petals that replaced her head (in one of her posthumous miracles). Or she could blaze with a fire that would scald the unapproachable, lash with words to make them jump from their skins. As statesmen and prelates eventually learnt, there was no point in trying to resist a woman, who dealt with them as with servants, from a life full of exhausting acts of charity, towards the poorest of Christ’s poor.

She was disturbing enough, by reputation, even in that quotidian life: for she had a gift for appropriating whatever she needed, often in a hurry, from sheer charm. There are those who will part with the shirts from their own backs: easy marks for any saint. But Catherine could talk those who would never dream of doing such a thing, into doing it, promptly.

Even her writing partakes of the miraculous, for she was never taught to write, if even to read, and her scintillating prose was usually dictated. But suddenly, as an adult, retiring from company, she began to copy her own thoughts in an elegant scribal hand. This was one of many casual accomplishments that staggered her companions. It was, too, a seemingly encyclopaedic, exact knowledge of things never known to have been taught, that was ultimately acknowledged when she became one of the four female “Doctors of the Church” (the others being Saints Teresa of Ávila, Thérèse of Lisieux, and Hildegard of Bingen). For her teaching still lives; it is immortal.

Such women do not themselves die. We can also know their present address. We may still ask their help; still reach them in purposeful prayer. At the moment our need is especially urgent, for it seems we have a lot of foolish old prelates in Rome once again, who need some stiff talking to. And who better than Saint Catherine to confront them?

Oddly, several correspondents have asked me to write my autobiography, unaware that they have been reading it. Any curious or amusing event from my life may fall into this space, eventually. True, the account is intermixed with my opinions, and general reflections, but that is the case in more conventional autobiographies. The individual chapters are sometimes short, but I compensate by the number of them.

There are stories which insist on being told in a certain order. Often that order is chronological, but novelists, even filmmakers, delight in playing with this. Historians are more strict, but then they are boring. Poets cannot help themselves: only balladeers ever stay on track, and Homer often nods, intentionally. I tell my own stories in the persona of an old man, jumbling the order of events, omitting necessary connectives, but generously supplying very fulsome repetitions.

Many years ago (note: autobiographical fragment approaching) I was sacked from a job I briefly held as a movie reviewer (in Bangkok). True enough, I knew nothing about movies, had watched only a few, and wouldn’t have thought of writing about them had I not been asked. It wasn’t my expertise that got me the assignment; rather my willingness to say “yes” on a lark. That is the journalist’s usual qualification.

I was sent to see some Italian movie, by some famous director with a name like Antinomianly. As later I learned, it involved flashbacks. It was almost what you’d call an “art movie” — you know, sort of European. There were subtitles in English, perhaps, but nobody warned me about the technique. A female lead was, I now think, portrayed at three different ages. I took her to be three different people. I took the whole film to be one continuous narrative roll — forward when it moved mostly backward. This produced in my mind a most intricate plot, which I had much trouble expounding. But I went about the task manfully enough. Newspapers being what they are, it was all printed.

A friend, himself a filmmaker, reading my piece, said that even though he hadn’t seen the film, he could tell I had written nonsense. “Not even an Italian could have made such a movie.”

His remark was prophetic. The next day, in the rival newspaper, a movie reviewer named Bernard Trink devoted his space to mocking my review. He advanced the theory that I was on drugs, which had caused brain damage. He left no doubt that I was a fool. The same day, my own editor decided, in light of that and a few other complaints, to assign someone else to the beat.

Ah, now I remember: the director’s name was Antonioni. Thinking he might be amused, I found his address, and sent him copies of both my review, and Mr Trink’s methodical demolition of it.

Months later, I received a reply. In elegant English, this Antonioni thanked me for forwarding the clippings. And then, with wry mischief aforethought, he added: “Congratulations, Mr Warren! You are the only reviewer in the whole world who understood my film.”

Of course, I contrived to bring this to everyone’s attention.

*

Now, that was an exceptionally self-indulgent little anecdote. And gentle reader will see, it comes in no particular order. My whole life seems like that, when I look back. Lots of things happened, but in no particular order. I must not misrepresent them by creating some specious narrative into which all the pieces might somehow fit. This would only increase the confusion. Someone might write in the next day, showing I’d misunderstood the plot.

Had I more time, I might dig out the title of the film, and like information. One wants to get the smaller details right. But not today. You see, it is my birthday. The whole morning was already lost to Shakespeare class, and I have errands to run this afternoon. Moreover, there are some lads prepared to drink with me in a public bar, as the afternoon evolves into evening. So gentle reader must take this Idlepost as it stands. For already I am feeling thirsty.

Sixty-two pints for sixty-two years?

Maybe just half-pints at my age.

This notion, that malice need not be assigned as an explanation, when stupidity could serve as well, is so Christian as to be almost attractive. I say “almost” illegitimately. There is much pagan left in all of us, or perhaps I should say so much in me, that I resist certain Christian attractions. I’d rather hang the malefactors than teach them. But there you go. It takes charity to recognize stupidity in another; intelligence to spot it in oneself.

Self-love does not come into this, incidentally. Except that, implicitly, it does.

It doesn’t come into much in the outward Christian analysis, so far as I can see. That is to say, Christ had little and perhaps nothing to say on this topic, as he had little or nothing to say on politics. A few points can be taken as implied, but Our Lord never appears for the cameras in the lab coat of a scientist or the smileyface of a politician. That is to say, He does not offer the heavenly service as an interpreter of nature. He lets nature speak for herself.

We are born with self-love. It comes pre-installed, so well that it cannot be removed without destroying the whole creature. That is to say, you can tell when a person has succeeded in removing his self-love, because he is dead, from suicide.

Now, perhaps I have put too many Christian ideas on the table at the same time. But they are all to a single purpose, I swear. That I might possibly gum up the works, should always be considered. (I assume people read other writers, too.) For it is not always easy to see what one is doing when trying to make Christian connexions, in an environment neither Christian nor aspiring to be.

But here is where I should like to go: self-love is not stupid. For if it were, we should have to question the celestial mechanics of our own being, along with that pertaining to all other creatures. My little finches, on the balconata, breakfasting again, are as full of self-love as I am, or perhaps a bit less since I am bigger and arguably more sophisticated. This self-love is discernible in their desire to preserve their little lives, from buzzards and so forth. Their occasional cries of alarm would indicate a certain fellow-feeling, too: a kind of love for one another. For self-love is not incompatible with love for others.

Indeed, it may be the analogical basis for it. In love, we might say that it is actually possible for a person to love another more than he loves himself. It happens, even in Canada. And, “greater love hath no man,” &c. This is not a suicidal disposition, as the pop psychologists might suspect. One loves oneself a lot, and loves another even more. If one hardly loved oneself at all, loving another more wouldn’t be so remarkable.

Humility comes into this, but only to make what I am saying clear. It is not the opposite of self-love. This is becoming a hard point to make only because we have generally been lapsing into a state of abject stupidity. The two qualities — humility and self-love — go together like justice and mercy. They are not “alternatives” to each other, as the liberals vainly preach, who believe there is such a thing as “altruism”; that it is Darwinian or something like that. But no, each pair is more like the cross hairs in a gun sight. The just act will also be merciful; the merciful act will also be just. And humility is implicitly self-loving. It is not a choice between shooting high, or shooting wide. It is a question of finding the target where the hairs meet.

Self-love is not shallow, or does not need to enshallow itself, any more than mercy should be steering for the shoals. It is the guardian of a self-interest, that should run very deep. When fools suggest that Christians are selfish, for wanting to get themselves into Heaven — for adjusting their behaviour to that imagined “self-serving” end — I am at a loss. (But of course, they don’t know any better.) We want to be saved. We want others to be saved, also. We cannot help them if we are lost ourselves. This is pretty much the opposite of selfish.

It is not shallow, to have some regard to one’s ultimate, personal fate; it is as deep as any absolute. Therefore it may be mysterious. Or rather, it is mysterious, for it is at the heart of the mystery of our being — at what the meaning of “is” is, and how we are not, so to say, “not.”

I think of a woman, married several times and with a child by her latest soi-disant “husband.” Lapsed beyond laughing from her Catholic upbringing, she suddenly decided that her son must be baptized. This presented a problem to her mind, because she had not darkened the portal of a church for a very long time. She asked advice on this, from me of all people. Could I suggest a priest who would baptize her child without asking her any questions?

Out of the blue sky she said to me, “David, I know that I am going to Hell. But I don’t want my” — insert name of little boy, here — “to go there.”

“Now look, lady” — in real life she has a name, too — “I think you might be fooling yourself. Are you sure you want to go to Hell? Because, from what you asked, it would seem you hadn’t entirely made up your mind yet.”

We’ve probably gone far enough into this case. Even priests who don’t know Latin often know what baptism is about, and that there are times to just shut up and not ask questions. They may also realize that each case is special.

My point here is to make an exhibition of a strange little fact — that to love another more than oneself may be, unknowingly, the highest form of self-love. Even into the well-hole of human error, light may suddenly shine. And the interesting question comes back up: who is saving whom? Christ alone saves, but in proximate causation, I would score that lady’s little boy, first. For he seems to be the means for saving his mother.

And she has never been especially evil, except in rather conventional ways. Turn on any television and one will soon see that. On the contrary she is one giant step above her fellows. She has some intellection that she has done wrong, that the course of her life has not been altogether excusable. Perhaps it is a signal from her own distant past, her own experience of childhood, when she once dressed up in white, for church; and the Catholic teaching went in one ear, without quite all of it coming out the other. It is something, to be raised even a little above the condition of “invincible ignorance.” Though of course it makes life more complicated.

(Great news: only one of those previous marriages could possibly be valid. So she will need, at most, only one annulment. )

It could be said, in a sense, that the ladder of stupidity reaches up to Heaven. That is to say, from its grounding in that invincible ignorance, the rungs go higher. They must be climbed, however.

Am I making any sense? That we, too, are enabled to climb the rungs of Bethel — the ladder seen by the Patriarch Jacob — and that it is in our self-loving self-interest (though the opposite of self-serving) to help each other up. For that is the message of Love, beaming angelically downward; and as it were, the angels coming down the stairs themselves to help us. And it is when we look up, that the light finally catches our sunless hidden faces.

Properly understood, I would say that self-love is quite the opposite of stupidity, and so far as it is the real natural thing, cannot involve malice at all. It might be described as our countenance itself. And, even better than to be condemned in darkness, is to be shown upward, towards that Light.

Characters like today’s (usus antiquior) saint, Peter Canisius, turn out to be quite relevant, forty-six years after the Vatican Vandals (™) stripped him from the liturgy, to make more space for kumbaya. A pioneering Jesuit, later recognized as a Doctor of the Church, he served through the reigns of four popes in the sixteenth century. His task was to save the Catholic Church from extinction in the German-speaking realms of Europe’s near north. How desperately we need another one like him today.

Saint Peter was all his life, from university days in Cologne, an itinerant preacher. He was an inhumanly tireless one. Wandering Germany at the height of the Protestant Reformation, as it was pushing all before it, he realized an important thing about preaching. It was little use to attack the Reformers, or to list heresies few would understand. That only meant a mud bath, and one for which his own side was badly outnumbered. The common people, and many of the better educated, too, were simple and often honest, he believed. They did not actually know what the Catholic faith was. No one had been teaching it for a while. They’d been taking on faith, instead, that the nasty caricature of Catholic doctrine the Reformers were imparting must be true, having heard nothing to contradict it.

This is what makes Saint Peter Canisius so modern. His situation is parallel to what we find today — in Germany, especially. A large part of the catastrophe of the Roman Church in our own time is likewise the direct consequence of failing to teach the faith — to children, to adults, even to seminarians. (In fact, teaching children is not really the Church’s job; it is the parents’ job.)

People can’t always be blamed for not knowing things of which they’ve never heard. On the eve of the Reformation, the Church had fallen into smugness and indifference of the kind we get from our bishops today, in too many places. It was time to find clergy who would teach the faith as if their lives depended on it. (Please take the hint.) This meant, creating them; for then as now there was what is called a “crisis in vocations.”

With his Jesuit colleagues — very few to start, but a remarkable lot — he got this show on the road, positively teaching, teaching, teaching. That is not to say Saint Peter Canisius avoided debate. He was on call to debate any Protestant theologian, in any venue — the more formidable, the better. He acquired a reputation for making fools of them — very public fools. He then leapt upon each opportunity to go after their patrons — the local rulers who had bowed to pressure, including mobs sometimes, to appoint such men to the leading pulpits. He became considerably resented for his success in bringing them around, from confusion, or to where they had left their cojones.

Yet he carefully avoided the ad hominem: refused to attack persons, including the persons of Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin. It was their teachings he wished to debate. Attacking the man cannot cure him, he reasoned; it will only make him incurable.

Penniless, for the most part, he contrived to found Jesuit colleges out of thin air. For the first time, the teaching was in German as well as Latin. He wrote catechisms, in German and Latin, suited to all sorts and conditions. He was a major figure behind the Catechism of the Council of Trent. Schools, everywhere — he launched schools to teach those at all ages, the Catholic religion and much besides. Rome occasionally wondered what he was up to; he seldom found time to reply. Offered bishoprics and other opportunities to become a Prince of the Church, he’d refuse, saying he didn’t have time. Sometimes he’d pause just long enough to clean up a mess the last bishop had left; but only until the new bishop arrived.

The Rhineland, Bavaria, Austria, beyond — all these heartlands of German-speaking Catholicism were, arguably, saved by the efforts of one man, who was recognized in the Mass as the second apostle of Germany, after Saint Boniface. We cannot afford to forget such men.

*

This Saint Peter was Pieter Kanis, in his native Dutch. He was raised in the Guelderland. I cannot resist a quick aside on his native place. It was one of several Dutch towns shown to me … many years ago.

Nijmegen, or Nimeguen as we used to say in English, was once a jewel on the River Waal in the beautiful Rhineland. Founded by the Romans, it had two millennia of artefacts to show, until the Second World War. An important entrepôt even in the first century, it remained so through Charlemagne and into the age of the Hanseatic League. It was a major art centre in the later Middle Ages (the Limbourg brothers came from there), an urban bouquet of Gothic craft and architecture. But moving right along. …

It was the first town to fall to the Nazis on the Western front, as the Blitz began. But that was not the worst of it. It is near Arnhem: not a good place to be at the end of that War, either.

Perhaps gentle reader has heard of Operation Market Garden. Stop me before I wander into a long disquisition on the Allied advance after the Normandy landings — which was heroic, on the part of so many of the individuals involved; but also, usually a farce, of the kind which reminds us that the army was the original bureaucracy. But that was not the worst of it, either.

Owing to navigation errors, American bombers mistook Nimeguen for another town — one actually in Germany — and pulverized it in the afternoon of 22 February 1944, killing quite a number of people, and giving Nazi propagandists a huge boost. The back-and-forth on the ground in the autumn helped smooth those ruins. Pockets of well-armed German resistance remained, even six months after that, with consequences gentle reader will imagine. Little was standing by VE Day.

But there were measured drawings and photographs, and much could have been patiently rebuilt. Saturation bombing is a setback, to be sure, but worse things can happen. And worse things did.

I refer to the city planners, who went into action after the War. And what they did to Nimeguen, … I don’t even want to talk about.