Essays in Idleness

I was “called,” as we say, to Christian belief and faith, but can’t say that I was called specifically to membership in the Catholic Church. That took some time to work out, for I am a slow thinker. To my reasonably certain knowledge, I was never called to the priesthood, nor to monastic life. Nor do I think myself suited to it, for obedience has never been my principal virtue. Prayer itself is a struggle for me; I blow hot and cold. When cold, I may whip myself to do what I ought, but if I then face one of these irreverent “New Masses,” the spirit of holiness does not quickly engulf me. I look at my watch if the homily strays over ten minutes; even if I’m not wearing it. The thought forms: “Look, I am here on business, I’ve been summoned into the Presence of Our Lord. Please don’t try to distract me.”

What I think of the Church, most mornings, in her aspect as a human organization, could be summarized in words I often quote from Hilaire Belloc: “The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.”

And yet I am, like any faithful Catholic, drawn short by any priest, acting in persona Christi. Confronted with the long history of Christian monasticism, and mystical works, I cannot possibly be dismissive. Rather, I am in awe.

While a superficial distinction can be made, between holiness in prayer and holiness in action, the contemplative life does not answer to it. Of course, a monastic profession is not free from “work”: nothing that gets you up before five in the morning could be. But by a trite modern notion we have come to understand that prayer is, even if work, effectual only in some “psychological” way. If there is a God, thinks the unreflecting modern, then praying might improve my standing with Him, and make me behave a little better. The Christian idea that it can move mountains is not something we are inclined to entertain. And this because, when push comes to shove, we are utterly faithless.

Holiness, as Freedom and a few other things — everything, actually — is indivisible. We have categories, but should not be under their spell. Though not called to the eremite condition myself, I am not prey to the modern superstition that the silent religious within their enclosures are “irrelevant” to the life of this world. Without them, I think, we are for the boilers. For not only is prayer “real” but — in flat contradiction of modernist individualism — the prayers of others also have effect.

In my piece at Catholic Thing this morning (here) I try to apply this to our current situation. We are passing through a time when, from our organizational summit in Rome, we are darkly warned against the many sins to which we are not tempted.

We are not, so far as I can see, in an age of all-encompassing monasticism, tithing to a Church that is fussily intruding into every aspect of our private lives, and preaching oppressive brimstone from every pulpit. (Nor were we ever, notwithstanding modern myths.) If we were, perhaps some of the latest Apostolic Exhortation would make sense.

Rather, we live in an age of irresponsible glibness, and oppressive faithlessness, towards Christ but also towards our neighbour. This is the circumstance the Church must address, if she is to have any influence on the sordid passage of human events. She must call us to worship, which means prayer. And what we should “do” about the mess around us should emerge from that prayer, not vice versa.

A journalist hiding behind a “Premium” pay wall, one Margi Murphy of the London Telegraph, noticed something I did, too, during my brief video reconnoitre of yesterday’s congressional hearings. It was about this Zuckerberg fellow who, with friends who have since been suing him, launched the appalling Facebook social media site, from his Harvard dorm room in 2004.

Did I mention that the whole idea of the thing is appalling? Or that it should be eliminated for reasons of good taste? Or that the “softball” questions the lad is being asked by the Merican Senators should be supplemented with spinballs, knuckleballs, spitballs, rocks, and the occasional guided missile? No? Well, sometimes I run over my self-imposed space allowance, in my tireless efforts to be “fair and balanced.”

What this Murphy lady noticed, with the help of some “body-language expert” — and I could spot without — was that young Zuckerberg is a computer animation. My words, not theirs, but they flagged the robotic delivery of prepared answers to prepared questions, and the facial gestures corresponding to the keystrokes in an emoji chart.

Now that we have seen him in action, an inquiry should be called to establish whether Zuckerberg actually exists. In his Wicked Paedia entry, for instance, his pre-college claim to know French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek is stated. Surely that is a giveaway. Many questions need answering, for instance: Was his height-enhancing seat-cushion real? Or was it part of the holographic projection? How many of the Senators were real? And how do we know the camera slips were genuine?

I do not accuse “Z.” of working for the Russians. Rather, I wonder if he was invented in the same Moscow simulation studios that came up with the characters of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Pope Francis. In which case we should worry: for Trump is able to simulate spontaneity.

Will the missile smacks on Syria that Trump has telegraphed be real? Was Putin’s promise to shoot them down part of the arrangement? What if there was no arrangement, or some gaffer accidentally deleted the script? Will more or fewer people be killed as a consequence?

I have other questions. They occur to me whenever I check the news. Nothing makes sense, on the Facebook of things, and one naturally tries to find explanations. I see various attempts that I would call paranoid, but those are as likely to come from the news presenters as from the Facebook customers.

The human mind seeks order. Even hallucinations serve this quest. Placed in an environment where nothing is intelligible, quite wonderful things will be imagined. Notwithstanding, I am struck by a horrible thought. What if Zuckerberg is real?

At the moment, up here in the High Doganate, or rather, inside my wee desktop communications facility, I am receiving requests from persons with names such as “Honey,” and “Alisha,” to do business with me. The sort of business was not mentioned; until Alisha hinted that it would be “long term,” and consist of me getting paid for advertisements on this website that would be automatically inserted so that I would never have to think about them. But I generally avoid getting into long-term relationships with people I’ve never met, who lack surnames. So, I hit “Spam,” as I have already done several times this morning, or “Report Phishing” for variety, and hope that if I continue hitting them, these “virtual ladies” will eventually go away, and I can get back to the more attractive business offers, that come from Nigeria.

The world out there is large, I have observed, in comparison to me. In the olden days, before the Internet was invented, and then Facebook and other obscenities, one had also to cope with the dodgy types; but only those in one’s immediate vicinity. Moreover, they had to show their faces. There was always buckshot, if they persisted in coming to your door. Now, thanks to technology, all the dodgy types in the world can come right through it, and the amount of effort that would have to be invested to give any one of them some much-needed pain, is beyond imagining.

I am not “on Facebook.” True enough, I tried a three-month experiment being “on Twitter,” several years ago. This ended in my freedom from the slightest temptation to ever be on it again. My problem was, the experiment was working. My “followers” were multiplying merrily, and my mind was becoming stuck in quick one-line responses to them and to my trolls. It was fun, in moments, the way battlefields are fun, for soldiers who enjoy heavy crossfire. And all of it “virtual,” and thus none of it harmful to the body; only to the soul. Ditto, I should think, for Facebook.

This kid called Zuckerberg is testifying to Congress at the moment, I gather from the news. People have been whining about how their privacy is invaded, and how he profits from the information he quasi-legally extracts. But the kid himself is only an “entrepreneur,” with proven skill appropriating anything that comes within his grasp. “You’re own bloody fault for opening a Facebook account,” I would say — if I did not know better.

Do you know that I was “banned” by Facebook, without ever having opened an account? This I learnt when I tried to read something unpleasant about me, which a friend said was on Facebook. He gave the link; cat-like I succumbed to curiosity. From the little I understand of the matter — yet it is more than I wanted to know — Facebook and other “social media” are able to “scrape” me algorithmically. Their machines, tipped off perhaps by some obvious cad, had guessed that I was not a liberal-progressive zombie, and was thus ineligible to participate in their “free service.”

It is in the nature of “post-modern irony,” however, that you must participate, or suffer consequences that the service can impose.

The analogy that comes to mind is driverless cars. We are told that these wonderful new computer-operated vehicles are perfectly safe and might even cut down on death and carnage from road collisions. That is good news for people in cars. The bad news will be an immense increase in death and carnage for pedestrians, who are harder than big metal objects for the machines to track. But those in cars won’t be criminally responsible, so why should they care?

In the reasoning of our progressive age, those who do not buy driverless cars will have only themselves to blame for getting “mistakenly” killed by them. Though I imagine we will soon be able to buy electronic implants, that will signal our location to the passing cars, and as a bonus to the authorities, allow satellite tracking of ourselves as we walk, sit, or sleep.

And then there is Sweden — in advance even of Canada in the movement towards the “cashless society,” in which, if you haven’t first bought the necessary high-tech equipment, you cannot buy even a loaf of bread. The intention is not to starve the elderly and feeble, of course. The Swedes already have elaborate social programmes for training these people like rats or hamsters. Rather, it is to provide the government, and the large corporations which interact with it (or vice versa if you’re Left instead of Right), with detailed information on your movements, and every transaction, no matter how small. The revenue offices need never again miss a penny of your taxes. And you get to pay for being hooked up.

Who could resist such a bargain, even were it not legally imposed? All these developments are good for the economy, and will contribute to an increase in our GDP.

My Chief Texas Correspondent, of all people, directs my attention this morning to an article by a certain Yoram Hazony, in the Wall Street Journal. It is entitled, “The Dark Side of the Enlightenment,” and is several cuts above the usual op-ed standard. It is worth busting in, for anyone who has the means to get through their pay wall. I would go farther than Mr Hazony, myself, but he goes far enough for the first mug of coffee, in dismembering the premisses under recent books by e.g. David Brooks and Steven Pinker. I noted, and was delighted by, a nice swift kick at Immanuel Kant — who, to my mind, was almost personally responsible for resetting the default of Western Civ to “agnosticism.” We must toggle it back, to “faith and reason.”

Reason belongs in all those areas to which reason can be applied. It is not opposed to, but complementary to, Faith. “Rationalism” is not reason, but its deification, in the same relation as “scientism” to science. It produces strange monsters, and a lot of bloodshed, and is paradoxically rife with superstition and the sort of priestcraft that comes in lab-coats. (“Science” says this and “science” says that, and we must run and do whatever Al Gore tells us because of “settled science.” In Russia they had seventy-five years of settled “scientific socialism.”) Mr Hazony’s opposition of genuine scepticism to the posturings of the enlightened is right on.

Many so-called “conservatives” are enlightened. Brooks is a jackass, and yet he counts as a “conservative,” at least for the purposes of tokenism in the New York Times. Pinker is a jackass, too, I say, though from another stable: reason and rationalism all jumbled together. (Or mule, if you prefer, in light of cross-breeding between Houyhnhnm horse and pack asinus.)

As gentle reader may know, my view of Darwinism — a key component of modern, enlightened, progressive thinking — is not favourable. In thinking about it recently, I remembered that while I’ve been anti-Darwinian since about the age of twelve, I didn’t come to it by my own genius. It was a remarkably impressive biology teacher, a certain Mr Henry (American), who got me started, in the (very backward and British-colonial) Bangkok Patana School. Apart from what seemed an encyclopaedic knowledge of every living creature and how it works, he was contemptuous of textbook evolutionism, saying we cannot prove descent from the mere fact of chronological succession. And indeed, the DNA revolution is still toppling the “settled” family tree, and shredding all its branches.

I mention this because, contrary to the teaching of Enlightenment, we do actually depend on teachers and precursors to get at any knowledge. An important conceit among the enlightened is that they alone know everything from scratch and experiment. On closer inspection, they don’t know squat. From Mr Henry, among other sources such as my father, I acquired that “scepticism.” It is not the same as doubting everything you are told, except what you are told by the cool people.

You know there is such a thing as Truth, and will not be put off it by bullshit. You know that the truth is not something that changes. What was true yesterday, stays true today. The task is to discover what the truth is, not to gauge which way the wind is blowing.

Mr Henry was, incidentally, sacked for teaching that the biology textbook was full of … whatever. He knew his subject inside out, and he was dead right. He was a quiet, rather timid man, but he wouldn’t knuckle under. Nor had this anything to do with his religion: I don’t think he had any.

That’s just Darwinism. The project of the Enlightenment is larger. It is totalitarian in nature, was from the beginning, and will be until by God’s grace, it ends.

My Chief Buncombe Correspondent (from the county of that name in the Carolinas) writes:

“An odd analogy presented itself while I was in the state between wakefulness and sleep. It came to pass that in youth I spent many Saturdays at a road course race track. It was a two-and-a-half mile course. I often chose to view the action from corner two. I would be looking down a short high-speed straight section that fed into a tight right-hand turn. It was an excellent vantage to see both the skills of the driver displayed, and the way the machine responded to his inputs, on the undulating surface of the track. I was a Ford man in the day, although I drove a VW Bug for economy’s sake. Being a Ford man, I took special interest in the Mustangs.

“The Mustang had uni-body construction. There was no frame. The members of the body acted as frame to carry tension, compression, and torsional loads.

“It worked well enough for driving to the market. …

“On the race track, however, the design was flawed. Coming into turn two, decelerating as hard as the brakes and tires would allow, and riding over lumpy asphalt where thousands of previous racers had braked, on much stickier tires that had rippled the surface, the Mustangs would dance and skitter. They would leap sideways, buck, shudder and chirp. One could plainly see the driver slashing the steering wheel from side to side — while still on the straight section, not yet into the turn. He fought to save control before entering the turn, where the real test of man and machine would be encountered.

“It was exciting to watch, but also upsetting. No one really wants to see the tightrope walker fall. The more obvious the danger, the less the enjoyment for the non-ghoulish.

“By contrast, the cars that were purpose-built for racing, were completely stable under hard braking. The driver’s hands were still as the chassis damped out the undulations, and the rigid steel tube ‘space frame’ kept all useful parts in their correct relations. Making time through turn two was still a test of skill, judgement, and feel, but it was not the existential threat faced by Mustang drivers, who rode random forces into the turn, like a bronc buster in a jackpot rodeo.

“And so it came unto me that rigidity has its purposes. Pace our current apostolic spiritual leader, rigidity is not an inherent evil. When man and his constructions are put to the test, rigidity is what allows for clarity of action. Instead of reacting to random fluctuations made worse by complex and unforeseeable rebounding, one may concentrate on the matter at hand. …”

*

One finds this principle, too, in wild nature. Creatures including men have spines, and a skeletal arrangement, whether it be internal or external. Bones do not bend. They are flexible in the joints, true enough, but within limits. The turtle has his carapace, the beetle his shell, neither of which benefit from cracking. And every creature, without an exception, is endowed with structure, finely adapted to his tasks. Not one can afford to be compromised. They are rigid and stable when it comes to the test, and not likelier to survive when broken. The Intelligent Designer made them that way.

For sure, there is a place for worms, whose design is well suited to slithering from sight, but I think the celebration of invertebrates has been overdone. Let us also celebrate the rigid.

Asked once if he were a happy man, Charles de Gaulle replied, “I am not stupid.”

It was a direct reply to a direct question, and it was superb. For the French general and president would not diminish the concept of happiness to what it has become in our modern world; to what I would call the “happyface” idiocy. The burdens of state are not happyface, and the jollying rhetoric of cheap politicians does not lighten them. I love Charles de Gaulle, by the way, in the same way I love Winston Churchill: the man for the job in each case. But I have never mistaken either for a saint.

Gethsemane, to be plain, was not a happyface story. Neither was the Crucifixion.

The Gloria is not a happyface proposition. Nothing that is bottomless could be so.

The moral stench of our contemporary, “progressive” worldview is not founded on anything. It floats in an air of glibness — the very glibness that denies the existence of Hell. It presents itself as more merciful than Jesus, more tolerant than the madame of any brothel. Its happiness is a false posture, shallow and neurotic; a mask over something unspeakably grim.

What troubles me most is not our current pope’s repeated contradictions, of the Catholic doctrines that are his duty to uphold. This troubles me a great deal, but even more, his refusal to answer direct questions about what he has said, or is reported to have said. Instead he leaves his staff to issue “plausible denials” — sophistical obfuscations — then goes back to playing conventional pope again, for the conventionally faithful, until his next irruption. He is playing a game with us — a game with the heart, mind, and soul of every Catholic. By now I am convinced that he is not an honest man.

He is not even a sincere heretic. The venerable heresy of Apokatastasis, attributed to proponents of universal salvation, from Origen to Teilhard, is not what he is selling, contrary to what several intellectuals claim. That doctrine is not glib. It does not involve denial of the existence of Hell; it rather affirms that the souls in Hell will be, somehow and eventually, brought to salvation. It further contradicts the pope’s Peronist notion that inconvenient souls can be made to “disappear.” For however we imagine Hell, or its duration, the idea that God did not make every human soul immortal is actually more offensive to Christian teaching.

I have been accused, by several correspondents, of being a bad Catholic, for showing the office of the papacy disrespect. This is upside down. It is exactly what the pope is doing — forcing us to choose between himself and Jesus Christ.

It will be the thesis of this Idlepost that there are no heretics today — not even in Rome, alas. The classical heresies are alive, and repeated, but not with the virulence of old. We are protected from them by a secret not yet discovered by medical science: that you can’t get the plague when you’ve already got a cold. Modern error is like the common cold, or drunkenness: a condition which afflicts so much of the human organism simultaneously, that there can be no cure, no elegant diagnosis. We are enwrapped, or enfogged, by all the symptoms. Some may die from the development of effects — from pneumonia, perhaps, or cirrhosis of the liver — but most experience only general debilitation.

The attempt to define the heresy of “Americanism” — a noble effort on the part of Leo XIII, in his Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae (1899), developed from the noble effort of Pius IX in his “Syllabus of Errors” (1864) — is indicative of this. There was, by those days, no “silver bullet” for the modern condition, nor even a spray of silver bullets: the Enemy was already too heterogeneous for that. Scholars debate what the “real targets” of these documents were (was Leo badgering the Americans to get at the French? &c) but cannot agree among themselves. The first thing we see in reading them again is that they seem dated, since Western society has since “moved on” — though precisely in the directions predicted. (The great encyclicals, including Humanae Vitae, have this prophetic quality. They seem “dated” today because they were so true.)

Implicit in modernity from the beginning was what we call post-modernity today: something irretrievably irrational and post-Christian, though from a host or legion of causes; a swamp within which we cannot trace any single spring. Mud, quite impossible to drain; though as ever we remember that God could do it.

Some tidsear sgoile (Scots Gaelic for “schoolteacher,” I hope) once told me that modernity consists of two poisoned streams of post-Christian thinking, one of which can be traced to Descartes, the other to Hegel. And that we are the fish carried along by them; not actually dead, but close to it. It was, I thought, the beginning of a brilliant clarification. But then the mud infills on every side.

When I call myself a “man of the thirteenth century,” I am not really claiming to be eight centuries old; only expressing an aspiration. It has seemed to me from the beginning of my journey into Christianity, towards Catholicism, that the challenge is to overcome — if only in one’s own mental outlook — the catastrophe of the Reformation. And by this I mean the Reformation in the broadest sense, not merely as the origin of Protestantism, for the Catholic realms were almost equally altered by it. As I once put it, the Protestants had walked off with some of our silverware; getting it back would require getting them back. But the analogy isn’t good enough; for the whole (“Catholic”) vision is larger than any sum of its parts.

What entered on all sides was a “rationalism” that irrationally denied the mystical, the miraculous, and the boundaries of reason; which finally denies reason itself, and leaves each man in utter isolation. Our saints in their visionary experience could get it back; but our people were being taught not even to look for it; to reduce the visionary to optics, as it were; finally to discount everything divine as forms of superstition. Progress was conceived: towards some point at which God could be eliminated entirely.

The task of righting what seems capsized in the Church is of course beyond any human capacity, individual or aggregate. We can only turn to Christ for that. But that turning is, in itself, a challenge beyond the reach of modernity. To follow Him, we must verily give up everything we have.

Methinks I am a prophet new inspired, and do foretell the use of ducks in rice fields. More precisely, I am reminded of this clever practice by an item on the Beeb this morning. It is what that BBC is good for, by the way. Skip immediately over their canting and pernicious news pages, and go to their earth and nature pieces. They are endowed with a huge budget, and one way that they spend it is on these mildly informative and passably entertaining “features.” Often I am slightly uplifted by them.

Their piece this morning on a French rice farmer, whose son happened to visit Vietnam, was in that class. There are pretty pictures of the now duckherd farmer, leading his flock through his paddies. The more paddy, the better for the ducks; the more ducks, the better for the paddy. God is bountiful.

The ducks, you see, do not like rice. They eat everything else while the rice grows, at all of its stages: weeds, insects, and many wee creatures which the moderns would restrain by truckloads of pesticides. They also replace the fertilizer truckloads, having been designed by nature to distribute their wealth evenly and lightly. This saves the expense of fuel, in a waste of heavy engineering.

On the other hand, it requires some art, and prayer whenever, as sometimes happens, the time is out of joint.

With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder; or once he gets the knack of gobbling, it makes him fat. By end of season, it is true, your ducks become so heavy, that they would trample the delicate seedlings for the next crop. This would be a problem were there not a simple and elegant solution: duck paté. Thus have we two full crops, in the space of a single beleaguered one.

Three, once we draw some fish into the picture. For the farmers in the wet monsoonal downwinds of south-eastern Asia take them at the flood; encourage them to stray from the swollen rivers into their rice fields. Fine, free-range fish these would be. Your children can catch them with their hands for dinner, or supplement the supply from dip nets in the streams and klongs. Such happy memories I have, of rural Thailand: delicious fresh fish, with the appropriate sauces.

And how I love to see small children, joyously at work. (Schools only make them sad.)

Now, before gentle reader abandons his good sense, to take up rice cultivation, he should consider whether the parking lots around him would be so easy to adapt, or if the local climate is tropical enough. He should also know, or perhaps does already, that the life of the traditional farmer on all our continents was never quite continuous Arcadian bliss.

Who, now, seeing Her so
Happily married,
Housewife, helpmate to Man,

Can imagine the screeching
Virago, the Amazon,
Earth Mother was? …

(Auden, 1965.)

Still, we might rethink our politics, our economics, and the other dimensions of our complacently destructive ways. And this before, in addition to our own sorry spectacle, of yammering and slammering and hammering and grinding, we get the screeching Virago back.

A correspondent in Italy, where it is five hours ahead, writes that she is lying abed; in the modern manner, with telecommunications. And all around her Venetian lair, the bells are ringing out. All of them, everywhere, throughout the city.

“Possibly Jesus has just broken down the door to Hell,” she writes, of the breaking news (so much better than the crap we get from the media). She says this is, “Thrilling.”

And the news gets better, still: for He has been there, and done that, and now is Resurrected.

Difficult, perhaps, for us worldlings to grasp, in all of its ramifications, but this much we should be able to take in: Crucified. Dead. Buried.

And Alive, for evermore; and has the keys of Hell and of Death.

My column for Good Friday (here) was written before I read the news of the latest papal expostulation, and the latest dishonesty in “spinning” it, from Rome. This makes no difference, of course; the Catholic Church to which I belong does not allow doctrinal innovations. What Christ preached, cannot be “updated.” When innovations are attempted, they fail. Our history is littered with the attempts; as, too, by some very bad popes. Christians should not be alarmed by them. “Fear not,” we were instructed.

We have this year, it would seem, the perfect Good Friday of desolation. The magnitude of the current programme, to bring Christ’s Church “down to the people” — to reduce the whole edifice to post-modern gravel — has been made plain.

Under the previously received dispensation, Hell is contained; the Church has her commanding rôle, at the front line. Now, perhaps, we may review that sometimes puzzling expression of the Christ:

“Thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the Gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.”

For if the very existence of Hell can be denied, by no other than our Supreme Pontiff, the gate is quite ajar. And as Hell most certainly does exist, it is no longer confined. To reverse the words of Georges Bernanos’ dying country priest: “Hell is everywhere.” (He said, “Grace is everywhere,” in the original.)

Under the latest “merciful” revision, death is not defeated, for men who persist in sin simply “disappear,” into the all-embracing void. Christ is left with no one to save. He is made redundant. It is God the Father, alone, who remains, in this perverted new teaching: God now surrounded by the void of nothingness, having drawn a finite number of penitents to himself. Rather, it is Heaven that is now contained, within a universal field of non-existence. But do not fret: for if worst comes to worst, then poof, you just vanish. (God turns out to be like the merciful Juan Perón.)

I think I have quoted before the late Polish poet, Czesław Miłosz:

“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death: the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.”

Yet this is plainly stated in the “new theology,” now coming from Rome: a reversal of all previous Catholic teaching. The Christian cosmology is turned inside out.

We are at the nadir of Good Friday, it might seem, at the feet of a dripping corpse, beneath a Christ himself gone to the void; a Christ forsaken by the Father, sent into the Nowhere. Thus a Christ who lied to us even about Hell, and must have lied about everything else as well. A Christ who left us to sordid human pastors, to play upon our gullibility. A Christ who, unknowingly of course, cheated his followers through twenty centuries, spoiling our fun with abstinence and fasting. A Christ who only makes us feel guilty. A Christ who “meant well,” to be sure, but could never deliver.

Instead we are now offered a “new,” substitute, “Christ of Surprises,” and comprehensive “mercy”; a sweetheart, who will forgive anything; who is not hung up on theology at all; and dispenses the Host like candy. A Christ for our ironical times.

This cannot stand. It is too wicked. The reversal will itself be reversed, and has, in fact, already been reversed. For the truth was, is, and will be, that Christ rises!

____________

I learn that as this latest news was breaking, plaster was falling from the ceiling on the tourists, inside St Peter’s. The image of the Rending of the Veil comes to mind. See Bible.

For many years I have — along with every conscious Christian with an IQ above room temperature — noticed that ugly and ridiculous media attacks on Christian belief peak around Easter. This is what one would expect. Christmas matters less because it is already buried in commercialized feelgood; has been effectively de-Christianized, much like Hallowe’en. But Easter has yet to succumb entirely to the attack of the chocolate bunnies. And so we get, for instance, quack archaeology, calling biblical events into question with the plausibility of a Dan Brown story; or a few juicy quotes from an obvious heretic, dressed ostentatiously as priest or nun; or an op-ed rant from some virulent head-case. It never fails: mud towards Easter.

This Easter, their task will be easier, as it has been these last few years, because the pope himself says the “juicy” thing. The quote of the moment is that hell doesn’t exist, that everyone goes to heaven except a few really bad ones, and they just “disappear” — I suppose, like an Argentine who rubbed the Peronists the wrong way.

I am not making this up. It is not the first time the Holy Father has said this in an interview with the public atheist, Eugenio Scalfari, his old friend and a founder of Rome’s upmarket radical leftist daily, La Repubblica. But the shoe has now dropped again, more loudly.

The pope has said other things in these interviews (which he freely grants and has at least once had re-posted on the Vatican website) that would appal any serious Catholic. I don’t want to get into it: the information is easily available elsewhere. In this week’s case, the statement was so egregious that the Vatican publicists squeaked up with a non-correction, in which they insinuated that Scalfari might not have quoted the pope exactly; reticently, in case Scalfari made a recording. What they didn’t correct, was the statement itself.

I have been around for some time. I know at first hand how the media work, and I know that Bergoglio came to Rome (from Argentina of all places) with a reputation as an adept media manipulator, fond of playing the crowd. He is no babe in the woods. He must know as I do that if a journalist seriously misrepresents what you say, you don’t give him another opportunity. Moreover, you publicly correct him in a way not only unambiguous, but sharp enough to get everyone’s attention — at speed, I should think, if you have millions of Catholics hanging on your words. Instead he lets the outrage stand.

The quoted statement, of course, makes a hash of Good Friday. What was Christ doing, descending into Hell, if Hell does not exist? Why did Christ so often mention Hell in the Gospels, in very grave terms of warning? And speak of Judgement, more often still? Was He just being “ironical”?

A naïve correspondent, citing the latest, asks if I will leave the Church like so many others whose faith and intelligence this pope has insulted.

Let him leave; I’m staying Catholic.

In addition to saints, there would seem to be two kinds of people: those who think that saints are possible, and those who do not. Neither will ever be extinguished in this world, where miracles also do or do not occur. The latter group (who call themselves “sceptics,” for they are also given to misuse of language) prevail at the moment, but this was not always so.

There were outright atheists in the Middle Ages, in addition to heretics and proto-protestants of many stripes, yet it was an age of faith, in the main, and gratitude for saints and sanctity was widespread. There were satirists of the claims made for saints, as for the behaviour of errant monks, priests, and other religious. But it did not follow that they mocked sanctity, or the claims of Holy Church herself. Rather they mocked charlatanry. That is another thing.

I should like to say something unmodern, on behalf of the simple mediaeval peasant, in awe of the Saints of Our Lord. It is true they were not intellectuals, and had not the facilities to check what they were told about the world beyond their immediate horizons. Yet they were in a better position than the complicated modern peasant, who also lacks the means to check what he reads and hears in the filth of our media. It is true that most men and women want to believe, want to trust, want to live in peace with their neighbours, now as then. But the phenomenon of Faith is not the same as credulity.

As some realize, and some do not, there are such things as saints, and angels. We might name them incorrectly, or mistake details, but still they would be there. We have, even in our two-dimensional ways, brushed against things in three dimensions. Some do, some don’t, realize what has happened.

Sanctity and heroism are tried in the forges. To be faithful unto death: that is the standard, and can only be the standard for faith in this world. There is no running from it. In reading of the fate of that French gendarme, Arnaud Beltrame, who surrendered himself in ransom for a kidnapped woman, and died as he could only expect, shot and with his throat slashed by a Muslim terrorist, we were slapped by history.

Here was a man who believed in saints. I do not mean this casually. Raised in a modern home, free of religion, he was called to military service. As a French soldier, he was decorated for his bravery in Iraq. In his thirties, he became a Catholic convert; made a pilgrimage to Sainte-Anne d’Auray, to ask the Virgin Mary to find him a wife. Found Marielle, a woman of deep faith like his own. Just before the terrorist attack at Trèbes, he had made his latest pilgrimage, to Compostela. He was an amateur historian, too, whose interest was in the Catholic roots of his own once-Christian country, France.

He would thus have been familiar with her long conflict with Islam, going back to Charles Martel. He would have known that in the Middle Ages, across the Mediterranean range of Europe, there were whole orders (including the Franciscans) devoted to ransoming Christians captured by Muslim pirates and slaving raids — often sacrificing their own lives. He would have known something of the very Catholic history of the men-at-arms, the Gendarmerie, and of the chivalric ideals that inspired them. More is conveyed by an old photograph of Beltrame’s face, wearing a smile of becoming simplicity. He had escaped the complexity of our modern world, while remaining very much part of it, and when he was called, by God, to redeem an innocent captive woman, he did not hesitate.

A Czech woman, moved to Canada by “events” (those of 1968), said something interesting to me yesterday, about this place: “Yet with all the things that bug me about contemporary Canada I retain a strange conviction: that the young lives lost in such numbers in the two World Wars have been guarding and protecting us.”

Note, that like Beltrame, they are all dead now; have been dead for decades, for a century. But they were our gens d’armes, and like this Frenchman, did not hesitate in their trenches.

On this Wednesday in Holy Week, which subsumes a ferial in commemoration of St John Capistran — the Franciscan Crusader whose appeals to faith stopped the Ottoman advance at the great Battle of Belgrade, shortly after Constantinople had fallen to them in 1453 — we are reminded of what has not changed.

How much worse things would be for us if such men hadn’t done as they did in life; or did not do as they continue to do.

“Thou tun’st this world below, the spheres above — who, in the heavenly round, to their own music move.”

The words, by the forgotten Nicholas Brady, are of course those for a soprano aria within an Ode by Henry Purcell. The melody is unearthly and sublime; Purcell was half an angel. I first heard this as a schoolchild, exploring the recordings in a music library. I was struck dead by it, or struck alive. My hair was still standing after I had replayed it into the earphones, several times.

It is an odd thing to mention in Holy Week, but then, I suppose I am odd. The movement towards Good Friday is no celebration of the music of the spheres. And yet I think it is this, too, and that the dimension of the Gloria, suppressed through Lent, remains; although as silent to us as the movement of the stars, and veiled behind our foreground.

Everything is happening in its course: wheels within wheels. The death in this world of Our Saviour is from a cause and to an end which we can understand, doctrinally; but only begin to glimpse in the mystical, when the near becomes the far and the far becomes the near. It is a human story of unimaginable pain, presented to us in words and images through art, and only tangentially in the soft chant of music, until that shall ignite in the Easter Resurrection.

We are human; it is a hard harvest in this world. But this is the way through death and life, there is no other. And in the end, no other than the Gloria.