Reflections of a stormy petrel

What just happened in Chile is awesome. The kind of titanic display of advanced technology, high competence and overwhelming organization that not so long ago seemed restricted to places like the USA and Germany has been deployed by a mid-sized Latin American country; little bits of help may have come from here or there, but the whole impulse, organization and direction of the immense effort was Chilean. Well may Chileans wax patriotic, wave their flags and sing their national anthem; nobody will begrudge it to them.

But there is another thing to be noticed. Everyone, from the President to the last miner and technician, spoke in religious terms. All the Chileans, the nation above and the miners below, did everything they could to achieve a positive result, with the most enormous display of human ingenuity, resolution and discipline; and then - they fell on their knees and thanked God. We have seen once more that feeling to which psalmists gave words 2500 or more years ago: "Not to ourselves, o Lord, but to Your Name give glory"; "Unless the Lord build the city, the workers labour in vain."

And it throws an interesting light on JK Rowling's own understanding of Christianity. In this article, she claims that the HP series is basically Christian. But she also claims - read the last three paragraphs - that the current Pope belongs to "the lunatic fringe" of Christianity. I'm afraid that what we have here, however incredible it may seem, is a survival, in the twenty-first century, of that English pathology that led nineteenth-century religious writers to call Catholicism "sectarian"; the ecclesiastical version of the "Fog in the Channel, Continent cut off" mentality.

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=17267
Considering the ability of science to change its basic paradigms very radically, we should not put more than so much trust on the current dominant theories. However, it is amusing that while aggressive and ignorant atheists are busy spreading their religion - especially in this country - in the name of science, real science is not giving them any good arguments.

The most dramatic part of World War Two as far as Italy was concerned began in September 8, 1943, when the Nazis, no longer as overbearing supposed allies, but as open enemies, invaded most of the country. One of the items on their agenda was to put an end to the culpably lax attitudes of most Italians to the Jewish problem. They wanted to destroy every Jew in Italy, and set about the work with gusto.

On direct orders from the Pope, every resource of the Catholic Church was made available to hide and disguise Jews and other prospective Nazi victims. The Vatican itself became overcrowded, as were dozens of cathedral closes and hundreds of churches, church schools and monasteries. Cloistered nuns were released from their vows to attend to necessary secret business. The Pope issued the Swiss Guard with machine guns and ordered them to use them if necessary. Everywhere, priests and trusted laymen worked overtime to produce false identity certificates and smuggle dangerous persons from farmhouse to monastery and from monastery to hotel.

One of the most astounding of the many episodes in this epic has only just come to light. The Church recruited one of her most famous lay faithful, the cycling champion Gino Bartali (Tour de France winner, 1938, 1948) and sent him on an impossible mission - cycling from Florence to Assisi and back in one day, to bring to Florence the false documents secretly printed in the town of St.Francis by a local printing-shop owner. The man who discovered the story, history graduate Paolo Alberati, was himself a professional cyclist who competed six times in the Giro d'Italia (1995-2000); but when he tried to match Bartali's exploit, in spite of having a bike half the weight (seven kilos against Bartali's fourteen), better roads and no Nazi patrols to dodge, he could not do it; he broke down half-way back. Bartali did this forty times between 1943 and 1944: forty world-class performances in the most appalling circumstances, more riding than a professional would ordinarily do for prizes, risking his life. He was never caught. And that in spite of the fact that he had been in the black books of the Fascist secret police (quite literally: he was Suspicious Person no.576) for at least five years. They did not like the fact that he openly and continuously refused to dedicate his victories to Mussolini, preferring to offer them up to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Bartali kept the secret to his grave, and for a long time even his wife and son knew nothing about it. His wife actually could not believe that the cloistered Poor Clare nuns of San Quirico, Assisi, knew her husband, but she went there and they answered - of course, madam, how could anyone be possibly mistaken about a man whose face had been in every newspaper in Europe? When his family asked, his answer was typical: "There's things you just do and don't brag about. I'm no hero, me. I just did the one thing I knew how to do - ride my bicycle."

The mission was sanctioned from the highest quarters. The man Bartali met at five o'clock in the morning of the first of his great rides was the private secretary of Cardinal Dalla Costa, Archbishop of Florence.

Tell this to the next moron you meet who dares open mouth about "Hitler's Pope" or the like.

For some reason quite unknown to me, when the Mass was translated from its original Greek into Latin (which was then the common language of the Western Roman Empire and some parts of the East as well), the opening call on the mercy of the Trinity was apparently left in Greek. At least, we can certainly say that after 1500 years or more of liturgical development, change, augmentation, diminution, and translation, those simple six words have remained in Greek: Kyrie, eleison. Christe, eleison. Kyrie, eleison. Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy; Lord, have mercy. Apart from the Aramaic Amen, this is certainly the best-known Catholic formula in a language other than Latin or the local. Virtually every good Catholic, certainly every priest, knows what it means. It is the first of the five great hymns which composers set to music when composing a "Mass" - Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei.

I recently was given a Jesuit's collection of classical music tapes, a quarter of which were of music by Bach. (Don't ask me why he was giving it away, I don't know. Probably he had got hold of CDs.) Most of the tapes were recorded by the man himself and had the titles of the work either in illegible hand script or in type. On the cover of the first part of Bach's mighty Mass in B, the word KYRIE had been spelled once KYRIA, once KYRRIE and never correctly.

Here is the link: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est_en.html. As with everything that I have read of his, it is simple in style, penetrating, full of unexpected connections, and of vast learning lightly worn. But I am rather amused to hear that some people, even in the Curia, were surprised at its "uncontroversial" content and expected something on some contemporary concern such as bioethics. I am willing to bet that the enemies of the Church, if and when they read it, will not find uncontroversial. I am willing to bet that the likes of aerynalexander or kennahijja would find it offensive in a dozen ways, some of which I cannot even guess at, but some of which (such as the calm restatement of the Catholic view of sexual love as being the link between one man and one woman) absolutely glare from the page.

Of all the nuisances that bedevil suffering Christianity in these latter days( Read more... )

A couple of days ago, I reported on the worrying trends among the orthodox rebels in the American Catholic Church. One thing I mentioned was the unlovely sympathy of at least one or two writers in the Roman Catholic Faithful newsletter for Lefebvrite schismatics and their paranoid view of the world (e.g. Popes John XXIII and Paul VI were Communist sympathizers). Thinking about it, I think this has a bearing on the issue of how conspiracy theories come to be.

Roman Catholic Faithful arose, as a group, in areas where the intellectual and ritual malfeasance of the "liberal" infiltrators in the Catholic Church had reached epidemic proportion. The experience of genuine Catholics in those dioceses was of trying to push against a rubber wall, that always snapped back the harder you fought against it. It can, without fear of exaggeration, be described as an experience of persecution and conspiracy: those in power - parish priests, diocesan bureaucrats, vicars, bishops - coming together to deny the man-in-the-pew what was due to them as Catholics; and nowhere for genuine Catholics to turn, for the authorities just reinforced each other and excluded any opportunity of reform or even of orthodox practice (orthodox priests from before the era of current management were got rid of one way or another, and notoriously orthodox congregations left without a priest or even closed with the excuse of a "vocations crisis" which the establishment itself had engineered). No doubt the generation in power did not regard this sort of thing as a conspiracy, just as vigorous executive action to enforce a progressive attitude. But try telling that to the person who cannot even get a hearing!

So the founders of Roman Catholic Faithful experience something which is, from their point of view, pretty indistinguishable from a conspiracy. They feel smothered by a group of men in power who work hand in glove with each other to force on them things they do not want and deny them even the shadow of justice. Then it develops. These rebellious faithful go to Rome; and for some reason or another they are disappointed. And they come to believe what their own enemies have told them (I quote)): "Rome will let ten thousand priests be shot rather than hurt one bishop." It is nonsense, of course. But they have had such an experience of constant rejection and ignoring that they take it seriously.

What happens to the mind of these people? That they project backwards, into an imagined past, the conspiracy which they feel to exist (and which, in some manner, does exist - at least as a convergence of interests and beliefs that leaves no space for opposition) in the present. They feel that if a conspiracy exists, then it was born as a conspiracy. They do not realize that it is often objective conditions that lead to such convergences of interests and beliefs. And they do not believe that, in so far conspiracies may have existed, they may have been penny-ante items taking place locally, not vast things that involve the world. This is part of a patter of historical ignorance. To them, the Church at present is what they experience, there and then, in Springfield or Rochester or Albany; but the Church in the past is the Church of the Popes, one single entity existing in Rome. Thus they assume that the current state of their diocese has a chain of origins that begins in Rome. They ignore purely local factors: they know nothing of how their church was fifty or a hundred years ago, or how certain local events in places such as New York or Philadelphia may have affected them.

But the basic element is the retrojection of present experience into the past. This is how conspiracy theories are born. It is an aspect of a greater feature of human thought, that events always create their own prehistory in people's minds. Like those interpretations of Russian or German history where everything concurs to the ultimate result of Communism or Nazism. It is a state of mind that I find inimical to good history, but there are a lot of historians who consciously or unconsciously cultivate it.