It's no wonder that Italian politics is the way it is.

Nosing about today into the local history of Umbria in the Spoleto-Perugia area, the big horseshoe valley of the Tiber.

My local village church, San Martino, was rebuilt in 1815, as were most of the parish churches of this area. It's a really lovely building, and of course was built in the same spot as the older church from the 13th century. But I wondered why that particular date and why all the rebuilding around here, since all the churches up and down the country road here were all about the same date and by the same architect.

As it turns out, there's a very sound historical reason. Of course, I live in what was once the Papal States. And that's kind of where the problem begins.

The history of the Church in Italy is not a happy one, and of course has a lot to do with the 1000 year conflict between the Pope and the Emperor, that spilled over into various iterations through the ages, culminating in the catastrophe of the secularist/freemasonic revolt of 1870 and the disastrous farce of unification, an artificial construct that has little actual social reality.

But as Rome and the Papal States flipped back and forth between rule by France, rule by Naples/Sicily, rule by the pope, like an oscillating sprinkler, there were brief moments of peace. One of these was at the end of French rule in this area, the département Trasimène (prefecture of Spoleto) ended in 1814. I expect after Napoleon had finished imposing his weird ideas of religion and the relations between Church and State, there wasn't much in the way of Catholic life left around here, so rebuilding was a way of reviving Catholic culture. Look particularly at the dates 1815: Rome changed hands three times in a single year. Hardly surprising that steps were taken in the provinces to try to establish some kind of ecclesial order.

Later in the 19th century the secularist Italian rulers had another go at the Church, in much the same way and for much the same reason as the English Dissolution: a kind of national possession of odium fidei...

Here is a little blurb about the decree of the governor Gioacchino Pepoli of 1860 in which all the convents and monasteries in this area were stripped of their possessions.

The Italian Suppression in 1866

With regard to the religious suppression decreed by the Italian Government in 1866, there is no specific mention in the Records of the Convent.

It is known from other sources, though, that the first decree of expulsion was issued by the High Commissioner of the Government, Gioacchino Pepoli on November 1th, 1860, after the occupation of the regions of Marche and Umbria. Such decree contained a clause which stated that all mendicant friars could remain in their cloisters of residence, provided that they expressed their intention to do so. They then provided to do such request. The definitive decree arrived nonetheless on July 7th, 1866.

Leafing through the Provincial Records in S. Maria degli Angeli, we have found a historic document sent to the General Ministry by the Provincial B. Stefano from Castelplanio, in 1882: “S. Antonio of Paccian Vecchio”, diocese of Città della Pieve – The Friars were expelled from this Convent as well, on March 24th, 1864”. The Church remained closed, and the building as well as its surroundings were rented to third parties.

~

Who was this Pepoli guy, and how could he have had the power to just wipe out Catholic religious life with the stroke of a pen?

This was the period of the beginning of the great disaster that Italy is still suffering from today. This comes from the 1935 (Mussolini-period) Italian Encyclopaedia...

Note the little ting of approval...

"Well accepted to Napoleon III, he was among the most valid cooperators with him to make him benevolent to Italian politics, especially to the Piedmontese one. Liberate the Romagne (1859) and appointed governor of them L. Cipriani, the P. assumed the posts of Minister of Foreign Affairs and Finance, of which he was an expert connoisseur. Member of the Romagne assembly, governor of Umbria, when he was occupied (September 1860) by the Italian government, he administered the region with wisdom..."

The blurb comes from the historical notes of a former Franciscan convent that is now a swank agritourismo near Trasimeno (a common fate of many, many monasteries and convents in Italy, and increasingly so...)

The Convent of Sant’Antonio of Padua Pacciano Vecchio, situated in the diocese of Città della Pieve, dates back to 1496. Its construction was authorised on July 16 that year by Pope Alexander VI, addressing the inhabitants of Pacciano Vecchio and Panicale. He affirmed the importance of this authorization based on the need of the presence of priests who would spread God’s Word and celebrate the Holy Misteries. He therefore gave his permission to build the Convent (“which would have the indulgencies and privileges of all other churches”) with a Church -consecrated to Saint Antonio of Padua- a bell tower, the cemetery, a dormitory, a refectory, a cloister, vegetable gardens and the smithery.

There is a Memorial, found in the Parish Archives of Panicale which says: “The Convent of the Fathers of Sant’Antonio of Paccian Vecchio was founded at the expenses of people from Panicale and Pacciano in 1496, in the site of the prisons of the County of Pacciano Vecchio, granted by the Counts Baglioni”.

~

It's no wonder that Italian politics is the way it is. They've had hundreds of years of this or that foreign or domestic ideological power declaring itself to be the rulers of this country. It's not surprising that the ordinary people have developed their unique Italian form of mental stoicism, a kind of aggressive indifference to politics at the national and international level, and the instinct to simply ignore the larger issues and preserve the family and one's private holdings, to be concerned exclusively with the local area, to protect the local interests.

It is also enlightening to see where the current suppression of the Catholic Faith within the Church's own institutions came from. It was, of course, in part the work of Modernist and Neo-Modernist theologians mainly from northern Europe. But a study could be usefully made of how the anti-clerical and secularist suppressions of the 19th century affected the situation in Italy, France and Germany to generate a kind of episcopal hopelessness, a sort of culture of ecclesiastical despair in response to the apparently unending stream of catastrophes of the modern period in Europe.



~

Quake-a-versary coming up

I just came across this photo. To my right is Fr. Basil, to my left are a couple of friends. It was taken by some of the news people who were there that morning. It must have been about an hour after the quake.

It was still pretty early in the morning, judging from the position of the shadows, after the Poor Clares had come stumbling out of the rubble and dust cloud, the first time I'd ever seen any of them. One of their older members of the community, still in her fluffy slippers, had to be carried over the piles of rubble.

When we saw them come out the thought came into my mind, "This is it. It's over." We spent a total of about five hours in the piazza, mainly waiting for the firemen to clear enough of the main street so we could walk out. Eventually they brought in a small bulldozer and escorted us out in groups of ten or twenty.



~

"They know in their bones that something has gone terribly wrong..."

Blessed fellowship of likemindedness.

John, a longtime reader, sent me a link to a blog by a guy who is doing what I'm doing, and apparently for much the same reason. Brian Kaller is apparently trying to raise a daughter in a way that is not in keeping with the mainstream. It seems like a pretty good idea to me. I don't have a daughter, but I have got latent maternal instincts. I feel the urge to teach people the things I was taught. I'm more glad than I can say that I'm not the only one.

Let’s say we've lost most of the self-reliant skills and classical education that our forbears posessed. Let's say we have replaced them with a culture of buying and discarding things we don't value, and staring at glowing screens. Let's say you want to try to rediscover an older way of life, believing we will need such things again. And let’s say you have a daughter.

Restoring Mayberry

When I ask most modern people to remember a particular decade, they usually remember the television shows and video games that took up much of their young life, or the clothes and hairstyles that were fashionable. They remember what Hollywood celebrities were doing at the time more than their own lives. They don’t typically remember what my elderly neighbours do, like the wildflowers that grew in a particular meadow, or peeking as children into the nests of herons and listening to the eggs. They don’t remember playing children’s games, or exploring the woods, or swimming to an island in the middle of the pond, or declaring themselves kings and princesses of their newfound lands. Most of them never had the friendships to even have such adventures – people moved around too much, or were always playing video games - even if they had been allowed to roam, and even if there were any woods to explore.

Most people my age spent 20,000 hours of their best years warehoused in a school that looked like a prison, but few remember anything they learned. Most remember spending many more hours in the backseats of cars, but never rode a horse or sailed a boat as children, or did anything that depended on skill and subtlety. Most modern people grew up with enough toys to fill an orphanage, but remember few of them, no more than their own children can remember the fifteenth toy they received last Christmas.

Perhaps most importantly, most people my age don’t remember ever having done anything useful. As children they might have been indulged or ignored, but when I ask if they ever contributed to the family, most are confused even by the question. A few cleaned their room or raked leaves outside. But few people my age grew up feeling necessary, or learning any skills, or feeling alive.

As working adults, most people I know spend their waking hours moving electrons around a screen, but they are still not necessary, and they feel it. Most depend entirely on electricity, but have no idea where my electricity comes from. They depend on pressing a button to keep warm, but don’t know what the button does. They need purified water from the tap, but have no idea where it comes from, or how pure it really is, or how it could be cleaned.

They know the president, but not their mayor or councilman, and know more about their favourite movie star than the old lady down the road. Most, I expect, have spent far more time watching others make love than they have making love themselves, and have spent thousands of hours watching actors feign death but have never bathed a body for burial.

Many Americans these days see family only on uncomfortable holidays, have no traditions to pass down, and little knowledge of songs or stories older than their parents. Most have spent their lives drifting across an ocean of strangers, committed to nothing and no one. No wonder suicide, which was once rare, has become a common cause of death. Most people don’t kill themselves in any identifiable way, of course – but when I return to my native country, I see many people who have ballooned in size, or require drugs of one kind or another to get through another day.

Even those who are nominally successful – who live in houses the size of barns, drive trucks the size of school-buses and have enough toys to stuff an orphanage – remain deeply unhappy. One way or another, they grow angrier every year; they know in their bones that something has gone terribly wrong.

~

Glad I'm not the only one to have noticed.










The more I think about the Beguine idea, the more I think if it is going to be useful, it has to encompass some kind of educational and hospitality aspect. The idea keeps coming back of having people to stay, receiving guests, according to the Holy Rule, is receiving Christ:

All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: I was a stranger and you welcomed me (Matt 25:35). 2 Proper honour must be shown to all, especially to those who share our faith (Gal 6:10) and to pilgrims. 3 Once a guest has been announced, the superior and the brothers are to meet him with all the courtesy of love. 4 First of all, they are to pray together and thus be united in peace...15 Great care and concern are to be shown in receiving poor people and pilgrims, because in them more particularly Christ is received...

And helping them reconnect with a more authentic way of life.

As this gentleman has pointed out, even the very materially wealthy people of Modernia are culturally impoverished to the point of absolute penury. As he says above, children are given toys and told to go away and stop bothering their parents. Anaesthetised by video games and screens, they are raised by machines who can teach them nothing useful, nor teach them how to be useful themselves. And I know young people feel this lack. I have friends younger than I who can't sew on a button or make a pot of tea.

There simply must be way not only to preserve this kind of life, but to help others discover and grow in it as well.



~

Losing my religion

Today I went to Mass at the basilica of San Benedetto. The monks chanted the propers beautifully and Fr. Basil was in especially fine voice for the Gospel. All was lovely and there were few of the irritations that are usual during tourist season. There were a few non-townies but they seemed to understand at least the gist of what was going on.

I came in a little late (as usual) and sat next to a woman - about her mid-fifties - who was obviously a Roman. She appeared to be engrossed in prayer and gave all the responses in Latin without hesitation.

Immediately after the gospel, she turned to me and whispered, "Are these Benedictine monks?"

Me: ... < blink >... < blink > ...

Ah, you mean those guys up front in the long black robes, with the shaved heads and the big beards...? The ones doing flawless Gregorian Chant ... as if they do it every day? ... In the Basilica of San Benedetto ... that has statues and paintings of San Benedetto everywhere? In the church that was built over top of the birthplace of San Benedetto... like it says on all the signs around town...

Those guys?

Ah, yeah, those are Benedictine monks.

What the... ?

The other day, I met a lovely young nun who is forming a new community in the US, to pray for and support priests and teach the faith to younger people. She was making a little pilgrimage around some of Italy's holy sites and stopped in town for a day or so. We had a lovely chat and I showed her around some of the neat stuff we have. We went in to look at St. Lawrence parish, a tiny little 4th century church around the corner from the main piazza. It's still a church but the Sacrament has been removed and it is no longer used for Masses, and is falling slowly into decrepitude. That day it was full of a grand piano and a few rows of chairs, since it was being used as part of the Norcia music festival. The person in charge of this saw us come and and asked if either of us played. Sister said she did, and she was kindly invited to sit down. She played and sang quite a lovely song she had written about the graces of the priesthood, as was appropriate. She sang in English.

At the end of it, as we were being ushered to the door, the nice gentleman asked sister, "Are you Catholic?" This was a nun dressed in a full habit, floor length white tunic, blue cincture, white linen guimpe and very long blue veil. She didn't just look like a nun, she looked like every painting you've ever seen of Our Lady of Lourdes. She stammered, "Yes, yes, I'm Catholic. I'm a nun." Having had his question answered, our new friend nodded with satisfaction at having guessed correctly the meaning of her peculiar attire.

As we were proceeding back to the piazza, she turned to me with a look of complete incredulity.

I said, "Yes, the Italians remember that there used to be this thing called 'Catholicism,' but they can recall very little about the details."

We are coming to the point in Italy where it will shortly no longer be accurate to refer to them even as "cultural Catholics".


Apparently, this is true in Germany too:

Emergency Call: The following call to 110 (the German version of 911/999) was made in Aachen, Germany:

Police: "Police Hotline."

Caller: "Hello, my name is [...] I'd like to report a large group of people who are walking down the street with a bullhorn. One of them recited some biblical saying, and the people were repeating the same saying. It's pretty creepy."

Police: "Which saying?"

Caller: "Something biblical, like ... that they are leaving this world ... something about a shepherd and stuff."

Police: "How many people are there?"

Caller: "Unfortunately, I couldn't tell. My husband was watching them ... wait a second ..."

Caller's Husband (shouting in the background): "20 people!"

Caller: "He says 20 people."

Police: "They are just walking through the area?"

Caller: "At the moment they haven't done anything, but it seems strange. Just in case something were to happen."

Police: "What, exactly, were they saying?

Caller's Husband (background): "... 'holy Mary, Mother of God' ..."

Caller: "You know, that saying ... 'and the fruit of thy womb' ... that saying people are always repeating ... I'm not a church person."

Police: "That's probably a procession which is passing through the area."

Caller: "A what?"

Police: "A procession. It's nothing to be afraid of."

Caller: "That they are wandering around here saying these things?"

Police: "Yes, it's a solemn church parade. That's called a 'procession' around here."

Caller: "Oh, I see. I'm not familiar with that. I just thought, because they were saying these things..."

Police: "Right. It's a procession."

~

Let's play a game!: name your obscure heroes

I was looking at my book shelf the other day (thinking I spend more time on the internet and less time reading them than I'd really like) and noticed that I like a great number of people whom the world would think very odd and obscure writers. It got me thinking; perhaps one of the things we can do, perhaps the only thing, to counter the evils of the celebrity-worship culture is to adopt another type of hero.

I'm betting that in our little O's P circle of readers we have amongst us a wonderful array of interesting, obscure and forgotten people who have influenced our thinking and lives who should be made more generally known.

So,

name ooooh, let's say, four, interesting writers, artists, political thinkers, philosophers, adventurers, explorers, warriors, gardeners, scientists, saints or relatives who have strongly influenced you to think and behave independently of the general crowd of our degenerate post-everything anti-culture.

I'll go first.


Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the writer, professor and literary philosopher who I most want to be when I grow up. He more or less invented the notion of studying literature as an academic field, and instituted the chair of English literature at Cambridge. Of a long and fruitful lifetime of works, including the monumentally important Oxford Book of English Verse (of which I think I have at least two editions) Sir Arthur's work that got me thinking about literature in a new way was his address to students in 1916 that was later published as "On the Art of Writing".

He was the inspiration for the character of Ratty in the Wind in the Willows (my first literary influence) and invented the adage for all writers of fiction, "murder your darlings."


Roger Tory Peterson
whose bird books got me started as the (half-assed) amateur field naturalist I am today. When I was eight, or so, I saw a TV programme about him and knew, right then, that I wanted to be a field naturalist artist when I grew up. (Too bad real life intervened so brutally about then, but that's another sob-story).


Sir Thomas Browne
the wacky 17th century English doctor whose book Religio Medici was condemned by the Vatican and demonstrated that pure, and very endearing, bull-headed English attitude that with the right sort of education, an Englishman can just damn well write about any subject he pleases, and to hell with the facts. His description of elephants will make you fall on your face laughing.

His literary style is the very model of a 17th century Protestant gentleman, and his whimsical spelling and random capitalisations are a delight to behold. I have a very nice three-volume edition of his collected works given to me by the late, great John Muggeridge from his father's collection which I treasure. His religious ideas are proof that what we today regard as nutty liberalism, born in the 60s, has been the mainstream of Anglicanism from its earliest days. But from a literary viewpoint, he, with John Donne and John Evelyn, epitomises all that was best and worth preserving about post-Medieval, early modern Anglicanism, and will do very nicely as part of the booty when we bring them in.


Blessed Margaret of Castello
who was a dwarf, born blind and hunchbacked with a gammy leg in 13th century Italy. She was rejected by her shallow, noble parents who wanted none of their rivals to know they'd spawned such a misfit. She was locked up in a kind of hermitage for most of her childhood where she was allowed only to speak to the parish priest and the servant who brought her food from her parents' palace.

Then, when she was 20, her parents took her to the town of Castello where miraculous healings were rumoured to be taking place, and when after a day of prayer she failed to be miraculously restored, they walked away, abandoning her to the streets. She was at first adopted by beggars and street people who protected her and taught her to beg. She became known in the town for her great holiness and cheerful disposition and was eventually (after many adventures) allowed to join the early Dominican Mantellatae, the third order for widows who wore the habit and took vows but did not live in community.

As a mantellata, she cared for the sick and poor, and especially visited and talked to poor prisoners, converting all of them. She was a wonderworker, putting out house fires with her cloak and healing people of blindness and cancer and all manner of things, including one little girl whom Margaret healed after her own death, rising briefly to life from her funeral bier to stretch out her hand to heal the girl.

She remains incorrupt in her glass Snow White coffin in Citta di Castello, Italy. And just as soon as I get it together, I'm going to work out the Trenitalia route and go see her.

I adopted Margaret as my patron at my confirmation because she was abandoned by her parents and in her whole life was not bitter and was never heard to criticise them for it.

...and if I'd said seven obscure heroes, I'd have added Fr. Frederick Faber (WAY more holy than Newman), John Ruskin, and Richard Lack for nearly single-handedly rescuing Art from the abyss of postmodern nihilism.

Oh, and Roger Scruton, for telling the entire academic philosophical world they're full of shit;

And of course, John Muggeridge who didn't let his famous surname make him into a twit, and who showed me that it is possible to overcome one's personal failings and become a saint in ordinary day-to-day life. Yes, I said it; John was clearly a saint and the three years I lived in his house totally changed me and my life.

OK, now you.



~

Roman Ruins Part II

Can't pay your student loans? Don't know what to do with ten years of philosophy?

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Consider becoming a Roman Ruin.



~

Roman Ruins

Rude Language Alert (but we're all grownups here, right?)

From the Onion:

While the tradition of dicking around abroad can be traced back to a medieval European university system that encouraged putzing off in other cultures, the practice didn't become common in the United States until the 1970s, when an entire generation began pursuing higher education and looking for ways to do ****-all.

"I've dicked around in France and Australia," said Lehigh University senior Christie Oden, a psychology major who spent last spring in the school's popular Holy Shit, Melbourne Is Laid Back program. "I tell everyone I know: Definitely dick around abroad if you get the chance. It's the best thing I did in college."

For students like Oden, who are seeking opportunities to waste enormous amounts of time in a specific field, some schools offer specialized programs for dicking around abroad. Engineering majors at MIT, for example, can spend a semester in a drunken haze at the school's Munich location...

But it's not just Americans who are interested in an international education: The Department of Education has also seen a steep rise in the number of foreign students taking buckle-down-and-succeed programs here in the U.S.

According to the report, applications for IIT Bombay's Spend Every Waking Second Making the Most of Your Education Abroad program are up 30 percent since 2009, while in the past decade enrollment in Peking University's Get an American Ph.D., Don't Draw Too Much Attention, and Report Back for Duty program has nearly tripled

Oh, you don't know how funny this is until you have lived somewhere like Rome.

Nearly everyone I know here are "students". Some of whom came in the 1970s and simply never left.

Santissima Trinita should start a "Roman Ruin Programme" where Anglos can come and spend a year "working" in the sacristy.


How to be a Roman Ruin









~

What went wrong?

My old man is eighty four
His generation won the war
He left the farm forever when
They only kept on one in ten
Landed gentry county snobs
Where were you when they lost their jobs
No-one marched or subsidised
To save a country way of life


If you want cheap food well here's the deal
Family farms are brought to heel
Hammer blows of size and scale
Foot and mouth the final nail
The coffin of our English dream
Lies out on the village green
While agri-barons cap in hand
Strip this green and pleasant land
Of meadow, woodland, hedgerow, pond
What remains gets built upon

No trains, jobs
No shops, no pubs

What went wrong

H.J. Massingham called it "willful murder". We can look to Labour for the latest manifestations of it, but it's been going on a long time. When the land lost the Faith, there was nothing to constrain the wealthy and powerful from taking everything for themselves.

It's that simple, I think.

(Thanks for reminding me Elinor.)

Led Zep

I was fifteen, and they were already "nostalgia rock," if not "retro" (an expression that was not invented yet).

Who the hell am I again?

God, I've forgotten.

Hendrix

Here's another one.

Getting you through the Monday

At pubquiz the other night (did I mention we won?!) I got a bunch of answers right about the music of 1970.

Yes. You read that right.

Nine. Teen. Seventy.

It was a shock when I heard the opening bars of this in the pub. I probably haven't heard the Guess Who in 25 years. Suddenly I had the odd sensation that I was in two places at once. I was 44 years old, in Rome, surrounded by my adult friends, drinking a pint, thinking about work the next day, and other kinds of grown-up things. In an instant, that was superimposed by a skinny eight year-old kid in bell bottoms, lying on the living room floor in our apartment in Victoria, with the album cover on the floor while the big black round thing went round and round on the turntable. I knew all the lyrics.

The Guess Who, Cream and Jefferson Airplane (and the Beatles and Simon and G, godhelpme) was what was playing in my whole world when I was still in rubber pants. It is, in other words, deeply ingrained. Hardwired, one might say.

It's weird that I had so thoroughly forgotten it.

I've often felt as if I died or diverged somehow, and became someone else at about 25. Who did that kid go on to become? I've no idea. She's just another person from the deep and misty past with whom I've long since lost touch.


But the Doors are a different set of memories.

Oh lordy! That three days! I was only 17!

Oh the tequila! Oh the vat of lime Jello! Oh the chocolate cake! Oh the cigarillos!

Was I ever 17? Is it possible really to be that young?

Ghosts

Ghosts

How then shall we live?

I've been involved in an interesting discussion in the last couple of days, which can be viewed here and here and in which it was my great pleasure to play the role of "gadfly".

It is one I enjoy enormously. There is little that bores and exasperates me faster than the usual inbox fare of these big Professional Catholic sites where someone writes an article that is meant to provoke discussion and receives a chorus of: "Great post Steve!" "Wow Steve! I've never heard it put that way before..." "I wish I were as eloquent as you are Steve, because you've really said what I've been thinking..."

Nnnggg..!

Yes, and who really cares what you've been thinking, since it is clear you have nothing interesting to say about it.

It is commbox love-ins like these that makes the gadfly in me break out of his cocoon and make a beeline straight for any exposed flesh. Given that no one in our times has been taught how to have a friendly disagreement, I find it is quite a simple matter to make things more interesting. The plodding earnestness of the New Orthodox Catholics is just too easy a target, too juicy a bit of meat, to leave alone. The fact that they, mired as they are in their own private version of political correctness, can't abide the slightest dissent and have no sense of proportion or humour, really only adds to the fun.

(Long Aside: There was, of course, simply no way at all that I could have resisted the temptation of saying What I Really Think about breastfeeding in public. It's a fairly straightforward syllogism: I hate hippies and all of their pomps and works. Hippies started the whole "lets expose our private parts in public to shock our parents and then demand that society change its attitude towards our 'natural and beautiful' body parts" movement that I remember so well from childhood. One of the major themes of the early hippies was the demand to breastfeed in public. The hippies have, through these apparently small discrete incursions, destroyed nearly the entirety of the Christian social agreement that once sustained Western Civilisation. Therefore, I think women need to keep their clothes on in public in order to preserve Christendom. So when I saw a cluster of admiring NOCs congratulating Steve on how wonderfully he had come to the defense of the practise, using exactly the same rhetoric I remember only too well from the furry-armpitted, fright-haired harridans of my earliest memories ... well, it was just too much to expect me to resist. I was certain Steve wouldn't mind.

I will grant, perhaps, the excuse that most of the NOCs are too young to remember the hippie movement themselves, and were for the most part raised in safe middle class neighbourhoods in which they had no direct exposure to the filthy hippies and their Crusade for Indecency. It is perhaps somewhat understandable that they would not realise they were dutifully reciting and defending the hippie doctrines that have slithered quietly into every aspect of our lives and destroyed Western Civilisation. But take it from me who remembers well life on the hippie West Coast in the early 1970s and her mother's grubby, patchouli-doused friends talking about their plans: the determination to force the rest of the world to accept the "beautiful and natural" phenomenon of breastfeeding in public is a manifestation of the feminist hippie movement slithering into Christianity and I won't have it.

Also, breastfeeding involves bodily fluids. Anything that involves bodily fluids needs to be kept out of public view.)

Now, wait. What was I talking about?

Oh yes, the discussion at Steve's Inside Catholic column. Jeff Culbreath is someone whose blogging I have enjoyed for some years now and with whom I've discussed many of these kinds of issues in a list we used to belong to. I would say that most of the writing by Catholics, especially traditionalist Catholics, that I find interesting and important is focused on this question of how to live, knowing what we know, in a world that knows nothing of it.

I make light of it and poke my stick into the hornets' nest because the question is an important one that needs to be taken seriously. It can't be left to the mutual admiration societies that cluster into commboxes. Steve and I and a few others have been working on this, almost as the main background theme of all our writing in the last five years. Some of us believe that it is counter productive, not to mention more or less impossible, to remove oneself off to the woods or the country to attempt to re-create a Catholic utopia where all the ladies wear long skirts and all the kids can converse in Latin.

Others disagree.

But the bigger question is one that remains.

Just how do we live as Catholics in a situation like the one we have? What is the proper "balance" of living in but not of the world? How much of the world, and which particular bits, can we take in? What must we reject and of what may we say, "yes, this is part of the human endeavour of which I am naturally a part"?

How do we get the proper perspective on a culture in which we are ourselves completely steeped, to which we owe the very shape of our thoughts?

This raises other questions. Can we have friends "in the world"? Non-Catholic friends? Can we hope for the salvation of our non-Catholic loved-ones?

Do we set ourselves up as arbiters of who qualifies for membership in the Elect? If so, according to what criteria and by whose authority?

Does it matter that we are, while being systematically forced out of public life in the secular world, at the same time deliberately withdrawing ourselves from it? Is this exclusion and withdrawal a bad thing or a good thing? Should we fight it or help it?

There are all sorts of solutions, some better than others, but none The Right solution. Many retreat. Many give up the struggle. Many join groups that help them withdraw, like the SSPX. Some go out of their way to live near a place where there is some safety and the protection of something like a monastery or an Oratory. Some just try to go it alone.

Catholics in general, and traditionalist Catholics in particular, have a habit of looking to the past for precedent to figure out a way to cobble together a method of dealing with the problem.

Is there a precedent for our current situation? I think not an exact one. As someone said, although we are indeed returning to a variation on pre-Christian paganism, complete with child sacrifice, lawlessness and philosophical fatalism, there is a vast difference between a virgin and a divorcee. A Christendom that has spurned Christ in her maturity is not the same bride that was wooed in her innocence.

So, how are we to see our times? How are we to interact with our non-Catholic, paganised neighbours? Do we approach them with disdain? Do we not approach them at all?

Is it possible for a Christian to make use of the things of the pagan world that are, through the working of the Natural Law, still under the headship of Christ, though He is unknown?

Can we read Truman Capote? Do we dare laugh at the bawdy jokes on Boston Legal, or empathise with the moral struggles of Alan Shore? Can we see goodness in films and music that is not specifically Christian?

Did the early Christians read the Classical writers?

Augustine derided the pagan entertainments of his youth, but was he entirely right? (Terribly daring, I know, to question so venerable a Doctor).

The fact is, I do not know the answers to these questions. But I believe this is the essence of our task, having been stuck in these almost inconceivably dreadful times.

I'm a child of this civilisation. I'm even a child of the hippie generation, and I'm sure am also unconsciously greatly influenced by that movement. I want to know the world, not reject it. The world is full of human beings, and there is nothing so interesting and wonderful to a misanthrope like me as human beings.

I can't help it. I love the world.

And I understand that it was not entirely repugnant to the Father either.

The day the movies stood still

Just when you thought it was safe to leave the house...

We were the first ones to break the news that a Day the Earth Stood Still remake was on the way, and now we bring you the next bit of news related to the remake. The Matrix star Keanu Reeves has signed on to play Klaatu, the humanoid alien that lands on Earth. Production on the remake will likely begin in late fall this year or early 2008, meaning the expected release date of May 2008 is probably no longer true. Somewhat exciting news for this highly talked about remake, but is it the perfect choice?

KEANU REEVES?!!!

Keanu Just-Don't-Ask-Him-To-Talk Reeves?

Keannn....

no.

I just can't stand it any more.

Can't they get Michael Rennie back from the dead?

I just want to know two things:


Is there going to be a soundtrack featuring the theramin?
Because just what is the point of this film if not to showcase the theramin?

and, perhaps most importantly,

ARE THEY GOING TO TEACH KEANU REEVES TO TALK?!!

Urgh.

Why is the world so dumb?

An ethical conundrum for you

You are doing your work in the evening, minding your own business and enjoying the last of the evening's sunshine when along come a handsome pair of young people, about 20 or so, who proceed to sprawl in the doorway of the greegrocer across the street from your window in the small, quiet respectable English country village in which you have chosen to make your home to escape this sort of thing.

The girl is obviously out of her head with drink and she and the boy are all over each other in an unchaste manner.

You are tempted, you are sorely tempted, to take a few photos with your digital camera and then go across the street to inform the young duo that they can either cease and desist or find themselves posted to the internet in this condition for all the world to see by next morning.

What do you do?

The No-God Zone

So, having just spent three days in Rome where Catholicism, even in decline, comes seeping out of the walls and radiating up off the cobbles, it is something of a shock to come back to the God-Free Zone.

British public life cannot be a "God-free zone", the head of the Catholic church in England and Wales warned last night.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor said he was unhappy about attempts to "eliminate the Christian voice" from the public forum. He urged Catholics to prevent the country from becoming a "world devoid of religious faith" through a deeper engagement with God by praying, studying and performing charitable acts.

Speaking in a lecture at Westminster Cathedral, he said there was "considerable spiritual homelessness", and even if people wanted to believe they felt faith was not an option.

"Many people have a sense of being in a sort of exile from faith-guided experience. This is the effect of the privatisation of religion today: religion comes to be treated as a personal need. You cannot banish religion to the church premises. There are social currents that want to isolate religion from other forms of knowledge and experience in order to marginalise it."

But I'm not sure which is worse, the totally anti-religious nation that the hardcore secularists of the Labour party would have, or the hazily heretical, lukewarm bathwater Church we would have if Cardinal Cormac were to have his way.

Come to think of it, I'm fairly sure I do know which is worse. It tells us which is worse in the Big Book:

I know thy works, that thou art neither cold, nor hot. I would thou wert cold, or hot. But because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold, not hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth. Because thou sayest: I am rich, and made wealthy, and have need of nothing: and knowest not, that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.

So, Cardinal Cormac "Bubbles" Murphy O'Connor has helped us again with more of the same rubbish that has resulted in millions abandoning the Faith around the world.

"If Christians really believed in the mystery of God, we would realise that proper talk about God is always difficult, always tentative."

Tell Thomas Aquinas that "talk about God is always tentative".

A few months ago, my aunt was telling me about the daughter of a friend of hers who was recently confirmed in the Catholic Church. They went to visit at Easter and the girl, who is fifteen and has been in a Catholic school throughout her education, was saying, "Well, that's just rubbish isn't it? How does anyone know for sure if Jesus rose from the dead. If you can't prove it, why should anyone believe it?"

My response is simply, "Quite so."

But her mother, apparently, was completely at a loss. She had never heard of apologetics and had gone through her whole Catholic life hearing from Cardinal Bubbles and his friends that "talk about God is always tentative" and there is nothing in Catholicism that you can prove. No evidence.

I knew a young, very enthusiastic and quite stupid fellow once who was very keen on the charismatic movement. He had a friend who was an unbeliever but was quite intelligent and wanted to know if there was a God. This young idiot just kept repeating, with the usual charismatic glaze in the eye, that, "No man, you've just gotta believe. You just gotta beleeeeeeve."

The young friend was stunned to meet with the idea that there is a strong and very venerable intellectual tradition in the Church giving quite satisfying proofs for the existence of God.

I'm actually with Dr. Dawkins on this one.

He told an interviewer: "There's absolutely no reason to take seriously someone who says, 'I believe it because I believe it.' God either exists or he doesn't. It's a matter of the truth."

Yep.

But I guess once you have made a fortune and a global reputation on being an atheist, one doesn't want to look at the assertion too closely, just in case there is any evidence available.

I'm confused

don't they expel students from university any more?

What's the hold-up?

The dean of Yale's school of art, Robert Storr, has said he will not allow Shvarts to show her work unless she confesses in writing that the project is a work of fiction and promises that no human blood will be used in the exhibition.

I'll take that meme

Kathy links to a thing at Libertas (a forum for conservative thought on film): "Top-Five Critically-Lauded Movies I Simply Detest"

he lists

1. Raging Bull
2. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
3. Being John Malkovich
4. Vertigo
5. Mystic River

Kathy gives

1. Anything by the Coen Brothers after Raising Arizona. Too much hipster hick-mockery. Fargo? Don't get it. Never will.
2. Anything with Quentin Tarrantino's name on it except True Romance. Pulp Fiction will one day be remembered as the Worst Film of the 1990s.
3. 2001
4. Night of the Hunter. Ultra-stylish anti-American, anti-Christian fairy tale. More hick-mockery.
5. Every "great" Oscar-nominated movie made in the last 15 years (Gosford Park, Moulin Rouge, Mystic River, Gangs of New York, Age of Innocence, The Thin Red Line, blah blah blah)
6. Because it has to be said: the entire Star Wars franchise
And I still don't understand why Chinatown is called Chinatown.

It's funny that (as I was killing my knees scrambling up mountains yesterday) I was thinking about a movie that everyone swooned over that I think I really detest:

The English Patient.

Pretty sure I can come up with four more.

2) Apocalypse Now

3) Like Water for Chocolate

4) Everything by Woody Allen (even before he started sleeping with his daughter)

(I know this isn't a movie, exactly but)
5) the BBC version of Brideshead. While watching, I could feel myself losing the will to live, even before Charles Ryder met the fam.
6) (Comrade) Ghandi

But Kathy stole one of my favourite Peeve Films.

2001 was just stupid. There was no excuse for it. I had a huge argument with the instructor in a screenwriting class I took once, who tried to convince us it was brilliant and a metaphor and a lot of other blithering po-mo hogwash. I was only 17 at the time and didn't know much of anything, but I knew this guy was a prat for liking that film. He tried to make us read the script. What script? Was there any talking in it?

You can't even say, "well, it was the '60's and everyone thought a lot of absurd rubbish was 'profound' and 'moving' when it was really just a lot of LSD-induced tat. After all, it was the age when people wore tie-dye without the intent-to-mock and sat around interpreting the spiritual meaning of Beatles' lyrics." But I don't buy it. The sixties also brought us Planet of the Apes, which was cool and fun and is still regularly watched by Real People.

How could our parents have sat through forty-five minutes of the wormhole effect from Stargate and come away thinking they'd seen God? Were they just dumb or something?

I was seven when I first saw it and was bored out of my tree, and I was an SF fan from toddlerhood. I knew what was good. Kirk beating up aliens in rubber suits and kissing big-haired women in sparkly dresses: that was good. I think 2001 was my earliest inkling that the adults didn't know what the hell they were doing. It was an emacipating moment.

So, on the other hand, maybe I should be thanking Stanley Kubrick.


I think I'll tag someone:

Steve
Dale
Fr. Finigan
Mac
and John

Happiness? No Market for it Son

The classical philosophers always concerned themselves with the big question: how can we be happy?

I attended a public lecture once at the philosophy department of Dalhousie University in Halifax, and realized that modern philosophers were not interested in these questions anymore. It was gibberish, and it seemed to concern nothing real.

Pope John Paul the Not So Great wrote in an encyclical once that philosophy as a discipline had gone off the rails and was concerning itself with things that mattered to absolutely no one.

True enough.

But I question his premise, that people want to know from their philosophers how to be happy.

I don't think anyone is interested in happiness or the Good Life or the big questions now. I think this not because people are any happier or any less desperate, but because we all know pretty much how to be happy already and we don't bother. We're just interested in other things and so accustomed to our nihilistic misery that we couldn't be induced to climb out of it if someone handed us the end of a rope.

The churches are all still open,

every Sunday.

And no one goes.

Gen X

I just noticed that Kurt Donald Cobain would have been 41 this year. Imagine that. He was just about a year younger than I.

I've noted elsewhere that we are about the same age, both from similar backgrounds, raised by divorced hippies in that time and on the West Coast; the time and place where the smell of the Scene was at its thickest and most choking. We were born in the Time After the End.

I know how you felt buddy. I really do.







I wish someone could have told Kurt that there was no point in getting too worked up about the world and its stupid pointlessnes. Nihilism is all that's left in the Time After; it's going to get you no matter where you run.