A request, and forgive me for forgetting.
Five days ago was the two-year anniversay of the death of one of the dearest and most important friends of my life, John Muggeridge.
Those who know me well, will know what I mean when I say that John did the miraculous task of giving me back three missing years of my life. Living in his house for nearly three years was like fixing a clay pot that had been thrown off kilter and re-centering it. That's what sanctity does.
Those who knew John, or even met him only once, will understand. We have never known anyone like him and we still miss him terribly.
Those religiously inclined, would you kindly remember to say a prayer for the repose of his soul?
Requiescat in pace.
Farewell John Muggeridge - Dear Friend to Many, Constant Defender of Life, Faith, Truth
John Muggeridge remembered
as a man of ‘national significance’
The words of John Muggeridge
John Muggeridge
JOHN MUGGERIDGE, TEACHER AND WRITER: 1933-2005
Showing posts with label Muggeridgiad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Muggeridgiad. Show all posts
Friday, November 30, 2007
Saturday, January 14, 2006
Tuns on Muggs
Paul Tuns is the editor of the Interim, the pro-life newspaper that I sometimes contribute to. Paul is a friend and came out to the pub once or twice with John Muggs. He is the successor as Interim editor to John's son Peter who headed it before I arrived on the scene.
John Muggeridge, a Catholic writer and retired teacher, passed away at the age of 72 at Princess Margaret Hospital on November 25 after a long battle with cancer.
Muggeridge, an editorial adviser to LifeSiteNews.com and senior editor at the New York-based Human Life Review, was the son of noted English author and journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, the husband of Catholic author Anne Roche Muggeridge (author of The Desolate City), and father to former Interim editor Peter Muggeridge, as well as former Interim contributor Charles Muggeridge. He was himself an occasional contributor to The Interim, as well as Catholic Insight magazine and other religious publications.
John Muggeridge was not nearly as famous as his father, but his influence is arguably as great. He counted as friends some of the leading lights of Canadian journalism, including David Frum, George Jonas, Peter Worthington and David Warren, and Catholic leaders, such as Fr. Jonathan Robinson and Janet Smith. In a column for the Ottawa Citizen, Warren said that Muggeridge was a “man of national significance,” even though “he was nearly invisible as a public character, was aloof from conventional politics, had no ambitions in the media (and) sought no audience.”
Yet, Warren notes, “his influence was steady.” Warren continued: “John was a man who, simply in being what he was, helped to keep the old Canada alive. Men and women of good will came to him, spontaneously.” He no doubt influenced them during countless discussions in his home and at the pub. As Warren said, his teaching extended beyond the classroom and often merely by example.
Muggeridge was a member of the advisory board of LifeSite and penned several stories for them. The Interim reprinted his article on the politics of new Governor-General Michaelle Jean in September.
He also wrote one of the first scathing critiques of Pierre Elliot Trudeau for the now-defunct Northern Institute Quarterly. Yet, as his friend Warren said, he hated writing, it being an almost painful exercise. In a column remembering John Muggeridge, George Jonas wrote in the National Post: “It’s one of life’s ironies that the best writers often dislike the process of writing and the best people rarely put a premium on self-expression. The best are busy being spouses, parents and friends. They’re spouses, parents and friends first and writers second.”
It was a mark of the man that he didn’t need, nor want to write, to become famous and popular. He was busy raising his four sons and one daughter and being a grandfather to his 16 grandchildren and grandfatherly to other children. The Globe and Mail reported in its obituary that Muggeridge “subsumed his own ambitions” to raise and support his family, but that implies a sacrificial choice. By all accounts, he never thought of it that way. He was a husband, a father and a grandfather. A friend and a teacher. He taught through the written word only reluctantly.
But when he did write, he wrote masterfully and often scathingly in defence of truth and against the perpetrators, enablers and defenders of the culture of death. In a June 2004 eulogy for Ronald Reagan composed for LifeSite, Muggeridge recalled the stirring words of the former president in defence of the unborn and pondered: “Wouldn’t it be nice if our own Paul Martin could bring himself to use such language in public? Canadians still wait for such a defence of life in any of their leaders.”
The funeral for Muggeridge, who often battled with the Catholic hierarchy over liturgical disputes, was held at Toronto’s St. Vincent de Paul Roman Catholic Church in the Traditional Latin funeral rite.
His friend, Catholic writer Hilary White, mused: “I thought that it was one of John’s great jokes, played on all his nice neo-Cath and non-Catholic friends, to force every one of them to attend the mighty traditional liturgy of the church and done at its best (in this country, anyway.) As though he was saying, ‘See? This is what Anne and I have been going on about all this time.’”
He continued to visit his wife Anne at Castlewood Wychwood, where she has been convalescing in recent years, battling an Alzheimer’s-like disease that sometimes has left family wondering if she remembers them.
Still, as Jonas recalled in his column: “He saw the best in the wife he loved so dearly and continued to see it even as she fell ill with an Alzheimer-type disease in her early 50s and failed to recognize him. Cancer should not be allowed to stop his caring. Every sort of medical indignity was embraced by him, if only it would yield the strength for one more month to visit her and the time to see his children. Those who did not know him might have thought, observing his grace in the face of so ferocious an illness, that he was putting on a brave performance. It was not performance, only the man himself.”
Friends and family will miss John Muggeridge, because as Hilary White said just days before he died, “The world needs more people like John Muggeridge, one of the most gentle, decent and intelligent men I’ve met and soon, it won’t have the one it has.”
John Muggeridge, a Catholic writer and retired teacher, passed away at the age of 72 at Princess Margaret Hospital on November 25 after a long battle with cancer.
Muggeridge, an editorial adviser to LifeSiteNews.com and senior editor at the New York-based Human Life Review, was the son of noted English author and journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, the husband of Catholic author Anne Roche Muggeridge (author of The Desolate City), and father to former Interim editor Peter Muggeridge, as well as former Interim contributor Charles Muggeridge. He was himself an occasional contributor to The Interim, as well as Catholic Insight magazine and other religious publications.
John Muggeridge was not nearly as famous as his father, but his influence is arguably as great. He counted as friends some of the leading lights of Canadian journalism, including David Frum, George Jonas, Peter Worthington and David Warren, and Catholic leaders, such as Fr. Jonathan Robinson and Janet Smith. In a column for the Ottawa Citizen, Warren said that Muggeridge was a “man of national significance,” even though “he was nearly invisible as a public character, was aloof from conventional politics, had no ambitions in the media (and) sought no audience.”
Yet, Warren notes, “his influence was steady.” Warren continued: “John was a man who, simply in being what he was, helped to keep the old Canada alive. Men and women of good will came to him, spontaneously.” He no doubt influenced them during countless discussions in his home and at the pub. As Warren said, his teaching extended beyond the classroom and often merely by example.
Muggeridge was a member of the advisory board of LifeSite and penned several stories for them. The Interim reprinted his article on the politics of new Governor-General Michaelle Jean in September.
He also wrote one of the first scathing critiques of Pierre Elliot Trudeau for the now-defunct Northern Institute Quarterly. Yet, as his friend Warren said, he hated writing, it being an almost painful exercise. In a column remembering John Muggeridge, George Jonas wrote in the National Post: “It’s one of life’s ironies that the best writers often dislike the process of writing and the best people rarely put a premium on self-expression. The best are busy being spouses, parents and friends. They’re spouses, parents and friends first and writers second.”
It was a mark of the man that he didn’t need, nor want to write, to become famous and popular. He was busy raising his four sons and one daughter and being a grandfather to his 16 grandchildren and grandfatherly to other children. The Globe and Mail reported in its obituary that Muggeridge “subsumed his own ambitions” to raise and support his family, but that implies a sacrificial choice. By all accounts, he never thought of it that way. He was a husband, a father and a grandfather. A friend and a teacher. He taught through the written word only reluctantly.
But when he did write, he wrote masterfully and often scathingly in defence of truth and against the perpetrators, enablers and defenders of the culture of death. In a June 2004 eulogy for Ronald Reagan composed for LifeSite, Muggeridge recalled the stirring words of the former president in defence of the unborn and pondered: “Wouldn’t it be nice if our own Paul Martin could bring himself to use such language in public? Canadians still wait for such a defence of life in any of their leaders.”
The funeral for Muggeridge, who often battled with the Catholic hierarchy over liturgical disputes, was held at Toronto’s St. Vincent de Paul Roman Catholic Church in the Traditional Latin funeral rite.
His friend, Catholic writer Hilary White, mused: “I thought that it was one of John’s great jokes, played on all his nice neo-Cath and non-Catholic friends, to force every one of them to attend the mighty traditional liturgy of the church and done at its best (in this country, anyway.) As though he was saying, ‘See? This is what Anne and I have been going on about all this time.’”
He continued to visit his wife Anne at Castlewood Wychwood, where she has been convalescing in recent years, battling an Alzheimer’s-like disease that sometimes has left family wondering if she remembers them.
Still, as Jonas recalled in his column: “He saw the best in the wife he loved so dearly and continued to see it even as she fell ill with an Alzheimer-type disease in her early 50s and failed to recognize him. Cancer should not be allowed to stop his caring. Every sort of medical indignity was embraced by him, if only it would yield the strength for one more month to visit her and the time to see his children. Those who did not know him might have thought, observing his grace in the face of so ferocious an illness, that he was putting on a brave performance. It was not performance, only the man himself.”
Friends and family will miss John Muggeridge, because as Hilary White said just days before he died, “The world needs more people like John Muggeridge, one of the most gentle, decent and intelligent men I’ve met and soon, it won’t have the one it has.”
Thursday, December 01, 2005
yet another...
Farewell John Muggeridge - Dear Friend to Many, Constant Defender of Life, Faith, Truth
Much loved LifeSiteNews advisor, sometime writer passed from this life Nov. 25
By Hilary White
TORONTO, December 1, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - It is sometimes possible to see in another indications of what men and women are called to be in this life. This Tuesday, at Toronto’s St. Vincent de Paul parish amidst the splendour of the Catholic Church’s Traditional Latin funeral rite, the pro-life community said farewell to one such man, John Muggeridge. In the last years of his life, John was on the LifeSiteNew.com board of advisors and penned a few stories for this service.
John died peacefully in Toronto of cancer which he had been battling with good humour for some years, in the early afternoon on Friday November 25, at Princess Margaret Hospital. He was lucid to the end, having received the last Sacraments of the Church and was surrounded by his family.
John Muggeridge may have been the bearer of an exceptionally famous name, but for himself, the quiet life as the paterfamilias of his large and boisterous Catholic family was his true calling. To most readers, John is probably best known as the son of the late Malcolm Muggeridge, and to Catholics as the husband of Anne Roche Muggeridge, the author of the Desolate City, one of the most salient analyses of the still unabated crisis in the Catholic Church. But to his family, local Canadian pro-lifers, writers, embattled political conservatives, journalists, fellow parishioners and friends John is remembered, in the words of one of his host of admirers, as “the sweetest, kindest, most decent human being we have encountered.”
He came to Canada after graduating from Cambridge University to pursue a teaching career. His first job was in Cornerbrook, Newfoundland, where he met his wife, Anne Roche, the author and formidable defender of the Catholic Church (often from itself). The couple moved to Welland Ontario where they established themselves as the centre of the growing Canadian Catholic counterrevolution. Throughout the tumult of the 1960’s and 70’s they took on a host of causes in defence of truth and the sanctity of life including battling their own Church hierarchy over the inadequacies of the Canadian Catechism, the demolition of the Church’s liturgy, and what they perceived to be the lukewarm response of the bishops to political attacks on marriage and human life.
A long-time supporter of the Canadian conservative movement, John’s influence was such that though few “ordinary” Canadians would ever have heard of him, many of his friends are household names to those who read newspapers or watch television news.
In the chaotic week of John’s final illness, after his admission to Princess Margaret hospital on Thursday, the family was surprised to find a voicemail message from Conrad Black, an admirer of John’s late father, who asked to visit. The joke went around the circle of friends and family in attendance that it may have been the only message Lord Black left that week that was not immediately returned.
The idea, however, that he might have courted fame or conspired to influence would strike anyone who knew him as merely a joke. His preference was for his own dining table or the local pub and it was to him and his family there that the world would come.
John wrote little, largely reserving his mastery of the English language for his defences of the Catholic faith and the sanctity of life in such publications as the Human Life Review, of which he was a senior editor.
John, in his capacity as historical observer was among the first to comprehend the depth and scope of the danger of the left and the legalization of abortion represented to the Canadian polity. He was one of the few historians in Canada, for example, clearly to identify abortion and the feminist and liberal movements since Trudeau’s revolution with its post-war French Marxist roots.
Though John Muggeridge was for thirty years a teacher of English and history – at which he claimed that his greatest disappointment was that he had failed in his self-appointed goal of instilling in his English students the difference between “it’s” with an apostrophe and “its” without - it is not for his years of standing in front of classes that John will be remembered and thanked.
The quiet work of John and Anne for the defence of the Faith, of human life, of simple good sense and kindness spread from the Muggeridge dining table at their house in Welland to inspire all who came in contact with them. These included such Canadian luminaries as David Frum; Janet Smith, the leading defender of the Catholic teaching on artificial birth control; author and columnist George Jonas; Fr. Jonathan Robinson, author and founder of the Toronto’s Oratory of St. Philip Neri and David Warren the prominent columnist in the Ottawa Citizen whom John sponsored in his reception into the Catholic Church.
As Warren wrote in the Ottawa Citizen on Wednesday, John knew the great secret “that ‘instruction’ never works, that it all comes down to tutoring by example; and where love is not, nothing is learned.”
John Muggeridge loved easily and well and it was this love through which he taught. His wife, their children, their grandchildren, other people’s children, their vast collection of friends, the strays and spiritual orphans who were drawn to them, will carry this tutelage of Christian love with them: this is how we ought to be.
We at LifeSiteNews.com were honored to have had John associated with us. His advice and insight will be impossible to replace.
Editor’s Note: Hilary White is a staff writer for LifeSiteNews.com and lived as a tenant in John Muggeridge’s Toronto home for two and a half years where she learned many things.
(c) Copyright: LifeSiteNews.com is a production of Interim Publishing. Permission to republish is granted (with limitation*) but acknowledgement of source is *REQUIRED* (use LifeSiteNews.com).
The Muggeridgiad
The last of the Muggeridge hordes have gone to their respective homes and we are, for the first time, alone in the house. And so much more alone than ever before.
All the remaining inmates of Manning Manor are going to be working the election which was announced Monday, so there will be little time for anything fun like mourning or blogging. Still, the electronic wake continues.
This is, again, from Warren. (I met George Jonas, of whom I had heard so very much over the Manning House breakfast table, for the first time and his piece on John will be appearing in the National Post tomorrow and I will probably stick it up here also.)
The good death of a good man
David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Wednesday, November 30, 2005
As an earthling (some of my critics to the contrary), I rebel against the Christian idea of a "good death," or death more generally, especially when it deprives me of a man who was my best friend. And yet I have just seen this improbable thing: a perfectly "good death" by a man of whom no one would have expected less -- rosary in hand, having made his last Confession.
The death of John Muggeridge in Toronto Friday, at the age of 72, racked in all the pain of a metastasized cancer, but still in good humour, and lucid to the last, marks the sudden end of an era in my personal life. But I wouldn't be mentioning it in a national newspaper did I not also think him a man of national significance. He was nearly invisible as a public character, was aloof from conventional politics, had no ambitions in the media, sought no audience; and yet his influence was steady.
The many who filed yesterday into the unreserved pews of Toronto's Church of St. Vincent de Paul, to celebrate the old mass in its full splendour over Muggeridge's coffin, included many with well-known names -- by no means all of them Catholic. John was a man who, simply in being what he was, helped to keep the old Canada alive. Men and women of good will came to him, spontaneously.
Though an immigrant from England, and carrying that surname made too famous by Malcolm Muggeridge, his media-friendly father, John became unselfconsciously Canadian of the old school. He was a real authority on Canadian history, and broad reading in both English and French gave him the means to see our nation from its foundations, and see it whole. Married to an extraordinary woman from Corner Brook, N.L. (the surviving but institutionalized Anne Roche Muggeridge), the two together had a house in Welland, Ont. that many of their visitors thought of as a shrine.
Malcolm Muggeridge's Christian conversion and late-life reception into the Catholic Church -- his "media discovery" of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and related events -- were iconic for a generation of believing Christians, of all denominations, throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. Yet how many know who led that notorious stray sheep into the Catholic fold? It was his son, John, and John's wife, Anne -- whose own husband had been her most remarkable convert. The son is father to the man, but sometimes also father to the father.
John wrote little, and that little hardly ever for the big papers, but I think of the essay he contributed to a transient publication of the long-defunct "Northern Institute," more than 30 years ago. It explained Pierre Trudeau's intellectual development, his outlook and his ambitions in power, better than any other writer had or would explain these things. The article demystified Trudeau for any intelligent reader. Instead, we continued listening to the mystified "talking heads."
Power we tend to acknowledge only where we see it dressed as power, but often as not the power is concealed. John Muggeridge's influence was always as a teacher, rarely as an author -- although the few things he so painfully wrote (he hated writing) showed him a master of the language. He'd been a schoolteacher, too, for his living, but that is not what I mean. He loved children with his whole heart (his many grandchildren and everyone else's), and the glory of him could be glimpsed when you saw him playing with a child. He would give himself entirely away. Similarly, in his many friendships, it was sometimes as if there was no self there, he was so perfectly sympathetic not merely with another person, but with the best in that person. This is the great secret of pedagogy: that "instruction" never works, that it all comes down to tutoring by example; and where love is not, nothing is learned.
could assemble a chorus-line of people to affirm that John was the kindest, sweetest, most decent human being ever. I heard several argue that he was a saint -- long before we were ever grieving. But the John I knew, and well, was no saint by natural disposition. He so much loved the world, and everything that was beautifully small; but he was equipped with no more than the standard human conscience. What made him "unnatural," as it were, was the recklessness with which he acknowledged Christ.
Recently, in these columns, I've been touching on the old political puzzle of "church and state." But while meditating on the life of John Muggeridge, as I have been doing inevitably since watching him die, a key to this relation has come home to me. It is that, in church and state alike, there must be an overarching appreciation of the importance of personal holiness. Without this, we have a dog's life, and there is nothing for church nor state to cherish.
David Warren's column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2005
All the remaining inmates of Manning Manor are going to be working the election which was announced Monday, so there will be little time for anything fun like mourning or blogging. Still, the electronic wake continues.
This is, again, from Warren. (I met George Jonas, of whom I had heard so very much over the Manning House breakfast table, for the first time and his piece on John will be appearing in the National Post tomorrow and I will probably stick it up here also.)
The good death of a good man
David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Wednesday, November 30, 2005
As an earthling (some of my critics to the contrary), I rebel against the Christian idea of a "good death," or death more generally, especially when it deprives me of a man who was my best friend. And yet I have just seen this improbable thing: a perfectly "good death" by a man of whom no one would have expected less -- rosary in hand, having made his last Confession.
The death of John Muggeridge in Toronto Friday, at the age of 72, racked in all the pain of a metastasized cancer, but still in good humour, and lucid to the last, marks the sudden end of an era in my personal life. But I wouldn't be mentioning it in a national newspaper did I not also think him a man of national significance. He was nearly invisible as a public character, was aloof from conventional politics, had no ambitions in the media, sought no audience; and yet his influence was steady.
The many who filed yesterday into the unreserved pews of Toronto's Church of St. Vincent de Paul, to celebrate the old mass in its full splendour over Muggeridge's coffin, included many with well-known names -- by no means all of them Catholic. John was a man who, simply in being what he was, helped to keep the old Canada alive. Men and women of good will came to him, spontaneously.
Though an immigrant from England, and carrying that surname made too famous by Malcolm Muggeridge, his media-friendly father, John became unselfconsciously Canadian of the old school. He was a real authority on Canadian history, and broad reading in both English and French gave him the means to see our nation from its foundations, and see it whole. Married to an extraordinary woman from Corner Brook, N.L. (the surviving but institutionalized Anne Roche Muggeridge), the two together had a house in Welland, Ont. that many of their visitors thought of as a shrine.
Malcolm Muggeridge's Christian conversion and late-life reception into the Catholic Church -- his "media discovery" of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and related events -- were iconic for a generation of believing Christians, of all denominations, throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. Yet how many know who led that notorious stray sheep into the Catholic fold? It was his son, John, and John's wife, Anne -- whose own husband had been her most remarkable convert. The son is father to the man, but sometimes also father to the father.
John wrote little, and that little hardly ever for the big papers, but I think of the essay he contributed to a transient publication of the long-defunct "Northern Institute," more than 30 years ago. It explained Pierre Trudeau's intellectual development, his outlook and his ambitions in power, better than any other writer had or would explain these things. The article demystified Trudeau for any intelligent reader. Instead, we continued listening to the mystified "talking heads."
Power we tend to acknowledge only where we see it dressed as power, but often as not the power is concealed. John Muggeridge's influence was always as a teacher, rarely as an author -- although the few things he so painfully wrote (he hated writing) showed him a master of the language. He'd been a schoolteacher, too, for his living, but that is not what I mean. He loved children with his whole heart (his many grandchildren and everyone else's), and the glory of him could be glimpsed when you saw him playing with a child. He would give himself entirely away. Similarly, in his many friendships, it was sometimes as if there was no self there, he was so perfectly sympathetic not merely with another person, but with the best in that person. This is the great secret of pedagogy: that "instruction" never works, that it all comes down to tutoring by example; and where love is not, nothing is learned.
could assemble a chorus-line of people to affirm that John was the kindest, sweetest, most decent human being ever. I heard several argue that he was a saint -- long before we were ever grieving. But the John I knew, and well, was no saint by natural disposition. He so much loved the world, and everything that was beautifully small; but he was equipped with no more than the standard human conscience. What made him "unnatural," as it were, was the recklessness with which he acknowledged Christ.
Recently, in these columns, I've been touching on the old political puzzle of "church and state." But while meditating on the life of John Muggeridge, as I have been doing inevitably since watching him die, a key to this relation has come home to me. It is that, in church and state alike, there must be an overarching appreciation of the importance of personal holiness. Without this, we have a dog's life, and there is nothing for church nor state to cherish.
David Warren's column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2005
Monday, November 28, 2005
Lord Muggs
Anecdotage from David Warren went round to a few of his friends and is posted here mainly for the benefit of the people of our acquaintance who are unable to be here:
>>... He went into Princess Margaret (needing oxygen) Thursday; on Friday morning he was perfectly lucid though continuing bright yellow from the failure of his liver. He said Confession to Fr. Roche (his Newfoundlandish cousin-in-law), Last Rites, then lingered only until a little after lunch. The whole week he'd been fading fast.
f
Yet was still joking, especially about our communist hospital bureaucracy. He thought it very amusing that, throughout his medical report, because he had originally been admitted to Toronto General the previous week as "Short Of Breath", he was referred to consistently as "S.O.B." & "the S.O.B."
There was a very good Indian-from-Uganda nurse, however. John noticed that
she was also quite pretty. (So did I.)
Spooky things: He died at 1:28 p.m., hospital time. At 1:27, on her office clock downtown, Hilary White, his tenant, suddenly decided she couldn't work, because she was overwhelmed by the idea John was going to die.
She started walking bleakly west on Queen, running into me by coincidence at the longitude of Abelard book shop, whenupon she communicated her funk. I took her back to my place to give her tea, then checking messages, we learned that John had just died. One of those messages was from my mother, 1:24 p.m. on Bell Canada time log. My mother's message was that she'd had a premonition, "John will die today."<<
Dannielle Frum has forwarded a picture of him taken last summer at the Frum house in Washington. I have it in my inbox and really would like to post it because it is of John before the terrible deterioration started that so characterized the last months of his life. It is of him sitting up, rather stiffly I thought, on the deck of the Frum guesthouse where, as I am given to understand, inmates there are generally photographed for future guest-archiving.
I wish I could show pictures of John in the places I knew him, sitting up at breakfast doing the cryptic crossword; surrounded by friends and his sprawling family at one of the innumerable dinner parties arguing politics; at Mass in rapt attention at the moment of the elevation; (or, as the altar servers removed the disposable wooden "altar" they use for the N.O. Mass at St. Vinnie's immediately prior to the True Mass, muttering "get that bloody ironing board out of there...").
John and Anne's acquaintance is vast and his eldest son, John Jr., was telling me that a huge part of the task is just remembering everyone to call. We are learning how many of the great and famous are his friends. I came home on Thursday night when John had gone into the hospital and checked messages and Conrad Black had called wanting to come for a visit.
For those who are within driving distance, the funeral Mass is going to be Tuesday, ten am, at St. Vincent De Paul Parish at 263 Roncesvalles Avenue. The royal lying-in-state is today at Turner and Porter funeral home at 436 Roncesvalles Ave. from 2-4 pm and 7-9 pm. As Anne quoted in her book, the Desolate City, "pity a feller has to die to get a Latin Mass..."
There is so much about death that is simply strange. Warren and Fr. Derek Cross and I went to lunch Saturday and we all remarked on it. Perhaps because his decline was so fast and his death so sudden, we agreed, it was as though we had been having a conversation over dinner and he had paused a moment asking us to 'hold that thought' and then seeing him getting into a taxi and driving off. I am left thinking, 'wait...no... hang on...I wasn't finished that conversation..."
I apologize to whatever readers I have for the devotion to Muggeridgian themes to the next few posts, I don't really feel like thinking about much else at the moment. It is also good, I think for people to know about a man like His Lordship. One of the things we all appreciated about him was that he was living proof that it was possible to be the sort of person, the sort of Christian, that is celebrated in story and song. The sort we are supposed to be. We are used to bad news, disappointment and outrage, but in John there was only good news and triumph.
HJW
PS. If any of our technogeek friends can tell me how one goes about posting electronic photos on a blog, let me know.
>>... He went into Princess Margaret (needing oxygen) Thursday; on Friday morning he was perfectly lucid though continuing bright yellow from the failure of his liver. He said Confession to Fr. Roche (his Newfoundlandish cousin-in-law), Last Rites, then lingered only until a little after lunch. The whole week he'd been fading fast.
f
Yet was still joking, especially about our communist hospital bureaucracy. He thought it very amusing that, throughout his medical report, because he had originally been admitted to Toronto General the previous week as "Short Of Breath", he was referred to consistently as "S.O.B." & "the S.O.B."
There was a very good Indian-from-Uganda nurse, however. John noticed that
she was also quite pretty. (So did I.)
Spooky things: He died at 1:28 p.m., hospital time. At 1:27, on her office clock downtown, Hilary White, his tenant, suddenly decided she couldn't work, because she was overwhelmed by the idea John was going to die.
She started walking bleakly west on Queen, running into me by coincidence at the longitude of Abelard book shop, whenupon she communicated her funk. I took her back to my place to give her tea, then checking messages, we learned that John had just died. One of those messages was from my mother, 1:24 p.m. on Bell Canada time log. My mother's message was that she'd had a premonition, "John will die today."<<
Dannielle Frum has forwarded a picture of him taken last summer at the Frum house in Washington. I have it in my inbox and really would like to post it because it is of John before the terrible deterioration started that so characterized the last months of his life. It is of him sitting up, rather stiffly I thought, on the deck of the Frum guesthouse where, as I am given to understand, inmates there are generally photographed for future guest-archiving.
I wish I could show pictures of John in the places I knew him, sitting up at breakfast doing the cryptic crossword; surrounded by friends and his sprawling family at one of the innumerable dinner parties arguing politics; at Mass in rapt attention at the moment of the elevation; (or, as the altar servers removed the disposable wooden "altar" they use for the N.O. Mass at St. Vinnie's immediately prior to the True Mass, muttering "get that bloody ironing board out of there...").
John and Anne's acquaintance is vast and his eldest son, John Jr., was telling me that a huge part of the task is just remembering everyone to call. We are learning how many of the great and famous are his friends. I came home on Thursday night when John had gone into the hospital and checked messages and Conrad Black had called wanting to come for a visit.
For those who are within driving distance, the funeral Mass is going to be Tuesday, ten am, at St. Vincent De Paul Parish at 263 Roncesvalles Avenue. The royal lying-in-state is today at Turner and Porter funeral home at 436 Roncesvalles Ave. from 2-4 pm and 7-9 pm. As Anne quoted in her book, the Desolate City, "pity a feller has to die to get a Latin Mass..."
There is so much about death that is simply strange. Warren and Fr. Derek Cross and I went to lunch Saturday and we all remarked on it. Perhaps because his decline was so fast and his death so sudden, we agreed, it was as though we had been having a conversation over dinner and he had paused a moment asking us to 'hold that thought' and then seeing him getting into a taxi and driving off. I am left thinking, 'wait...no... hang on...I wasn't finished that conversation..."
I apologize to whatever readers I have for the devotion to Muggeridgian themes to the next few posts, I don't really feel like thinking about much else at the moment. It is also good, I think for people to know about a man like His Lordship. One of the things we all appreciated about him was that he was living proof that it was possible to be the sort of person, the sort of Christian, that is celebrated in story and song. The sort we are supposed to be. We are used to bad news, disappointment and outrage, but in John there was only good news and triumph.
HJW
PS. If any of our technogeek friends can tell me how one goes about posting electronic photos on a blog, let me know.
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Muggeridge on Reagan
His Britannic Maj. wrote an article last year (over which he fretted most unnecessarily) on the Great Ronald Reagan for Human Life Review which he has honored by being a senior editor.
I offer it for your edification:
For Ronald Reagan religion and patriotism coincided. He took the words of the Declaration of Independence at their face value. His America was a promised land, flowing with democracy and freedom, under, of course, the rule of God. For Reagan, acceptance of divine authority was the key to social order. "If we will not be governed by God," he warned an audience of Evangelicals in March, 1983, quoting William Penn, "we must be governed by tyrants."
Like the Israelites of old, in ignoring God's laws, Americans brooked disaster. But Reagan was American enough never to lose faith in their essential goodness. Corrupt government had led them astray, as had King Joram his subjects when "he made the inhabitants of Jerusalem to commit fornication and Juda to transgress." It took another century and a half, but didn't Ezechias finally manage to undo the evil Joram had caused? Reagan expected the same sort of reformation in his own kingdom of Judah. Restore prayer to public schools; keep parents informed of what was really happening to their teenage children in birth control clinics; fight child pornography, but above all put an end to the massacre of innocent children that had resulted from the Roe v. Wade decision of 1972, and, as Reagan confidently assumed, Americans would be brought back to their senses.
Some day, he promised his evangelical audience, Congress would indeed enact human life legislation to end the tragedy of abortion on demand; meanwhile, they must never rest until that happened. Their task was no less than that of helping to enforce the Declaration of Independence. Since science dictates that preborn children are indeed living persons, their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness required protecting.
And the same American-born spirit of militant hopefulness animated Reagan's foreign policy. He fought the Cold War not to placate the Soviets, but to defeat them. Hence he refused to countenance a nuclear freeze. Pursuing peace by leaving your enemy permanently in possession of superior military force to him seemed suicidal. The thing to do was end the arms race by winning it. Reagan believed that the United States was founded on moral principles. And, since in the end good must prevail over evil, the Soviet Union, as he told members of the British House of Commons in 1982, was indeed destined for the ash heap of history. Thus perish all evil empires.
Nevertheless, like American abortion advocates in high places, Soviet freedom-usurpers in the Kremlin were not about to quit without a fight. So in 1983, his ears plugged against the massed choirs of anti-war protesters, Reagan advanced U.S. Pershing and cruise missiles to within range of Eastern European targets. Soviet negotiators stormed out of arms limitation talks. Pundits around the world rose as one man in protest. Reagan responded by announcing that U.S. scientists had started work on a missile shield in space. This was the so-called Strategic Defence Initiative, parodied by opponents of Reagan's foreign policy as "Star Wars."
Peaceniks mocked S.D.I., but ruling circles in Moscow treated it with deadly seriousness. They knew that, should Washington ever develop an effective defence against on-coming missiles, Mass Assured Destruction would for their country become Mass Assured Defeat. S.D.I, persuaded the Kremlin to resume arms limitation talks, as Reagan predicted it would.
Here's the rest
I offer it for your edification:
For Ronald Reagan religion and patriotism coincided. He took the words of the Declaration of Independence at their face value. His America was a promised land, flowing with democracy and freedom, under, of course, the rule of God. For Reagan, acceptance of divine authority was the key to social order. "If we will not be governed by God," he warned an audience of Evangelicals in March, 1983, quoting William Penn, "we must be governed by tyrants."
Like the Israelites of old, in ignoring God's laws, Americans brooked disaster. But Reagan was American enough never to lose faith in their essential goodness. Corrupt government had led them astray, as had King Joram his subjects when "he made the inhabitants of Jerusalem to commit fornication and Juda to transgress." It took another century and a half, but didn't Ezechias finally manage to undo the evil Joram had caused? Reagan expected the same sort of reformation in his own kingdom of Judah. Restore prayer to public schools; keep parents informed of what was really happening to their teenage children in birth control clinics; fight child pornography, but above all put an end to the massacre of innocent children that had resulted from the Roe v. Wade decision of 1972, and, as Reagan confidently assumed, Americans would be brought back to their senses.
Some day, he promised his evangelical audience, Congress would indeed enact human life legislation to end the tragedy of abortion on demand; meanwhile, they must never rest until that happened. Their task was no less than that of helping to enforce the Declaration of Independence. Since science dictates that preborn children are indeed living persons, their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness required protecting.
And the same American-born spirit of militant hopefulness animated Reagan's foreign policy. He fought the Cold War not to placate the Soviets, but to defeat them. Hence he refused to countenance a nuclear freeze. Pursuing peace by leaving your enemy permanently in possession of superior military force to him seemed suicidal. The thing to do was end the arms race by winning it. Reagan believed that the United States was founded on moral principles. And, since in the end good must prevail over evil, the Soviet Union, as he told members of the British House of Commons in 1982, was indeed destined for the ash heap of history. Thus perish all evil empires.
Nevertheless, like American abortion advocates in high places, Soviet freedom-usurpers in the Kremlin were not about to quit without a fight. So in 1983, his ears plugged against the massed choirs of anti-war protesters, Reagan advanced U.S. Pershing and cruise missiles to within range of Eastern European targets. Soviet negotiators stormed out of arms limitation talks. Pundits around the world rose as one man in protest. Reagan responded by announcing that U.S. scientists had started work on a missile shield in space. This was the so-called Strategic Defence Initiative, parodied by opponents of Reagan's foreign policy as "Star Wars."
Peaceniks mocked S.D.I., but ruling circles in Moscow treated it with deadly seriousness. They knew that, should Washington ever develop an effective defence against on-coming missiles, Mass Assured Destruction would for their country become Mass Assured Defeat. S.D.I, persuaded the Kremlin to resume arms limitation talks, as Reagan predicted it would.
Here's the rest
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