Category Archives: Church/State

“God talk”: an opportunity?

27 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by in Church/State, Faith, Politics

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Some have taken yesterday’s post to be hyper-critical of ++ Justin, a reminder that the post-modernists have a point when they say the author of a text has no control over how it is read. It seems to me that the Archbishop’s words have been taken out of context, but that even in context, they show a deafness of tone which is worrying.

The Very Reverend Professor Martyn Percy, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, commented some years ago that “one of the disappointing and alarming features of ++Justin’s primacy is his refusal to birth his proposed reforms in any good theology.” For Professor Percy, the heart of the problem is “++ Justin’s bewildering reluctance to talk about God.” That is not a problem confined to one Communion. The speed with which, mainly white Bishops moved to condemn the “systemic racism” of their own churches, has been contrasted by some with the want of serious theological talk about the pandemic and the place of Christianity at this time. Others think that unfair and point, rightly, to the good work done on parishes up and down the land.

One of the best analyses of how Christian churches should respond in the aftermath of Covid19 is that of the Bishop of Burnley, The Rt. Rev. Philip North in the Church Times, where he writes:

First, it is revealing something about our national life, and any attempt to rethink the ministry of the Church of England must begin with an attentive listening to the culture that it is our task to transform in Christ.

This is a brave and evangelical approach, but +Philip is clear:

We need priests — and bishops — who see themselves not as functionaries of an organisation, but as free-roaming evangelists in the style of Aidan or Cuthbert.

There is, of course, here the danger identified by Adrian Hilton (“Cranmer”) in his discussion with Professor Percy, that there is “no point teaching if no-one is listening.” But +Philip sees in the events of the past few months a period where, despite churches being closed, people have been listening, and may remain attentive – for a while:

we are seeing the unpicking of the lie that people today are not interested in the gospel. We have, instead, a nation relearning how to pray, looking to us for answers to the big questions, and accessing church life through online means in a way that we could not have imagined possible six months ago. Some studies reckon that one in three of the population have attended online worship since lockdown began. One Sunday, the Christians crashed Zoom.

At the same time, the economic and social consequences of the “lockdown” period are likely to be severe, and that part of parish ministry which has been quietly devoted to foodbanks and helping those bady hit, is only going to increase. As one whose family benefitted from such an initiative during industrial action in the mid-1960s, I can attest to the lasting effect of such a ministry; the Church was there for my family when no one else, including the Union which had called the strike, was.

Bishop Philip is right to say:

We now need to be ready to honour and acknowledge this new generation of lay leaders who have learnt how to use their gifts in Christ’s service, and who will not be happy to be mere consumers again.

To quote Professor Percy again (and yes, I know there may seem to be an irony in juxtaposing him with +Philip in view ofhis part in the former not becoming Bishop of Sheffield, but that just shows God’s providence, and maybe His sense of humour): “Theology and faith is always contextual, but that does not suggest an ultimate capitulation to relativism.” (Percy, Thirty-Nine New Articles, 2013, p. 19). A Church which, in times of crisis, adapts to bring the Word of God in action to those in need, has in the past, and can again, help transform the society within which it is set.

And this is where Professor Percy and +Philip are at one. If the Church is to meet the challenge set then it will need to be theologically-grounded as well as nimble. That would require it to move beyond the current “understanding of the diocese as an organisation, and its bishop and clergy as no more than “leaders”.

a diocese is not an organisation. It is a communion: a network of sacramental relationships flowing from the bishop, which together make up part of the body of Christ. Rather than draw everything into the centre, perhaps we need smaller, looser, central structures, which trust the local and encourage resourceful leadership; a bishop would offer oversight, but not control

In Professor Percy’s words, there needs to be more“God talk” and it needs to inform and drive how the Church reacts:

If A nation is, indeed, turning again to its Church, now is not the time to withdraw and manage decline. This crisis is showing us patterns of ministry which can enable us to reconnect to the culture and recapture imaginations with the gospel.

What +Philip writes, although addressed to a predominantly Anglican audience, is true for all Christian Churches.

There is a hunger for something beyond the material rewards offered by the consumerism that has been dominant in the West for so long. The question is whether the Churches are led by those who can seize the opportunity identified by Bishop Philip North.

Christianity without Christ?

25 Thursday Jun 2020

Posted by in Church/State, Early Church

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Gene Veith at Cranach had an interesting post yesterday on whether the Christian virtues can survive without Christianity. I think this ties in well to mine on NEO today on the immorality of Christian clergy supporting BLM, instead of continuing our own mission, the most successful in helping the disadvantaged in history, by far. Here’s part of Gene’s article.

The secular British historian Tom Holland has published a new book entitled Dominion:  How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (Basic Books).  Here is the summary from Amazon.com:

Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular victim of crucifixion-an obscure provincial by the name of Jesus-was to be worshipped as a god. Dominion explores the implications of this shocking conviction as they have reverberated throughout history. Today, the West remains utterly saturated by Christian assumptions. As Tom Holland demonstrates, our morals and ethics are not universal but are instead the fruits of a very distinctive civilization. Concepts such as secularism, liberalism, science, and homosexuality are deeply rooted in a Christian seedbed. From Babylon to the Beatles, Saint Michael to #MeToo, Dominion tells the story of how Christianity transformed the modern world.
His book shows just how different Christian values and ethics were from those of the Greeks and the Romans and how the Christian mindset has prevailed in Western Civilization even among his fellow secularists.  (Holland is an atheist.)  The Greeks, for example, considered compassion, for example to be a weakness, not one of the highest virtues as Christianity made it.  The principle from Christianity that all human beings have equal value was incomprehensible to the hierarchies of ancient Rome.  Today we assume that peace is better than war, a legacy of Christianity utterly foreign to the ancient Greeks, Romans, and European tribes.

It’s something that is easy to forget, and mostly we have.

Holland appears to think that it’s possible to have the fruits without the faith, to have Christian influence without the Christianity.  Strand, however, disagrees:
Christian ethics cannot be about merely upholding and claiming certain values that flow from the Christian faith. That would be to mistake the fruit from the tree. The very center of the Christian life is not what the cross teaches us morally but what the cross did for us in atoning for our sins and bringing us from life to death in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The transformation of the person from death to life and the ultimate union with the Triune God in the City of God is the goal of all Christians. Their works of mercy and sacrifice for neighbor and their culture-building over millennia are a testament of this transforming power. We make a mistake if we think the fruit is the goal or that we can separate the fruit from the tree that produced it.

I would say that although principles such as love, equality, compassion and the like are still dominant, even among the secularists, they are starting to fade.  Certainly those who no longer believe in the key Christian teachings of atonement and redemption will have difficulty with the concept of forgiveness, and we are seeing that.  Secularists today say they believe in equality, but they are also demonizing and deriding the worth of those with whom they disagree.  And the strange embrace of abortion on the part of so many secularists, even liberals and progressives, undercuts their claim to be compassionate and supportive of the powerless.  It is, in fact, a reversion to the Greco-Roman practice of infanticide, with everything else that implied about the value of human life.

I should at this point go on and add examples of my own, but two things, I think this is perfectly lucid, clear, and self-evidently correct. Our morality will never stand on its own, its foundation is in our hope of redemption, not in earthly values. To claim otherwise is sophistry and sophistry which history has shown to be false. Without the hope of redemption, we return to the dog eat dog world of Greece and Rome, where the only reason for doing anything is self-aggrandizement. We see that happening already in our so-called elites, who are mostly post-Christian, for not believing in God, they seem to only believe in earthly acquisition and what may be even worse, they seem to think this is a zero-sum game.

Well, Christ taught us better, as they will find out one day. After all, the Lord did say, “Vengeance is mine”. And as I’ve said a few times, without hell there can be no heaven.

Iconoclasm

23 Tuesday Jun 2020

Posted by in Anti Catholic, Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Faith

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We have been here before, at least in England and other parts of Christendom. It has been estimated that upto ninety percent of the artwork of medieval England was destroyed at the Reformation. The “Reformers” regarded statues as idols and broke and burnt them. The statue of Our Lady of Walsingham, along with the medieval Abbey, one of the greatest pilgrimage sites in Europe, was destroyed. There was only one way to regard such statues – idolatry – and if you failed to agree, then you too were marked for destruction. Depressing as it is, we seem to be here again.

The original Christian iconoclasts were led by Emperor Leo III (717-741) who banned the use of images and had many destroyed. John of Damascus led the argument against the iconclasts, and at the Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 787, the Empress Ireme secured a victory against iconoclasm. One of the proximate causes of the crisis was the fact that the new religion of Islam took a very hard line indeed on images, and there had been those in the Church who thought that by taking the same view, they could stem the rise of Islam. They were wrong. So were those who thought that Nicaea 787 had solved the problem.

There seems to be, in our fallen nature, an almost Caliban-like instinct to destroy images our ourselves – perhaps some cannot bear to look into the mirror, like Shakespeare’s Caliban. There will, of course, always be those whose attempt to regulate thought includes governance over what might and might not be displayed in public, whether it is the ankles of a woman or the statue of someone of whom they disapprove.

In democratic countries there is a legal process by which statues can be erected, and there is one by which they can be removed, which is why comparisons with what happened in the former Communist bloc and Iraq are wide of the mark. It may be that there are those who think mob rule preferable to the tedium of democratic process, but it may be unwise to pay them Danegeld.

Historically, destroying representations of people has tended to be accompanied by harming real people. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and every human life is sacred. Orthodox Christianity has tended to eschew iconoclasm for good reasons. now is not the time to change. As a reminder of the past, I include not a statue, but a poem:

 

A Lament for Our Lady’s Shrine at Walsingham

In the wracks of Walsingham
Whom should I choose
But the Queen of Walsingham
to be my guide and muse.

Then, thou Prince of Walsingham,
Grant me to frame
Bitter plaints to rue thy wrong,
Bitter woe for thy name.

Bitter was it so to see
The seely sheep
Murdered by the ravenous wolves
While the shepherds did sleep.

Bitter was it, O to view
The sacred vine,
Whilst the gardeners played all close,
Rooted up by the swine.

Bitter, bitter, O to behold
The grass to grow
Where the walls of Walsingham
So stately did show.

Such were the worth of Walsingham
While she did stand,
Such are the wracks as now do show
Of that Holy Land.

Level, level, with the ground
The towers do lie,
Which, with their golden glittering tops,
Pierced once to the sky.

Where were gates are no gates now,
The ways unknown
Where the press of peers did pass
While her fame was blown.

Owls do scrike where the sweetest hymns
Lately were sung,
Toads and serpents hold their dens
Where the palmers did throng.

Weep, weep, O Walsingham,
Whose days are nights,
Blessings turned to blasphemies,
Holy deeds to despites.

Sin is where Our Lady sat,
Heaven is turned to hell,
Satan sits where Our Lord did sway —
Walsingham, O farewell!

Working with the Spirit

21 Sunday Jun 2020

Posted by in Church/State, Early Church, Faith, Galatians

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As expected, yesterday’s post on Black Lives Matter, evoked some heated responses. It is essential that we differentiate between what extremists (on both sides) say and the problem itself; to identify the two, or to deny there is a problem, seems to me self-defeating. One way lies political opportunism masquerading as concern, the other way lies a continuation of the ills which caused the problem in the first place. Whilst it is true that extremists have sought (literally) to fan the flames, the idea that the emotions behind the protests is all manufactured by sinister agencies intent on overthrowing the system, risks precipitating the danger it dismisses. Scoop, yesterday in the comments, rightly listed all the legislation passed in the USA since the Civil War, and yet there are problems to this day. Law alone is not enough. As we know, we are not saved by the Law, were that the case, Jesus would never have had to suffer and die to redeem our sins, neither would He have needed to rise again as the first-fruits of His sacrifice for us.

There are those who see the attitude of the Churches on this issue as mealy-mouthed; these are, in the main, critics of whatever Church leaders do. None of that is to say that Church leaders get it right all the time, but it is to put the heated criticism in context. Church leaders have a wider responsibility than to the scribbling and commentating classes, and even as criticism is levelled (no doubt some of it deserved) it should be leavened with that caveat. To ignore the furore would be to condemn Church leaders as out of touch, to acknowledge it risks the accusation of being an appeaser. As statues of Saints fall, Church leaders have to respond whether they will or not. Nor should ot be forgotten that Churches are multi-racial organisations. Christianity, from the beginning, has been unusual in religions in this aspect of its teaching and practice.

The main problem with the slogan “Black Livers Matter” is that taken to extremes it implies that there is a united “Black” view of the world, and it can lead, and has led to, those BAME politicians who are conservatives or Republicans, being insulted, as though they are the “wrong sort” of BAME person. This, as yesterday’s post argued, is as pernicious as the attempt to deny there is any problem in our society for people of a different skin colour. I suppose extremists will, by nature, go to extremes, but that’s no reason for the rest of us to follow them. To deny that there are those in the Church who feel that their skin colour makes them a problem for others is to deny the obvious. The orthodoxy of men like Cardinal Sarah has occasionally drawn the ire of some Western Bishops in terms which suggest that the latter may not be free sin here.

We know from St Paul’s struggles on the matter, how hard it was for him to persuade his fellow Jews that Gentiles were not “unclean” and that it was in order to break bread and share wine with them. It is very easy for us, at thise distance, to forget how fierce an argument this was among early Christians. Even St Peter, under pressure from Jerusalem, recant from his position of sharing table fellowship with Gentiles, forcing St Paul intoa fierce condemnation of his position. For St Peter to agree with St James and the Jerusalem Church undermined, for St Paul, the whole thrust of the Gospel message that “For no one is put right with God by doing what the Law requires.”

The Church is a fellowship of believers or it is nothing. The first Christians found it as hard as we often do. Men from Corinth probably found men from Rome stand-offish and a bit inclined to assume superiority; men from Rome probably found the Corinthians a bit lively for their taste; and women, such as Phoebe, would have wrestled with male condescension as much as their modern contemporaries often do. But they were one on Christ, and the Spirit worked through them to make them one, as He does with us, if we let Him.

 

Oak Apples and Restoration

29 Friday May 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Church/State, Faith

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Until 1859, the Church of England marked 29 May as “Oak Apple Day,” marking the day that the Monarchy, and with it, the Church of England, was restored after the interlude of the Commonwealth under Cromwell. As Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary:

Parliament had ordered the 29th of May, the King’s birthday, to be forever kept as a day of thanksgiving for our redemption from tyranny and the King’s return to his Government, he returning to London that day.

The “oak tree” commemorated the fact that after the Royalist defeat at Worcester in 1651, the young Prince of Wales (later Charles II) had hidden in one whilst the Rounheads sought him. The English like a good story, and a good party, and Restoration Day provided both.

The Church of England had good reason to commemorate the day, and the decision to abolish its official memorial in 1859 was, along with the decision to drop the service for Guy Fawkes’ day, a sign that parliament wanted to take a less censorious line towards Nonconformists and Catholics, which whilst welcome in itself, should not lead us not to celebrate the day on which the Monarchy was restored.

History and identity are important to a nation, and as one commentator has shrewdly suggested:

Against a joyless Puritan commerical republic, the Restoration symbolised the renewal of convivality, balance, memory, locality, a deeper, more joyful vision of communal flourishing than the Puritan republic could envisage or allow.

There is in this a deeper message to be grasped too.

A nation is more than the sum of its Gross Domestic Product and its balance sheets. A nation which knows the cost of everything often knows the value of nothing, and its polity can become one which sees people as means to an end. This can never be a Christian view of mankind. Life is given to each of us by God for His purpose which, across the course of that life we work out more or less. Any polity which neglects the poor and denies the rights of workers is headed for degradation. At the heart of the Restoration was “monarchy – an expression of the anointed, sacramental nature of communal life, a rejection of the idea of the ‘secular’.” Man does not live by bread alone, and his worth cannot be defined solely by the material. Neither the free market nor social activism quite cuts through to what makes the good life, even if both might have their place.

During this crisis we have seen people going on line to find Church is a way not as many did beforehand; will this continue? Sceptical by nature of claims that “everything will/must change” and of assertions that “nothing will be the same”, if only because history tens to show that change is slow and human beings are always the same, nonetheless, it will be interesting to see whether a chance to slow down and reflect, to be more rooted on one place than usual, will have any lasting effects.

In the meantime, Oak Apple day was, by tradition, an occasion for joy and celebration, so let us do that as best we can, giving God thanks for His many and great mercies, as we await Pentecost.

Happy Thanksgiving

28 Thursday Nov 2019

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Today, in America is Thanksgiving Day. It is a day of celebration of what we have made of God’s gift to us all. Its history reaches all the way back to our Pilgrim forebearers, who felt called to thank God that they had survived the first year in the Massachusetts Bay.

Now it is a day of parades, football, serious overeating, and sleeping off that overeating by sleeping through the football on TV. But I think we all deep in our hearts do remember to thank “The Big Guy” for all we have, and the freedom to enjoy it.

President Washington certainly knew something about dark days, far darker than ours are today, and he (and Congress) thought it fit to remember the Author of our blessings. So should we.

From the Heritage Foundation

Thanksgiving Proclamation

Issued by President George Washington, at the request of Congress, on October 3, 1789

By the President of the United States of America, a Proclamation.

Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor; and—Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me “to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:”

Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favor, able interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquillity, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted; for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our national and other trangressions; to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us), and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally, to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

Go. Washington

That’s the reason for the day put as well as anyone has, ever.

My family’s traditional table grace is this

In the press of daily events, it is not always easy to remember just how good we have it. Perry Metzger at Samizdata sums it up well.

We live lives of such astonishing wealth that we scarcely notice it. Only a fool would rather be an Emperor in 1600 than a poor person living today. Compared to a king of several centuries ago, poor people in the developed world live in astonishing luxury. In the developed world, we eat fresh vegetables in midwinter, our homes are heated toasty warm in the winter and cooled and dehumidified in the summer, we travel in enormous comfort (no wooden wheeled carriages without shock absorbers for us, and indeed, we can fly to the other side of the world for a quite modest sum of money), our medical care is incomparably better, our beds more comfortable, our entertainment options beyond any potentate’s wildest dreams. This is true even of quite poor people, at least in developed countries.

Whence comes this bounty? It is not because of union organizing, or minimum wage laws, or the triumph of the proletariat over the evil factory owners. Indeed, a few centuries ago, there were few mass production factories to triumph over.

No, the source of this bounty is productivity, and the engines of productivity are deferred consumption being invested in improved infrastructure (that is, capital accumulation), improved technology, and specialization. Thanks to our better means of making things and the sacrifices needed to construct those means, productivity per worker is orders of magnitude higher, and thus there’s more stuff to go around.

Read it all, but realize this is the characteristic Anglo-American achievement, that we have shared with all the world, along with the freedom to enjoy it. Not to mention the freedom to create it, which is why it started with our peoples.

It is indeed meet that we thank our God for our Blessings.

Happy Thanksgiving

Remembrance Sunday

10 Sunday Nov 2019

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I wrote about Remembrance Sunday here on 13 November 2013, this is part of that article.

Poppy_wreath_stockwell

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place: and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead: Short days ago,
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved: and now we lie
In Flanders fields!

Take up our quarrel with the foe
To you, from failing hands, we throw
The torch: be yours to hold it high
If ye break faith with us who die,
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields

 

A WOMAN’S TRIBUTE

The Message of the Double Line of Khaki; From the London Times, October 18, 1921

In Westminster Abbey, yesterday, General Pershing laid the American Medal of Honour upon the grave of the Unknown Soldier of Britain. The bright sunlight streamed through the high stained-glass windows in long shafts of light that fell warm upon the grey stone of the Gothic arches, upon the quiet people in the Nave, and around the flower-strewn tomb, and that lay in a cloth of scarlet on the flag above the body of the Unknown Dead.

A thousand years of great history stood silent within those old walls. Close by are the tombs of Norman, Plantagenet, Tudor, and Stuart Kings and Queens, of the priests, and soldiers and the sailors, of the poets and statesmen that have made England great.

As the organ filled the sunlit spaces of the ancient church with its deep volume of sound, there marched up the aisle, with bared heads, a detachment of British soldiers from the Guard’s regiments. As they formed a line facing the centre, an equal number of American soldiers, bare-headed, marched up the other side, and turning, stood facing the British soldiers across the narrow aisle.

Both lines of khaki, both lines of straight and young and clear-eyed boys, both lines of men of Anglo-Saxon blood, of the same standards and of the same ideals they stood there in the sunlight in that shrine of a thousand years of memory, looking straight into each other’s eyes.

Between them, up the aisle, marched the choir in their scarlet vestments with their bright cross on high, the generals, the admirals, and the Ministers of the Empire, and the Ambassador and the Commanding General of the Great Republic but in all that they represented, and in all that was said in the ceremonies that followed, there was no such potent symbol as those two lines of khaki- clad boys, with the sun shining on their bared heads, their brave young faces, and their strong young bodies, looking each other straight in the face.Between them lay, not the narrow aisle, but a thousand leagues of sea, the building of a new world, the birth of a new destiny for man. But as they stood there where they could have touched hands in the old Abbey which was a shrine for their common ancestors, they were so amazingly alike in bearing and appearance that they ceased to be a detachment of soldiers from two different countries, and they became a symbol of the illimitable potentiality of a common heritage that heritage of which the ancient Abbey was a shrine the heritage of the ideals of freedom, of order, of self-discipline, of self-respect.

If any words spoken in the Abbey could have conveyed a hundredth part of what that double line of clear- eyed boys said in utter silence the world would have been a happier place to-day. The old strength and the new force of a common heritage stood in khaki in the aisle of Westminster Abbey bare-headed, to honour the symbol of supreme sacrifice to those ideals in the Cross of Christ and in the body of an Unknown Soldier.

The service included this.

Kind of the cousins, who have always been so gracious. I wonder if they also sang this, which was new that year.

It has been a very long century since that last quiet August weekend of the Edwardian Age. It has been filled far too often with the roar of the guns, and the rattle of musketry followed by the sounding of the Last Post. But the mission has been maintained, it will never be won, although we can and should pray that it will be less horrific going forward. But all around the world, freedom-loving people have learned of the steadfast valor even unto death of English-speaking soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen. We are proud of our part, yes. But we are equally proud to be your allies and friends.

Has it been worth it? The citizen of Ypres, Belgium seem to think so. Every night at 8:00pm since 2 July 1928, except during the German occupation in World War II, they have executed this ceremony, and when the Polish forces liberated them in 1944, they resumed, while heavy fighting was still going on in the city. While under occupation in World War II the ceremony took place at Brookwood Military Cemetery, in Surrey, England.

Just this week, our President presented postumously to Colonel Rick Rescorla’s, the Great Anglo-American hero of 9/11, responsible for saving at least 2700 people that day, widow Susan, the Presidential Citizens Medal. Col Rescorla was a veteran of the British Army, a paratrooper who fought on Cypress and in Rhodesia, then emigrated to the US and led a platoon at the First Battle of Ia Drang, in Vietnam, in 1965. You will find his picture on the cover of We Were Soldiers Once, and Young. . To quote Nina Bookout of Victory Girls Blog,

 Mostly he sang dirty songs that would make a sailor blush. Interspersed with the lyrics was the voice of command: ‘Fix bayonets…on liiiiine…reaaaa-dy…forward.’ It was a voice straight from Waterloo, from the Somme, implacable, impeccable, impossible to disobey. His men forgot their fear, concentrated on his orders and marched forward as he led them straight into the pages of history: 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry…’Hard Corps.’”

I would ad that voice was also heard at Roark’s Drift, for both at the Ia Drang Valley in 1965, and in the stairway of WTC 2 on September 11, 2001 he was heard singing this:

“”Men of Cornwall stop your dreaming
Can’t you see their spear points gleaming?
See their warriors’ pennants streaming
To this battlefield.
Men of Cornwall stand ye steady
It cannot be ever said ye
for the battle were not ready.
STAND AND NEVER YIELD!“
– “Men of Harlech”

He was last seen heading back up the stairs of the tower. More, including the president’s remarks, here.

EVERY NIGHT

For The Fallen

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England’s foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

Newman and a White Rose

19 Friday Jul 2019

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Newman

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Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie, with their friend Christoph Probst, in 1943

Many of us see our countries as possibly headed into dark times, and sometimes we despair, and it is hard to remember that while we are in this world, we are not of this world. But we do have our duties and responsibilities in this world as well. Perhaps a reminder wouldn’t hurt. Particularly one which reminds us that what we say and write and do today may well echo down the corridors of time. This is an article I first published here on 19 February 2018. I ran across it yesterday, and think it worth a rereading. Neo.

Here most of us admire the Blessed John Henry Newman quite a lot, as we should. After all, most of us who write here are orthodox Christians of one flavor or another. Nor are we alone.

A couple of weeks ago, I was involved in a discussion of The White Rose, one of the main resistance groups in Nazi Germany, and how it was almost completely driven by Christian ideals, although its leadership was a combination of Catholic, Lutheran, and Orthodox.

But how did that come to be, can we see the roots of this? Why yes, yes, we can.

An article in Catholic Herald last week by Paul Shrimpton tells how a goodly share of what Hans and Sophie Scholl believed and would lead them to the guillotine, seventy-five years ago yesterday, came from Newman.

From their letters and diaries we know that they were strongly influenced by St Augustine’s Confessions, Pascal’s Pensées and George Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest. Now it has become clear that their lives were also shaped by the writings of Blessed John Henry Newman.

The man who brought Newman’s writings to the attention of the Munich students was the philosopher and cultural historian Theodor Haecker. Haecker had become a Catholic after translating Newman’s Grammar of Assent in 1921, and for the rest of his life Newman was his guiding star. He translated seven of Newman’s works, and on several occasions read excerpts from them at the illegal secret meetings Hans Scholl convened for his friends. Strange though it may seem, the insights of the Oxford academic were ideally suited to help these students make sense of the catastrophe they were living through.

Haecker’s influence is evident already in the first three White Rose leaflets, but his becomes the dominant voice in the fourth: this leaflet, written the day after Haecker had read the students some powerful Newman sermons, finishes with the words: “We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace! Please read and distribute!”

When Sophie’s boyfriend, a Luftwaffe officer called Fritz Hartnagel, was deployed to the Eastern Front in May 1942, Sophie’s parting gift was two volumes of Newman’s sermons. After witnessing the carnage in Russia, Fritz wrote to Sophie to say that reading Newman’s words in such an awful place was like tasting “drops of precious wine”.

In another letter, Fritz wrote: “We know by whom we were created, and that we stand in a relationship of moral obligation to our creator. Conscience gives us the capacity to distinguish between good and evil.” These words were taken almost verbatim from a famous sermon of Newman’s called “The Testimony of Conscience”.

The White Rose, which Hans and Sophie led, has become the most famous anti-Hitler resistance in Germany today, saving only the Zwanzigsten Juli conspiracy itself, in which the Rev Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was implicated. This founder (amongst others) of the Confessing Church would surely have also agreed with much of what Hans and Sophie learned from Newman’s writing.

In fact, I’m quite sure he was familiar with it, if in no other way, because of his friendship with Bishop George Bell of Chichester, now subject to a witch hunt led by his own church, to whom Bonhoeffer’s last message from Flossenbürg was addressed. Of course, Bonhoeffer was hanged a few weeks before the camp at Flossenbürg was liberated.

When Fritz visited Sophie’s parents, he gave them a collection of Newman sermons translated by Theodor Haecker. Haecker himself also visited the Scholls, and signed the visitor’s book with Newman’s own motto, Cor ad cor loquitur (“Heart speaks to heart”).

So does it still.

What is America for Mummy?

04 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by in Church/State, Uncategorized

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633701545The main part of this post is one of the first posts Jessica wrote for my blog. It’s still one of my favorites, and I think it explains why there is something a bit special about America, that has drawn so many to our shores.

Not long after wwe met, Jessica asked me in an email, 

Perhaps the parallel goes beyond just the early pilgrims? America is either a vision of what can be, or it is nothing.

That is the choice we face, and it’s a stark one. Either we are who we have always said we are, or we are just another slave state like Europe.The question must be answered by the American people, we already know what the government thinks, don’t we?

Churchill said, in the Grand Alliance

But I had studied the American Civil War, fought out to the last desperate inch. American blood flowed in my veins. I thought of a remark which Edward Grey had made to me more than thirty years before—that the United States is like “a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is ignited under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.

That is true, we are Americans, we can do anything, if we choose to. Is the fire under the boiler lighted? If it is not, the dream is over. If it is, anything is possible for us.

It strikes me that we often become bogged down in detail, in theory, in the mundane day-to-day stuff that we deal with. We tend to forget what it’s all about, and we shouldn’t. Almost from the beginning, America has been a dream; a dream of freedom above all, but also of material prosperity.

It was such a potent dream that Italian peasants told each other that the streets were paved with gold, although they knew what really awaited them was hard work, and bias against them because of their language and religion but, they came anyway, and if they didn’t have much but hard work and cramped tenements, their children did. And that’s really what the dream has always been: for our children to have a better life than we did. In the nineteenth century, Russian immigrants who had never had anything but black bread, except maybe on holidays, wrote home ecstatically that “in America, we eat wheaten bread every day.” And that too was part of the saga of America.

That’s what we have built over the last 400 years, a dream of freedom, of individual liberty, yes, but also of freedom from material want by virtue of hard work. And you know, as Jess is going to tell you again here, that is really pretty damned heroic as well. Here is Jess’ post. Neo]

When I was ten, I lived in America for a year – in the mid-West. I remember when we got to O’Hare airport looking at its size and marvelling; it seemed bigger than the town in which we lived in Wales. I recall going to St. Louis and seeing the Arch, and going up it and looking across the vastness of the city and asking my mother: ‘What is America for mummy?’ I can’t remember what she answered – she probably thought it was me trying to be clever; but it was a real question, and one I came to ask a few times whilst I was there.

I think I asked it for the reason many foreigners ask – there is something different about America.  I remember going with my mother to a Kiwanis Club and being struck by the way everyone put their fist on their breast as they swore the oath of allegiance to the flag. Indeed, I was so impressed that I memorised it so that the second time we went, I could do it too. I remember a nice man smiling but saying that I couldn’t do it because I was not an American citizen.  ‘How do you get to be one of those’, I asked? ‘Well, little lady, you could always marry an all-American boy’, was the answer.  I think I said something about ‘smelly boys’ and never wanting to get married because I wanted to be a nun. But a bit later I recall thinking that maybe the kind man had a point.  America, the very idea, seemed Romantic.

My father was fifty when I was born, and his tastes in movies became mine. When other teenage girls were swooning about Kevin Costner (really???), I was dismissive. John Wayne was my hero – and remains so. He summed up America for me. Strong, but never boastful about it. I remember crying when I saw ‘The Man who shot Liberty Valance’ – it was so unfair – it was Tom Donovan, not Ransom Stoddard who shot Liberty Valance, so why did the latter end up with the girl? Huh, I remember thinking, if I had been ‘the girl’ there was no way I’d have chosen Jimmy Stewart over John Wayne – what was she thinking?  But, as Tom Donovan might have said: “Whoa, take ‘er easy there, Pilgrim”.

The film’s message, which passed me by in my indignation, was about the passing of the old West, and the place of myth in the making of a nation. America is a nation built around myths and legends. That is not to say they are wrong, it is to say that those movies told a bigger story about the making of a great nation and what made it that. All nations need myths, and the point about the American one seemed to be encapsulated in my second favourite John Wayne film – ‘She wore a Yellow ribbon.’ Captain Nathan Brittles was the quintessential quiet American. A man who, having lost his family, was married to the army, and who did his duty, no matter what. My teenage heart went out to him, and I was very sniffy about the heroine going off with those ‘boys’ rather than a ‘real man’.

What John Ford caught in those films – especially the great trilogy which began with ‘Fort Apache’ and ended with ‘Rio Grande’ – was the very idea of America.  Call me a Romantic (no, do) – but that idea of America remains with me to this day. God Bless America – the land of the free.

I think Jess is very right, America is romantic, and yes, you can call me one too. But if we take the romance, and yes the legend and the saga out of our history, we are left with a strip of dirt, and just another group of people. That’s not my America, either. Here’s a piece of the legend. Neo

Happy Independence Day

And Now, in Illinois

13 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by in Abortion, Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Faith

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Indeed, Live Action reports

The state already had among the most liberal abortion laws in the nation. The new Illinois RHA does away with things the state’s ban on partial-birth abortion, parental notification of minors, ends the need for licensing abortion facilities by the state, allows non-physicians to commit abortions, and allows for abortion at any time, for any reason, including for reasons of “health” which may include “physical, emotional, psychological, familial” or any other type of “health” the abortionist will accept. And abortionists have made clear that they believe the very state of being pregnant and not wanting to be is reason enough to commit an abortion.

Today on NEO, I’m talking about Pelegianism in the modern world. Here’s a prime example.

But Gene Veith at Cranach noted one ray of hope.

The Bishop of Springfield, Illinois, Thomas Paprocki, has issued a decree barring the leadership of the state legislator and Catholic lawmakers who voted for one of the most radically pro-abortion laws in the country from receiving Holy Communion.

He did so with some excellent language describing just how great a sin that abortion is.

From the Catholic News Agency (my [Gene’s] bolds):

“In accord with canon 915 of the Code of Canon Law…Illinois Senate President John Cullerton and Speaker of the House Michael J. Madigan, who facilitated the passage of the Act Concerning Abortion of 2017 (House Bill 40) as well as the Reproductive Health Act of 2019 (Senate Bill 25), are not to be admitted to Holy Communion in the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois because they have obstinately persisted in promoting the abominable crime and very grave sin of abortion as evidenced by the influence they exerted in their leadership roles and their repeated votes and obdurate public support for abortion rights over an extended period of time,” Bishop Thomas Paprocki wrote in a June 2 decree.

“These persons may be readmitted to Holy Communion only after they have truly repented these grave sins and furthermore have made suitable reparation for damages and scandal, or at least have seriously promised to do so, as determined in my judgment or in the judgment of their diocesan bishop in consultation with me or my successor,” the bishop added. . . .

“I declare that Catholic legislators of the Illinois General Assembly who have cooperated in evil and committed grave sin by voting for any legislation that promotes abortion are not to present themselves to receive Holy Communion without first being reconciled to Christ and the Church in accord with canon 916 of the Code of Canon Law,” Paprocki wrote.

In a statement issued June 6, the bishop said that “in issuing this decree, I anticipate that some will point out the Church’s own failings with regard to the abuse of children.”

“The same justifiable anger we feel toward the abuse of innocent children, however, should prompt an outcry of resistance against legalizing the murder of innocent children. The failings of the Church do not change the objective reality that the murder of a defenseless baby is an utterly evil act.

So there you go, a couple of Lutherans commending a Catholic bishop.

Sadly, it’s not an extreme sanction, like excommunication which separates one (presumably permanently) from the Church, and it only applies in the Diocese of Springfield. But it is way past time for our clergy to begin to correct the course of these murderous miscreants. That applies to all clergy, for I think not correcting your congregants on such an issue, makes one a participant. I’m not smart enough to know if God agrees with that, but I think He may not be overly happy with his ministers who do not protect children.