Google Liberia images, you will see sun-drenched towns, in which slim inhabitants are dark figures over-exposed against the bright surf, bent over their nets, but also young soldiers standing over gruesome trophies and squinting into the camera, and several sad shots of dead babies lying, even worse, on the bare ground. So the history is not difficult to guess. It seems to have been an incredibly uncivil war.  It stopped and started several times between 1989 and 2003.

In this surprising call of theirs, Liberians (whose constitution and culture was based on our own in this colony of former US slaves returned to the African continent of their birth) reject our rigid neutrality toward religion in public institutions like schools and courtrooms.  They reject the banishment of the Christian moral code, resulting in the proliferation of divorce, concubinage, homosexuality, abortion, contraception, pedophilia, and euthanasia in our nation and in theirs, and for the same ends. One by one each pseudo ‘right’ to some form of sexual laxity and perversion has been granted in exchange for votes. More ‘rights’ will come, as sure as taxes, until we are reduced to the wages and the lives of the lowest paid and most abused workers on earth, as free as slaves to hump anything or anyone we like in the shadows, and terminated when our utility falters. Only the Church ever cared if we gave birth to valued citizens, not litters to be killed or kept at will. That dignity is gone.  We are back down in the mud, it is pagan times.  They call it choice, inspired, they must have paid their house poet very well indeed.

But in Liberia on March 19, several thousand Liberians in peaceful demonstration presented their government with a petition brimming with signatories asking for something different: a Christian religious government.  They wore snow white tee shirts and observers say they were a sight to see as they filled their capital, Monrovia, on the coast of the North Atlantic.  The scant coverage the event received was short on details.  One reporter at AllAfrica noted the demand for religious tolerance, not freedom, a very important distinction, one made also in Catholicism at Vatican II  except the Council went the opposite direction, you know, the easy direction. Liberians have taken the unpopular position, rejecting the freedom that amounts to freedom from religion for simple tolerance of other faiths (they made sure that was included) but one central faith, one matching the majority of people in their nation.

You can bet these Liberians represented no other interests. No al queda lurks behind them. No brotherhood, not even the Mystical Body, since they apparently are protestants. And yet there they were in their white tee-pelts, peering up into the murky realms of government with their poor-people’s big, shortsighted sheep eyes, petitioning that God who was subtracted be added back.  They want a religious state, one that honors our debt toward our Creator, because they know that is only just, only right, and furthermore platforms a state in which all other justice can flow.  They didn’t say platform–or probably not, the details in the media reports were slim. They doubtless never read Pius XI’s Quas primas either, which says the same thing,  though much elevated: Christ must be at the center of every nation. These Liberians perhaps cannot read in great numbers.  Nevertheless, they know–John 10:27, it’s the Master’s voice thing–they know help when they hear it. And poor things, they need help and they don’t mind asking for it. Me, either!

Who wants the sheep of this flock?

Not Rome. Rome got off that bus officially at Vatican II. Rome has either ignored or attacked Hungary, which also very recently has attempted to restore Christianity to their constitution by amending it with Catholic values legislation. Their party overwhelmingly won an election on that platform. They have instituted protections for the sheep on all the usual fronts, protecting life from conception to natural death,  that is, no abortion, no euthanasia, outlawing not homosexuality but homosexual ‘marriage’ and adoption of children, vowing to protect and foster natural marriage and strengthen the family by every means possible (and empower them–Hungary has given each child born a vote, to be exercised by their parents until they reach voting age, for example).

Hungary has come down hard on the banks, too, insisting on independent government oversight rather than a chairman chosen by the banking industry. Hungary instituted many similar economic changes, not a one of which takes anything from the ordinary working man and woman,  not one of which would be unacceptable to reformist groups in this country, like Occupy, but which has the European Union frothing at the mouth, but chained, unable to overturn the hated new Christian constitution, since the changes have already met constitutional challenges, and besides, the party effecting them was demonstrably democratically elected and by a large majority (although the chief liberal criticism is contradictorily the ‘undemocratic’ nature of the changes, presumably the restraints on the homosexual lobby, giving a new definition– prohibiting discrimination in any way between genders—as the measure of ‘democracy,’ rather than voting results, just as they have designated the percentage of women in the labor market as the measure of considerate treatment of women in any given nation, which of course it is not, it is even in many cases the opposite).

If you would be refreshed by a politician who mentions the rosary as one of his campaign tools, please read this interview of the Polish Catholic newspaper Niedziela with Viktor Orban, the bogey man to all liberal Europe and one of the brilliant architects of Hungary’s revolution. You will cheer, you might cry. But you will not understand what is Rome’s problem to ignore this light shining in our darkness (hint:  a council, rhymes with bippity boo).

Those who are fighting the struggle against the errors of the Council understood what horror for the working class lay behind the abandonment of the Catholic state. Marcel Lefebvre wrote, in They Have Uncrowned Him,  that the new teaching would cause social chaos.  ”May God deliver us from subjectivistic and naturalistic errors! They are the unmistakable mark of the Liberalism which inspired the religious liberty of Vatican II. But they can lead only to social chaos!”  (199-200, Angelus Press, 1988)

Hungary and Liberia deserve that we Catholics examine their attempts to restore Christ to their nations with our most devoted attention. The world’s sheep need new, unsecular, flat-out Faith-founded constitutions that undo the deformation of the last five hundred years since the protestant rebellion.   The Catholic state is a goal to be worked toward systematically, strategically, just as the Muslim brotherhood makes the Islamic state their ultimate goal and are prepared for interim governments as stepping stones. Gallup confirms that American people want a religious state just as much as Muslims, when the question is worded, Do you want the Bible to be the foundation for laws in our country?   Gallup found the same response all over the world.  The world’s people reject secularism. They are waiting for leadership. Liberia and Hungary are showing the way. Of course it is the way of the cross, but it is also the only way to peace.

It is not that modernists don’t wish to be understood, but rather from experience (advertising, for one) know  they can trust that the whole meaning will reassemble itself in the reader’s psyche later, carried there past security by the shell of orthodoxy. They’re sidestepping a fair fight, to get into the heart. Think virus.

 Their cynical tactic proves to be successful.  They can even target niche audiences, it would seem. Consider, for example, that, judging from copious online reports, tenth graders ‘get’ Flannery O’Connor, while traditional Catholic school administrators apparently don’t.

In their defense, the administrators might be over-focused on non-fiction. We modern Catholics are familiar with the modernist rhetorical devices in non-fiction, thanks to Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and others.  We have been fortunate they have revealed to us the modernism buried in the text of Vatican II regarding collegiality, ecumenism, and religious freedom. We must admit, however, to  vulnerability in the jungle of fiction, with its complicated language usage, its violations of time and space,  and its shifting or unreliable point of view.

Modernists’ well-hidden meanings are aided by another difference, compared to the old heretics, noted by Pascendi: they do not voluntarily leave the Church. This is what Father Francois Knittel, familiar to many traditionalists, wrote concerning it:

 The heretic, or more accurately the Modernist apostate like a Loisy or Teilhard de Chardin, deliberately rejects the whole doctrine of the Church, but desires to remain in the Church and  takes the necessary measures to stay in. He dissembles and feigns with the hope of changing the Church in the long run–or, as the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin wrote, to rectify the Faith from the  inside. The Modernist has in common with other heretics the rejection of Catholic Revelation.  But he differentiates himself from other heretics, because he hides this rejection.

Not only do they stay–they rule. Often they will work their way up the ranks until they are highly placed, and they are avid seekers of professional certifications and other levers of power and authority, so that they may appear to be well educated, Pius X continues.  (Section 3).

So we have the double whammy of liberal meaning concealed by ambiguity, being spoken from positions of authority or prestige or popularity.  And as Pius X cannily mentioned, there is the additional factor, that the meaning is continually urging the reader toward something easier, something more passive, something more anonymous, something less challenging, than the life of the Faith as traditionally conceived.

We can relate!  That rings a bell! That is how the Church was changed before our very eyes. That is how our culture was changed. This is how we came to be in chains.

We have learned just how thoroughly we’ve been had the hard way, although there are certain websites of ‘tradition’ that seem, like Groundhog Day, to have to re-learn it fresh every morning.  They need every day new scandals, and then they take a vigorous stand–until tomorrow, when they are back to talking about obedience.

But most of us have learned, and retained, how to detect the poison in modernist non-fiction, as in the constitutions of Vatican II.  We have learned and retained the code words–dignity, dialogue, diminishment, all the rest of the alphabet of apostasy, and we can recognize them even when they are sugar-coated and chocolate-dipped, praise God. Those with eyes to see now see the exact text in Vatican II that SSPX and other theologians are talking about; they no longer pretend the embodiment of those texts in Church policy, canon law, and even in catechisms is the fault of “the spirit of the council misinterpreted” and not the letter. (If you still have not done so, please google Gleize and Ocariz for a concise, clear statement giving the significance and location of the text in question along with the location of the traditional text being contradicted, regarding religious liberty, ecumenism, and collegiality.)

But it would seem that we still have to see how we’ve been had  in fiction, because some traditionalists are apparently missing the actual point Flannery O’Connor was making in her flaming work, because– why, again? Because she said (over and over) that she was Catholic.

And we yearn to believe her, because kids ‘love her, eat her up’ or at least one traditionalist’s daughter did, or so he said of his home-schooled offspring.  Besides, Flannery spoke with authority, because she enjoyed–and still enjoys (perhaps more now than ever) some moderate fame with the secular and protestant intelligentsia, who recognize, better than Catholics perhaps, having made the journey themselves, her defection from tradition, and love her for it, because they love all enemies of the Church and are always seeking to lionize them. But  confronted with the evidence of Flannery’s popularity with the wrong crowd, traditional O’Connor supporters blow it off with the suggestion that it just gives Catholics more street cred, so it can’t hurt, right? O’Connor’s cool and she’s ours, ha ha.  (Or maybe not.)

Professionals have noticed this weakness in the line. As one critical essay points out, contemporary readers  ”approach O’Connor’s material from varied spiritual perspectives, but generally assume her acceptance of classical Catholic Theology. This school of O’Connor scholarship is relevant because its proponents are some of the fiercest opponents of any profound philosophical/theological relationship between Flannery O’Connor and Teilhard de Chardin.”  They then usually go on to demonstrate just how her work completes his. They’re talking about us, who should know better, who have read Pius X, and they find it astonishing that we believe her to be, of all things, traditional.

For, here they are,  all the indicators Pius X warned us about:  public assertions of orthodoxy but private  pursuit of error, staying in the Church while differing with the Church on these significant points, and avid pursuit of professional credibility. Flannery fits the profile,  her private unorthodoxy suggested by her enthusiastic  promotion of Teilhard de Chardin in her book reviews and letters, when we know him as one of tradition’s worst enemies, so identified by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, when we know that his liberal-fascist poison still circulates in our comatose Church, newly injected by the recent praise of Benedict XVI.   So it is only fair to ask: which side is Flannery on?  Is she a Thomist, or a Teilhardist?  And how should we begin to know? How does one analyze fiction? 

Here’s one approach that ought to be persuasive to traditionalists, the excellent How to Read A Book, the Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, offered by Angelus Press.   Briefly, they recommend that, after establishing the genre to which a work belongs, one does what is necessary to grasp the unity of the work in a sentence or two, and ‘what is necessary’ is accomplished by  pinning down the plot in its temporal order,  including the episodes, incidents, characters, and their thoughts, speeches, and actions, and then last, having capsulated the meaning of the work in the one or two sentences mentioned, one must say whether one likes or dislikes the work, and why–and this liking or disliking is based on whether the work is ‘true.’

This is a brilliantly simple way of putting the matter of interpretation so that even children can begin to exercise their critical faculties, but all criticism is simply whether or not we ‘like’ something, based on a world full of various and sundry walls to bounce that against, some that Adler points out are cheap (like the application of a ‘test’ of historical accuracy to historical fiction, for example) and some so powerful they knock your cognitive socks off.  And notice the importance of step one before the application of step two: the ‘plot’ must be addressed first, what the author actually wrote must be addressed, in totality, not in bits (this is a real kindness to an author, by the way; people simply making up your stories as they go along is a painful trial).  The most powerful interpretations explain the most broad range of plot elements, and violate none.

This approach is typically the one favored on the better standardized essay tests, by the way, whose agencies typically reserve the best scores  to students who are able to grasp and communicate in one short coherent statement or thesis (such as the two-sentence standard recommended by Angelus’ Adler) the central meaning that ties together all the major events and statements in the particular work of fiction,  then go on to support that thesis using evidence from the text,  and finally, one more thing,  make a judgement/interpretation as to the truth of the statement, again in parallel with Adler.  New Standards, one excellent nineties think tank (Pittsburgh used the approach until liberals killed it),  favored the thesis that was able, without violating the evidence from the text, to extend the reach of the thesis to larger issues pertinent to the topic (‘go big or go home’ in terms of the breadth of the thesis), and I will try to do that regarding “Revelation,” as you will see, or have already guessed from the title of this post.

Adler’s methodology, and others like New Standards, is profoundly anti-modernist; the liberal understanding of the world disputes that a text (or a religion) can have any stable, non-subjective meaning; furthermore, is has fallen out of use because our US kids simply can’t do it.  Teachers familiar with standardized testing, like the writer, are too aware that our kids can answer concrete questions about a text, who did what to whom kinds of questions, but they cannot or will not venture to say what the text means. It feels like judgement, and all their socialization is focused on their never, ever judging, apparently anything. Interpretation is a dying art, stemming from modernism’s philosophical taboo. Liberalism doesn’t permit us to make such statements. That’s because they are powerful, really powerful, and when they push back against liberalism’s lying tyranny, they can win.

Adler’s trick to help children ferret out the meaning of a work,  was to ask oneself, after doing steps one and two, if we ‘liked’ the meaning we’d discovered.  They must interpret it to answer, more important than their yes or no. Mature readers do not ‘like’ falsehood, and do like truth. The truth of a work is found or lacking on a very broad field of questions, but in our case, we traditionalists are looking for the meaning of the work in terms of its doctrine, because we heed the warning of Pius X and above all else do not wish to inadvertently introduce the poison of modernism into our children’s minds, nor into our own, via the unguarded back door of fiction. To us, the most important question of truth in Flannery O’Connor and in this particular story is simply whether it reflects Thomism and the teaching of the Church, or, on the contrary, Teilhardism and the teaching of modernism.  So, let us turn to the text,  as Adler suggests, and see whether we ‘like’ the truth we find asserted there.

We must begin by examining the details of the plot and characters. “Revelation” is found in the collection of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge. The title of the book  refers to a work by Teilhard, in  the Omega Point. A representative statement of its thesis is one like this:

“Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.”

It is this phrase that O’Connor borrowed in her book title. In Flannery’s story “Revelation”  her title refers to a sustained experience of the central character,  Mrs. Ruby Turpin, which the narrative follows throughout. Mrs. Turpin enters a crowded doctor’s waiting room with her husband Claude. She is a “large woman,” so large that she made the room look “even smaller by her presence” (The Complete Stories, 1971, p. 488; all subsequent references will be from this source). Mrs. Turpin must stand, at first, because a child was monopolizing two seats, one of which is the last seat in the waiting room; she judged him mentally for doing so. She engaged in conversation with a ‘nice woman.’ They discussed and dismissed her fatness with platitudes. This annoyed a college student trying to read a book called Human Development. Mrs. Turpin mentally judged her as ugly because of her acne. Next Mrs. Turpin turned her attention toward the grandmother of the child who is monopolizing two seats, judging her as a woman dressed in “a flour sack,” as ‘dirty,’ and “worse than n——- any day” (490). Mrs. Turpin judged more positively the better dress of the nice woman with whom she had been speaking.

Mrs. Turpin’s thoughts about the people in the room reminded her of an experience she sometimes had at night in bed, considering that she could have been created black, or white-trash, instead of her respectable self, and concluding that of the choices open to her, she would have chosen, if she could not have been created herself, to be a respectable black woman rather than white trash. But she liked her own identity and would’ve preferred that over all others.

Next Mrs. Turpin judged another woman in the waiting room who is “not white trash, just common” (491) and then recollected her personal ranking of the classes of people – most colored people on the bottom, and next to them, equal to them, the white trash; then above them, the homeowners, and above them the owners of both home and land, the one to which she and her husband belong. Above them were people with lots of money and bigger houses and more land. But her personal racial and social classification system dictated that money alone is not the only criteria for rank. “Good blood” counted.  She was aware that there was a connection between the ranking of people such as she has been doing, and the use of such rankings to eliminate some of them, in box cars (a reference to the holocaust), and this confused her.

When the conversation in the waiting room turned to green stamps [a form of merchandising coupons], Mrs. Turpin was critical of the white trash grandmother for getting jewelry with her green stamps instead of “a wash rag and some soap” (492).

The white trash woman in the waiting room criticized hogs as dirty and hog farmers in general as derelict, and Mrs. Turpin defended hogs and farmers  and described the clean way they are raised on her farm, with a daily wash down. Interiorly, she asserted that her hogs are cleaner than the little boy with the white trash woman.

The conversation continued. Mrs. Turpin described how she is able to work with the black people but how she was tired of buttering them up. Her husband picks up their workers, and drives them home, she said. She described other efforts they make with their black help.

The white trash woman argued with her and said she wouldn’t either work with black people or wash down hogs.

Mrs. Turpin then helped a black delivery boy who had just entered, by telling him how to summon the receptionist. Then she defended black people against the statement of the white trash woman that they ‘ought to be sent back to Africa’. She said, “It’s all kinds of them just like it’s all kinds of us” (494). This causes the college girl to make an ugly face. Then Mrs. Turpin gives reasons why it would be impractical to send black people back to Africa – mainly because they wouldn’t stand for it.  And also because they’d rather stay here and marry white people and “improve their color.”  Then her husband makes a joke based on his white-face cattle [a common type of meat animal named for their broad blaze], that black people who marry white would become white-face n——–.  This makes everyone laugh except the white trash woman and the college girl.

A song comes on the radio. Mrs. Turpin agreed with its meaning, which she interpreted as an endorsement of her own philosophy of life, which is to help anybody out it needed it, whether they were “white or black, trash or decent” (497). Mrs. Turpin thought that, “of all she had to be thankful for, she was most thankful that this was so” (497). She reflected that even if Jesus had offered her a choice in the matter and had offered her riches rather than being “a good woman,” even if being “a good woman” was accompanied by being ugly and poor, she would still choose being good. Her heart “rose” that Christ had “made her herself and given her a little of everything” (497).

There was more conversation in which the white trash woman says that she “can’t get nothing down them two [the grandmother and the child] but Co’Cola and candy,” and Mrs. Turpin judgmentally thought, that’s because “that’s all you try to get down ‘em,” and reflected further on how well she knows white trash, how well she knows that “if you gave them everything, in two weeks it would all be broken or filthy or they would’ve chopped it up for lightwood. She knew all this from her own experience. Help them you must, but help them you couldn’t” (497). As if in response to her thoughts, the college girl again made an ugly face, and began to stare at Mrs. Turpin.

Mrs. Turpin tried to make conversation with the college girl, who rudely refused to answer her. The n’ice woman,’ the girl’s mother, said how well she’s doing in college, while the girl looked “as if she would like to hurl them all through the plate glass window” (498). Mrs. Turpin judgmentally observesdthat she may be doing well in college, but they’re not teaching her manners.

The girl became the butt of jokes (started by her mother) revolving around her refusal to show gratitude for everything that is done for her, and this caused Mrs. Turpin to share some of her interior dialogue with the others.  She said that it’s the one thing that she was, “is grateful.  When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!  It could have been different!’ “  For one thing, somebody else could’ve ‘got Claude,’ she observed mentally, and is “flooded with gratitude and a terrible pang of joy ran through her” (499).

Following  this expression of gratitude to God for the world exactly as it was, the college girl attacked her. She threw the book about human development she had been reading at Mrs. Turpin and hit her in the head, cursed her by calling her a wart hog from hell that she should go back to, and choked her. The attack was followed by moments of confusion before the others  were able to extricate Mrs. Turpin, and then she and her husband were called for his appointment with the doctor, who examined Mrs. Turpin as well as her husband for the injuries she received in the girl’s attack, and then the couple was subsequently on their way home, passing in the waiting room the white trash family, who were heard to give thanks that they are not lunatics like the college girl, as the ambulance hauled the girl away.

When they got home, Mrs. Turpin continued to think about what the girl said to her. She took it seriously. She asked for and received a kiss and comfort from her husband. When their black workers arrived at ther house to be taken home, she took them cold water, as they ‘prefer it’ to tepid, and shared with them what happened and what the girl said to her. They flattered her outrageously in response, and she was disappointed: “Idiots! Mrs. Turpin growled to herself you could never say anything intelligent to a n—–. You could talk at them but not with them” (505).

When her husband left to take their workers home, Mrs. Turpin, washing down the hogs in the hog pen, complained to God. She had taken it as God’s will that the girl chose her to call a hog and to attack her, rather than the other people in the waiting room. She asked God if He prefers trash. She reminded God that “it’s no trash around here, black or white, that I haven’t given to. And break my back to the bone every day working. And do for the church” (507). She asked God if He would prefer that she quit working and be filthy and nasty and dip snuff and lie down in the middle of the road and stop traffic (perhaps a reference to the civil rights movement). Genuinely furious, she roared at God, “Who do you think you are?” (507) and her question echoed all around the pasture and highway and cotton field until it came back to her.

She stood there a long time, until she had a vision. In the vision “a vast horde of souls” were “rumbling” toward heaven. They were in groups. There was a group of white trash, and a group of blacks, and a group of freaks and lunatics leaping around like frogs, and finally after those, at the very end, were “tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claude, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.”  Like the white trash, “clean for the first time in their lives,” these respectable people too were changed: it was clear in their shocked faces that “even their virtues were being burned away” (508). As she leaves the hog pen to go home, the last of her vision is music – gospel music accompanies the souls in the sky.

Adler would have us sum up this action in two sentences, and comment on it. Mrs. Turpin is every good, happy housewife with attitude, but she wakes up to the fact that her decent life amounts to zip in the bigger picture and isn’t even what her God wanted. And that about covers it. We can go ahead with saying what we think it means–whether we like it.  To sum  up the salient plot points: Ruby Turpin is a comfortable, prosperous,virtuous,  judgemental woman who uses impolite racial terms, but who is in fact reliably kind to black people, helping them as she can, taking them seriously enough to reject their flattery, and combatting racial persecution in rejecting the demand that blacks ’be sent back to Africa.’ She is charitable in other ways, for example the reliable support of her church, her habitual care for the poor regardless of race, and her love for  her husband, and she has done all this for God, when she is made to realize in this story that God doesn’t like it.

So, Mrs. Turpin is a type, don’t you recognize her?   Mrs. Turpin is Ethel Mertz, devoted to her Fred. Except this Ethel gets transformed. She’s Joan Allen in Pleasantville, transformed from her virtuous black and white (boring!) life to technicolor sexual freedom– except Mrs. Turpin is even more blessed than the movie character,  Mrs. Turpin is allowed to be fat and happy and sexually complacent in her Claude (their married kiss she asks for, and gets).

But Ruby Turpin is more than that. The text said she’s ’the largest presence in the room’,  that is, the most comfortable, the most judgemental, the fattest, the most insultingly charitable, the one Teilhard was aiming at. The Queen.  Mrs. Turpin, in her completely relaxed freedom, her freedom to criticize with complete and shameless confidence the sinful (or merely unwashed) world around her,  is no less than the Church Triumphant. It’s the Church that has to wise up. That was Teilhard’s obsession. It’s the Church that has to wise up in Revelation.

Mrs. Turpin is so confident she uses the private names we Americans sometimes, in extremity, with family, never in public, put on sinners, including the n word and the w t word, and more, she is confident even to the degree of criticizing the personal hygiene of her neighbor, all in step with Mother Church, who shows a similar rude arrogance certainly bordering on racist, at least to the rebels’ eyes, to the degree of putting clothing on naked native bodies, and forcing on them new music for liturgy, which She dares to substitute for their healthy pagan music.  Mother Church has the nerve to call a sin a sin, just as Ruby never hesitates to tell it like it is. It is this confidence and this largeness and this satisfaction that must burn away. Such confidence is bad. That is what the text says. Flannery points it at Ruby but Teilhard was aiming at the Bride of Christ.

The reader will object! Flannery O’Connor didn’t intend to ‘bring down’ Holy Mother Church! Flannery O’Connor loved the Church and in spite of her jokiness on the subject, she would have died for the Church.  One must agree!

And one does agree. But it doesn’t work that way. The thesis of a work isn’t always what the author intended, but what it means on its own, which is the sum total of all the plot elements etc. as Adler said. Sometimes stories/novels/plays mean the opposite of the stated beliefs of the writer. Sigrid Undset gives the example of D.H. Lawrence (in her essay in Men Women and Places) who was a free love advocate, and who taught and lectured about how sexual liberation would bring perfect happiness on earth, but whose tortured characters  proved over and over how empty promiscuity is. He could not do otherwise, Undset wrote, simply because he was a good writer and was unable to write inauthentic (untruthful) characters. J.M. Coetzee makes the same point about South African writer Sarah Millen, whose fiction work followed Nazi biological theories in spite of her Jewish blood and her dedicated, life-long anti-Nazi propogandizing (White Writing, On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, 1988).

This is like that. Flannery didn’t intend to take down the Church Triumphant, but her story nevertheless serves to throw the shadow of doubt over the characteristics we habitually associate with Mother Church, most certainly her audacity to judge the good from the bad.

You know how that kills modernists. They hate it. How dare She!  It’s a tone. When Pius XI called indigenous religions ‘motley assemblies’ (Mortalium animos p. 7) he sounds awfully like Ruby Turpin’s racial ephthets,  that is, harsh but true (perhaps only a child of poor white trash can say that with credibility). This is the tone,  banned at Nuremberg, that audacious confidence to judge what is motley and what is not, and even to put it in racial terms en famile at least, what is trash and what is not, that Vatican II replaced with the unctuous ecumenism that has killed our mission and our joy.  This is the tone of the Church Triumphant. Flannery’s ‘Revelation’ speaks to this tone in Ruby Turpin. The story reveals how deeply Flannery despises it.

Certainly,  one wants to say in charity,  Flannery didn’t will that message.  And yet it’s inescapable how the story serves the cause, to dethrone, not the sinner, which would be orthodox, but the Good Wife.  Flannery has brought them all down. Her letters reveal how she hated them, all the fat, happy wives, the happy, pious nuns, the comfortable virtuous, and now, at the end of her career and very life, she has brought them with this story to heel in the service of equality, stripping them all of the one feature that the text says in Mrs. Turpin’s eyes was her crown (since the plot says it was the one thing in her meditation on the topic of identity, she would not consent to surrender, even if God Himself should require it of her): her virtue. The thing that sets her apart. And the thing that must be burned away. Only modernism, never tradition, thinks it sinful to wish only to be oneself, as Ruby did. They always wish to be someone else, you see.

Look at the other behaviors that Flannery’s text would vanish! She hardly missed a virtue!  Mrs. Turpin will have to have burned away her life-long pursuit of what we call ‘Christian perfection,’ her almsgiving, her support of her church, her uncritical generosity to the poor, her accumulation of property, and last, of course, her constitutional right to judge the behaviors of others according to their measurement against a standard, a standard which includes the damnably European and classist use of soap and water. Apparently also sacred music: what is left at the end of the vision in Flannery’s text, is gospel singing, the hallelujah.  (That must be consciously composed on Flannery’s part, since we know how she sees the distinction, as she did in the short story “Temple of the Holy Ghost,” contrasting the Pange Lingua to a cheap gospel tune.)

Only then, with all that virtue gone, will she and her fellow believers be able to enter heaven.  And only then. Presumably for the other groups in the vision’s line up, their distinguishing features will be burnt away as well, the white trashness will be burnt off that crowd, as it has already begun to be, since the text notes they are ‘clean for the first time in the lives,’ the blackness from the black people, the foolishness from the simple in their jittering herd. Who can miss the implication: all, all are going to heaven,  as soon as they are all the same, and for the group of up-tight virtuous, it means, the text says, losing the virtue.

I believe the case is made, then,  that the book Human Development  is thrown not only at Ruby Turpin but at the Church Herself as the chief promoter and example of Ruby’s particular behaviors. The Church is the biggest, fattest, richest, happiest house wife around, with that judgmental attitude so despised by modernism, and Flannery has brought her down.  It will be burned away, until all churches are equal.  Ruby Turpin ‘subsists’ in the white trash. Not as special as she thought she was.

I hope we can agree that this thesis statement covers, as per Adler, the sum of the plot details (and not just one or another,as,  for example, a recent piece in a traditional magazine asserting that Flannery was intending to show her wonderfully Thomistic belief in purgatory with this story, which cheap thesis cherry picks that one element and ignores all the rest of the plot details– rather like saying that we must introduce Lady Gaga in our schools, because she teaches girls to be Ladies; in fact, it may be the new modernist paradigm, since Benedict once argued that the Council and Tradition must agree, because, after all,  they address the same subjects ).  It covers all the plot elements, and is negated by none of them.  This thesis, which reveals the modernism of “Revelation,” is fully supported. And it does address an element larger than one hilarious good old girl with a beef.

Now we can turn to the second step of the Adler method; we must ask, do we like it?

We will like it if it is Catholic.

But is it? Is this Thomism? One hardly feels the need to say more! All of one’s Catholicism rises up in protest!

Does St. Thomas ever make virtue the equal of any bad thing? The equal of vice? Does St. Thomas equate virtue, for example, with those well-known behaviors that make white trash such unforgettable neighbors? Does St. Thomas ever equate virtue with those black trash behaviors that unfortunately provoke many humans, including African American ones, to let loose the n word? Does he ever equate virtue with race at all, that is, as something we’re either born with, or we’re not?  We’d get better Thomism  from Martin Luther King–his dream was that black people should be judged by the content of their character, Mrs. Turpin’s motto, too. Flannery’s story is so not that. Flannery’s story is so the modernist garbage that killed the civil rights movement in favor of the promotion of vote-captives languishing in their gang-infested ghettoes except during elections.

What St. Thomas makes equal to virtue is Christ’s suffering on the cross. Here is what he says, see if it is his wish we should lose virtue:

Why did the Son of God have to suffer for us? There was a great need, and it can be considered in a twofold way: in the first place, as a remedy for sin, and secondly, as an example of how to act.

It is a remedy, for, in the face of all the evils which we incur on account of our sins, we have found relief through the passion of Christ. Yet, it is no less an example, for the passion of Christ completely suffices to fashion our lives. Whoever wishes to live perfectly should do nothing but disdain what Christ disdained on the cross and desire what he desired, for the cross exemplifies every virtue.

Equally troublesome to the brown-skinned, one must think, is the text’s evident equation of race with sin to be burnt away.  Does St. Thomas teach that race is a bad thing? And let’s not neglect another of Mrs. Turpin’s, and the Church’s, virtues/sins, as we are encouraged to think of it in Revelation’s modernistic double-speak, the question of her property, a feature she shares with the others of her ‘kind’? Does St. Thomas not defend our right to property without any perjoration whatsoever except that we use it for good (Summa Question 66)–and doesn’t the story make such a point of the Turpin’s constant care to use it for good, so that Flannery is telling us she’s not talking about its good usage but its actual ownership that must be burnt away? Isn’t that socialism’s position,  and Teilhard’s? And the general position of liberal education? But not ours. But here it is, in this story, sneaked into our children’s minds with the blessing of their traditional teacher at their traditional school.

We–traditional, not liberal, Catholics– know very well, just from the collects of the holy mass, let alone the Summa and Pius X’s catechism,  that our Church calls us every day to heroic virtue and the life of perfection.  We try, and fail, and try again. That is our goal as Catholics, for each day, for the whole life.  It does  not make us  worse, this inequality growing over time from the sum of small sacrifices into a precious habit, it makes us better in this life, it makes us more prosperous, it makes us less tortured by divorce and infidelity and theft and murder and the consequences of all those sins.  Virtue is good for us, experience teaches us that, so do the psalms I (“I was young and now I am old, but never have I seen the sons of a just man begging bread,” that is the message of the psalms again and again and again) in this life as well as in the next in heaven. We shall achieve heaven, not by becoming equal to sinners,  as this story teaches, but by becoming ever more meritorious–ever more unequal. Teilhard hated that. It’s the opposite of his convergence. It’s the opposite of his understanding of evolution, in which species are moved along, not individuals.

Simply consider the Lenten preface:  we give thanks to the God who “by this bodily fast extinguish our vices, elevate our understanding, bestow on us virtue and its reward.” We Catholics know that virtue is rewarded both spiritually and materially, and we don’t mind. We can always donate it, if we get too much reward.

And do we forget what St. Ambrose specifically teaches us about the very common  fault of envying others the success they earn even in this life by faithfully following the practice of Christian perfection? Here is what he says:

It shows no triffling degree of envy to forget the charity due a fellow-citizen and turn motives for love into bitter hatreds. It is made clear both by word and by example that the Man who envies another the fruit of his virtue will wait in vain for heaven’s merciful help. The Lord is the foe of all men of ill will, and keeps His wondrous power from those who attack His good deeds in others. (Book 4 on Luke, Chapter 4, in the latter part; we read it at Matins of the Third Week of Lent.)

If the reader were thinking that the average kid probably won’t even get the message that being rewarded for being virtuous is wrong, and that good works disfigure the soul in such a way that they have to be burned away, that the average kid will just read along and be edified by the mere fact alone that the author is Catholic– that’s just not true. They get it. Here’s a sadly representative quote from a young person’s on-line essay which clearly shows how much she gets it:

The revelation Mrs. Turpin receives in the last scene of the book is one that has challenged me.  In the end, everyone’s “good deeds” are burned away because they were done with human intentions.  As she watches a vision of a parade going by, the last group of people who were bringing up the rear was people who she noticed were like her. She realized that everyone was entitled to the saving grace of God. Not just the people who did great “human” things with their time here on earth.  She and her husband Claud were not any greater than the “white trash people” or the “black people” or anyone else.  Salvation was an equal matter issue to God.

This is what this student ‘got’ from the story “Revelation.” Nor is her conclusion unsupported by the text we have just examined–she really gets it, the real story.  It’s impossible to call it Thomism. Besides the error regarding virtue and reward for virtue, there’s the assertion in that final image that all are saved  equally. All are not saved as in Flannery’s story. We know who does teach that, though, and where their teaching broke through into the Church, and we’ve been fighting it in non-fiction all along.

This is not a peripheral issue. To destroy the goal of ‘good works’ in Catholic lives is to destroy the identity of the  Catholic Church, and the Catholics with it. It was always protestantism’s exact mission to deny good works because they make the lie of equality. Teilhard was nothing different than the rest of the lot.  Equality in all things is the touchstone of modernism and protestantism, and it is good works that promotes the profound and eternal inequality of individuals (even when found in so rough a chalice as Ruby Turpin, which is why we love to hate the woman, just as the Church’s enemies are always forced grudgingly to admire Her, even as Flannery admitted she liked Ruby, according to a later comment).

To emphasize the point that equality is the cant for all things liberal, it is interesting that ads soliciting charitable donations are consciously tailored on that line, a recent NPR piece discusses: ads for a left audience stress equality themes–’give to Hurricane Sandy funds to restore equal access to housing,’ wording like that works with all stripes of modernists to pry out donations.  And we are so good at seeing ithis trick in non-fiction; why is it so hard for us in fiction, and why so especially hard in Flannery’s fiction?  Flannery is nothing different. It’s just Satan’s old song: the dream to be equal to God.  And it always amounts to rejection of the lot we earn for ourselves through our own actions. It’s the refusal to admit our sins, backwards. Ruby’s renunciation of her virtue is the backhand way of accomplishing this same psychological hell.  

Flannery’s vision is Teilhard’s vision.  Entering heaven in racial groups, an involuntary equalization taking place, and cheap music.  We ought to decline on the basis of manners to avoid quoting Teilhard’s silliness at any length, but here is one of Teilhard’s visions, given in The Phenomenon of Man:

 All round us, one by one, like a continual exhalation, “souls” break away, carrying upwards their incommunicable load of consciousness. One by one, yet not in isolation. Since, for each of them, by the very nature of Omega, there can only be one possible point of definitive emersion—that point at which, under the synthesizing action of personalizing union, the noosphere (furling its elements upon themselves as it too furls upon itself) will reach collectively its point of convergence – at the end of the world.

One schoolgirl candidate for the bachelor’s degree easily sees the parallel: 

This paragraph [the one above] is very similar to Ruby’s vision at the end of “Revelation” through which she receives her salvation. Ruby envisions a parade of souls headed toward heaven made up of all kinds of people, worthy and, according to Ruby, unworthy, coming together at the end of time to march to their creator, a fictionalized account of the kind of convergence experience Pierre Teilhard de Chardin describes.

This novice author sees the parallel, but she doesn’t know that Pierre Teilhard is not Catholic. We traditionalists do. Why don’t we process the similarity, and react? Why do we continue to put this vision before trusting young people?  It would seem that traditionalists are the last to know. Besides the ample internet evidence that students see the message clearly, the most recent critical trend among professionals in the secular arena finds that Flannery misrepresents her identity as a traditional Catholic. They argue–with delight–that Flannery’s work goes with the new trends in the Church. Perhaps traditionalists have lost the ability to read fiction the way other untraditional Catholics, even priests, seem to have lost theirs to read non-fiction, specifically the constitutions of Vatican II. They read them and look up sweetly, soothed by the primitive rhythms of Gaudium et spes, and ask, What’s the problem?  They do not process the contradictions. They do not follow the faint crumbs of inauthenticity down. There must be a house rule they keep, sort of like dropped toast in a busy kitchen, if you can forget a contradiction within three seconds, it’s okay to forget about it for good.

This must be how it works for those traditionalists who give “Revelation” to the children entrusted to their schools. The story disses virtue and promotes an idea of salvation right out of a Marxist nightmare, right out of old Teilhard. That’s there on the page, the message of the plot, see above, no interpretation required. (The interpretation part, and a bold one it is, is that Ruby Turpin represents something broader than a profile of a particular kind of good old girl, represents Mother Church Herself.)

Right? But wait. Hold on for three seconds. What cute thing did Flannery say? And aren’t her books doing well in our stores? And isn’t that O’Connor conference sold out? So why can’t we claim her? After all, Thomism is dripping from every page.

And see,  three two one puff it’s gone.

But let’s not let that  happen, this time. Let’s consider realizing our error and getting Flannery O’Connor out of our traditional schools just a warm up for the soon-to-come round 2 with Rome, you know,  the other place traditionalists will have to be able to recognize modernism no matter how tricky it gets.

If that isn’t sufficient motivation, how about this: consider how the press (in their great love for tradition) could spin her inclusion in our curriculum, how they could dwell on common and shall we say earthy  features of Flannery’s vocabulary.  How dramatically they would pair it with the ‘racist past’ they’ve manufactured for us. Let us hear the coherent case that can be made for O’Connor’s orthodoxy with which we would combat the media spin, this time using all the plot elements as erudition demands.

I have been a faithful Amazon customer for years. The service is so very good, the price is usually moderate and sometimes the cheapest available, and the forums are always instructive–I chose my camera with the generous advice of several participants, and I was really grateful. I love Amazon.

But I am emptying my shopping cart for the last time. Because I do not want my small part of Amazon profits to be used for gay marriage.

I am sure you must think I am a hater, and that you, on the other hand, are demonstrating justice in your support for a cause that you think is obvious.

But that isn’t true, it is the reverse. You are the hater, and it is I who show real concern for the gay community. I want them to be healthy, and go to heaven. Gay marriage will not ensure their fidelity, won’t bring happiness, and will encourage more and more ‘choice’ of the lifestyle among the young. Gay happiness, as for all unmarried people, including myself, lies in celibacy and service to God and man, and in that role gay people over the centuries have been (arguably but persuasively) one of the world’s greatest resources.

Gay sex is wrong for an individual. It is against the law of God. It is against the law of nature given the universe by its Creator. One only has to open one’s eyes to see that gay sex is unsustainable and unhealthy, whether or not they are ‘accepted.’ We do not publicize or recognize the existing data, but it emerges anyway, in CNN specials, for example, like the one that aired just last weekend about the premature aging of HIV infected people. New HIV cases come predominantly from the gay community, in the US. Gay marriage will not change that, it will on the contrary make it even more likely.

But gay sex is not just wrong for the individual, it is wrong for the country. It is the promotion of sterile sexuality, and we cannot afford it. Our economy is on the brink. We need babies. Contraception and abortion are also wrong, for the same supernatural reason, because they are against the law of God as revealed in the bible, but also, for a purely natural reason gay sex is wrong; it rules out the conception of new citizens. We need those citizens. They are our real, hidden wealth. We need them to buy houses. We need them to buy cars and fill schools and do the work of caring for the aged and the infirm, and imagining the next physics breakthroughs and painting the next masterpieces.

We need them. We have been killing them through abortion, or rejecting their conception through birth control, and we can clearly see the practical results–if we will just shake off our stubborn, disobedient denial of the fact that population growth is related to real economic growth. All other growth is unstable speculation, built on sand. It evaporates with the next rumor.

We deny all this.

Do you not think we’re capable of such massive denial? On the contrary, we are capable of worse, I give you the Holocaust as evidence, or perhaps you will spend an hour with the film The Trollhunter for the humorous Norwegian take on our capability to lie to ourselves when the evidence is staring us in the face. What do you think ‘lack of internal markets’ which we hear so often regarding the economies of both Asian and European countries, actually means? It means no babies. That is what is killing Europe, and this last quarter has begun to bring China down at last. The US was doing better, with a rate at least of replacement level. This year it has fallen below. With your unwise support of sterile ‘marriages,’ it will keep on sliding.

Sir, marriage is not for personal pleasure or personal validation. It is a very difficult vocation for the preservation of the delicate human species, whose reproductive vitality is not guaranteed (for example, cf Japan’s copulation rate). The Reformation already damaged the role savagely by introducing easy divorce. Gay marriage simply extends the trauma. Marriage will become the equivalent of a dog license, indeed it already has, and women do not reproduce well under those circumstances. This is already happening in the world, with the ‘marriage hotels’ where you are married when you check in and divorced when you check out, or China’s two week marriages. These are slave marriages, weak, impermanent, make-believe. It’s the opposite of healthy. It’s the beginning of the end. And do you know who suffers the most from the death of real, life-long marriage? The poorest women, Mr. Bezos.

I know that I have a chance in hell of convincing you that you have made a mistake in your support for gay marriage. But in writing this letter, I did what I could for our nation, just as I have tried to do my whole life. I was a civil rights activist dodging bullets in Selma, a union organizer in California on San Francisco’s Auto Row and also for the Transportation Workers local there, a Democratic party precinct committee-woman (before I wised up) in Florida, and a faithful teacher of the urban poor for thirty five years, retiring in Pittsburgh. I am not tea party or conservative in that protestant sense. I just love our people. I think you love us less. I wish it were not true, and I do not want to offend, but the empirical evidence argues otherwise. Gay marriage and gay lifestyle is not good for gay people, and it’s most loving to say so.

If there is any chance that you might begin to investigate the evidence with the philosophical blinders off, that is, from the point of view of the maximum common good, rather than from the vantage point of personal satisfaction and that seductive French liar Miss Liberty, perhaps you might reconsider your donation and withdraw it, or as much as you could of it. Not that the full amount will do any good, because there is no ‘good’ to come from this cause. It is money thrown to wolves. Even Amazon will suffer.

So, for me, meanwhile: adios, Amazon. It was fun.

Yours most sincerely,

Janet Baker

Here’s Jeff’s address, if you want to write, too.

Jeff Bezos Amazon.com P.O. Box 81226 Seattle, WA 98108-1226   or   jeff@amazon.com

The first chapter of Why We Get Fat is titled “The Original Sin.” It presents the current hypotheses, which Taubes disputes: that we get fat because we eat too many calories related to the calories we burn in exercise, or, in Christian terms, because we’re gluttonous, and lazy. The Original Sin is a falsehood, Taubes says: calories in equals calories out doesn’t match the way the body works. But doctors, family, and friends believe that fat people are fat because it’s their fault.   They are sinners! This easy excuse saves the medical profession a lot of work, and Taubes attacks Christianity for our failure to get to the real root of the problem.

The second, corollary (and equally easy) default explanation for the epidemic of obesity and diabetes is that prosperity enables our vice. We earn more money now, and buy too much food with it. Prosperity makes us fat. Either way, there’s not much doctors or anybody else can do about it, since nobody is going to voluntarily give up any prosperity (don’t worry, it’s happening speedily enouogh quite without our input, in any case) except propose expensive stomach stapling with equally expensive monthly maintenence.

There’s little doubt that Gary Taubes has completely trashed the calories in/calories out hypotheses about obesity. Simply by examining the known populations with the greatest obesity correlated with their income, the idea that prosperity makes people fat is negated. Fat people are poor people. Their very thin children will be fat by their teens, if they survive.  The fat and the thin are flipped coins of the same malnutrition.

Nor do we stay lean by exercise. If literally calculated, the amount of exercise required to burn a pound of fat exposes the notion that a sedentary lifestyle is responsible for the epidemic. It’s much too great! No one would ever lose a pound. Lab results (a physics lab, not a clinical lab, because that’s where the term calorie belongs, it’s a measure of heat) show that the amount of effort required to burn the calories in just two slices of bread is the equivalent of running up the stairs of a twenty story building. Our skinny ancestors worked hard, but not that hard. Anyway, so do poor, fat diabetic people in the slums of Bombay. They work much harder than we can imagine, yet they are still fat. Exercise alone clearly cannot account for the epidemic. That’s what Taubes says, and he makes sense.

Taubes repeatedly asserts that the obesity epidemic has to do not with the quantity of calories we eat at all, but with the types of foods, because the different types, protein, fat, and carbohydrates, are processed differently by the body. Those calories which promote the release of insulin in the body are the bad guys.  It’s the carbs, stupid. Not the calories.

He makes the case easily. One succinct presentation, for the uninitiated, is in a recent petition written by Taubes and signed by some hundreds of professionals and a thousand others and counting, to force the New York Times to stop publishing articles about weight loss that contradict the actual research. The Times keeps publishing new versions of the old calories in/calories out stories,  of poignant failures to lose weight on very low calorie, high exercise regimens, followed by sincere gut-wrenching vows to ‘try again’ with the same old unsuccessful treadmill:  exercise while wretchedly fatigued from a low calorie diet, ravenously hungry, unaware (and uninformeed by the Times) that research supports the incredibly easier and more effective regime of a high fat, high protein, high calorie, low carbohydrate diet for weight loss. That’s nix on grains and even many fruits, but yes on bacon, and yes on cheeseburgers, too, as long as you skip the bun. Eat all the meat and greens you want, you’ll still lose weight and keep it off. Taubes opens the protocols of the major studies and proves it.

But that’s Heresy! (I told you it was religious!)

What’s that got to do with fighting the power, though?  Who is the Power, in this case? Why do the array of industries involved, from healthcare providers to dietitians to writers of advertising, resist the idea that carbs are to blame?

Taubes is wrong when we get to this territory. He wants to blame the Christians, but no, you have to follow the money.

Because carbs are cheap, and they make us sick. What’s not to love, if you happen to be invested in the right stocks.

Those who buy labor can pay less if workers eat a diet based on carbohydrates, that is, on the cheap grains and vegetable oils used in the not-too-distant past only to fatten animals, and not based, as in thousands of previous generations of humans on expensive proteins and fat,s like butter and steak and fish.  That is what humans ate in eras past.–right up to the sixties, in fact.  This new grain-based diet that justifies lower wages makes us both fat and sick,  and those who medicate us to cure us of our poor cheap diets reap the financial benefits. In the case of diabetes, the profits are enormous.

It’s win/win, but not for us. In this chain, we’re the food.

In his eagerness to play on the popular anti-Christian team and use prejudice  to dismiss the idea that calories and exercise are the keys to weight loss, and not sugar, Taubes runs into one slight problem in his own research:  exercise and moderation of appetite actually do play a role in weight loss. Darn it!

It’s pretty interesting. Exercise ‘enhances’ the process by which fat cells are unpacked when we stop eating sugars. How?  Exercise knocks the saran wrap off cells so that the openings in the cell wall are big enough for the fat chains to escape into the blood stream to be burnt as energy when the proper hormonal chemistries are in place. That’s the simple but accurate way to put it.

And, in fact,  discipline over appetite plays a role, too. Faced with the choice between a (fattening) cupcake and a (non-fattening) cheese stick, who hasn’t experienced that it takes almost as much willpower to avoid carbohydrates as it takes to avoid eating, period? Sweets are seductive, and they are everywhere.

Gary, I hate to break it to you. Both gluttony and sloth, and their corresponding virtues (also touted by that terrible villain Christianity) of temperance and diligence  play a role in weight loss. The research shows it. Too bad, Gary. Ah, but forget about it. They will never let you be one of the boys anyway. Come on over to the Christian side.

Because, Taubes is attacking the wrong religion.

More likely suspects thanpoor  Christianity would be vegetarianism and the several religions that practice it, like Hinduism,  Jainism,  Buddhism, and Seventh Day Adventists. Thanks to the convenient attacks on Christianity in the West, and the defection of leadership most especially in the Catholic church since Vatican II, the Eastern religions have become very much part of the popular culture as a mildly rebellious compromise to the genuine demands of the True Faith.  We seem to love Hinduism especially. Every health ‘expert’ in the ads on the telly now must be a Hindu with a superior smile recommending skinny bliss and great bowel movements through cheap oatmeal.

But these religions are only stalking horses. They’re not putting up the money and reaping the reward. They are being used by much larger forces.

The real culprit is not usually called religion. It is an anti-religion. It pretends to be rational. It is secularism, the modern religion of making-it-up-as-we-go-along and then trading it for a vote or two.  Secularism is the religion of opportunity. Those who barter labor for cheaper or dearer, in other words, the rich, buy the writers and the actors and the scientists and the music and pizza for the crowd. You can bet that it is pizza and not steak.

We call their politics democracy, and their official religion is secularism, which teaches first and foremost that all religions are equal (equally expendable–get it?).

It began only as the proposition that all religions are equal. That was the first error, all the rest splintered off from there. Secularism goes on to declare that everything is equal. It’s a money-maker!

But religions start from different premises, and  lead to different practical conclusions, and so they cannot be equal. In fact they differ greatly. Some religions insist on the dignity of each individual person, dignity surpassing all things, including profits. Some religions subordinate the individual’s worth to a great variety of conditions, one of which is convenience. President Obama, for example, characterizes the hypothetical individual with which his daughter might someday be pregnant as a “mistake.” His value system allows for that. The value system of Catholicism does not.   Both systems cannot be right,  since one permits killing that little hypothetical grandchild and the other does not, and dead is dead. Yet secularism insists that they are.

Because of this default assumption beginning in religion and radiating through ethics and standards in the physical sciences, that all things are equal in all cases, or just most things in most cases, it makes sense to us, it just feels right that weight gain should simply be a matter of all the calories we eat balanced against all the burning of them that we do, and any surplus would end up packed into fat cells.  All calories must be equal. Because all men are equal. And all religions are equal. And everything is equal. That is our default assumption in secularism.  Good luck with over-coming it, Gary!

Some advice: Since you are almost certain to end up a martyr, anyway (sorry, lad, and we’ll pray for you), you ought to come over to the only religion which still asserts a right and a wrong.  You too believe in right and wrong, or you wouldn’t be fighting this fight for truth in the weight loss game.  So just come and be Catholic. True, the Catholic Church backtracked at Vatican II, but now there are significant numbers that are finally recovering their wits. You have a better chance of convincing them that all calories are not equal.

They also still believe in the virtues, and are taught to resist the vices. That will come in handy when it’s time for the necessary work out, or the rejection of those French fries.  And Catholics have some very helpful apps. For the acquisition of the virtues, they don’t rely just on their own strength, they pray for and receive supernatural help in the form of the One Good Carb, the sacred host which is literally transformed into Christ at every mass and which the faithful gratefully receive as food. He strengthens us Catholics.

All calories are not equal, all carbs are not equal, and all religions are not equal. Can’t assert the one without admitting the possibility of the other. Christianity is not the enemy in the fight for truth, secularism is.

Now the call for a stronger church has come from another surprising voice–a woman, a Baroness, and a Muslim. Baroness  Sayeeda Warsi was invited to address an audience of future Vatican diplomats studying at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy in Rome, reports the Vatican Insider three days ago on February 15.

Baroness Warsi did not call for increased religious liberty for her own faith. She called for less!  

She warned the audience of the threat from “a deeply intolerant militant secularization,” and called, instead of liberty, for European leaders to heed the Pope’s  message about the indispensable role of his faith, not hers,  as a foundation of democracy.  Baroness Warsi quoted the Holy Father’s words about the impossibility to disconnect Europe’s past and future history from Christianity.

Like Benedict, she speaks of Christianity, not Catholicism. Like Benedict, she does not cite Pius XI’s Quas Primas teaching that Christ must be at the center of our societies in name and in fact, or that society will fail. What she does recognize is that a more assertive Church is not a threat to her Muslim faith, but helps “reinforce” it, and because of that she chooses to send her daughter to a Christian school rather than to a secular one. It is contrary to modernism’s continual celebration of an insipid diversity.

Vatican Insider calls her observations ‘original,’ and they do seem counter-intuitive, after the education in modernism we’ve been put through the last forty years, but in fact, ‘religious liberty’ causes a reaction, a struggle for power in the vacuum left by the Church. Secularism causes war.

Consider the Philippines, almost 100% Catholic, flung into secularism by the Council, and now challenged and battered by a tiny Muslim minority insisting on–what? An Islamic religious state, of course. Because the secular one they have left, after the Council, is depraved. If the Church would rescind the false teaching of Dignitatis humanae and step up and take Her place as the formal inspiration for the government, many of the most disturbing features of secularism–abortion, contraception, divorce, gay marriage, and uncontrolled fiscal predation on the poor–would be settled. The unborn and families would be protected once again. Other steps could follow.

These pleas for a stronger Church are a recent development in our struggle for justice, excepting SSPX’s older struggle for the same goal – the only justice that matters first, before all others can hope to appear, is the justice of Christ at the center of our nations, and not the vague and weak, deliberately helpless Christianity Benedict calls the faith now. Most of the Protestant sects that consitute ‘Christianity’ have caved in to modernism and do not provide the moral security that the Baroness realizes stable societies need.

That we could possibly have the counter-Reformation at last seems impossible, and yet all around us the false dawn of secularism is fading into a desperate night in a red light district.

Christendom! We will not have it back all at once, it will take work, unity, focus, and martyrs. But Hungary is leading the way, not least by making the meaningless term ‘Christianity’ more explicitly Catholic.  Besdies Hungary’s positive example, we suffer the additional negative motivation of the drastic economic circumstances secularism has left us. God willing it will motivate us to wake up and reclaim our Catholic identity from failed ecumensim, even in America.

Obama’s HHS bill mandating the Catholic charities offer services exactly as their protestant or atheist counterparts do is the other shoe implicit in Vatican II’s bargain with the devil. The shoe has landed squarely on the last little acre of Catholic teaching, ‘all things reproductive.’ Reproductive issues are almost all that’s left of the vast great array of economic and social protections the Church used to wield as necessary in defense of the vulnerable. Before she handed them over to the secular state to administer. Before Vatican II joined forces with the yahoo apostacy.

With recent Health and Human Services mandates , the last small bump in the way of the principle that all social services must reflect the values and legislation of the secular society because they are not part of the religious content of Faith is the contradiction between Catholic religious teaching on reproduction, but that bump is easily smoothed by Kathleen Sibelius’ rendition that religious freedom extends only to religious portions of a service, not to the service itself. The service itself should be as neutral as the secular state is, regardless of the provider.  Her Gospel, as Charles Krauthammer deemed it in a recent piece in the Washington Post,  is like this:

‘A “religious institution” must have “the inculcation of religious values as its purpose.” But that’s not the purpose of Catholic charities; it’s to give succor to the poor. That’s not the purpose of Catholic hospitals; it’s to give succor to the sick. Therefore, they don’t qualify as “religious” — and therefore can be required, among other things, to provide free morning-after abortifacients.’

She is not the first to teach that. Vatican II beat her, in Dignitatis humanae’s revision of traditional Catholic teaching regarding religious liberty and secularism.  Number two says that

This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.

Catholic social efforts,responding to the untraditional and unCatholic passage above,  have already put that teaching into practice even without being told by Kathleen Sibelius to do so.  They have done so out of a misplaced sense of decency.  Subsequent to the Council, Catholic charities like hospitals and schools stripped their social services of Catholic content.  “Coercion” was broadly interpreted, as it must be, making it feel dishonorable to expect those seeking food at a soup kitchen to pray before the meal, or to offer the sacrament of baptism to non-Catholics in a Catholic hospital (as occured with my grandmother, dying of cancer in a Catholic hospital in East St. Louis, Illinois, who accepted the offer; her deathbed conversion had profound beneficial consequences for her family, may I add). There are ‘no strings’ on Catholic social services now.

Except for one exception, the small area of reproduction now under dispute. The Council did not go so far as to abandon the traditional teachings in sexual morality except an equivocation regarding masturbation and homosexuality by the first policy-setting promulgation after the council by a priest named Seper, whose works opened the door for the eventual murky clarification managed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then prefect of the Congregation of the Faith.    Or perhaps the prohibition against abortion survived as a Catholic issue only because the artifacts are so terribly persuasive.  It really is almost imossible to ignore those miniature hands and tiny faces found in garbage cans behind Planned Parenthood, as we do divorce, contraception, and homosexuality–although the victims are equally dear to us.

Even in the special area of abortion, Catholic social services hides its Catholicity; it provides to their clients absolutely no Catholic content, only material aid and purely secular ‘counseling.’  The clients are typically living with a series of men or having promiscuous sex, unmarried,  with no religion or not practicing one,  often abused.  Those Catholic pro-life centers (completely Catholic in the back of the house) make no effort to promote baptism and Catholic upbringing to the babies they save; the women are not encouraged to convert, to use the sacraments, to reform their lives.  Catholic pro-life centers, in the spirit and letter of Dignitatis Humanae,  have already secularized their services to a degree no saint in the Catholic lexicon would recognize as coming from the Faith;  now Obama and his minion Sibelius is simply extending the thought and making it official. It is a great scandal given by sincere people.

Obama is gambling on Vatican II. He knows The froth over ‘taking on the Catholics’ prior to an election is possibly a non-starter, and possibly Obama’s handlers read the polls. American Catholics don’t care about it.

American Catholics learned their Vatican II catechisms.  They listened to Benedict XVI greet abortion-supporting  and Obama-contributing Miguel Diaz as US representative to the Vatican with effuse praise for Diaz and Obama and ‘vibrant American democracy.’  And now, although their bishops are going out on a limb to condemn this last stripping of the altars through Obama’s HHS attack,  American Catholics do not support their bishops. According to a recent poll, fifty eight percent of Amereican Catholics report that they do not care if Catholic institutions offer abortion coverage, sterilization, and contraception, some of which causes the abortion of fertilized eggs. They have learned from Vatican II to tolerate it all.

There will be nothing left but a state church, the one Flannery O’Connor called the Church of Christ without Christ. Obama is ramping up as chief priest. Guess who his religious orders will be? Us Catholics. Unless we fight the bad, liberal doctrine promulgated at the Council. Please go only to traditional mass! Please pray the rosary!  Please give SSPX your totals! Send them here. Please read SSPX.org, and Wiltgen, and all those theologians struggling with this issue. Please bug everybody, not only about Obama but about Obama’s scripture: Vatican II.

American magazine had it right the first time. Vatican II is the nuclear energy behind our crisis, not the likes of poor, tired, sad Barack.

http://www.petitions24.com/support_hungary

Above is a link  to sign a petition to support Hungary.  For the sake of Hungary’s unborn children, do it now. The text of the petition follows if you would like to read it here and sign it there.

The Hungarian American association supports Hungary, has thoroughly examined the means by which Viktor Orban came to power and calls them unquestionably democratic, and asks that the West give Hungary a chance.

The material below is the petition:

People of Europe! Hungary needs your support in its strife for freedom, cultural integrity, traditional values, and moral worth.

Currently Hungary is the symbol of resistance in Europe. Hungary has demonstrated that they will not lose the freedom they gained from the Soviet Union to a better masked, yet not less oppressive empire. On January 21, 2012, four hundred thousand Hungarians marched in a “Peace Train” to assert their patriotism and support their government and constitution.

The newly constructed Hungarian constitution reflects an awakening of cultural and moral sensibilities, it recognizes the continuum of history above the trashy verbiage of EU treaties and grants citizenship to Hungarians who live in annexed regions. The Constitution expresses Hungarians’ belief in the role of Christianity in preserving nationhood. It declares that marriage is the sacred union of a man and a woman, and it protects human life from the moment of conception. In addition, the government has withdrawn financial support from money-mongering churches.

Mr. Orbán asserts that in spite of the fiscal problems the country inherited from the previous deficit-obsessed New Labor-style government, Hungary will recover, if the bank system helps alleviate the current economic crisis. Thus, he refused to let the IMF implement its austerity measure’s detailed execution.

This is not something a credit-driven version of capitalism wants people to discover. This is why Brussels technocrats, who cherish their independence from the electorate, are annoyed. The unelected bureaucrats of the EU fear that the elected representatives may overrule cronyism among their bonus-entitled classes. They are unaccustomed to governments with a massive democratic mandate telling “the IMF, the EU and Uncle Tom Goldman to get stuffed” and in response, against a freely elected government they use undemocratic coercive pressure, which a few decades ago would have been described as a classic example of neo-colonial pressure.

This is why Hungary is portrayed as civilization’s Public Enemy No. 1. This is why the European Union, the United Nations, the IMF, and the leftist media hysterically attack Orban’s government, which was elected with an overwhelming majority. As far as the EU and the Western media are concerned, the real crime of the Hungarian government is not so much its inept economic strategy as its promotion of cultural and political values that run counter to what is deemed correct in Brussels. The real crime is the fact that a civilized nation with a majority mandated government reclaims its heritage and autonomy. This is the real reason the EU wages its culture war against this nation. This is why Daniel Cohn-Bendit et al. fail to address facts, and bully the Hungarian representatives with their biased opinion.

We ask for the support of all who believe in the traditional values of Europe that the Hungarian Prime Minister fights for in the EU. We ask for your support as we are being attacked in the European Parliament and the leftist media for our moral stance in the face of moral relativism that the EU has forced upon us to destroy all of our European heritage. We need your signatures to ascertain that Europe reclaims its heritage and autonomy as “we all have an eminent need of spiritual and intellectual renewal”.

We, the undersigned, support Hungary in its strife for all-European traditional values against Brussels-directed integration and PC impositions.

Akos Szilagyi

 And now, on the topic:

A Polish Catholic Sunday weekly interviewed Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban that makes the connection between Hungary’s fight to reverse her dire situation and SSPX’s doctrinal struggles.  You must read this interview, where the rosary is  given its proper place as a full-blown political weapon, and in which we hear the director of a country in the fight of its life say the words traditional Catholics are saying all over the world.  Viktor Orban laid it out: “If we had stronger Church, the whole country would be stronger.”

Certainly the faux traditionalists will hear this merely as a plea for an increased recognition of  that new church, the Counciliar church, and not a plea for any kind of doctrinal restoration of the old True Faith. (That new church, by the way, was still too preoccupied with its ecumenical week to manage a press conference in support of Hungary.)

Orban means the true Church, that much is obvious, because of the Church’s traditional support for the Catholic religious state, not the ‘religious liberty’ of Vatican II; Hungary has put itself on the line moving in the direction of a religious state, and away from the Council’s favored secular one.  Hungary now desperately needs the Church to repudiate the ‘religious liberty’ that the Church has touted since the Council and continues to trumpet in defiance of Her tradition. She asserts it is a new Tradition.

And it isn’t just that issue.  There are others where the Church can and must help. Hungary needs the Church to approve Hungary’s fight against the banks.  Hungary needs for the Church to assert Hungary’s right to fight homosexuality through public civic sanctions (only against gay marriage or adoption of children, not other homosexual behavior), instead of legitimizing it, as the Church’s current governing documents and practice presently do. Hungary needs the Church to at least support the new constitution’s protection of life from conception. At least that!

But no, instead the Vatican attacks Hungary. Stefan Bos’ March 2013 reportage on Vatican Radio repeats and augments every single liberal criticism of Hungary’s struggle to restore the Faith to their civic life, including a slur against their attempt to protect marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Very interestingly, Hungary needs what traditionalists want:  doctrinal reversal of Vatican II’s false teachings on religious liberty, collegiality, and ecumenism. This is what SSPX wants. They want real Catholicism back. They, too, want a strong Church, and it must come from the restoration of the strong doctines.

Very many Catholics do not see the connection between doctrine and practice. They think the former is for eggheads and the latter is for do-ers. Some time back there was a comment on one of the accomodationalist traditional blogs that ‘all this misplaced  SSPX stubborness about doctrinal issues’ mattered not at all to those engaged ‘in real struggles, on the ground,’ which caused the whitelilyblog to eye the liquor cabinet early.

Because it’s such bs. Because here, in this interview, is Orban’s assessment on the ground, and nobody is ‘on the ground’ more, at this moment, than Hungary, except possibly SSPX.  They have practical needs, and their constitution has laid down a doctrinal constitution to meet them.  Do we want financial stability? Do we want social stability? Give us the teachings of the Catholic Church about family and economic justice! Orban is pleading for it. Not the ecumenical blatherings of that other, new church that blurs all the strong principles until there are none left to use to defend us.

The ecumenical church is on the other side. The ecumenical church whose interests Benedict curiously continues to promote, the ecumenical church whose palid purpose bored us all last week,  permits divorce, permits common law relationships,  permits homosexual relations, and promotes the homosexual model.  Economically the ecumenical church permits a whole slew of vague ‘free market’ un-Catholic economic positions that leaves the barn door wide open for various predators.  The traditional Catholic church protected us with regulation such as Hungary now tries to impose. The traditional Catholic church protected the poor such as Hungary’s new constitution promises to do, by bringing the banks and the other predatory mercantile interests into line. The new church mumbles we ‘should’ be just, –but make no laws! That would be against freedom! That might offend someone’s dignity! Everyone must have the right to choose whatever sin they like, and the poor church must only abstain from sinning, never forbid it in legislation. We must ‘form consciences’ until our children are wearing chains.

Hungary has disobeyed. But she has obeyed the old, true Church. Just like SSPX.  Neither Hungary nor SSPX are in schism. It is the modernists, both in the Church and in the EUSSR who are in schism, and they have wrecked both the Church and the economy, with their idiotic liberalism.

Every working man and woman in the world needs the sleeping beauty called the One Holy Apostolic Catholic Church to wake up and engage.

If you do not wish to read the entire interview, below are several substantial quotes that capture the heart of Hungary’s struggle over both values and economics. Regarding Hungary’s economic steps that have so shocked Europe, Orban says

“When we took over the authority in 2010, we had enormous debts and a big budget gap, our country was on the verge of bankruptcy, and corruption was omnipresent. Everything which was thicker than the air was either stolen or sold. We were trying to stop it together with our government. I did not have any other choice than using methods which are not popular in Europe – the bank tax or the tax for the biggest corporations. I used these methods in order to help indebted citizens of the middle class who are paying off loans in foreign currencies. International corporations and bank institutions felt it as a big blow. They suffered from enormous losses and therefore, my actions were perceived in a negative way. International corporations, banks and financial institutions submitted accusations against me to Brussels in order to regain their lost money.”

There is nothing in the steps named here that the traditional Catholic church cannot support and did not use, in the blessed Catholic state, in the service of broad distribution of ownership and income. She should please come out and do so again, when Hungary needs a friend.

Regarding Hungary’s new pro-life constitution, Orban says about the attacks on it:

“There is a paragraph in it which defines the family as the base for the social life. Therefore we do not give homosexual couples such rights as to families and we refuse to give homosexual couples rights to adopt children. Certainly, the constitution also says that we defend life from the conception, that we respect and protect it. But the fact that it is our opinion does not mean that we are outside Europe. There is a discussion on such issues in the whole Europe. Millions of people in Germany, France or Spain think about these issues in a similar way. It is a problem not only in Hungary; it concerns all European countries. But we inscribed these values in the constitution. And those who do not like it will do everything to prevent us from it.”

These are heartening words for all the rest of us ‘on the ground’ in the war for our families and our country.

That Hungary’s new constitution is thoroughly legitimate and thoroughly modern (rather than some kind of throw-back to an earlier epoch), there is an extremely interesting interview with German constitutional expert Rupert Scholz that completely exposes the simplistic leftist lies about that aspect of the issue.

Please go read the entire article, and perhaps consider it as a kind of draft blueprint for Catholic America. We are at a crossroads now, and we ought to consider an independent position asking for these same steps that Hungary is taking, rather than submerging our identity in the Democrat or Republican parties, both of which are selling us out. And even more urgently, we should pledge ourselves to SSPX’s next rosary crusade, and we should keep demanding doctrinal reversal of Vatican II’s errors.

Here is a link to the FIDESZ  homesite in English:

http://www.fidesz.hu/index.php?Rovat=10035&Tol=1

…. Western society,” the Holy Father said, “seems to have lost direction and is  feeling its way forward.  The Church, thanks to the word of God, see beyond the  shadows. She does not possess technical solutions but she has her gaze turned to the final destination offering the light of the gospel to all men and women of  goodwill, of whatever nation or culture.”

Dearest Holy Father, what do you mean, no technical solutions! We have apps!

Besides, Holy Father, with all due respect, the Church is bound to do more than ‘keep Her gaze turned to a future destination.’  The Catholic Church was established by Christ to care for us His brothers and sisters in the here and now,  whatever our civic circumstances.  Wherever we live, our society is supposed to help us live serene and secure lives during our time on earth, and then live with God in heaven; but if, on the contrary, our society hinders or hampers us from those two goals, we are obligated to try to change society, to change those unhelpful laws and policies–not give up and wait for our ‘final destination.’ The Church has always taught that, until Vatican II.  Pius XII wrote in his letter of October 19, 1945, when ordinary secularism such as we suffer in the United States was rising in Italy:

Every Catholic will readily understand that the question which, before every  other,  ought at present to attract his attention and to spur him to action, is that of securing for this and future generations the benefit of a fundamental law of the State, which is not opposed to sound religious and moral principles, but which rather draws vigorous inspiration from them and proclaims and  pursues their lofty aims.”  (primary source not available in English, secondary source here ) Cardinal Brunero Ottaviani, the champion of tradition, the sworn enemy of liberalism and leftism, our trusted guide, excoriated those who would keep the Church ‘shut up in the four walls of the Temple”! (same source)

Pius XII was not speaking here of restraining our civic behavior either to merely ‘forming consciences,’ a phrase often on the lips of old Council II supporters, or, that failing,  waiting for future end times for justice to be done.  Pius XII was speaking of changing the laws of the state here and now to fit Catholic teaching. (same source)

Besides, we have technical solutions! We have apps! We even have a platform!  Our operating system kicks –!  Suppose the Holy Father recommended Catholics concentrate their political efforts on a  return to the Catholic religious state?  He could reasonably specify this political structure in those areas where Catholics have a majority of the electorate (that is how the popes before Vatican II and after the Reformation put it). In some countries we already have this majority, in others we could potentially regain a lost majority by renewed evangelical efforts and by the growth of Catholic families, as the muslims are accomplishing the growth of their families in islamic nations not practicing the contraceptive mentality, and the Church teaches that we are within our rights to desire and arrange a cooperative unity between the state and the Church.

We could  call a return to the Catholic religious state the restore point. Techies call the ‘restore point’ a good technical solution that one uses when one’s machine has been infected by viruses and malware. One surveys the situation to determine more or less when the problems began to be intrusive, and then one chooses a point where the machine was working well and selects it as the new now. The restoration scrubs all of the bad stuff away, and leaves you with your functionality. Viruses all gone.

There’s a solution for you! We could do that! We must do that! The Holy Father must authorize us to work for that, not defer our justice to the Last Judgement! We are literally dying for lack of solutions that would be available to us in a Catholic state!

When is the healthy restore point for western civilization? When was it, speaking just of the present on-going economic crisis, that uncontrolled profit-taking was unleashed on the world?  Not in the Catholic state! That’s why they rebelled against it!  The bitterest enemy of Catholicism would not identify the Catholic state as the one in which that particular anti-social behavior was allowed. The criticism of the Catholic state was that they did not allow it. Businesses were not allowed to become too big to fail. Individuals were not allowed to exploit others. There were limits on profits, a sense of reasonable and unreasonable, and it was enforced. There were limits on advertising (it was forbidden!). There were limits on the interest rates lenders could charge.  This was not socialism–no state protected private property so loyally as the Catholic religious states, and the profit-worshipping rebels are still struggling to undo or dilute the common law coming from those ages that protect the concept of private property.

Take those features of the Catholic religious state to the Occupy protesters and ask them if they would like to see a system of state where businesses were not allowed to become too big to fail, and in which, after one’s own bread for oneself and one’s family was earned, it was expected that one would pass business on to one’s brothers, so that they too could enjoy their lives.  See if Occupy would like a system in which profits could not outstrip wages, and in which that delicate balance was actually discussed on-the-job, in cross-class guilds, rather than in the clearly moribund union system we now suffer, where nobody talks to anybody, nobody plans anything, and the wages of the unorganized are insufficient. Tell Occupy the poor were cared for, in the Catholic state (and still are now by Catholic charities, although there are so many more of them beggared and unhoused by the profit-worshipping rebels that the task is greater than mere philanthropy can accomplish).  Tell them health care was affordable in the Catholic state, not because people paid through the nose for it through privatized insurance, or the only other option we are offered now, went to unhappy state-run warehouses; health care was affordable in the middle ages because of the skilled work of volunteer religious orders expressing their boundless love for Christ (Who deserves it, as our presidents so seldom do) through their love for His poor.  Ask Occupy if they would like more cooperatives where the profits go to the employees,  and some price protections on some essential commodities.

Take those solutions regarding health care and profits and wages, in fact, to just about any American besides the Occupy movement, and you would get an assent in a New York minute. You would get an assent in Europe, too, if some of the discussion we are hearing is accurate, in which housewives scream at their legislatures to stop putting profits before people.  That is what Catholics want!  And what Christ promised. Apparently it has already been demonstrated you can get assent to such a platform in Hungary, although the extent is not so broad yet;  still, they are on the move, although they need our prayers. The Catholic state is the alternative to both communism/socialism and the Free Market folks. It is green without the bogus population- explosion hypothesis, it is sustainable, it is local, it is democratic in the best sense, not just in the voting booth every four years. It is kind.

Listen to the screaming. No no no, the paid plants chant, we must have religious freedom! (Which means no religion has any official weight or presence in the state, of course, and thus the state has no coherent moral standard.)  No no no, we must have abortion and birth control and gay marriage and women must work for a living just like men! No, no, they will scream, we must put mankind at the center of everything, not God. And we must be able to vote on anything our hearts desire–that’s what we’ll call democracy! And we’ll kill others if they do not agree with us!

And those within the Church still in love with the Vatican II notions and novelties will scream, too. The church is spiritual, they will say, no politics allowed!   They agree completely that the Church’s eyes should be ‘fixed on the final destination,’ as the Holy Father said at Epiphany. Because that will keep our eyes off their swollen bank accounts and our unemployed brothers and our ruined cities.

But Cardinal Brunero Ottaviani wrote against this liberal notion by saying, “Today some maintain that there is in the church only a spiritual order,” and then he quotes from an encyclical letter of Pius XII, Mystici Corporis,  in which the Holy Father deplores and condemns those who

“fail to understand that it was one and the same purpose – namely that of  perpetuating  on this earth the solitary work of the redemption – which caused  the divine Redeemer both to give the community of human beings founded  by him the Constitution of the society perfect in its own order, provided with all its juridical and social elements, and also, with the same ending view, to have it enriched by the Holy Spirit with heavenly gifts and powers.” [emphasis added]

Ottaviani adds, ” The Church does not desire to be a state, but Her divine founder has constituted the Church a perfect society, enriched with all the powers inherent in such a juridical condition, in order to accomplish its mission in every state, without conflicts between the two societies of which He is, though in different ways, the author and the support.”

If only the Holy Father would give us the option, and restore the teaching of the traditional Church. Things are overdue for just such a change. The muslims never cease calling for an islamic religious state. Now it appears the hindus will have theirs, too. But we Catholics gave away our right to ask for ours, at Vatican II, on the basis that times had changed, secularism was the wave of the future.  During the sixties, It looked as if Europe could go on forever aborting and contracepting its young,  the rich fattening on the new labor market of women, and importing workers to cover the loss of indigenous population. It looked, too, as the US would never stop getting richer and richer and richer with the Free Market scam. Now we know better. The liberal game is up, after five hundred years.

Holy Father, download that Savior app! And that Christ the King  one!

But there are less broad technical solutions we can use to help us get back our Catholic religious state. There are interim apps.

For example, there is a rosary app. In fact there are several. You can have the rosary on your android, your laptop, the television, and your bedside radio.  The rosary, that ancient prayer, addresses problems the Church and Her people face in all times.  It was given to us by Our Lady to combat the precise problems that Benedict has been speaking of so very often lately, the incredible rise of bloody violence against Catholics. Pope Leo XIII specifically recommended the use of the rosary to defend the church in just such times of oppression (in Supremi apostolatus officio). “Nothing is surer and more effective in obtaining God’s help in defending the rights of the church as devotion to the Virgin Mary,” the Holy Father wrote.

Pope Leo then points out Dominic’s immediate application of the rosary as a solution to the problems facing the church in his time, characterized as  ”the violence of errors, the intolerable corruption of morals, and the attacks of powerful adversaries.” Commenting that the church was just as much in need of divine help in the present, he stated, “Enlightened by heavenly inspiration, this great saint saw clearly that no other remedy would be as efficacious as this which would bring men back to Jesus Christ.”

It is cruel to fail to remind us of this remedy when we are suffering so, in our times.

But of course Pope Leo is suggesting the rosary as a supernatural technical solution, and our August Pontiff Gloriously Reigning may have overlooked it, in favor of the natural kind. Or perhaps it could be because he is following in the footsteps of Pope John Paul II and thus failing to see it as a sharp sword in our defense.  John Paul did not see it so.  John Paul wrote an apostolic letter on the rosary in 2001 in which he did not present the rosary as a weapon of defense or a tool to bring men back to Christ, as Pope Leo did. He presented the rosary to be, instead, evidence of the modern world’s new ecumenical advances, “the flowering of a new call for spirituality, due also to the influence of other religions” (paragraph 5–for an SSPX commentary on this letter, and link to the primary source, click here). The rosary is seen as the result of laudable modern religious pluralism, not a weapon to defend ourselves against it as pluralism in all its naked violence tries to stab, shoot, and strangle us.

There is another tool we could use apparently ignored even before Vatican II. There is a social aspect of Catholicism. This aspect is referred to as the Mystical Body of Christ, or the Catholic brotherhood will do equally well, with more contemporary cache.  Or call it an operating system, if you want to, since it is, a social one. The concept of Catholic brotherhood is one of incalculable benefit, but modern times have seen an absence of attention to it. We find interesting passage  in the journal The  Ecclesiastical Review in 1919. A letter to the editor praised a previous article by the Rev. Dr. Mc Mahon on Eucharistic preaching. The article said that the Eucharistic preaching present in the United States had an overly restrained view, and neglected, while teaching Holy Communion as food for individual souls, to preach it as a banquet of brotherhood.

“At this banquet” (the writer quotes Pope Leo the 13th’s encyclical on the Blessed Eucharist), “we find the spectacle of Christian brotherhood and social equality which is afforded when men of all conditions, gentle and simple, rich and poor, learned and unlearned, gather round the holy altar, all sharing the like in these heavenly banquet.” And of what matter is that “the preaching of individualistic religion has been so common that the social side of Catholicism seems strange to us, and the word ‘charity’ is being restricted to mean nothing more than the giving of alms. If Catholicism as applicable to all relations of life had been upheld among us during the 19th century [and the 21st!], the world would now be turning to Catholics as experts in brotherhood, and the reaction against industrial individualism and in the sore need of voluntary cooperation for the well-being of society.”

Holy Communion is a tool for social sanctity the world could use now! It is our way to build up an army of men and women in the state of grace. It is a solution the Holy Father could have mentioned, while keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the future. If we had such an army, we might have such a future.

That leaves intact the vicious system that concentrates wealth, and delivers the bill only to the dumb rich who get caught with their pants down outside the various tax loop hole protections they’ve managed to buy and bribe.

But there is truth in the thesis otherwise, when Sachs points out that we simply cannot afford, even if we tax the rich,  Obama’s government-mandated, government-platformed (in terms of absent moral values) but completely privatized solution.  The profits skimmed by all the various middle-men make it too expensive.  Sachs instead casually endorses the only alternative he can imagine, single- payer health care–in other words, government-run health care.

But we all know how that story ends, too: crappy, cranky, niggling care in dimly lit paint-peeling facilities with waiting lists for the good procedures, as it is in those countries which presently fund health care that way. Low standards have been the rule in government-run health facilities even in good times,  and how can we now expect more, in our staggering economy? The government, like Greece, is cutting back, not adding expenses as astronomical as those required by our ‘sick’ population.  This government running these hospitals in this economy is a recommendation for horrific care on all levels and eventually, of course, euthanasia, still illegal but being practiced to just about the same degree that still-illegal marijuana is being smoked, with the quasi-permission now being obtained on-the-spot in informal confereces with family members or through senior citizens’ centers’ “free” health care power of attorney services. (I have the one being distributed to senior citizens in Chicago’s senior service centers,  which  gives hospitals the right to pull the plug for everything, including ’expense,’ explicitly stated. Sign here, lady, right here on the dotted line, the pro-bono lawyer crooned–except then he wanted fifty bucks. Icertainly  didn’t sign it, but instead searched for and found a pro-life one available on-line, where you tell them they can’t pull the plug when you run out of money and that you do want all care for your condition . They can’t pull the plug –legally–if you don’t give them permission. Google will-to-live power of attorney.)

So neither solution works, not privatized health care, nor government-run health care. And yet Sachs, and myself, and all the rest of us, want health care.  So it must be solved. And it can be solved.

The thing is, we can’t get there from here.

If we want humane health care that is also affordable, we must re-set our cultures to a clean point before the virus of modern civilization took hold. We must restore Catholicism, its dominant (and tolerant) Church, and its economics, loosely called distributism, which made as many people owners as possible by regulating things so that nobody got too big to fail.

Even now, in our secular society, we know intuitively that health care and religion go together. Marilyn Gaston, Assistant Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, recommended in 2001 that privatized health care form alliances with religious organizations of various persuasions in order to deliver care to the poor. On the ground, very often religious organizations deliver health care as the provider of last resort, in towns like Bakersfield, California. These efforts will not fill the gap, however, because they lack one essential career path that was present in the Middle Ages, but not now: volunteer health care provider via religious orders.  And this path may be the necessary piece of the puzzle, the one that makes health care to the very sick and very poor afforcable.

In the area of health care, the expense was manageable because very large numbers of the health care workers were unmarried, consecrated men and women giving their entire lives to Christ in religious orders and expressing that love in health care for no salary. They worked free (made possible by the absence of children to support, while their orders provided for their personal needs, in case of illness or age, as children would have), and vowed to live poor and obedient and chaste. They didn’t all live up to their vows, but enough did, notably generation after generation of saints. These were the orders that the so-called Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sought to destroy by any means necessary, starting with seizing and parceling out the ancient properties of the orders. They dismantled and doled out the very foundation stones.

Do you know the first act of ‘reformist’ Henry VIII’s ‘health care plan’? To privatize St. Bartholemew’s, a hospital that had functioned free to all since the fourth century, but especially welcome had been the poor who were served there (in hospital rooms larger than those currently allowed in new hospital construction) in the name of Christ, in the person of Christ, by generations of saints. To privatize it.

They say the poor wandered England looking for a hospital in the days of the new religion, as each in turn was privatized and their nursing nuns turned out from those safe and sacred walls. And each hospital in all the new secular societies in turn has suffered it, the gradual re-writing of the wonderfully persistent dream of the poor that when they are hurt bad, society will help them, like they ‘used to do,’ until we come to now.  (England itself had to return to free care, this time government run.  You surely have read the same articles as I on the level of care available there.) Even the so-called Catholic hospitals, now, function like little profit machines, just as protestantism and the reformation wanted, and worked for. They are now your stinking tea party. (It is their system, though, and not their rich, which is the enemy. Sachs still doesn’t see it, and I admit it takes a really radical eye–or a mother’s, whose sons have no health care. Either one.)

The government playing the role of the Church and the religious orders and the parent and all the rest, because of course secular government wants all those roles, cannot restore health care without restoring all those other necessary conditions. We have to re-build the bridge we burned, and restore, first, Christ at the center of our laws, our governments, and our lives, and then restore the Church and let the Church, and all churches, and all charities, begin to ‘manage’ health care. Yes, some services, like abortion, will have to go. Because you don’t get loving care unless all humans get loving care, and everyone knows now those tiny little bodies are so fully human. That’s not to mention at all the economic effect of killing them.  That’s not to suggest that us having killed fully one-sixth of the American population has anything to do with slumping home sales.

This restore point–forgive me, but the metaphor is so apt–is the same in economics. We have to dial back interest–which was illegal, back in the day–restore guilds as management tools that go across class, unlike labor unions, which forbid participation by management and owners, let guilds handle education (they will know what industries are in growth mode, which not, because their leadership will include members from the whole process, from raw materials to transport of finished products; that is simply how guilds functioned); we have to control monopolization, simply taxing into unprofitability enterprises that grow too big to fail; and so forth.

There are a thousand good techniques, too many to even begin to discuss in one post, but this is true of all of them: they only function in a coherent, not a multi-religious, society, they only function in a society where dishonesty and all the other deadly sins are taught from the beginning, are shamed from the beginning, and, at the personal level, have a heaven and a hell even if society does not punish every transgression. I do not want to reduce the Faith to that, but perhaps some people could see the point who otherwise will not listen to the Voice of the God who created them calling out across time, to live well on earth and then come to live with Him, as in the original plan until sin and death ruined it.

In any case, in our own society, we have lost that personal level; we foolishly expect honesty to begin and end in the board room, rather than in the heart and root of our society, which of course must be in our homes and schools, in our willingness to honor our God, the totally dynamic and awesome Trinity from which our great civilization has sprung. But we do not. We let ourselves be led by a handful of men who wish, themselves, to be god. They like it. (When I think of the beauty of God and the ugliness of their cruel, proud faces, it makes me want to cry.)

So I am arguing that we have to go back, to go forward. There is simply no other possible solution. The ideal that we have, which is health care for all (a wonderful ideal, a necessary ideal for a stable society, an ideal born in Christian civilization) is only possible under some circumstances, circumstances that are both moral and economic, and as it appears to be turning out, we had those circumstances five hundred years ago, but we ‘reformed it.’  The virus of Too Big to Fail began right then, on Henry VIII’s fat paunch, around which men were waiting, had been waiting for some centuries, breaking out of their sleep here and then in medievalism to take a profit, to make a killing, then suppressed by that mean old Catholic Church. They were waiting, and they whispered it in his royal ear: freedom.  He meant by it a woman, they meant by it a world open for plunder. And it is their song, still. You’d think we’d learn the words by now and stop whistling it with them.

Restore Catholicism and the ideal and goal of the restoration of the Catholic state. Viva Cristo Rey. Don’t be afraid.