Essays in Idleness

One slight change to this Idlepost: I was persuaded that I’d gone too easy on the Anabaptists. I’ve always had a soft spot for Mennonites, I admit.

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Being a liberal in a Catholic country (Newman’s definition of a liberal will do) should be safe, legal, and rare. It is a condition that does not necessarily preclude salvation, though at its worst it may endanger others, and so some vigilance is needed, just as it is against corrupt priests. Men should be oriented to God, leaving to God his orientation towards men; a society in which men are constantly nattering at each other is unhealthy.

It must be free in some other than the current “liberal” and “democratic” usage, in which obsessive voting and campaigning is directed to the power of one interest over another. Far from seeking political power as the class of Catholic (i.e. “universal”) Christians over any other class, civil courts and legislature in a Catholic country must be restricted to tenets of justice that pertain to all men, qua men. A Catholic who breaks laws should be looked upon as “blindly” as a man of any other affiliation, so far as it is not a pretence to undermine the laws. From petty theft and cheating, to murder and abortion aforethought, no man charged should ever fear that judge and jury are predisposed against him. This is no easy task, but we should never stop trying.

Regardless of denomination, a man should, if he lives a reasonably honest life, have no fear of police. In a country where the Catholic principle of subsidiarity is properly observed, custom would reign at any local level. The beauty of custom, unlike written law, is that it grows organically by consensus over time; so that it includes even such arrangements as what is voted on, and what not. There may be ways of doing things in one parish, and perhaps other ways in the next; but until there is some conflict between them, or some grave allegation of misgovernment, no higher authority will be involved.

This was, to my mind, among the great principles overturned by the French Revolution. Overnight, some sixty thousand parishes in France — no two of which were governed quite the same — were redrawn as thirty-six thousand civil wards, to be governed identically by directives from Paris. The measure was so attractive to totalitarians, that the obscenity spread country to country, so that by now the contrary idea of municipal independence is inconceivable almost everywhere.

Many other traditions, parallel to that, were also overturned; centralization proved very convenient to administrators of the Industrial Revolution, too. Our challenge, as I often suggest, is to turn them back, and thereby reverse the effects of what is by now a long history of dirigisme.

I am aware that there have been events in history in which the Church, when in her unwanted position of civil power, has acted less than Christianly towards non-Catholics; and more when Christian majorities (whether Catholic or non-Catholic) have abused minorities — harmless Anabaptists for instance, minding their own business in their own estates. It is enough that their doctrinal errors be publicly explained and corrected; they need not be physically suppressed. But we are in no perfect world, and not all heretics are peaceful. The best we can do is resist excess, for without the freedom to protest, sans retribution, and the institutional means to address protest, insurrections will spawn. It is in the interest of the Church not only to present a clean operation, but to create and contribute to moral cleanliness at large. The Church must not seek to replace an over-centralized State that should never have existed. The “universal” power must be a spiritual, civilizing power, of God not of men.

While I could go on, sketching what is abstractly required in a Catholic country, gentle reader may be asking a practical question, i.e. “How do you propose to get from here to there?”

The answer is, I have no idea. But I affirm that, with God, all things are possible.