Essays in Idleness

“Reciprocal, sterilizing mistrust.”

This is a phrase I have lifted from the recent complaint of the bishops of France, to the Vatican congregation about Summorum Pontificum. A friend has been working on the translation. Our ecclesial oldies (my observation) continue to advance, or shove, doctrinal “talking points” they have “evolved” from (still my opinion) wrong interpretations of Vatican II — towards (down the throats of) the lay and clerical faithful. Believers, in their turn, continue to hunger for the Gospel and the Mass. In particular, the young are attracted to traditional Catholicism, if they are attracted to Catholicism at all. They, and their hippie elders, exhibit mutual distrust. It is the new generation gap. Or, in the cowboy colloquial, neither has the other’s back.

But overall, few Catholics today are attracted to their religion. This becomes evident if you look at them. Over here on west-side Atlantic, we may now start at the top, with a new, nominally Catholic, “POTUS.” He favours various unambiguously anti-Catholic policies, from abortion-on-demand to making nuns pay for condoms. It would be easier to define him as a common fern, however, than as a leader of men. Something called a “Kamala” stands to replace him. (I am reminded of an Ottawa journalist, years ago, who described the first female leader of our socialist NDP as, “the houseplant from the shop of horrors.”) We might as well start at the bottom, instead.

I have encountered constant frustration when trying to explain, to self-styled “modern Catholics,” the most elementary precepts of the religion they claim to profess. They defend themselves, when they intuit that they are under attack, with one of the two known arguments all progressive moderns use. One is, “How dare you!” And the other is, “Shut up!”

Yet most being innocent, at least of education, they cannot be held responsible for their views. These originate in the mass culture, passing through its Internet stage. Currently, our tech lords conceive their task as “unifying.” This means bringing the two arguments together into a single, aggressive, silencing of discordant voices.

At present, the Googlies are doing a better job of co-opting governments, than vice versa, but as the latter retain their monopoly on serious, military power, I assume that gummint will be taking over Big Tech fairly soon. (I’d put my money on a low-tech sledgehammer, over a high-end computer, any day.) Thanks to innovations such as Red China’s extremely successful “social credit” system, that enforces round-the-clock conformity at every street corner and inside every home, universal idiocy can then be obtained. “Conservatives” will look back on the tech lords fondly.

Now, what is the connexion between these two things — the collapse of civilization into the black hole of “cancel culture,” and the intellectual, spiritual, and physical decline of the Roman Catholic Church?

Having created what we still call Western Civ, the Church should be at the heart of resistance to its destruction. But it isn’t at the heart of anything at the moment.

O Lord, please insert spines where required.