Essays in Idleness

Fortunately, I do not believe in years. I make empirical exceptions to my disbeliefs, which anyone may accept as an admission of error, but seriously, one must have faith in other things. That the Earth goes around the Sun is among my many exceptional beliefs, and the distance until it returns to the same point in space is not even believable, for as I understand it is unlikely ever to return to that place. For on slightly sharper thought, that would anyway be impossible. Space is not full of locator points; it is rarely even full of planet. Fullness itself is, in the better physics leading into metaphysics, rather an empty concept. Humans may “get it,” but only because we are full of emptiness.

But to repeat, I disbelieve in years; this one for instance. One might say it is proving to be a very bad year. It is the year that began from the death of our last reliable pope, and has deteriorated not only with further deaths, but with general disintegration. However, to believe that a year should have any kind of significance, is to believe in numbers.

Who could be so foolish as to believe in silly numbers?

I read in the news that the young (61) and foolish German bishop, Heiner Wilmer, is about to be appointed prefect of the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith, in succession to Ratzinger, Mueller, and Bergoglio’s Ladaria. The late Cardinal Pell was, when he was alive just the other day, warning Pope Francis about Wilmer’s many deviations from Catholic dogma. His appointment would mean the replacement of “official” Catholic teaching on various subjects with the latest fashionable “synodal” blather from north of the Alps.

The alternative, long-settled view, was that Catholic doctrine exists outside human legislation. It is something which, like the criminal law, or the movement of the planets, we discover, and do not make. It may appear to change, when we discover some subtlety we missed before. But it does not turn about. Dicasteries and other institutions of judgement may inquire, or be corrected, when we discover that the previous reach of our understanding was ham-fisted. We do not, however, insert ham fists into the workings of nature, and nature’s God, for sport. Reality, as it were, bites the arrogant hand.