|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Can Anything Good Come From Rome? pt. 3
Theresa Ickinger, a post-conciliar champion of the Faith active in many realms, spoke at one of my first Roman Forum meetings in the early 1970s. I cannot remember which of her battles she recounted to us, but I do recall that it took place in Philadelphia.
She noted that after discussions with the church authorities brought about the usual depressing failure, she regained her courage by going to the National Shrine of St. John Neumann, the bishop of that city from 1852-1860, and praying for his help. Theresa was a powerful speaker, and the succinct comment that she made on the contrast of her experience with the current leaders as opposed to the nineteenth century saint left a lasting impact on me. “Who are the dead?” she asked. “And who are the living?”
Obviously, the vigorous, masculine, Catholic action that she was desperately seeking to put an end to yet another totally unnecessary contemporary Church scandal was infinitely more likely to come from a man who had left our earthly midst before the American Civil War to fight the good fight for his diocese from the Court of Heaven. Who are the dead and who are the living indeed. “And why”, as an elderly woman in the audience asked me at the end of Theresa’s talk, “can’t the bishops just go out there and ‘bish’!!!”
Today, May 7th, 2025, we all wonder—if I may absolutely butcher the language to paraphrase this frustrated member of a traditionalist organization’s audience of more than half a century past—“why the cardinals cannot just go out there and ‘card’”. That is to say, why can’t they just do their most important job—which is a hinge on which the future hangs—and elect someone who will “make the Catholic Church great again”? The answer to that query is a story that involves discussion of the Conclave with relation to “the good, the bad, and the criminally ugly”.
Talking about the “good” brings me back to the point that I made in a previous article about the irony of Traditionalists being probably the most obvious “outsiders” of all, even though they, personally, feel that their commitment to the defense of the fullness of the Catholic Faith makes them the ultimate “insiders”. Theresa’s comment reminds us that we must now exercise our perceived role as believing “insiders” by practicing what we preach; by leaning upon the influence of those who can move the voting cardinals properly to “card” infinitely better than we can; by turning to fellow insiders more inside and more truly fully alive than anyone else: the saints in heaven.
The fact that there just may be more “good” cardinals than we can imagine among the horde of new Princes of the Church named by Pope Francis was driven home to me again last night at dinner near the Vatican. One of these newcomers was sitting at the table next to my group. A member of our party smiled at him as he left, began chatting with him, and said that our prayers were with him in the Conclave about to begin.
Faces and behavior are important, and this cardinal’s was pious, welcoming, and—in a word—charitably Catholic in character. We were already sufficiently encouraged by the chance encounter when, a minute or two after his departure, one of his entourage came back with a rosary to stimulate our evening prayers still further. What was in our prelate’s mind at the moment was totally hidden to us; we have to go to those whose thoughts are an open book to inspire him to express his faith openly in the days to come. St. John Neumann, you who are truly among the living, animate this cardinal to work to bring life to our dying Church once again. Help us to stir up those of his comrades who may also be good in spirit to the utmost degree.
Now the “good”—or potentially good—have to flee from the pressure of the “bad”. This is not the easiest task imaginable. “Dead” though the latter are. in Theresa Ickinger’s use of the word, their spiritually inanimate “corpses” are always nevertheless in our fallen world’s paths, blocking our movement to our proper goals. There is no need for me to name names regarding their representatives in the Conclave, especially since I hope that even the most blatant among them can be brought back to the land of the spiritually living through the prayers of the Mother of God. It is, rather, the enormous generic strength that comes from the immense, thick, wet blanket that they, as a class, heavily dump upon the prostrate body of the Church Militant that concerns me here. Without claiming that everything I am about to say applies to all of the members of the classes of the “good” and the “bad”, allow me just to toss out a few of the general aspects of the problem that come immediately to mind.
The “good” question themselves. “Am I right?”; “have I made a mistake?”; “perhaps I have not looked at the issue from the right perspective?”; “who am I to push my point when everyone around me seems to be of the opposite viewpoint?” The good are often all too timid—and here I think lies the greatest flaw in the behavior of Pope Benedict. Shocking as it is to me that I should quote the Declaration of Independence, I cannot resist paraphrasing it when emphasizing this dangerous timidity still further: “all experience hath shewn, that {the good} are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the {bad} forms to which they are accustomed”.
Our generic “bad” representative has no self-doubt. He is always in the right. After all, all of his “bad” comrades, his journals, his television stations, and his stockbrokers tell him that this is so. The self-confidence that comes from his “badness” is given to him and to his buddies by the panzer-like force of the overall alliance to which they all belong; the alliance that in my Black Legends book I call “The Grand Coalition of the Status Quo”.
Members of the Grand Coalition are legion. They include the ancient Sophist enemies of the Socratics seeking the True, the Good, and the Beautiful; the many-faceted supporters of Gnosticism, who cannot believe that nature was created by a loving God; serious Protestantism, with its belief in the Total Depravity of the fallen world; the power, money, sexually obsessed, and consumer driven; and, finally, almost everybody else in your neighborhoods and your extended families today. It is a union of everyone who turns the consequences of Original Sin into a program for all of human life.
What that program means is a commitment to sinful nature as is and to its wretched business as usual; the business as usual that cannot help but assure the triumph of the strongest and most unredeemed, anti-Christian, and irrational wills. What that translates into with respect to the “bad” Modernism of those inside the Conclave today is an inability even to imagine, much less accept the reality of a possible transformation of all things in the life of Our Savior; of our definitive need to defy “the world, the flesh, and the devil” to construct the Social Kingdom of Christ.
For such men, the “good”—and the outsider Trads, whatever their spiritual state may be—are hopeless, ideological losers. And the tools that the Coalition members inside the Conclave have at their disposal to ridicule anyone challenging the religious Status Quo and its prohibition to “lift up your hearts” have been honed to perfection from even before the Christian dispensation; in fact, it’s been happening at least since the Sophist battles against anyone attempting to flee the darkness of the back of the cave described in Plato’s immortal allegory—to break his chains, to “turn around” (convert), to move upwards so as to find “every good and perfect gift that comes from above, the Father of Lights”. These tools are crushingly effective. If you do not think so, look at some of my writings on the subject for further enlightenment. Either that, of try fighting with the members of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo in your environment on your own steam. Transformation in Christ, they will ask? Give me a break! Get real and make a buck! Everyone else is doing it!
As we move towards a conclusion of this third report, let me remind you of something that I alluded to in my last piece. Catholic Christendom, in its effort to build Christ’s Social Kingdom, could not accept “the business as usual of fallen nature”. It sought, through Revelation and Grace, to order everything in life according to its proper hierarchy of values, in such a way as to allow us to see the world in its entirety with the eyes of the Creator and Redeemer God; to hear, in consequence, “the music of the spheres” that those who fall in love on the natural plane also hear and should work to hear throughout their married life; the “music of the spheres” that those who discern will long to hear for all eternity through the eternal possession of everything that is beautiful in the Beatific Vision.
Anti-Catholic, naturalist “Modernity” drops its wet blanket over this enterprise, denying our ability to use Revelation and Grace to readjust the unnatural world of fallen nature properly. Its consequence is to create the perverse and Global Kingdom of Sinful Criminal Ugliness under whose yoke we slave. The assistance that this global reign of ugliness, active in every realm of life, gives to the “bad” to intimidate and weigh on the spirit of the “good” is incalculable. For it is almost impossible to “awaken” a soul to the music of the spheres when one constructs society on the basis of an enthusiastic dive into that nihilist perversion of nature that the pseudo-awakedness of criminal Wokedom’s refusal to transform anything in Christ makes inevitable. St. John Neumann, pray for the good in the Conclave who have to wrestle with the weight of this Satanic force atop them!
If the Kingdom of Criminal Ugliness, aiding the bad, could be battled by the good with the help of those most fully living, the saints in Heaven—and let us never forget that it can!—the cardinals in Conclave would really come to know how to “card”. Heaven help me once again, but I have to return to my paraphrase of the Declaration of Independence to indicate what they would have the courage to say.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce {Catholics} under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security…The history of the present {regime}is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over {the Church Militant}.
“Let Facts be submitted to a candid world”, the Declaration moves on to state immediately after the above words. One of those facts is that the Liturgy is the chief, regular means, by which Catholics are taught about their Faith and given its supernatural Grace. Alas, the Novus Ordo, valid as it is, with its insistence on primarily responding, pastorally, to a world which is unfortunately dominated by Criminal Ugliness and the triumph of the faithless, irrational will, simply cannot be beautiful. It sinks in its ability to be beautiful with every further fall of naturalist Modernity into its nihilist, Satanic abyss. It simply cannot awaken us to the music of the spheres. The Traditional Roman Liturgy, “with its back to the business as usual of the fallen world”, and its eyes aimed unshakenly towards the adoration of the Creator and Redeemer God, sees all things through His eyes. It is the most powerful tool for allowing all of Christendom to hear that music of the spheres once again.
One final note. If we are interested in ecumenical union with the greatest of the non-Roman forces in Christendom; a force that understands the Liturgy in the way that I have indicated above—and that is Eastern Orthodoxy—we would recognize that we should take its concerns seriously. I know at least one person sitting in the Conclave who does. It would be wonderful to have a pope who will allow our Traditional Liturgy freely once again to do the work that the Orthodox Liturgies have not stopped doing. In short, we need a pope who will move us from death back into the land of the living, and with the Liturgy as the most obvious tool for to do so.
St. John Neumann, pray for the cardinals in the Conclave!
