The Devout Life

An alert reader (not one of mine, someone else's alert reader) send the following as proof to the as-yet unconvinced: Things were a little different before 1969.

"We need to reaffirm the faith that first made our nation great. To man anew our spiritual frontiers..." So, how's that working out, eh?

 Appropos, a correspondent writes:

The cause of the Asteroid or the Eclipse is staring us in the face; we've just been conditioned to laugh at the mention of it.  The cause was decades of effective communist infiltration specifically aimed at destroying the West.  I have mulled on this and I really think that no further earthly explanation is necessary.  The apostate West  was desperately hungry for faith, and the faith that was available was communism, and many of its devotees worked for their whole lives to destroy their societies.  The current psychosis and delusion in all areas of race relations, for example, is simply a Soviet export. Communism was in turn caused by the bad behavior of rich people, which was in turn caused by the Reformation and the excesses of the Counter-Reformation.  Whether it's all ultimately because of the schism between the Western and Eastern Churches is a question I leave for others.

To which I was momentarily tempted to respond, "Well, duhhh," but thought it might have been misconstrued as snippy. As for Canadian Catholicism, a quick glance through the pastoral letters from any Quebec bishop since the "Quiet Revolution" will tell you everything you need to know.

But of course, Bella Dodd herself said that it was not communism that was the real moving force. Something was pushing it from behind. Conspiracies are easy and, to tell the truth, not really even all that interesting, once one drags oneself out of the Modernist Matrix and can view the world and recent history from the viewpoint of the One Holy C. and A. Faith. We are well aware of the origin and have had plenty of warning about its current manifestations.

We have become conditioned, as my reader said, to laugh at the Red Menace, so effective has been the propaganda. Think about the automatic assocations that pop into your mind when you hear the word, "McCarthyism". Ann Coulter is controversial for many reasons, but possibly mostly because she dares to say, "McCarthy was right." And he was. There really was one under every bed; the proof is in, even if the Gramsciist flunkies at CNN and Reuters don't want to tell you about it.

No amount of media spin is going to change the facts, but it is the existence of the spin itself that is, perhaps, the best evidence that McCarthy was telling the truth. One doesn't have to look up VENONA in Wiki or read Whittaker Chambers or Bella Dodd to get the gist. But is it shocking? Is it a surprise?

It shouldn't be. Catholics knew the real score; we had been warned by the Son of God to expect attacks on the Truth, on the Church, all along and they have not been lacking. We also had more specific warnings in more recent times. The infiltration of the Church has resulted in lots of disasters, but among the worst has been the erasure of recent Catholic history. In our parents' time, all Catholics knew the story of Pius IX, the secularist revolutions of 1848

In the theatre, the drama of any given plot line depends, as Aristotle told us long ago, upon the audience's pity and fear. There must be conflict, and tension and sympathy. We must associate ourselves in some way with the characters, "identify" with them, as we say in the modernist psychobabble parlance, and come to think that what is happening to them is happening to us.

We must also not know the entire plot and outcome before sitting down. There must be some question whether it is going to go well or ill for the characters. (It is why even fantasies and scientifiction programmes must be plausible, that is, not step outside the bounds of the basic rules of the universe. It is also why I never saw any reason to sit all the way through the silly lightshow in Stanley Kubrik's 2001: A Space Odyssey: nothing is happening that makes any sense and whatever it is, isn't happening to anyone I cared about so...yawn...).

But for a Catholic, particularly for a Catholic traditionalist who has read a little history, the story really isn't all that tense. There's conflict, but the conclusion is fore-ordained. A happy ending has already been obtained, even though there is going to be plenty of suffering before the curtain falls.

That is not to diminish the grande drama of the Christian life, but it does help us identify the location of the real action. Many of us, especially bloggers, are activists and that is a good thing to be. It's important and necessary work, but really it's just a job. The most important theatre of the war is necessarily, from a dramatic standpoint, the one where the outcome is not a foregone conclusion. The world is saved, but each of us still hangs in the balance.