Capitol Ideas / Altars, Pulpits, and Knaves

...Returning to the Catholic Church in these wobbly times is like reading a modern translation of the Bible, which, in turn, as Dwight Macdonald noted in a famous essay, is like walking through an old city that has just been given, if not a saturation bombing, a thorough going-over...

...We are impotent as a result...

...There is congregational handshaking, the "sign of peace," a renewal of chumminess...

...Does that still survive...

...Whatever else they may lack, they have one important thing going for them: They believe in something...

...But on this occasion I was spared even that, because all the doors to the church were locked (on a Sunday afternoon...

...This in turn would rescue us from the horns of the M a r x i s t / m a t e r i a l i s t dilemma...

...Capitalism, formerly buoyed up by the "ethic" of hard work, by the ideology of freedom and voluntarism, for some peculiar reason now finds itself bereft of ideological justification...

...But snobbishness is excusable in a Cardinal, and there are in any event worse vices...

...Yet how poor Teddy is suffering...

...Surprisingly the old Credo III still survives in that wonderful melody from the seventeenth century (the music of an age of belief...

...Doctrines of containment, missiles, armies, even gunboats, are of no avail...

...But now a new force has risen, to return at last to the mullahs and the ayatollahs: a reactivated Islam...

...In consequence, they have adopted as their "role model" the only ideology currently in sight: egalitarianism, "social justice," the ideology of Marx...

...We've put the second commandment before the first," he said...

...He has become a skittish cad, awaiting orders from the higtl and mighty...

...For some time I have been telling people that I would happily return to the fold if only I could find a mass in Latin (no need to dwell here on the PULPITS, AND KNAVES unwisdom of translating the liturgy into humdrum vernacular) and did not have to sit through too many sermons on the theme of Social Justice...

...For those in the dark, this mid-60s gathering, convened, by Pope John, was "captured" by left-leaning clerics who then succeeded in imposing their belief that the ecclesiastical compass was in error, meaning that the Church's course would have to change, which was not very encouraging for those like myself~and we must have numbered in the millions-who had grown up contentedly under the ancient regime and could see no reason o t h e r than a p e r v e r s e neophili.a for changing it...

...He, alas, recently departed for Rome, where he will no doubt find many important tasks awaiting him...

...Christianity has been immensely weakened and divided by its (halfhearted) flirtation with Marxism, a philosophy which, however godless, has somehow managed to convey the illusion of possessing a morality superior to the "meaningless materialism" of the West...

...Such sermons are unappealing because they put too much emphasis on the material world and so tacitly repudiate the spiritual...

...The Beverly Hills boobs of liberal sensibility and their trendy kind all across the United States, its protectorates, and the isle of Majorca are sending their checks to Anderson...

...Somehow this was not a reassuring sight...

...6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980...

...The thing is an extravaganza of incoherence...

...Sometimes I enter churches experimentally...

...I have now been to the cathedral on a number of occasions, and the one constant throughout all services is this dogged feminist (certainly not feminine) presence: a rotation of grizzly ladies who read the lesson and then return to their lookout post in th( lee of the altar, which seems to be a kind of beachhead established for tim silent proclamation of grievance, a vantage point from which its occupants gaze out over the congregation with an air of injured righteousness...

...at bay...

...but throughout the West) are largely atheist...

...C J n e Sunday 1 made my way up to the vast, incomplete, imitation-Gothic National Cathedral, a citadel of ecumenicism, where the clergymen are in general more eager to stress THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 5 what they don't believe than what they do...

...After an awkward pause, the young man beside me evidently decided to grant me "observer status" and moved forward to usherout the next pew...

...They may even embolden him into running on a third part}' ticket...

...Churchmen, who I suppose have always been more under the thumb of intellectual sponsorship than would seem to be strictly necessary, have taken note...

...Last autumn I returned to my old school in England--Downside--run by Benedictine monks...

...Thinking about this, I was struck by an observation in a book called East and West by C. Northcote Parkinson (he was writing about the Crusades): "The onset of one religion can be resisted only by another...

...He ought not to be denied political and financial support because of the fickleness of the Victorian Gent, whose enthusiasm has d i v e r t e d the Left to Anderson...

...Happily, though, St...

...I believe" has become "we believe," a concession to collectivism...

...Matthew's Cathedral had a Latin mass at ten a.m., so I went...

...That is an effective summary of the post-Vatican II Church...

...And so our so-called liberals cross the line and vote for him...

...They usually read from the "letter of Paul"--not epistle, not Saint Paul--and always in some atrocious, bulldozed translation...

...Someone told me that St...

...This spring the order is to whoop it up for the sermons of Parson Anderson...

...Shortly thereafter I made good my escape...

...I was expected t(~ start things moving, to lead the procession to the table, since the enfilade began, evidently, with the rear-most pew...

...A deliverer of fluent, intelligent sermons, Baum in some ways reminded me of an old-fashioned Fnglish catholic-much given to hobnobbing with diplomats...

...There the businesslike minister sat enthroned in front of his counting house, consisting of a folding table around which stood a covey of eager deacons, ready to scoop up the offertory and arrange it in orderly green piles...

...These patriots will keep Anderson following in the well-trod path of old Quixote for weeks to come...

...Matthew's is relatively free of this-worldy sermons, social gospel, and socialist claptrap...

...The thing too often revolves around nothing more than petty complaints and hysterical premonitions...

...I decided it was high time that I too retraced my steps, back toward the Catholic Church from which I had strayed years ago not so much in a spirit of apostasy as of disillusionment with the doctrinal confusion that seems to have so weakened the Church ever since the Second Vatican Council...

...This tells us too plainly that there is no rival Western ideology at present...

...You do not feel they are worshipping God so much as asserting their rights...

...When offered the opportunity, some even vote for him, holding their noses and voting in the party of Coolidge for the first time in their lives...

...That is why a handful of grubby militants in Teheran can so easily hold the U.S...

...Here would be an act of political onanism, yet in committing such an act the ritualistic liberals would be acting in perfect character...

...I would hope also not to hear anything at all about "human rights," whatever they may be...

...A hundred curious heads turned toward the door, my entrance appraised by stout, starched matrons under floral hats...

...Clearly, at present, we have no response to it...

...U] ALTARS, With mullahs, popes, and ayatollahs on the move once again (dare one hope this spells an end to the misnamed Enlightenment...

...I attended high mass one Sunday (not that it's so "high" any more) to find the ranks thinned "(student attendance being now voluntary), the Gregorian Chant disrupted by modern insertions, the former unity dispersed, and an actual mention of "economic justice" in the course of a sermon...

...Onanism has been at the heart of the liberal enterprise for some years...

...Material prosperity, it turns out, is not a cause people are prepared to die for...

...So we are confronted by bleak alternatives, as the editor of the Times of London, William ReesMogg, noted in his recent book, An Humbler Heaven: on the one hand, the "false doctrine of Marxism," on the other "the meaningless postChristian materialism of the West...

...Perceiving this lack of faith, churchmen have felt leaderless, demoralized, unnerved...

...He told me that the monastic community had been agitated by all the ecclesiastical changes...

...Surely they might have spared that...

...One looks about anxiously...

...They won't even build a modern cathedral with a nave going straight back, evidently...

...It makes for a disconcerting experience to sit in this vast, and usually empty, nave, and observe the skewed perspective facing you...

...Obviously neither high-mindedness nor love of reason have had anything to do with their orgies for nearly a decade, maybe longer...

...But much of the church music now is feeble in the extreme (how dispiriting it is to see in the hymnal that the composer was "b...

...Today's liberal is inimical to most of the founding principles of liberalism...

...It is a most curious piece of architecture, with the long nave not quite at right angles with the transept...

...The picture of lean, black-cowled asceticism, he stood outside Downside Abbey with a brisk wind blowing and clouds flying in the buttresses...

...Now comes the "onset" oflslam, and it may yet save us, by summoning forth the more militant Christianity that will undoubtedly be needed to resist it...

...It is the same with the mass...

...Looked upon from above, then, the plan of the church is a slight dogl e g - a n architectural embodiment of the contemporary ecclesiastical disarray if there ever was one...

...Imagine, here is the liberal worth}' devoted to tolerance, yet he fills his waking hours by demanding an end to smoking in public places, an ea~d to scientific inquiry into areas placed beyond the pale by his archbishops, the extinction of the term " M r s . , " and a thousand more importunities trivial and not so trivial...

...I took a rear pew as the minister, wearing a three-piece business suit, began a lengthy fund-raising " p a t t e r , " accompanied by organ crescendi, piano fortes, drums atoll, whooping and weeping--the whole pitch reaching a climax (with cymbals by Tom Bethell crashing and suspenseful sevenths trilling in the organ loft) when I came to . . . and found that a well dressed young usher, tall and dapper-suited, stood expectantly beside my pew and was urging me altarwards...

...we no longer do...

...Clerics with intellectual pretensions have often found it desirable to base their activities on an idea with at least a modicum of intellectual sponsorship, no matter how atheistic it might be...

...Now--to return to America--it seems to me that the cause of all this clerical vacillation, the flirting with "liberation theology," the appease...

...1924"): hymns to vacillation, uncertainty, weakness, and doubt, with will-o'-the-wisp Debussy-like harmonies, surely concocted in experimental music schools and supported by matching funds from the government...

...went 1o a black Baptist church in Georgetown (a former working class, now f a s h i o n a b l e , neighborhood, where church attendance reflects the old living arrangements...

...This is modern day liberalism in all its beauty, an exercise in self-gratification...

...Even so, it comes as a pleasant surprise to find that the Apostle has survived at all in this materialist age...

...ment or outright imitation of Marxism, is that our intellectual elites (not just in the U.S...

...From the church door, so to speak, one is directed straight to HEW...

...One Sunday evening I Tom Bethellis The American Spectator's Washington columnist...

...Love Thy Neighbor has taken precedence over Love God...

...For this I imagine we have to thank the Cardinal, William Baum...

...After church 1 spoke to Dom Hubert Van Zeller, an old teacher who has since spent years in America and written many books ("two more than Agatha Christie," he told me...

...The papal reappearance, after decades of hibernation in the Vatican, onlo the stage of public events suggests that this Christian revitalization may at last be underway--and not a moment tOO soon...

...Heads were beginning to turn in my direction once again, with a great bobbing and nodd;ng of artificial cherries atop hats...

...He changes his enthusiasms with the seasons...

...We shall miss him, and I shall certainly be praying that he will not be replaced by the Bishop from Tallahassee who appeared in the pulpit one day and delivered himself of some very peculiar opinions, including the verdict that the seizure of the hostages in Iran was an act of "revolutionary justice...

...The first thing that struck me was the presence of a gray-haired lady, berobed, ensconced right next to the altar...

...He is a champion of democracy, yet he thumps fl~r placing ever more areas of governance under the claw of unelected bureaucracies and unelected judges...

...Is this gone...

...And there really isn't...