The Neros of the Western World
During the night of
June 18 in the year 64 fires broke out in Rome; they were soon out of control
and over the next nine days destroyed more than half the city.
Some said that the Emperor Nero, or his
agents, had set the fires, others that he celebrated the spectacle by declaiming
an ode on the destruction of Troy. Whatever the truth, Nero had reason to
deflect blame for the disaster from himself. So he had Christians, who were
popularly detested, rounded up and some of them convicted as incendiaries –
not, according to Tacitus, "upon clear evidence of their having set the
city on fire, but rather on account of their sullen hatred of the whole human
race.”
Since the arenas had been damaged in the
catastrophe, Nero turned his private gardens on the Vatican Hill into a
temporary circus and there the Christians died terrible deaths. Some of them,
covered with pitch and sulphur, were set on fire to provide torch light for the
grotesque evening spectacle. It was so horrifying that even the Romans were
shocked. In fact, sentiment turned in favour of the Christians because few
people were under any illusions about why these people had died. As Tacitus put
it, "it was evident, that they fell a sacrifice, not for the public good,
but to glut the rage and cruelty of one man only." Nero’s human candles
signalled the beginning a long series of persecutions that were not to end until
313 with Constantine’s Edict of Milan.
It is now 2002 and on September 11 last
year, in the cities of New York and Washington, there were other explosions and
fires, other buildings collapsed and other thousands died. While the cause of
the Roman conflagration is a matter of speculation, we know for certain that
that of September 11 was planned and executed by agents acting on the orders of
a high command. It was, moreover, a high command inspired by hatred and
possessed of notions about itself, and about the rest of humanity, which border
on madness. Like an echo of that earlier time, those responsible for these
events, and their ideological kith and kin, delighted in the spectacle and
cheered the deaths.
There is one difference, however, between
the events of September 11, 2001 and those of June 18, 64. The people who have
been blamed for the destruction of the World Trade Centre have not really tried
to hide their guilt, while some who noisily proclaim themselves victims of this
crime labour to shift blame from the guilty onto an innocent people who are
alleged, just as in Roman times, to be unbending misanthropes.
In this edition of Oriens we look at a certain kind of reaction to the events of
September 11 among a section of the Western intellectual elite (see page 4). These are people who argue that religions
which claim to be based upon a revelation – and Christianity in particular -
are as much responsible for September 11 as the peculiar strain of Islamic
radicalism which motivated those who conceived and carried out the attacks on
New York and Washington.
New Rome, new Neros
There is a certain kind of Western intellectual who, in a perverse way, appears to exult in the actions of Islamic terrorists. These prove to the radical Western secularist that the great semitic religions are evil, and the Christian faith above all.
It is not that these antagonists of
religion are bothered either by Islam or Judaism as such. For the genuine
rationalist these are subjects unfit even for idle curiosity. The Christian
religion, however, is another matter. It occupies their thoughts; it fills them
with dread; and they have it always in their sights. In the end, all the great
religions are their enemy because, in a world where religion flourishes, there
is space for the one they most fear, the Christian religion. The modern
secularist preaches multiculturalism and spiritual eclecticism. But his
doctrines are sham.For the
clear-sighted rationalist these are weapons in the war against religion. They
are instruments designed to weaken it. They are tools fashioned to deprive
religion of influence in culture, society, and political life. For the apostles
of a radically secularist world order, there is only one tolerable religion and
that is an emasculated one. While they proclaim tolerance and peace, they intend
neither tolerance nor peace for Christians. As their own words testify, the
Christian religion is the ultimate, legitimate object of hatred and a thing
against which to levy war. Just as the old Nero blamed the Christians for the
fires of Rome because it suited his interests, so the new Neros of the Western
world blame Christians for September 11 because it serves the interest of their
unfinished war against the Christian faith.
This war began with the Enlightenment and
found its highest 18th Century exponent in Maximilian Robespierre who employed
state terrorism and judicial murder against Catholics and other "enemies of
the Revolution". His children have popped up regularly since that time,
especially in the 20th Century. Some appeared in the guise of Nazi or
Communist. But much more important have been the direct inheritors of the
Enlightenment and French Revolutionary traditions such as the
‘constitutionalist’ revolutionaries of Mexico and the Spanish Republicans
both of which movements used systematic murder against Catholic priests,
religious, and laity. Many of these Mexican and Spanish martyrs have been
canonised in recent years by Pope John Paul II.
The foe within
These events are a sharp reminder that the
greatest enemies of the Christian Faith do not come, as it were, from
‘outside’ the mainstream of Western culture and society. Both the Nazis and
the Communists were essentially ‘outsiders’ who pitted themselves against
the dominant liberal-rationalist ‘insiders’ - though this did not exclude
alliances of convenience such as in the Spanish Civil War, between Republicans
and Communists, and in the Second World War, between the Western democracies and
the Soviet Union. Notwithstanding these, the Second World War and the Cold War
were, in fact, titanic struggles in which the ‘insiders’ were pitted,
successively, against the ‘outsiders’, and in each case the ‘insiders’
destroyed their great rivals. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 there was
rejoicing in the West among secularists and Christians that the Soviet empire
had collapsed. But Catholics with a deeper historical memory might have
reflected that the comprehensive victory of the Enlightenment tradition created
an opportunity for its more radical exponents to resume unfinished business.
September 11 and its aftermath have
confirmed the truth of this insight.
How the next great persecution of
Christians in the West will unfold, or the timing thereof, can only be guessed.
The methods, however, are already evident. State-sponsored bloody persecutions will be
unlikely. Catholics will face, instead, the ‘dry’ martyrdom of exclusion
from public life, from business, from the professions, and, in the long run,
from economic activity itself - though long before we have to face this
‘final’ measure, we will have been judged on our fitness to enter society at
large according to tests which have already been set. The defining issues are
where we stand on abortion, on euthanasia, on in
vitro fertilisation, and on the nature of
marriage and the family.
The big question then is neither when nor how these things will come to pass, but how
might we stay the hand of persecution or face up to it when it comes. The answer is holiness.
Much could be written on the theme of
holiness and its relation to suffering and persecution. Suffice it here to make
two points. First, in connection with the wider Church, we can see that in the
West she is in desperate need of holiness but is ‘in denial’. So perhaps for
this Church the only road to ‘acceptance’ and to holiness is through the
fire of persecution. Secondly, in relation to the traditional liturgy movement,
the only truly compelling justification for its existence is holiness of life,
lived (as it only can be lived) within the context of right belief and worship.
These two issues are related. Because the
classical liturgical tradition served for all the saints as the great door
opening onto the pathways of holiness, then the recovery and re-opening of this
splendid gateway would be of immense advantage to a troubled and imperilled
Church. Consequently, in this decisive moment, the
disposition of Catholics attached to the great tradition is crucial. If the
quest for holiness were not to inspire the whole movement and if, instead, it
were to slip into cultural chauvinism, then it, and its members, would pass from
history deservedly unlamented and remembered only as a reproach.
