Between hammer and anvil
Throughout the Western world we are stunned, perplexed, frightened. Radical Islam has come against us unexpectedly. Its power of reaching into our cities the finger of death, its glee in ruin and blood, its religious zealotry, have destroyed the slumber of our civilisation. We have been awakened from dreams of peace, plenty and pleasure by the roar of a nightmare reality.
“Why? And why us?” These are the questions we ask. We phrase them in the language of justice denied. We set them in tones of wounded innocence. We colour them with righteousness and sentimentality. We who have created the earthly paradise - and who want nothing but that others should enter into it - have been rejected. We who, for the common good, have brought history to an end, find our achievement despised and the engines of history set whirring again. Were it not tragic, we Westerners would make in our confusion a pathetic spectacle.
Key to history
For an answer to the questions raised by every Islamic bomb, we might turn aside from the empanelled commentariat, and enter for a moment into a Benedictine monastery. The day is Saturday; the hour Lauds; the monks are chanting.
Ipsi me provocaverunt in eo, qui non erat Deus, et irritaverunt in vantibus suis:
Et ego provocabo eos in eo, qui non est populus, et in gente stulta irritabo illos.(“They have provoked me with a false god and angered me with their vanities:
So I will provoke them with a false people and vex them with a foolish nation.”)
The ‘educated’ westerner
would likely dismiss it. “The music is haunting and lovely. But the text
propagates an ancient and dangerous myth about the jealous God of the Jews and
how he set Egyptians and Babylonians against his own people when they took a
legitimate interest in other ‘spiritual realities’. Well, we know that there
is no God – and, if there were a God or gods, we would have no room for the
jealous kind. Jealous gods mean war, and we
are men of peace. The cultural imperative for today is to put an end to
religions based upon gods who will brook no rival.”
But the Canticle of Moses that
the monks are singing contains not only religious doctrine about the one God and
his exclusive worship. It also contains a sociology of strife between peoples
and nations. Nations are related to one another by their virtues and vices: and
the vices of each bring them into collision with one another.
The presumption, greed, complacency, self-obsession, infidelity, sexual perversity and child murder practiced by one culture calls forth first the resentment, then the hatred, and finally the violence of another marked by pride, vanity, envy, spite, grievance, and fratricide.
Law of conflict
The law of equal and opposite reactions is not confined to the physical realm. It applies also in the social, political, and cultural spheres; it operates within communities and between peoples and nations. Atheism and moral relativism on one side calls forth religious fanaticism and puritanism on the other. In one culture the idealisation of human loves finds expression in another as the celebration of hatreds. Among one people the cult of life here-and-now finds its response among another people as a cult of death. Such are the elemental forces that underlie conflict between nations. Each threatens its own chastisement – to use the biblical term – by drawing down upon itself the enmity of others with opposite vices.
So when Mr. Average Westerner
looks horrified upon the sight of his own bloodied and mangled flesh, he blames
radical Islam – and, of course, radical Islam is the immediate cause. But it
is not the root of the evil. We ourselves are the ultimate cause of our agonies.
In a certain sense, such injuries as we have suffered are self nflicted. By denying God and his law, we
have sown the whirlwind, and have reaped its harvest.
The condition of the Catholic Church in the western world figures centrally in these misfortunes. Within hours of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington voices were raised decrying religion and, in particular, the Catholic Church. It is, certain intellectuals claimed, the real cause of all our woes and as such a fit object of hatred and of warfare. Books of revelation, faith, orthodoxies, the very name of God, must be expunged.
Correlation of opposites
Here Oriens takes part with the intellectuals. They are right, up to a point. Religion is indeed the problem; and the Catholic Church is the problem-in-chief. However, it is not that we believe too much or too ardently. The issue is that we believe too little and with too little fire. The ferocious certainties of fundamentalist Islam, its infatuation with martyrdom, and its lively expectation of an erotic heaven, provides the perfect counterpoise to the Catholic faith as it is lived and believed in the Western world: its few remaining beliefs tentatively held; its evasion of death, suffering, and sacrifice; its pre-occupations with sexual liberty in this life and its vague hopes of a spiritual heaven in which personal identities fade away. Even the stormy mullahs of Islam serve as an exquisite correlative to the studied hesitancy and, in some cases, downright unbelief to be found among the Western Catholic clergy. Many are the bishops and priests for whom the passion of the Christ, and its unbloody representation in the Mass, are an embarrassment. Many too are those who will not declare with the Apostles that “Jesus” is the only Name under heaven by which men can be saved. It is, then, on account of the infidelity by Catholics – on account of our flirtation with apostasy - that times such as these have broken upon the West.
Unfortunately, our political and religious leaders do not see it this way. The former are preoccupied with ensuring that the latter are joined in syncretic embrace with mullahs and rabbis, and the latter are all too ready to oblige. If, however, Presidents and Prime Ministers really understood what was happening, and if they really had the interests of their countries at heart, they would be putting the hard word on the Catholic bishops:
Why aren’t your churches full of praying and fasting people? Where is your Blessed Sacrament, and where your processions? Where are your ancient symbols and rituals? Why do you not deploy them and invoke a blessing on us and the gift of wisdom? Where are your monks and nuns, their houses of austere life, and the daily round of prayer that would surely move God to mercy and to our help? Why have you allowed your spiritual arms to go rusty when their exercise is what makes for peace between nations and harmony within the state?
We dream of course. There is no one to ask such questions, and if there were, few who could understand them.
Hammer and anvil
It is just possible then that we Catholics have much further to
fall, and greater things to suffer, before we understand how far we have
betrayed the blood of Christ and repent of it. Turning points and New
Pentecosts are frequently sighted and announced. Oriens does not doubt that the
future is full of good things that it cannot now see. But when official organs
report, for example, that in
So there is no hope? Not at all.
Even at this late stage, the
course of history can be changed. Each one of us can start today by rejecting
the post- Conciliar revolution and emulating our Catholic ancestors in their
ways of life, in their worship, and in their faith. The only thing that could
stop us is fear of what others might say. In fact the distance between where we
are now, and where we could be in a moment from now, is not very great at all:
just the distance between our knees and the floor.
“Veni sancte
Spiritus…”
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