A Dirty, Jovial and Unscrupulous Crew

Reading through the accumulation of modernist novels one has gathered over the years of graduate school is much like a slow and careful mining operation. One might occasionally find a rich vein of valuable ore, but must be careful of cave-ins, pockets of poison gas, and societies of mole men. I had never read much of Ford Madox Ford's fiction before now, just part of a science fiction collaboration with Joseph Conrad and a few essays. The Good Soldier is probably Ford's most famous novel, a story about bourgeois indolence and cuckoldry. The narrator is the victim of his wife's infidelity and of his friend Edward's apparent trustworthiness. While the novel is not especially worthy of the attention it has received, one passage jumped out at me as I was desperate to find anything memorable within:

I have given you a wrong impression if I have not made you see that Leonora [Edward's wife] was a woman of a strong, cold conscience, like all English Catholics. (I cannot, myself, help disliking this religion; there is always, at the bottom of my mind, in spite of Leonora, the feeling of shuddering at the Scarlet Woman, that filtered in upon me in the tranquility of the little old Friends' Meeting House in Arch Street, Philadelphia.)[...] For Edward was great at remorse. But Leonora's English Catholic conscience, her rigid principles, her coldness, even her very patience, were, I cannot help thinking, all wrong in this special case. She quite seriously and naïvely imagined that the Church of Rome disapproves of divorce; she quite seriously and naïvely believed that her church could be such a monstrous and imbecile institution as to expect her to take on the impossible job of making Edward Ashburnham a faithful husband. She had, as the English would say, the Nonconformist temperament. In the United States of North America we call it the New England conscience. For, of course, that frame of mind has been driven in on the English Catholics. The centuries that they have gone through—centuries of blind and malignant oppression, of ostracism from public employment, of being, as it were, a small beleagured garrison in a hostile country, and therefore having to act with great formality—all these things have combined to perform that conjuring trick. And I suppose that Papists in England are even technically Nonconformists.

Ford himself was a Catholic, at least at one time. He had been received into the Church at the age of nineteen (1892), but by the writing of this novel his marriage had fallen apart and he and his lover attempted unsuccessfully to secure German citizenship in order to procure a divorce. To Ford's credit, I suppose, he never exploited his fellow Catholics as a readership like the pseudo-Catholic Graham Greene later would. His bitterness about the Church's doctrine against divorce and remarriage makes The Good Soldier an interesting kind of anti-Catholic propaganda, and also grants readers a glimpse into his own soul.

The passage continues:

Continental Papists are a dirty, jovial and unscrupulous crew. But that, at least, lets them be opportunists. They would have fixed poor dear Edward up all right.

Perhaps this is true or perhaps it is wishful thinking. Leonora's Irish Catholicism (her religion is described alternately as English and Irish) has the kind of strength that comes from embattlement, and those who have lived for years comfortable in the practice of their faith do tend to slouch into laxity. Certainly the slothfulness of our own days bears this out.

I have no idea if Ford, like Conrad, finally died reconciled to the Church. There is little indication he cared to move past the "feeling of shuddering" at the thought of Papistry or to repent of his war against marriage.

"The Good of Truly Diverse Pluralism"

Padre J.J.

Two months ago I made the mistake of visiting a local parish wherein the popular Pauline Novelty Mass is celebrated. This parish, advertised as St. Rita Catholic Community, and boasting a rather sizable campus, went somewhat beyond the banal and into the offensive in its celebration of newness and undeserved familiarity. I will not bore our readers with the details, since they are as common as they were repulsive, but I thought of SRCC when I noticed the publication of an opinion piece concerning our new bishop by its so-called pastoral administrator, Rev. Joshua Jair Whitfield.

Padre J.J.'s article, "Why the new bishop of Dallas matters, even if you aren't Catholic," is rather dull and generic piece of brown-nosing until the end, where he drops this whopper:

This is the sort of city I believe in, a city of genuine diverse voices both secular and spiritual. It's a city in which I may grow under the wisdom of the Torah as well as the insights of the Hadith, sanctified in the teachings of Jesus as well as enlightened by the precise beauties of science. A city in which these voices come together as one chorus, not in any sort of tired blurred syncretism, but truly symphonic. A city in which each person keeps his or her authentic faith and authentic voice, speaking and bearing witness to it peacefully; each sharing the wisdom and insights of his or her traditions for the good of all. A truly diverse city: this is my vision, my hope and my prayer.

And I believe this new bishop will add to this chorus beautifully. Dallas is a city of remarkable men and women, remarkable leaders of faith. It's a city of civic and political leaders of good will and good argument. A city that doesn't hide its differences, it celebrates them as it struggles to live an ethics of dignity and fairness for all. It's a great city, great because of this diversity. It's a city we love.

Quite an insult to Bp. Burns, to suggest that the man considers himself the spokesman for just one spiritual voice among many "genuine diverse voices," rather than the local shepherd of the One Church outside of which one cannot be saved. At least, I have no particular reason to suspect His Excellency of indifferentism. No doubt his response to Padre J.J.'s doctrinally confusing article will be swift and clear, but merciful—after all, the good reverend is a former Anglican minister, and has a wife and children to support.

A disturbing stained glass window Padre J.J. contemplates daily at St. Rita's, courtesy of Mr. Lyle Novinski.

HJA Sire on the Recent Church

Bookends of an era look at each other.

Fr. Hunwicke continues to plug for H.J.A. Sire's Phoenix from the Ashes, a book about the decline and aspiring restoration of Western Catholic culture. While the book begins very factually and Eurocentric, it develops a broader and spiritual view of the Church and her influence on the West. I have only recently begun the book, but Sire's comments on the Church's last 120 years demand some reflection:

"When Leo XIII died in 1903, distinct progress had taken place in the intellectual life of the Church. Nevertheless, the revival of Thomism had among some an unintended consequence. These fell into treating St. Thomas's work not as a philosophical system but as a store from which infallible answers were to be extracted on any subject. While some were thus making Thomism the basis for innovative thought, others made it into a system that was unlikely to convince minds not predisposed to accept it. Partly for that reason, the extension of the Thomist approach beyond seminaries and its acquisition of a real influence on contemporary thought was not achieved." (137)

"The integrist frame of mind, now as a hundred years ago, may be defined as follows: its exponents are clericalist in their sympathies, and they were also strongly papalist until events since the 1960s forced them to shift their position. Their outlook is distinctly Western and relatively modern, tending to see the period from 1850 to 1958 as the norm of Catholic practice. They regard popes Pius IX, Pius X, and Pius XII as the models of what a pope ought to be, but (with due respect for their sacred office) really look upon Leo XIII and Pius XI as rather letting down the standards of papal authority. They show little sympathy with political and social pragmatism in the framing of religious policy. In philosophy, they hold to Thomism as the bastion of orthodoxy, to the extent of considering any lapse from the pure word of St. Thomas as inherently unsound." (139)

 "What can be said, however, was that [Pius X's] measures [against Modernism] were over-influenced by conditions in Italy, where Modernism was a pretentious, elusive, and even underhand phenomenon, and where there was, in parallel, a strong need to tighten standards in seminary training. In Italy, his measures may have been successful, but in the world as a whole they must be considered to have had a narrowing effect on the clerical intellect. Theologians need to be lean greyhounds, seeking out heresy and hunting it down; instead they became fat lap dogs, yapping foolishly at the enemy beyond the window. The results of Pius X's policy were seen in the Second Vatican Council, when two thousand bishops who had solemnly taken the anti-Modernist oath at their ordination were unable to recognize Modernism when it jumped up and bit them" (140)

"Journalistic opinion, remembering as always nothing beyond last week, worked to give [John XXIII's] reign the appearance of a new era, a distortion that has imposed itself ever since; but at the time those who remembered Pius XI and Leo XIII would have regarded his pontificate, apart from a certain naive optimism that distinguished it, as a return to a familiar style. Essentially, the reign of John XXIII is in the tradition of the period since 1814." (145)

"Linked with this clericalism was the dominance of a seminary-bound school of theology, losing something of the human fullness of earlier centuries. Thus, in natural theology there was a certain over-intellectualisation of the understanding of God, which lost sight of the potency of love as a divine attribute; akin to it, an over-spiritualisation of the doctrine of the Eucharist, obscuring the reality of physical union with Christ." (147)

Sire is fond of the post-Napoleonic period and even equates it with the revivals of the Middle Ages and Counter-Reformation, but also readily acknowledges that its limitations and drawbacks impeded it from influencing society and the Church in the same way.

The below documentary could be a primary source document for Sire's last observation. Ushaw, sadly, had to close a few years ago for lack of students. It had over 400 when this footage was filmed.

Buffalo Wings: Modernism as Food

Initially I hoped to write something about why traddie communities attract unusual demographics (the very young, more males than usual, eccentrics and the like), but instead find myself obligated by a friend to write about—of all things—the Buffalo Wing.

I have been to the supposed invention point of a great many American staples. The burger came from a sandwich shop in New Haven called Louis' Lunch, where they will defenestrate you should you ask for ketchup. The "Buffalo wing" was born at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York—an industrial town without any sort of industry left. The food was not exceptional, but it was the only place where I have tasted that most manly of foods—the chicken wing—without wrongly, or rightly, thinking I must have consumed the stale remains of a Cornish hen covered in processed sugar. The meat clearly came from a fully grown chicken and the sauce was meant as a compliment. Why did the "wing" descend to the depths of poultry of the masses so quickly? It is culinary Novus Ordoism!

Yes, we have all moaned about the "Novus Ordo" at some point and "what they do in the Novus Ordo" blah blah blah.... as if it were a place. It is a state of mind that not only blends new fangled ideas of dubious orthodoxy and orthopraxis, but it retains the folkish elements of religion from its day. I think if I went to the nearest neo-con parish and presented the idea of moving adoration half an hour later and concatenating Vespers into it, they would toss me out faster than they would if I were a Society cleric.

So is the same with the Buffalo chicken wing: it retains its hearty origins as American comfort food like New York pizza and the burger, but became bastardized by the frozen food department and the likes of Buffalo Wild "Wings" until it became as the pizza under Domino's and the burger under McDonald's. The difference is that I can still find a good burger and a good pizza. I cannot find a good wing anywhere. Quomodo sedet sola civitas.