“I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how such a fraud
could become president.”
“Neither do I.”
“People must be that stupid.”
“Of course they are! They don’t work in business.”
“They don’t believe anything.”
“No, they’ll believe anything.”
“He can’t win.”
“We can’t let him win.”
“He won’t win.”
“Stop him at any cost!”
So developed a group therapy session in a well-appointed
finance manager’s office across the hall from my own office. Four or five sons
of white baby-boomers, degreed and earning low six-figure salaries,
commiserated over the ascendance of Donald Trump. I probed them gently:
“Have you ever considered that Trump is a symptom and not a
cause?”
“No, never.”
“Yep, he’s caused everything wrong with this country, or at
least 99% of it.”
I continued, “Have we perhaps left the Republican politics
of the ‘90s and you don’t see it?”
“Nope.”
“Absolutely not!”
“We know what it takes to win.”
“We can’t win with him.”
“He won’t win.”
“We cannot let him win!”
“Is it too late for a third party?”
“The Weekly Standard
is promising a neo-conservative independent. If not, it’s the libertarians.”
“I don’t care about marijuana, bitcoin, or Ron Paul, though.
Maybe I’ll stay home.”
“Good choice.”
“Yes.”
* * *
The fact is that the Republican party of 1984 and of 1994 is
over. Whatever cultural currency Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” or reform
legacy Newt Gingrich left behind is long spent and structural Republicans
cannot come to grips with the change. No Republican is going to win the
Hispanic vote by putting the son of a Cuban immigrant on stage. The antiquated
political calculus epitomized by Karl Rove lives twenty years in the past. It
does not understand the populist rise of Trump on the right and Sanders on the
left, nor does it want to. It is too narrow, too content seeing the narrow path
within its blinders to realize its burden has been lightened and its passengers
have begun to traverse the streets themselves.
There is nothing particularly remarkable about Donald
Trump’s policy positions. His “America first” attitude reflected the general
American outlook until George Bush decided it was America’s responsibility to
engender democracy among the Muhammadans. Several other candidates wanted to
build a wall bordering Mexico. Trump’s brashness makes him popular. It attracts
the frustrations of marginalized white, middle-class men who have found
themselves marginalized by university politics, hiring preference programs, and
the chilling of free speech by media shaming. As “alt right” diva Milo
Yiannopoulos points out, it almost does not matter what Trump thinks; his
supporters project their desires onto him. Trump and his less potent Democrat
counter-part, Bernie Sanders, reflect a reinvention of the American political
paradigm. The conventional “conservative vs. liberal” contrast, “limited
government” vs. FDR’s welfare state narrative is over. The future paradigm will
pit the nationalist against the arrant socialist, which has been emerging in
Europe for nearly decades.
No reformer has ever accomplished anything by engaging
existing structures as they are. No one has ever beaten the hometown referee
and the hometown team. Reform changes the narrative as much as it changes the
policy. Only the soulless are convinced by listening to calm, considered public
debate. Men are instinctively passionate and vigorous beings who want to
channel their energy to some worthwhile purpose. The most successful reformers
in both State and Church did not offer ideas, they offered movements.
Gregory the Great was an unwitting leader of reform. A son
of an ancient Roman family and former imperial governor of the city, he retired
and adopted the then rural monastic life of St. Benedict within his family
home. After the death of Pelagius II, the clergy and populace of Rome elected
Archdeacon Gregory their new bishop. He was drawn into St. Peter’s basilica and
consecrated to the sacred episcopate. Upon his accession to the Petrine chair
one could imagine most plotters concerned themselves with their deteriorating
position with Byzantium, the ambitions of the archbishop of Constantinople, the
threat of barbarian raids, the effects of plague, and the role of the papacy in
governing the city of Rome. Remarkably, almost none of Gregory’s legacy could
be ascribed to addressing the concerns of his day directly. Gregory enriched
the Roman See’s liturgy with a few oriental ornaments, he reserved the Pater to the celebrant, he added five
words to the Canon of Mass, and he moved the pax. Gregory promoted monasticism by setting the seeds for
contemplative life within the diocese of Rome, giving several communities at a
time access to the great churches of Rome; a century later St. Peter’s basilica
would be served by three monasteries before evolving into canonries. While he
protected his See’s historical prerogatives against the “ecumenical bishop” of
New Rome, he generally removed himself from Imperial politics. Above all,
Gregory saw in monasticism a way of leading Christian life unspoiled by the
temptations of “vanity”, as he described St. Benedict’s motives for leaving
“the world.” In sending monks rather than Roman priests to the Anglos, Gregory
showed the world a higher form of Christianity, one focused intently on God
rather than on Greek politics, on the heavenly court rather than the imperial.
Gregory’s fasting took his life, but he left treasure upon earth. In the
following centuries the Byzantine papacy had ended, the Empire receded, and
Europe left in a Dark Age illuminated only by the monks Gregory had dispersed
throughout Europe who worshipped God with the Eucharistic Canon the saint
codified.
Four centuries later the son of a blacksmith found himself
in the backwaters of Christendom. Far from the gilded walls of the Hagia
Sophia, in decrepit Rome he entrusted himself to a priest named Gratian for
instruction. The City and the See of Rome were nominally ruled by the Bishops
of Rome, but in fact had been under the consistent influence of a series of
whorish female nobility who realized the potency of women’s sexual prowess. Papal
reigns last until family feuds made the Roman ordinaries expendable, usually a
few years. The priest Gratian’s despicable nephew, Benedict IX—who one
historian described as a “demon from hell disguised as a priest”—sold the
papacy to his pious uncle—all too happy to remove the whelp from the papacy—and
then reclaimed it by arms when his would-be suitor turned him away. The emperor
sacked them both, as well as two other claimants. Hildebrand, the blacksmith’s
son and Gratian’s student, took refuge in the monastery of Cluny, singing four
Offices a day, before returning to Rome years later as Archdeacon. From his
vantage as counsel to the popes he influenced several attempted reformers who
were inevitably still beholden to the Frankish emperor and the Roman
aristocracy. At Pope Alexander’s funeral fortune smiled. Ugo Candidus, the
Cardinal-Priest of St. Clement, who would later oppose Hildebrand, took to the
ambo at the Lateran Cathedral and incited the masses, “Let Hildebrand be pope!”
The crowd followed the priest’s inspiration and un-canonically elected
Hildebrand by acclamation. The Archdeacon hid in a monastery, fitting at the
church of S. Petri ad vincula, until
he was found and compelled to accept election; after ordination and
consecration, he took the regnal name Gregory VII and began a reforming program
worthy of his namesake, if more deliberate than his namesake’s.
Brooks Adams, a long descendant of the second and sixth
American presidents, summarizes Gregory VII’s papacy in depicting Henry IV’s
reconciliation after spending days on his knees in the frigid winter outside
the papal residence. Gregory carried a consecrated host to Henry, fractured it,
consumed a portion, and pressed the other to the king’s lips; Henry dared not
consume it under excommunication, lest he exacerbate his sins with the offence
of sacrilege. To the secularist Adams, Gregory’s gesture represented the
triumph of superstition. In fact it represented a small victory in a longer
path to reform, but the most significant of all victories. For nearly two
centuries small towns leaned on monasteries for spiritual direction and Eastern
Churches heard nothing from Rome while the popes were the play things of minor
nobles and harlots who readily liquidated the incumbents when their position
grew tiresome. Pope Hildebrand’s triumph over Emperor Henry, not unlike the
modern political changes energy industry financiers cannot swallow, made that
paradigm obsolete. If the pope could excommunicate the Emperor and “win” then
the Duke of Spoleto’s position in the Curia was no longer relevant.
Perhaps no Latin Church reform better represents the
importance of new narratives than the various rebirths of religious orders. Save
the Order of Preachers, most religious orders purified themselves by fracturing
into the existing group and the purified, new branch more attuned with the
earlier spirituality. Effectively, the multiplication of monastic orders in the
Middle Ages were attempts to isolate the monks from the communitarian and
administrative elements that pervaded medieval Benedictine spirituality,
especially in abbeys descended from the Cluniacs. Indeed, the Order of
Carmelites Discalced and the founding saints of that order—John of the Cross
and Teresa of Avila—are blessed with a greater renown in the Latin Church than
the original Carmelites of Ancient Observance and any of its associated saints.
Succinctly, true reform and renewal does not address
symptoms of the problem that contemporaries see, but introduce new fluids and
cells into the body that treat the real diseases in the Church. Traditionalists
wield the twin rapiers of the Roman liturgical patrimony and reproduction and
they use neither effectively in combatting diseases in Latin Christianity
because too often they refuse to look beyond the fever and when they caught it
in the high-flying plane of Vatican II. The “Conciliar” clergy will continue to
hold the upper hand in any conversation about the Second Vatican Council and
any discussion of liturgical revival as long as the options are between parish
life in 2016 and 1956. They play a game against the referees and cry “foul
play.” Above all, traditionalists fail to do what previous reformers and
revivers of the Church did, that is, produce great saints for their cause whose
fruits cannot be ignored. Archbishop Lefebvre’s legacy is the only one of any
post-1965 traditionalist that even has enough following to cause the faithful
to seek his posthumous intercession.
Breaking from the established narrative is difficult. Past
Romans watched the papacy whither for years before Hildebrand emerged. In
modern times, “conservative” politicians have struggled to express any reason
for voters to support them outside of “low taxes, limited government,
pro-Israel.” Traditionalists may well have to swallow the Second Vatican
Council if they desire to better the Church Universal beyond the walls of Dulcis Devotio Traditional Latin Mass
Chapel. Self-enclosed communities are like blinders on a horse, they leave a
very intensely focused view on very little. Like the Cluniac monasteries of the
Dark Ages, such communities stabilized people’s spiritual fluctuations during
the turbulent years of Paul VI and the John Pauls. The situational standing of
“Latin Mass chapels,” under diocesan auspices or otherwise, is unlikely to
improve one way or another. Yet, they are established and their places unlikely
to change. Cognizant of the tranquility of these places, provided they do not
go out of their way to anger their ordinaries, it is time for traditionalists
to look at other means of breaking the narrative and the established order.
As mentioned earlier, the two strengths of the
traditionalist movement are its liturgy and its numbers, especially as far as
vocations and multiplication of the human species. While these elements seem
potent, only a minute percentage, even of men in the traditionalist sphere, are
willing to dedicate their lives to the proliferation of the “liturgical books
of 1962.” The Church will not benefit from a return to the “old ways” and an
age long gone, but she may well benefit from a return of the old ways.
Communities and orders founded on basic, established
practices unfettered by modern compromises that happen to use the old liturgy have proven far more successful than
communities crafted on lollipop theology which exist to enable the 1962 Missal
and 1961 Divine Office. A new Benedictine monastery seemingly opens every other
year in France. Indeed, in a Christendom with Mount Athos and the Egyptian
Anchorites, Christian monasticism thrives nowhere in the world like it does in
modern France. These Benedictine monks do not operate schools, charge for
spiritual weekend retreats, or even utilize a central air conditioning system.
Their houses are cold stone hulks replete with sons of St. Benedict focused on
God and singing the Latin psalms all the day long. More than the Atlantic Ocean
separates Fontgombault from Collegeville.
The Franciscans of the Immaculate had the potential to be
another modern example of genuine revival if not for the unilateral change of
liturgies on the part of their leadership without consulting older members of
the order and if not for the arrant blindness of their female leaders. Complain
about Fr. Volpi and the Pope all you want, the same Vatican that suppressed the
FFI also confirmed the constitutions of the ICRSS and may well sanitize the
FSSPX without requiring anything of them.
Another area where traditionalists should excel, and which
the established authorities wish they could, is in serving others through
outreach and missionary work. In his 1990 series of spiritual vignettes, Nearer My God, William F. Buckley’s
laments the halving of the number of nuns and the doubling of their average age
since the Second Vatican Council. What, pray tell, have advocates of the older
liturgy done to return to missionary religious life or to revive religious
communities that serve the poor and dying?
The Fraternity of St. Pius X exceeded the Vatican’s ability
to cope with them four decades ago because of the missionary zeal of their
founder, Msgr. Lefebvre. Right or wrong, he had love of souls few could doubt
and which he imbued in many of his priests. The Fraternity seems simple-minded,
and it is; its education and spirituality are imitations of the same missionary
and spiritual formation Lefebvre himself would have received and imparted in
the Holy Ghost Fathers before the Great War. These tools are basic enough to
translate into other missionary settings. A missionary band in South America
combatting the Pentecostalists or in Africa converting pagans, fortified by the
Latin psalms and an intense realization—clear in the old Latin rite—that God is
above and demands everything, will encourage more young men and women to
explore vocations than simply celebrating the 1962 Mass for a community of
third generation traditionalists in North Carolina.
Indeed, an outwardly oriented society that utilizes
traditional forms could render redundant the endless discussion of removing the
Last Gospel or the errors of Lumen
Gentium. Thirty year old nuns who have no prior exposure to the old liturgy
could do far more for the Church by working in hospices, serving shelters, and
looking to protect women endangered by newer concerns like international human
trafficking than existing 1962 communities ever could, if only we let such an
instigating saint arise and do not swat her down.
Perhaps one more conventional setting for the return of the
old liturgy is one that has not suffered very much spiritual displacement, the
Congregation of the Oratory. English Oratories retained their identities rather
well after 1965, a provost in one city exempt. Several new American Oratories
have appeared, all modelled after their English counterparts, not the extant
Oratory in Philadelphia. The loose structure of any given Oratory should permit
the open and casual use of the old Mass ad
libitum by its priests without disconcerting the local bishop. A Jesuit
once described the Oratory as “twelve eccentrics under one roof without rules.”
With enough Theosophy, the old liturgy and the faithful should both thrive
under the patronage of St. Phillip Neri.
If the traditionalists can look beyond their own walls, ordain
a hundred new priests annually, and baptize a million souls into Christ, the
inherited obsession with holding on to the Council’s legacy and the new rite
will obsolesce. Both reforming popes named Gregory walked into a Church wrapped
in family power struggles and passed unto Judgment after leaving the Church
still wrapped in disputes among the existing authorities, but also injected a
cure that would revive the Church from its disease, not from its discomforts.
When I suggested that special attention in the form of a
community dedicated to ministering to the wayward youth on university campuses
(campi?) ought to be pondered, one commenter contemned my concern for the elite
and my all too human machinations; where, in my suggestion, was room for the Holy
Spirit? The Holy Spirit came once on Pentecost Sunday nearly twenty centuries
ago; He passes on to the faithful by the laying of hands. The Spirit may
inspire and confirm, but He leaves cooperation with grace up to us men. If you
have a better idea, please share it, but if not you may find yourself no
different from the finance manager who cannot understand how his comfortable
surroundings have transformed into something else without his consent.
Above all, pray.
