A New Catholicism?
A New Catholicism?
The Eugenic Health Tyranny as a Test of Fidelity, Part I
Rite of confirmation in the new catholicism
The events of the past two or three years, though extraordinary and indeed unprecedented, did not appear ex nihilo. To comprehend them requires attention to their highly complex context—too complex, no doubt, for any one person to know or grasp. They are pushing us, nonetheless, towards an hour of decision, both for the city of man and for the city of God. I will attempt to explain that by making the following twelve claims:
that there is an emergent eugenic health tyranny
that this tyranny has been cross bred with its Chinese counterpart
that it is replete with negligent and deliberate homicide
that classical liberalism has reached a dead end
that fear was the symptom proper to the pandemic
that churches failed to respond appropriately
that there are a number of reasons for their failure
that they are being led where they do not wish to go
that those leading them are secretly in despair
that robust eschatology is essential for effective resistance
that recovery of a proper hierarchy of law is likewise necessary
that a contest of catholicisms is underway, between which we must choose.
What follows is a rather uneven expansion of these claims. I am fully aware that each claim requires a fulsome treatment of its own. I am also aware that the big picture I am trying to sketch is only poorly sketched and that many elements are missing. Let's commence anyway.
1. That there is a eugenic health tyranny
By tyranny, I mean in this context a paternalistic pattern of governance, operating partly inside and partly outside the law, that in the name of protecting citizens from hazards putatively beyond their control, declares war against those hazards and conducts that war in a manner that produces many casualties among the citizens themselves, or makes casualties of their rights and freedoms and chosen manner of life. By eugenic health tyranny, I mean such governance insofar as the hazards it specifies are deemed health-related and insofar as the remedies it imposes entail the reorganization of spaces public and private (through mandatory health passports, social restraints, cashless CBDC economies, etc.) or modifications to the human organism itself (via genetic therapies, biodigital devices, control of reproduction, etc.). Such remedies serve the interests of those who are governing because they marginalize or eliminate deplorables, while maximizing social, political, economic, and ideological control. They also lend themselves to perpetual deployment of emergency powers, threatening a permanent state of exception.
In Eugenics and Other Evils, G. K. Chesterton forewarned us of the development of such a tyranny, as I explained in Anarchy from Above, having borrowed from him the title of that tripartite essay. Chesterton understood the responsible parties to be the usual suspects: the monied men, the industrialists, the capitalists or communists who see their fellow man as a beast of burden—of which there should be an optimum number, optimally organized, with the sub-optimal subject to the state's paternal care and gradual elimination. He knew that this outlook accounted for the rise of eugenics in the nineteenth century; that is, for the notion that humans, like other animals, could be bred to remove undesirable traits and refine desirable ones. Eugenics is a twin to social Darwinism, and the two were traveling the world together well before their bloody triumph in the Nazi era. A full century before our own era, Chesterton predicted the rise of a medical bureaucracy that would serve as scaffolding for a power that would touch, not merely what lies on the periphery of a man's life, but also what lies at its very core; a power that would experiment with individuals and classes of individuals, with whole societies and nations.
That Nuremberg saw a few men hanging from a scaffold in consequence of such experiments has proved but a temporary setback for the eugenics movement. The greatest success of eugenics in the twentieth century, pursuant to Nazi crimes, was the worldwide abortion industry, promotion of which invited other, less obvious ways for men of power to violate the powerless. That was done through a doctrine of empowerment, according to which invading wombs to kill babies somehow helps women be more like men. What it actually helped with, besides ridding the world of a great number of babies, was turning "woman" (or even "pregnant") into an undefinable term. And once "reproductive health" had come to mean no reproduction at all, the path was clear to do other peculiar things in the sphere of health. Producing non-sterilizing vaccines, for example, and marketing them in a fashion that achieves a reorganization of labour, redistribution of capital, reconception of civil society, revision of sovereignty, and (some say) redesign of the human being as such.
That sounds a rather sweeping claim, I know, but it does not have to be confected by the cynical mind. It has already been confected by those who aspire to be what C. S. Lewis called the Controllers. Even our principal at McGill was enthused about the opportunity the pandemic provided “to reshape our global future … rethink and redefine our humanity … create a world that is more just, more compassionate, and more humane.” (What she had in mind with all that Davos talk became clear a little later.) Health, just as Chesterton warned, is becoming the property of the powerful to define, defend, and demand as they please.
2. That this tyranny has been cross bred with Chinese-style socialism
In The Emerging Nowa Huta I mentioned the strange axis between East and West that is carrying westward policies foreign to our legal habits and arrangements. At the Beijing end, "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is an export product. To prevent political competition from gaining strength at home, it is deemed wise to discredit it abroad. As Tanner Greer observes, "the tenets of liberal capitalism" must be undermined, such that "notions like individual freedom and constitutional democracy come to be seen as the relics of an obsolete system." At the Western end, customers for the exported product have proved plentiful. China's powers of coercion are envied by globalists who have not been able to persuade the common man to get with the program. Nationalists have concluded that, without such powers at home, their nation will not be able to compete with China. But there's more to it than that. This product has been home grown since the 1930s. In some circles, very powerful circles, the axis is a natural one.
We should not be surprised, then, to discover that a cross-section of economic, military, political, and medical players appear to have been rehearsing for decades how to effect fundamental change in the West, simulating pandemic conditions as the trigger mechanism. This helps explain why we were so quick to emulate China during the covid crisis, adopting lockdowns, masks, media tactics, coercive mandates, and other procedures contrary to tried and true emergency planning, as indeed to established law and medical practice. Fear (about which more in a moment) was deliberately cultivated by military-grade operations. While much remains to be learned about the nature and extent of what was surely illegal activity, if not treasonous collusion, enough has been learned already to warrant full and formal investigation at the highest juridical level.
3. That it is replete with negligent and willful homicide
Homicide? There is no other way to put it, though it is difficult to know how many killings there have been, or to discern which of them are negligent or reckless and which involve malice aforethought.
As an example of negligent killings, we may take deaths caused by lockdowns. There is no reason to suppose that lockdowns are designed to kill people, any more than there is reason to suppose that they are designed to kill the virus. But why did we have lockdowns? Zero-covid was always a preposterous idea that no sane agent could take seriously except as a means to another end altogether; that is, as a lesson in political submission in a course that ranges from mask mandates to internment camps and forced vaccination. It wouldn't do to say that, so we were told instead that lockdowns were necessary to flatten the curve because our hospital systems weren't quite ready to handle the covid rush. These rushes proved quite modest, typical of a bad flu season. Moreover, the hospitals never were got ready; indeed, policies were followed that made them more rather than less dysfunctional, while false modeling was trotted out over and over again, in tandem with unnecessary and unreliable testing, to justify new attempts to flatten the curve. The curves, of course, went on following the same predictable pattern they always follow, justifying nothing the authorities were doing. And lockdowns did kill people. There are now too many studies and meta-studies from reliable sources to debate that point. Whether through economic ruin, despair, and suicide, or through the rendering of a treatable illness untreatable by reason of delay, or in some other way, lockdowns produced a steep rise in excess mortality.
So did the injections, whether the euthanizing injections that took place under first cover of lockdown or the covid injections which were to end lockdowns. The latter may be considered according to two scenarios. In one, the product's manufacturer does not know what damage the product will do, but hopes that it will not damage or kill too many while it is helping others; he certainly does not call it "safe and effective" or encourage its use among high-risk groups. In the other, he knows the product to be damaging, even fatal, for at least a certain percentage of recipients, but does not disclose that. This amounts to willful killing, killing that cannot be covered off by the doctrine of double effect. That doctrine might apply where the threat against which the product is meant to guard is sufficiently serious, the threat of the product itself is much lower, the dangers are carefully studied and openly declared, and decisions to receive the product are taken with free and informed consent. Such conditions might be met on the first scenario. Unfortunately, it is the second scenario that has widely prevailed, for none of these conditions have been met where the great majority of injections are concerned. And the damage is staggering—staggering to the general public, which even now is incredulous, but not apparently to the manufacturers, whose own studies pointed in that direction. Whether their actions should or shouldn't be described as genocidal, they must be described as deliberate and willful killing.
This killing is not, or not yet, on the scale of German or Soviet or Chinese crimes against humanity over the past century. It seems somehow less wicked than the live organ harvesting that China conducts. But it is, morally speaking, of the same type and in some cases just as cruel. Among the greatest challenges now facing us, besides the economic fallout and the medical aftermath—so-called Sudden Death Syndrome and long-term injuries yet to be reckoned with—are the existential task of getting to grips with the reckless and the willful killing, and the legal task of attempting to bring to justice those most responsible.
4. That classical liberalism has reached a dead end
J. S. Mill, comparing men to (then) hypothetical androids, insisted in On Liberty that "human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides." So confident was he in human nature that a few years later, in Utilitarianism, he opined that
most of the great positive evils of the world are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced within narrow limits. Poverty, in any sense implying suffering, may be completely extinguished by the wisdom of society, combined with the good sense and providence of individuals. Even that most intractable of enemies, disease, may be indefinitely reduced in dimensions by good physical and moral education, and proper control of noxious influences; while the progress of science holds out a promise for the future of still more direct conquests over this detestable foe.
To this program we are still working, but with far less confidence in human nature; restricted scope for the element Chesterton most recommended, viz., "the good sense and providence of individuals;" increasing reliance on robots and artificial intelligence, both of which lack entirely that good sense; and a pragmatic merger of science and technology, the economic, political, and educational ramifications of which threaten to hem us within narrow limits. In other words, the trust once placed in the West's liberal tradition has been crumbling on all sides. Covid has brought it into crisis, creating the ideological vacuum and opportunity some were looking for.
We may put the opportunity this way: Mill's famous maxim—"the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others"—leaves harm undefined. Whoever gets to define it gains the power to restrict freedoms, thereby commandeering societal and state resources. That explains the enormous effort expended by national and global public/private partnerships to identify or if necessary invent harms, from pandemics to climate change, from money laundering to misinformation (areas in which these PPPs can certainly claim expertise), from data theft to internet security. This produces insecurity and permits the marketing of proposed solutions. The process is as old as the hills and one we're all familiar with, but it is operating today on a scale and with a speed never before possible. Our liberal reflexes, or what's left of them, have not been able to keep up.
In Covid was Liberalism's Endgame, Matthew Crawford wonders whether even the more liberal liberalism of the Lockean tradition contains the resources for coping with such a threat; that is, for escaping the towering tyranny of some Hobbesian monster by means of which the social contract is effectively torn up and a new contract imposed. Leviathan, after all, cannot be domesticated. An absolutely sovereign authority cannot be made to appear and disappear at will. It cannot be called upon to arise and assert itself only in the face of some great storm or emergency, before sinking out of sight again in calmer seas. Leviathan needs emergencies in order to exist at all, frequent emergencies. The disruptive and the iterative, as the Faucians like to say, are equally required to satisfy its appetite for power, the power necessary to its protectorate.
This worry is not misplaced, but what gave rise to it theologically is often overlooked. The Lockean wants to view man more optimistically than the Hobbesian, yes, but he is caught in the same dilemma. Man, whether he likes it or not, is a creature in need of redemption. Hearing from Hobbes only a distorted echo of the fall and lacking even Locke's residual faith in the Redeemer, the liberal today is helpless to prevent the state, or powerful coalitions working with the state, from usurping that role. Liberalism's original sin forces him in the end to look to the state for salvation, which he is increasingly inclined to do. Unfortunately the benefits queue has become a pretty rough place, with lots of pushing and shoving. Neo-Marxist "stakeholder capitalists" have taken charge of it, working to a plan of their own, a plan to hasten the demise of the liberal tradition under a cascade of lies and absurdities. The old Babel is dissolving in a strife of tongues. Its builders have become confused, frightened, prone to panic, a weakness that has been efficiently exploited by the builders of a new and more ruthless Babel.
5. That fear was the symptom proper to the pandemic, signaling that something was very wrong
Christians also have shown themselves prone to panic and, in their panic, to an authoritarian turn. That turn was taken in some surprising places and with surprising promptitude. Though subsequent events have revealed its unseemliness (to use the mildest term I can think of) attempts to justify it are still made. Only the other day, in theological company, I heard such an attempt. Those dramatic images flowing out of China, then Italy, in early 2020—images of people dropping dead in the streets as if from a deadly plague—were invoked. A comparison to smallpox followed, and a defence of all manner of draconian state and church actions. That for a long while we have known those images to have been fraudulent, and any comparison of covid to smallpox statistically absurd, had not registered. Nor had it occurred that decisions based on fear rather than on facts tend to be faulty decisions, and culpably so.
Fear. Fear and manipulation. Statistics as lies and modeling as damned lies. Doctors who won't doctor and hospitals that won't treat. The elderly, the ill, and the dying cut off from their loved ones, even from last rites. Churches shuttered for months at a time. The first commandment set aside in favour of the second, and the second reduced to a pro-vaccination trope. Families and parishes at loggerheads. Education and healthcare on hold. Young people with heart damage or fertility issues. Livelihoods, reputations, and economies destroyed. The poor getting poorer and hungrier (something that began before war in Ukraine). The unvaccinated ostracized, cut off, blamed for the sins of others or for a modicum of once-common sense. The vaccinated dying inexplicably. Ubiquitous, unrelenting propaganda; furious censorship of every reasoned argument. Constitutional rights and freedoms shredded. Protesters bludgeoned, fined, incarcerated. And, all the while, children in anti-social isolation and soul-destroying masks—children still subject, despite everything we know, to experimental treatments they do not need that lay them open to any number of unexamined hazards. All in the face of a virus with a kill rate analogous to that of a bad flu, a much narrower vulnerable population, and an average age of death indistinguishable from ordinary life expectancy.
It is remarkable what a coordinated effort to generate, nurture, amplify, and sustain fear can achieve. In February 2020, on the Diamond Princess, where an older demographic faced the first wave without medical assistance, the mortality rate didn't exceed 2% of those known to be infected, or 0.4% of its exposed population. Last summer, in Britain, the IFR dropped as low as 0.1%. Canada lists less than 29,000 covid-related deaths for the entire duration of the pandemic, and only a fraction of these—an unknown fraction—can be put down to the virus as primary cause. Yet even as restrictive mandates are lifted, rumours of their return abound. Masked walkers and cyclists remain plentiful, though masks do nothing but keep insects out of their mouths, reduce their oxygenation, and deposit fibres in their lungs. People whose booster shots have failed them, or even injured them, prepare to roll the dice again in the autumn. The collective psyche, like the healthcare system, is still in tatters in many places. And the death toll, not of covid but of covid panic, continues to mount.
Covid can and did kill. Some say it is a bioweapon designed to kill. Others that people with vested interests are happy that we should think it so, because that makes us more fearful. Still others say that the "vaccines" are the real bioweapon. Whatever the truth of that—and the truth will out, sooner or later—the assiduously cultivated fear that was used to drive all the pandemic measures—the lockdowns, the vaccinations, the passports, the economic and political changes, the alterations to habits and norms—betrays a pandemic that is a disease of the soul more than of the body. In this global shell game, our focus has been fixed on the wrong thing.
6. That many churches failed to recognize this or to respond appropriately
Those who purport to be able to treat the soul ought to have recognized this, and helped remedy it. From them a diagnosis was needed, and a prescription of some sort. Neither were forthcoming. The main response in the churches, including hasty attempts (later rectified) to justify deployment of abortion-related products in the fight with covid, was complete credulity and full compliance. The sacramental churches were as quick as their congregationalist counterparts to retreat to the safety of online liturgies. When in some jurisdictions it was demanded, as a condition for return to live worship, that the unvaccinated be excluded, this too met with compliance. That the imposition of passports for mass amounted to a denial of baptismal unity, to a desecrating Apartheid in the most sacred ecclesial act, to an admission that the church was now a creature of the state—not eucharistically united, even within the Roman Catholic Church, but divided in every church as the state wished it divided—went largely unremarked. This, on my view, was the sorriest feature of the whole sorry business, and the most damning. Jab-pushing bishops, ejecting from seminaries young men who refused vaccination or disciplining priests who refused to abandon the sick and dying, added local flourishes to the general apostasy, which the Vatican has now commemorated with the coin pictured above, depicting a masked "holy family" of doctor, nurse, and injected child.
In short, many churches in the West have failed their spiritual covid test. They carried a high viral load of fear—fear of sickness, fear of man, fear of death—and displayed low levels of spiritual antibodies. The gospel of freedom from fear was rarely preached in a way that challenged secular powers or popular sentiment. When it was, there were consequences, of course, not all pleasant. I do not wish to dwell on that, however, but rather to ponder some of the reasons for the failure, as they presently appear to me, and so to expand on what I have just said.
Michelangelo lost the commemorative coin competition because he forgot to put a needle in Mary’s right hand.
7. That there are several reasons for their failure
First reason: Complacency, a lack of spiritual alertness. This is the consequence of full immersion into the prevailing materialism and its bondage to gadgetry; of a corresponding weakness of individual and corporate prayer and fasting; of corruption of morals among both clergy and laity; of liturgical and homiletical sloppiness; of widespread ignorance of scripture, tradition, and the sacraments; of doubts about the public relevance of the church and its gospel. These and other such factors in the failure to watch and pray vary from place to place, but the lukewarmness and self-absorption of the Western churches is difficult to deny. The churches were not ready for the testing that came upon them. They could not even tell the difference between embodied worship and "remote" worship, which they supposed to be very like "working from home." They entered into temptation and succumbed to it. They became complicit.
Second reason: Status-seeking and the search for respectability—a desire to be players on the world stage, not to be taken for benighted, recalcitrant fundamentalists—opened the churches to corporate grooming. The World Economic Forum and the Fauci/Collins regime at the NIH carefully cultivated influential Evangelical leaders such as Rick Warren, Ed Stetzer, Tim Keller, and Russell Moore; even the renowned Anglican scholar, N. T. Wright, was among those pursued. Similar efforts were under way, and still are, at the Vatican, engaging the Bishop of Rome himself. These charm offensives and resulting propaganda coups were carefully devised to provide trusted access to religious communities at just the right moment. The goal was to make the latter super-spreaders of Pharma's gospel of fall and redemption—that is, of pandemic and vaccination—carrying it deep into the religious heartlands of America and the wider Christian world.
The goal was met. No attention was paid to the fact that Pharma and its public faces—those in charge of regulatory or advisory agencies long since captured—were unreliable partners who, in the words of Cecil Fox, "were willing to go to the back side of the moon to find out if they had a viable product." That such men, including famous scientists lauded as saviours of mankind, had already wrought destruction on a massive scale was ignored. The lessons of the past were forgotten. The facts about those with whom they were dealing were overlooked, together with their financial motives and miscreant methods. Like dutiful Congolese villagers lining up for HIV-contaminated polio shots, many religious people can only say with their neighbours: "They called us and we came. It was an important vaccine. No one could be missing. No one could refuse."
Yet they are not like, but unlike; for they could have known and they could have acted differently. They could now act differently, but many do not. That Vatican coin tells an all too common tale of deceiving and being deceived. It might have been minted by The New York Times. "Good morning," says the Grey Lady, wandering uninvited into my inbox to share the good news that even the little ones are now suffered to approach their saviour. "Very soon, almost everyone in the U.S. will be able to get a Covid vaccine." By which is meant children under five, who have absolutely no need for it and stand to lose the most by it.
Now any parent—and kid—who has been waiting for the vaccines can finally see the endpoint. That is potentially a big group: Nearly 20 million children are under five in the U.S. In some cases, the wait has taken a toll, as parents have held up their careers and lives, not to mention the lives of their children, to stay as safe from Covid as possible until a vaccine is available.
"I feel helpless and hopeless," such parents report; "every cough sets me on edge." Though rumour has it that the rounds of coughing have only just begun, In Vaccines We Trust is their firm motto. In some places, people have learned to distrust. But in the churches, politically naive and God-forgetful, the same motto has been adopted. The grooming has paid off handsomely.
Third reason: The health-first heresy, which inverts Christian anthropology by promoting the health of the body, not for the sake of the health of the soul or in subservience to it, but for its own sake. The perceived interests of the body trumped the interests of the soul, the good of life in this world was pursued at the expense of treasure in heaven. The earthly witness to heaven came to a grinding halt as public worship ceased. Fixation on preservation of the mortal body disclosed secret doubts about the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. It laid bare a return to bondage through fear of death, a fear encouraged semper ubique et ab omnibus by secular powers in order to promote initiations into a new triune name—baptisms, authenticated by QR code, into the name of The Science and of Universal Vaccination and of Global Governance. From the first derives authority; from the second, salvation; from the third, a new world order. But those busy fleeing covid did not notice the substitution. In my own diocese there remain deranged clergy more solicitous of the para-liturgies of masking and hand sanitization than of the divine liturgy itself, which is capable of sanctifying both body and soul.
Fourth reason: A faulty subservience reflex, which conflates fear of God with honouring the emperor, to the effect that a good Christian must always obey the law of the land without hint of rebellion. This reflex kicked in, uninhibited even by blasphemous vacina salva messaging and vaxpass masses. The key texts to which appeal was made were the obvious ones: the opening verses of Romans 13—"Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment"—and 1 Peter 2:13–17, which reinforces that message:
Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right. For it is God’s will that by doing right you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish men. Live as free men, yet without using your freedom as a pretext for evil; but live as servants of God. Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the emperor.
Subservience in this sense is not faulty. But what is the sense? Peter himself had pressed the question, and supplied the answer, when refusing to comply with orders-in-council from the duly constituted authorities in Jerusalem: "Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge; for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:19f.). "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). Paul said and did the same, as had the prophets before them—Elijah, for example, or Elisha, who was filled with his spirit. Of the latter it is written, "In all his days he did not tremble before any ruler, and no one brought him into subjection" (Sir. 48:12).
This answer is straightforward in principle. Lawful governance is instituted by God for the welfare of a people; respecting lawful governance is therefore the duty of every person and especially of those called to bear witness to God. But lawful governance is lawful only under God, and of course under law itself. Where it conflicts externally with God or internally with itself, it cannot bind the conscience and may compel the citizen, especially the Christian citizen, to contrary action. Determining whether such conflicts exist is not a duty the church can shirk without calling into question its own integrity, even its own existence. There must never be a conflation of divine and secular governance anywhere but in Jesus Christ himself.
Even what is relatively straightforward in principle, however, can sometimes be difficult of application, and so it proved here. The duty was shirked, conflation did occur, and there were consequences. The witness of the church was silenced at a crucial time, and the churches themselves were recategorized by the state. They were no longer foreign embassies representing one whom they claimed to be Lord of all. They were merely service-providers, and their services were deemed inessential. It follows that they should be taxed, and in all likelihood they soon will be; but it follows first that they can, at the will and whim of the priests of Public Health, be denied a licence to meet. That this licencing and suspending of licences was accepted by the churches suggests that embassy or divine-mission talk is mere talk—that churches have become creatures of the state, unable or unwilling to resist.
Fifth reason: Misplaced faith in ecclesiastical institutions. This deserves far more attention than it can be given here, but I will offer a single provocative pointer to the problem, which can be found in chapter 23 of Mark Riebling's Church of Spies.
After the failure of the July 1944 attempt on Hitler's life and the Nazi regime's capture of papers confirming Pius XII's active support for the resistance, Jesuit Fr Alfred Delp was among those who were rounded up. He was tried, tortured, and (still refusing to implicate the pontiff) hanged. While in prison, writing at Epiphany 1945, he spoke of seeing the world from new and revealing perspectives. He noted "the connection between the corpse-strewn battlefields, the heaps of rubble we live in, and the collapse of the spiritual cosmos of our views." He foresaw communism, whose forces were advancing towards Berlin (too late to save him or Bonhoeffer et al.) becoming the "donkey for an imperialism of limitless proportions." And he worried that Catholics had "overrated the Church's political machine and let it run on long after its essential divine power had ceased to function." Of course they had hoped that the Catholic Church could save Europe from such a fate, or at all events help rebuild it, and Delp admired all the worthy efforts that had already been expended to that end. His conclusion, however, was this: Modern man no longer cares what the Church says or does.
It makes absolutely no difference so far as the beneficial influence of the Church is concerned whether a state maintains diplomatic relations with the Vatican or not. The only thing that really matters is the inherent power of the Church as a religious force in the countries concerned. This is where the mistake started; religion died, from various diseases, and humanity died with it.
Bonhoeffer expressed similar concerns in the Protestant sphere. His notion of religionless Christianity moves, mutatis mutandis, along the same lines. Neither should be understood as anti-institutional, anti-liturgical, or anti-ecclesiastical, yet both looked in the last analysis for a Christianity powerful through prayer and righteousness rather than through worldly channels. What they would have made of subsequent developments (at Vatican II, for example, or in Poland under John Paul II) I can’t say; but their judgment that Christian hopes have followed a false trajectory, too much governed by law and politics, too little by pure discipleship, is even more compelling today.
Sixth reason: The persistent influence of what I have elsewhere dubbed diagonalism, in honour of Teilhard de Chardin, its master expositor. Diagonalism is the "onwards and upwards" of ideological evolutionism and the cult of progress to which it belongs, the totalizing and totalitarian instinct as it manifests today, the push (as Teilhard would say) for Omega point. At present it is in a phase called globalization, two related features of which are germane here. While the ordinary person pays little attention to the first and almost none to the second, both are bending the general consciousness towards Omega point.
The first is an appeal to artificial intelligence (AI) as the key to the future and its promised new order, in which all things will be managed well and all manner of things will turn out well. AI is the ring of power on the finger of an ambitious new catholicism that, to paraphrase Cyril's description of the old one, will extend over all the world, from one end of the earth to the other; will teach fully and completely all the doctrines that ought to come to men's knowledge, censoring the rest; will bring into subjection the whole human race, governors and governed, learned and unlearned; will universally treat the whole class of humans offences and heal every disease afflicting the planet; and will possesses in itself plenipotentiary authority over every right and resource, dispensing or withholding as it sees fit.
The second, known only to initiates, is what we may call hygienic gnosticism, which secretly views the body itself (the object of so much care) as a kind of disease and the human race as a pathogen. Omega point will be reached when the natural has been scrubbed altogether in favour of the artificial or supernatural. Meanwhile, things deemed natural (eating meat, for example) are to be discouraged as far as possible. Nature must be quarantined from humans and humans from nature. Humans must be distanced even from one another, cease reproducing, and learn to live online or in the metaverse, rather like those hellish shades described by Lewis in The Great Divorce.
Before the reader objects that the sixth reason is altogether incommensurate with the first five, and may safely be set aside as irrelevant, permit me to unpack it a little. It is in fact a return to the first reason; that is, to the concern about complacency. The developments I am about to describe are not neutral as regards religion, and religion cannot afford to be neutral as regards them.
Read Part II, which completes this analysis and takes up the final points:
that they are being led where they do not wish to go
that those leading them are secretly in despair
that robust eschatology is essential for effective resistance
that recovery of a proper hierarchy of law is likewise necessary
that a contest of catholicisms is underway, between which we must choose.
Further to the charge of treasonous activity at the highest levels of government, in the case of the Canadian government see https://twitter.com/ncio_canada/status/1478855651732463619. (This charge was made earlier on DBC, in "Segregation Sunday.")
I thank you for this essay and look forward to the 2nd part. This was a great summary.
I hadn't seen the coin set up until your post and am incredulous.