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November 17, 2015 Church, World

Liberalism Will Not Save Us

A few days ago William Tighe, an Associate Professor of History at Muhlenberg College and frequent contributor to numerous Catholic publications, left the following extended comment on this blog:

As I wrote earlier today on another blog, as a comment to a post featuring Edith Piaf singing La Marseillaise:

Why should I applaud, or even listen to, some sluttish chanteuse singing a song that encapsulates and celebrates events that constituted the overthrow of France as “the eldest daughter of the Church” and enthroned “laicite” in it place?

If this is the “French heritage” that we are rallying to defend, my call would, rather, be “pereat!” The French Revolution was the first, and the bellwether, of subsequent revolutions aimed at overthrowing any Catholic Christian social order, and the Marseillaise, like the Internationale, is freighted with anti-Christian (and, indeed, savagely neopagan) ideas. Were I a Frenchman I would have no truck with “1789 and All That” and, indeed, would take some melancholy consolation in the fact that with the Charlie Hebdo massacre and now the Paris Slaughter it seems to be expiring from, as Karl Marx wrote, mistakenly, of bourgeois capitalism, its own “inner contradictions.”

And if I were to feel moved to show solidarity with the French, the flag that I would wave would be the drapeau blanc.

At the time this remark appeared, Owen White was on Facebook rightly snickering at his monarchist and traditionalist friends who didn’t think twice about distorting their profile pictures with the Tricolour. Perhaps these folks misguidedly thought that to stand with the French Republic at this moment in time is to take a stand both against Islam and for Christendom. But Christendom has been almost entirely wiped out and the country which suffered a terrible tragedy at the hands of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) played no small part in its demise. Now well-meaning Christians of all stripes are rallying behind Europe and the United States to “do something” about ISIS, as if the destruction of one highly efficient band of Muslim madmen will rid the world of Islamic terror. And even if ISIS falls and the false religion of the false prophet Mohammed is contained in the desert, what have we—good Christians of the West—left ourselves with? Unfettered secular liberalism which holds as much contempt for us as the sons of Ishmael do.

Liberalism will not save us. The self-interested forces of capitalism and sham democracy may find a way to temporarily push back the Islamic threat, but they will leave nothing for us to glory over. The time is not far off where the ostensibly protecting hand of liberalism claps us in irons for not submitting to its perverse and ungodly ideology. Watch well the stripes liberal-democratic polities deal out to the Muslims. They will be our stripes next.

October 28, 2015 Church, Eastern Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Church, World

The Road Ahead

Much to my surprise, “A Closing Comment on the Synod” became one of the highest viewed posts on Opus Publicum since I reset the blog last year, though it received far fewer comments than other posts related to, say, Catholic/Orthodox relations or liturgical reform. Perhaps people are tired of reading and talking about the recently concluded Extraordinary Synod on the Family. I know I am. Several worst-case-scenarios were proposed by observers over the past year; none of them, thankfully, came to pass. As I pointed out previously, however, that is no cause for comfort. Pope Francis, who has already revolutionized the annulment process, can still set loose more doctrinal and moral confusion within the Church with his pending Apostolic Exhortation. Liberal bishops, priests, and laity, despite their alleged defeat at the Synod, now appear emboldened to continue turning a blind eye to mortal sin in the name of “mercy.” As for the conservatives and traditionalists, the immediate future looks bleak. Those Synod participants who refused to get on board with the liberal reforms championed by the Continental prelates and backed by the Pope are now exposed. No, Francis cannot lay the hammer down on all of them, but he can continue to play musical chairs with the seats of power at the Vatican to help ensure that the orthodox hierarchy won’t get in his way in the future.

August 29, 2015 Church, Politics, World

An Untimely Post

Note: When I wrote this in October 2012 for the previous iteration of Opus Publicum I never expected it to become as “popular” (relatively speaking) as it did. Since it was brought up to me the other day, I am pulling it from the archives and reposting it without any emendations.

March 17, 2015 Politics, World

Mark Lilla’s Tragic Trilogy on Islam and France

Mark Lilla has done little to endear himself to Christians, specifically Catholics, over the past decade, but that doesn’t mean he should be ignored. The Stillborn God, Lilla’s less-than-complete account of the role of religion and politics in modernity which largely failed to include Catholic thinkers, earned him some chastising words from George Weigel: “[W]riting any part of the history of the Western debate over religion and politics without a serious wrestling with Catholic sources is a bit like writing the history of baseball without mentioning the National League.” More recently, Lilla’s polemical review of Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation was unsurprisingly ill-received despite having a few insightful words to offer on meta-narratives of spiritual-intellectual decline. Lilla, for reasons which remain foggy, hasn’t done much in the academic sphere since transferring from Chicago to Columbia. Happily, however, that has left him with sufficient time to keep running reviews and commentaries in various publications, including The New York Review of Books which just published Lilla’s three-part series covering, inter alia, France, Islam, and the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Comprised of two book reviews and an independent reflection, Lilla’s “trilogy” deserves to be read in full, not because everything he says is spot-on, but because unlike most commentators on “things political and religious,” Lilla has a surprising, even enchanting, way of detaching himself from secular-liberal commitments even if, at the end of the day, he appears dedicated to holding on to them.

March 2, 2015 Church, World

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig Contra “Fearful” Catholics

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig (ESB) has had quite the year. After being received into the bosom of the Catholic Church last Easter, she proceeded to develop a loyal readership of mostly young Catholics who, like her, are fed up with economic liberalism, or at least some variants of it. In addition to writing a blog and weekly newsletter, ESB found time to publish articles in a diverse array of outlets, including The American Conservative, Salon, and Jacobin. She has since moved on to take a position as a staff writer at The New Republic (TNR), a former icon of American socio-political commentary which is struggling to restore its tarnished name, where, inter alia, she criticizes mainline conservatism, capitalism, and anyone else who doesn’t share her somewhat idiosyncratic take on Christianity. ESB also contributes to other places, including The Nation, which just published her excellent but disturbing piece on prison rape—a horrific problem that receives lamentably little attention from the mainstream media. At almost the same time as that story appeared, TNR ran “Fear of a Radical Pope,” ESB’s misaligned and difficult-to-follow polemic aimed at Pope Francis’s critics, real and imagined. Part autobiographical reflection, part historical and doctrinal mishmash, and part rant, the article is slated to appear on the cover of TNR’s next issue, which doesn’t bode well for that publication’s prospects for reputational restoration.

February 23, 2015 World

Pornography Porn

Could there be anything more vile to read than Christians of all confessional stripes commenting, nay, waxing indignant about pornography, either the sort popularly portrayed in films like 50 Shades of Grey or the everyday stuff which litters the Internet? Pornography is evil — is there much more to be said about it than that? The attempts of some to build-up utilitarian arguments against its production and consumption are not without merit; but that’s a dangerous road to walk down. For whether some wish to admit it or not, there are plenty of pro-pornography arguments cast in utilitarian terms, and the social-science literature has only yielded findings which are, at best, inconclusive and, more often than not, contestable. The less charitable side of me, the one activated by social media and e-mail chains, finds almost all Christian writings on pornography is perverse. The curiosity that sits just underneath the condemnatory rhetoric is — if I may use the word again — perverse. It’s not enough to just say that the sort of “deviant sex” portrayed in most pornographic (or quasi-pornographic) videos is “disgusting” or “immoral”; graphic descriptions, the sort which ended up enticing more than horrifying, are part of the package. O, how I long for the days of yore when a sly euphemism or two might have stood-in for “analingus.”