Pope Francis: No 'Faggotry' In Priesthood

And: Biden's Pier To Nowhere Sinks; Renaud Camus's Fable About Europe's Decline

It’s so hard to figure Pope Francis out. He gave a talk to Italian bishops recently in which he warned against what he called “faggotry” (“frociaggine”)in the priesthood, telling them not to let gays into the seminaries. Here’s a link to the original report in Italian. The newspaper, La Repubblica, notes that whatever the Pope said, it is unlikely to have much practical impact. Here’s a link to a CNN version of the story, which notes that Francis speaks Italian as a second language, and might not have been aware of how vulgar the word frociaggine is.

On one hand, it is encouraging that Francis understands the problems that come with admitting same-sex attracted men into an all-male, unmarried priesthood. You readers who closely followed the reporting during the long sex abuse scandal period will be very well aware of the role that homosexual networks in the Catholic clergy played in perpetuating the scandal. This was consciously not reported by the mainstream media, which, as I keep telling you, is typically more interested in maintaining a Narrative than reporting the truth. But it was and is absolutely true. A very liberal Catholic journalist I know told me privately back in 2002 or 2003 that the inability of his side to cope with the reality of sexually active gays in the priesthood is their primary blind spot in the scandal.

In 2002, Richard Sipe, the liberal Catholic sociologist who was the top expert on the sexual behavior of the clergy, told me on the record that gay men should not be admitted to seminary. Sipe’s view was not theological, but sociological: he said that gay cliques formed that not only protected each other — most all such priests were having sex and lots of it — but also protected the minority of such clergy who were molesting minors. The idea was that solidarity required absolute omerta when it came to sexual derring-do. Sipe told me — and wrote this elsewhere — that these gay networks would get their own men into key gatekeeper positions (especially running seminaries), and try to keep out any seminarians they judged as potential threats to their position.

I understand that a lot of that has been cleaned up over the last two decades. I hope so. The point is, even a progressive like Sipe understood the problem here. Perhaps Francis is like that.

Nevertheless, Francis has done an enormous amount to fling open the doors widely to normalizing homosexuality within the Catholic Church. That is what really counts, not whether or not he might be an octogenarian given to uttering mild slurs against gays. If I were Father James Martin, I could easily tolerate this kind of thing from Francis, given how much practical good (from Father Martin’s point of view) this pope has done to advance the queering of Catholicism. After all, Pope St. John Paul II said all the right things about homosexuality, from an orthodox Catholic perspective, but did nothing, or next to nothing, to combat it effectively within the institution. Words don’t matter; actions do.

Francis gave a recent interview to Norah O’Donnell of CBS News — an exchange that gives softballs a bad name; for example, she allowed him to get away with posing as a great enemy of abuse in the Church, when in fact he has covered up and defended his clerical allies, like Father Marko Rupnik. Anyway, at this point in the interview, Francis accused his conservative Catholic critics of a “suicidal” tendency — that is, saying that their conservatism is going to be the death of the Church.

It’s a sweet, whipped-cream narrative that the media eat with a spoon. But it’s false. The other day, New Statesman, a venerable left-wing British magazine, published an insightful piece this week saying that there’s no such thing as progressive Catholicism. They aren’t saying that progressives who identify as Catholics don’t exist, but rather simply that the structure of Catholicism means that progressivism can’t really get very far. Excerpt:

Francis is a Pope for Guardian readers, those who take the mores established in the 2010s as their gospel. But despite trading the papal finery for a humble cassock, as conservative momentum builds it seems now the Pope has no clothes.  

His liberal bent is defended as a survival mechanism for a church in decline, with a reputation so badly bruised by years of sex-abuse scandal that it will likely never recover. If this is the aim, the outcome is bleak: under Francis there has been no flurry of the lapsed re-embracing the church.  

But there is a far greater existential question for the papacy. Cardinal Burke issued an early warning in the Francis pontificate: “The pope does not have the power to change teaching [or] doctrine.” Indeed, Francis has realised that he cannot launder Catholicism of its inherent conservatism without entirely disrupting its nature. His tenure has revealed that liberal Catholicism is a theologically inconsistent proposition. The popularity of Francis among the progressive establishment can do very little to change that.  

Attempts have been made to adopt facets of Catholicism while divesting it of its baggage. … Yet both the Catholic reformers and the young unserious adopters of the religion make a similar mistake. The young think they can engage with the style while subverting the dogma. And the reformers believe that everything can be forced into a liberal shape, no matter its inherent nature, logic be damned. Meanwhile, the conservatives are at the gates.  

The magazine observes correctly that the liberal Francis papacy has not resulted in a reversal of the Church’s decline in membership and influence. There has been no Generation Francis rush into the seminaries by young men inspired by him. Francis’s own style of traditionalism — his “bitter clinging” to the antiquated and empty hopes of the Second Vatican Council — is what a death-spiral conservatism looks like.

It is true that praxis can be more important than theology. As I’ve said many times, I entered the Catholic Church in 1993 with my head full of theology, and was shocked to see how very different Catholicism on the ground at the local parish was from what the Church and its holy pope, John Paul II, taught. But you cannot just treat theology as a superfluous adjunct to what the kids these days call “lived experience”. This is something that liberals within every Church cannot seem to understand.

It is true that you can have a Catholic church building, and a validly ordained liberal priest, and inside that building, under the direction of that priest, the religion celebrated and proclaimed has very little to do with normative Catholicism. But you can’t sustain this for long, because as we know from the unhappy experience of 20th century Christian churches, most especially Mainline Protestant ones, a religion that makes no demands on its adherents is one that bores and alienates people. There’s no drama there, no mystery, no calling oneself to something higher and deeper. It’s just therapy and good works.

To be fair, it is also possible for a religion to become ossified by ritual and dogma. There’s a terrific book, The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-1983, containing observations the late Orthodox priest committed to his diary. My copy is back in the US in storage, but I found the passage I was looking for in this First Things review essay by his friend Richard John Neuhaus. Excerpt:

The Russian émigrés, who did not share his vision of Orthodoxy’s universal mission, were the cause of endless frustration. As were the émigrés, so to speak, from Protestantism and Catholicism who sought out Orthodoxy as an escape from history. Fr. Alexander wrote, “Since the Orthodox world was and is inevitably and even radically changing, we have to recognize, as the first symptom of the crisis, a deep schizophrenia which has slowly penetrated the Orthodox mentality: life in an unreal, nonexisting world, firmly affirmed as real and existing. Orthodox consciousness did not notice the fall of Byzantium, Peter the Great’s reforms, the Revolution; it did not notice the revolution of the mind, of science, of lifestyles, forms of life. . . . In brief, it did not notice history.”

It is precisely that escape from history that many think is the glory of Orthodoxy. But the escape is delusory. Years later, this entry: “Once more, I am convinced that I am quite alienated from Byzantium, and even hostile to it. In the Bible, there is space and air; in Byzantium the air is always stuffy. All is heavy, static, petrified. . . . Byzantium’s complete indifference to the world is astounding. The drama of Orthodoxy: we did not have a Renaissance, sinful but liberating from the sacred. So we live in nonexistent worlds: in Byzantium, in Russia, wherever, but not in our own time.” (Here and elsewhere, “the sacred” refers to the artificial world of religiosity, churchiness, and clericalism separated from history and everyday experience.) May 24, 1977: “Orthodoxy refuses to recognize the fact of the collapse and the breakup of the Orthodox world; it has decided to live in its illusion; it has turned the Church into that illusion (yesterday we heard again and again about the ‘Patriarch of the great city of Antioch and of all the East’); it made the Church into a nonexistent world. I feel more and more strongly that I must devote the rest of my life to trying to dispel this illusion.”

I have not personally experienced that in Orthodoxy, but I know others who have. In any case, it’s a temptation that we who are theological and religious conservatives face, and we mustn’t lie about that, not to others and especially not to ourselves.

On the other hand, religious liberalism is dead as a dynamic force. Oh, it can still destroy, and is destroying. But religious liberals have no children. I mean to say, they don’t pass down liberal religion to their kids, because if religion is about nothing more than being good and feeling good about yourself, do you really have to have church for that? A non-observant Jewish friend told me not long ago that some Jews go to synagogue for the sense of community. One can understand that, and sympathize with it, but if that’s the only reason to go, well, you can find community in other places.

The main thing the world wants from the Christian churches is to change their teaching on sex and sexuality. And that’s the main thing that liberals within every church want. Philip Rieff, that atheist Jew, understood that back in the 1960s. He saw even then that the Sexual Revolution was going to be the death of Christianity as a strong social force in the West. Why? Because, the sociologist said, “the rejection of sexual individualism” in the Greco-Roman world was “very near the center of the symbolic that has not held.” In Rieff’s particular language, the “symbolic” was the system of meaning within a religion. He said that an attempt to maintain the outward appearance of a religion while abandoning the restraints imposed by its dogma was bound to fail. You cannot have a permissive Christianity, and still have Christianity, said Rieff (who, again, was not a believer, but a sociologist and cultural critic). It’s not that Christianity was against sex and sexuality, but rather that its understanding of what sex is, and what sex is for, is contrary to the way the Roman pagans saw it.

You don’t have to accept Christian sexual morality, of course — but as Rieff saw it, and as I see it, to accept Christianity without also accepting the way Christianity sees the body and sexuality — or to attempt to reform Christianity to make it affirm what it once denied … well, that cannot work. It’s like trying to radically rewrite the rules of football, and say that it’s still football. Traditions — any tradition, sacred or profane — are not infinitely elastic. Borders matter.

Anyway, I’m quite sure that gay and progressive Catholics are dismayed by Francis’s language here, and perhaps even his instruction to keep gays out of the priesthood. They should relax. Papa Bergoglio has done a great deal to advance their cause. The large number of pro-gay progressive bishops he has appointed, his coddling of sexual revolutionaries Father James Martin and Sister Jeannine Gramick, his meeting with transgenders and constant insulting of traditionalists, and more — all of these things are certainly worth an elderly Latino gent saying frociaggine.

Biden’s Pier To Nowhere

O Pier To Nowhere, We Hardly Knew Ye…

So now the Mediterranean waves off of Gaza have sunk Joe Biden’s $320 million pier, only a couple of weeks after it went into operation. Just the other day, a Pentagon general conceded that none of the 500+ metric tons of humanitarian aid offloaded on the pier had reached suffering Palestinians. Presumably Hamas stole it.

And now the pier is sinking. No kidding:

Think about it: Biden built this pier at the cost of $320 million in an attempt to placate angry Arabs in Michigan. The first humanitarian aid shipments it offloaded didn’t make it to the people of Gaza, because they are ruled by a terrorist mafia that almost certainly grabbed the goods for itself. And now the big waves of the Mediterranean off Gaza have sunk the damn thing. Do you think the military engineers didn’t account for the size of Gaza’s waves? They can be so large at times that Gaza has a surfing community!

If this botched pier is not a condensed symbol of what American power has become, I don’t know what is. It’s damned humiliating.

Speaking of unserious, did you see how Donald Trump marked Memorial Day? Like this:

What a disgraceful, absurd, small-souled man. We could have had Ron DeSantis, but that’s not what the GOP base wanted. The miniseries America: The Chernenko Years rolls on. Nevertheless, I would vote for Trump through gritted teeth for the same reason Douglas Murray is preparing to vote for the abysmal Tories: because there is no such thing as a more sensible, moderate Left. Wokeness has destroyed it.

Renaud Camus’s ‘Ørop’

I just learned that Vauban Books, which translated and published for the first time in English some political essays of Renaud Camus, has now come out with a very powerful fable of his, titled Ørop (pronounced “europe”). You can get it on Kindle for five bucks, or in paperback. It’s short, and can be read in one sitting. But it’s the kind of thing everybody should read. There’s so much wisdom condensed in its pages. In fact, if you want to know why not only Europe, but all the Western world, is in deep crisis, you would do well to read this short story as a prelude to anything else.

Camus writes it as a lost but rediscovered Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale about modern Europe (hence the Danish spelling). It begins after the end of the Second World War. Excerpt:

So as to be quite sure that the horror would not be repeated, however, that the darkest hours would not be relived, that the eternal return would once and for all be stopped in its tracks, Ørop’s masters had found but one way: it was necessary to exit history, but without saying so (for to say as much would amount to an historical fact—an immediate contradiction—and the new era would thus get off to a bad start).

It would thus be claimed that nothing happened anymore, not even time itself. One would be alive, but one would be dead. Much like a doctor who, in order to totally root out the dreadful disease eating away at his patient, surgically removes not just the diseased tissue, but, little by little and as a matter of precaution, all vital functions. The patient is cured, but he no longer exists. No more brain, no more eyes, no more heart, no more anger, no more stomach, no more loins, no more legs, no more ambition, no more dignity, no more virility, no more anything.

In other words, to keep the peace, Ørop has to destroy its own personality — everything in history that made the peoples of Ørop who they are would have to be denied. More:

Laws were diligently passed so that men might marry men, women marry women, sons have children with their mothers without anyone being able to say a word about it. That, or yet more doggedly, teaching was reformed. At regular intervals every year, the education system was utterly remade, each time by cutting back the portion of the curriculum reserved for the most classical subjects: dead languages, mythology, rhetoric, literature, history, in short everything that would have required one to speak of the past. It was a matter of ensuring that school would be less and less school.

Indeed, that was the goal to be achieved in all domains, the supreme ambition, the great objective of the powerful Ministry of Deconstruction: to see to it that living creatures and things were less and less what they were. Livestock, for example, no longer ever saw grass or sky, nor knew the joy of the fields, with the result that, like everything else, they came to resemble objects, manufactured products that one might exchange at will. Even sex came to be seen as an unduly clear-cut distinction between beings. That nothing and no one, not even the empire itself, be quite distinctly something or someone: that, it was thought, was the price of peace.

The philosophical purpose of the project was literally to kill time — to deny history, and even the memory of history:

For schools, the teaching of forgetting was the most important mission. Children attended them so as to carefully verify that they knew no history, that they hadn’t the least inkling of the literature, music, and arts of their country, that they mastered ever fewer of its language’s rules, and, above all, that they had not secretly gotten from their parents or grandparents any knowledge, memories, suspicions, regrets, manners that might have made them a danger for the empire or that might have restored them to themselves, to the awareness of time, to this history about which the empire no longer wanted to hear anything said. Something that went by this name was still vaguely taught so as to not directly run afoul of entrenched habits, but it was an intangible subject, torn from the passage of time: a diffuse assortment of facts, names, civilizational traits, which floated freely in a directionless limbo, and which in no way threatened to arouse among students the least feeling of duration, destiny, will, or loss.

To erase all heritage, impose the perpetual present, and guarantee that history not return because there would be no more history, no more past, no more centuries, the ideal of equality proved itself to be of matchless efficiency. The taste for the arts, the love of literature, the appetite for knowledge, the aspiration towards the examined life, all became deeply suspect over time.

You get the point. The pain of living in history became so immense that the leaders of Ørop set out to destroy it. This is how you get the French leftist intellectual Mathieu Slama declaring recently in an interview that “the identity of Europe is to be without identity”. The radical egalitarianism of the Left — which found no effective resistance from the Right — seeks to destroy all hierarchy, all distinction — even distinctions dictated by biology, and by the passage of time.

Well, the rest of the world did not receive the declaration that history has ended, and, seeing how feeble the people of Ørop had become — how unwilling to cherish their own historical traditions and identities — undertook to invade it, to seek to sack it and conquer it.

You’ll have to read the whole thing to see how it ends. Again, it’s a single short story, but like all good myths and fables, it packs great symbolic power. We Americans do not have the legacy of the 20th century wars, at least not fought at our initiative, on our territory. Still, we too are subject to the elites’ so far largely successful attempts to erase history, historical consciousness, and traditional identities, all for the sake of remolding us as proper progressives. Camus’s Ørop is by all means for us too.

In fact, if I were teaching a class that touched on the crisis of Ørop into the hands of my students. It’s an easily accessible portal leading to the very philosophical heart of the various crises. We live in a time and in a civilization in which the leaders of that civilization, challenged by far too few of us, wish to dispossess us all of our heritage, of our cultural and religious patrimony.

This means many things, and one of the most important things it means is control. From Live Not By Lies:

Forgetting the atrocities of communism is bad enough. What is even more dangerous is the habit of forgetting one’s past. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera drily observes that nobody today will defend gulags, but the world remains full of suckers for the false utopian promises that bring gulags into existence.

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever,” said Cicero. This, explains Kundera, is why communists placed such emphasis on conquering the minds and hearts of young people. In his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera recalls a speech that Czech president Gustáv Husák gave to a group of Young Pioneers, urging them to keep pressing forward to the Marxist paradise of peace, justice, and equality.

“Children, never look back!,” [cries Kundera’s character Husak], and what he meant was that we must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.

A collective loss of historical memory—not just memory of communism but memory of our shared cultural past—within the West is bound to have a devastating effect on our future. It’s not that forgetting the evils of communism means we are in danger of re-creating precisely that form of totalitarianism. It’s that the act of forgetting itself makes us vulnerable to totalitarianism in general.

Put another way, we not only have to remember totalitarianism to build a resistance to it; we have to remember how to remember, period.

Everything about modern society is designed to make memory—historical, social, and cultural—hard to cultivate. Christians must understand this not only to resist soft totalitarianism but also to transmit the faith to the coming generations.

In his 1989 book, How Societies Remember, the late British social anthropologist Paul Connerton explains that there are different kinds of memory. Historical memory is an objective recollection of past events. Social memory is what a people choose to remember—that is, deciding collectively which facts about past events it believes to be important. Cultural memory constitutes the stories, events, people, and other phenomena that a society chooses to remember as the building blocks of its collective identity. A nation’s gods, its heroes, its villains, its landmarks, its art, its music, its holidays—all these things are part of its cultural memory.

Connerton says that “participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory.” Memory of the past conditions how they experience the present—that is, how they grasp its meaning, how they are to understand it, and what they are supposed to do in it.

No culture, and no person, can remember everything. A culture’s memory is the result of its collective sifting of facts to produce a story—a story that society tells itself to remember who it is. Without collective memory, you have no culture, and without a culture, you have no identity.

The more totalitarian a regime’s nature, the more it will try to force people to forget their cultural memories. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the role of Winston Smith within the Ministry of Information is to erase all newspaper records of past events to reflect the current political priorities of the Party. This, said the ex-communist Polish intellectual Leszek Kołakowski, reflects “the great ambition of totalitarianism—the total possession and control of human memory.”

“Let us consider what happens when the ideal has been effectively achieved,” says Kołakowski. “People remember only what they are taught to remember today and the content of their memory changes overnight, if needed.”

As you have read in this space, “The Great Replacement” idea of Camus’s is not a conspiracy theory. Whatever far-right nutters have made of it, you can read in Camus’s political essays his explicit denial that there was any kind of conspiracy here. This has been brought about by left-wing and right-wing postwar elites going about their business, living out their programs, without a conscious intention of erasing Europeans and replacing them with foreigners. Yet, says Camus, that is what has been happening, and continues to happen.

It is happening because these same European leaders first worked hard to erase in the minds and hearts of Europeans the idea that they belong to a particular culture that deserves to be cherished and defended. Camus explains why in his political essays, but with special potency in the fable, Ørop. They neutralized the European peoples. I don’t think they want Europeans to be conquered by migrants from alien cultures. I think like most progressives, they really do believe in their crackpot utopian ideals, and are shocked, truly shocked, when paradise does not dawn upon the earth.

See, this is why in Houellebecq’s novel Submission, the villains are not the Islamists working their way to power in France. The villains are the French elites who, in the postwar decades, enfeebled the entire nation, such that they have nothing to live for but shopping, drinking, and sex. But (says Houellebecq, an agnostic who appreciates religion as sociology), no civilization can survive without a shared higher purpose. Traditional French republican ideals aren’t enough. In the novel, the French public, exhausted by life and just wanting to be told what to do, submit to the rule of Islam. In the novel, as in Cavafy’s poem “Waiting For the Barbarians,” a rich and decadent civilization is not conquered by the sword, but surrenders in seeking a solution to its own malaise.

My view is that the West will not survive without a true revival of Christianity. Not just cultural Christianity, but actual belief. The embers are dying out, but they still burn. The future is not fated. We need to break the evil spell of the Grima Wormtongues of both high and low culture who reduce us to feeble zombies.

Grima, left, with King Theoden