From Newman onward, the chief sensation many converts from Anglicanism to Catholicism have had when looking back at their old communion is amazement at its utter nothingness. Converts’ views aren’t always fair, but it does seem that the habitual accusations against a serious enterprise would involve something worse than general dottiness. An recent example: the proposal from an English bishop to improve the observance of Christmas by bringing buckets of horse manure to church. Even when the Anglicans do something outrageous, as in the case of the recent Robinson ordination, it’s hard for many ex-Anglicans to take it seriously because it seems so obviously a case of something utterly insubstantial being blown about by whatever the wind happens to be.
Say what you want about Catholicism (and people do say what they want), no-one thinks it’s trivial. People are willing to reconstruct the whole of history if it helps them slander it: Pius XII becomes a Nazi, the Protestant Reformation becomes a great movement of rationality and tolerance, the Crusades become an incident in the long history of Christian aggression against Muslims, and so on. And the enemies of Catholicism within the Church don’t limit themselves to buckets of horse manure. Sade could not have been a Protestant. It’s hard, for example, to imagine a politely apostate Anglican rector, still devoted to good taste and “niceness,” painting his church with a 30-foot Jesus, naked and apparently in an state of sexual excitation, and succeeding in keeping it there for almost 20 years. The extreme nature of the attacks against the Catholic Church, and the strength of the forces behind them, is a sign of the importance of what is at stake.
As regards the
As regards the Episcopalians’ beyond-idiotic one-hundred-percent capitulation to homosexuality, I happened to see an interview on one of the standard morning shows a few minutes ago (conducted not by Katy Couric, but—and did anyone really expect anything else on the standard PC morning shows?—by a woman evidently chosen for her even greater skill at blending vacuous stupidity with a repulsively mannish and extremely abrasive personal style)—I saw an interview of an Episcopalian bishop conducted by one of these abrasive morning-show men-masquerading-as-“women” in which it emerged that there is concrete deep and widespread dissatisfaction with the consecration of this man who abandoned his wife and children to live with another man in a homosexual relationship, and apparently a genuine rebellion is brewing. The Anglican lay community is not going to stand for this—it will be either outright schism of international scope, or this homosexual person will have to resign, IMHO.
That’s the good news. The bad news is, once that’s sorted out it will still leave Anglicanism’s other capitulations to deal with: its capitulations women’s lib, to P.C., and to the movement to abolish the white Christian Euro ethno-culture on the North-American continent and around the world. And finally of course its dottiness will have to be dealt with, so that what Mr. Kalb cites in this blog entry (and he sadly had to cite in previous entries too numerous to list here in the time I have to type this but I’ve gone back and found a couple, below) won’t have to be cited too, too many times more in future.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/000815.html
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/000839.html
Great posting Jim, and a
Great posting Jim, and a great comment by Unadorned. God bless you both and your dear ones abundantly, and a very merry Christmas! 🙂
P.S. All of your postings are great, actually, Jim.