October 2018 – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

The Cross Won, but the Battle Never Ends

I ended my European tour in June at Rome where all roads are said to lead. After hours of prayer and meditation in Santa Maria Maggiore, I spent a long time in the vicinity of the Coliseum where I noticed something I had missed on previous visits:

The brutal Romans contributed mightily to civilization, but it took Christianity to civilize us truly. But now the Church of Rome is collapsing under the weight of its own decadence. It will most likely survive as a remnant, stripped down to essentials and purified by suffering and worldly losses. Such losses will do it good. The Church needs to spend a generation or two in the desert, there to examine its collective conscience and to ponder the mission it has abandoned.

All institutions require reform and renewal from time to time, as do their members. But it is not reform or renewal when an institution is diverted from its founding purpose. It is rather destruction. The whole point of the church founded by Christ was to stand against the world and point us, and indeed lead us, beyond it. "My kingdom is not of this world." (John 18:36) Betraying its mandate, the Roman church has become just another piece of cultural junk. Cozying up to secularity, the Church seeks to maintain itself as an organizational hustle for the clerics it serves while abandoning the deposit of faith it is supposed to be preserving.

The vast, ancient edifice needs fumigation. The termites, from Bergoglio on down, need to be sent scurrying. The rotten hierarchy needs to be defunded. My trenchant but obviously figurative talk of termites and fumigation will elicit howls of protest from some. "Eliminationist rhetoric!" But consider this report from a correspondent, Dr. Vito Caiati:

In its October 7th edition, Corriere della Sera offered excepts from Pope Bergoglio’s just released book on the Virgin Mary , including the following paragraph, which well reveals his insidious method of undermining dogma and tradition. I provide the first paragraph of this longer reflection, followed by my translation.

Da quando è nata fino all’Annunciazione, al momento dell’incontro con l’angelo di Dio, me l’immagino come una ragazza normale, una ragazza di oggi, una ragazza non posso dire di città, perché Lei è di un paesino, ma normale, normale, educata normalmente, aperta a sposarsi, a fare una famiglia. Una cosa che immagino è che amasse le Scritture: conosceva le Scritture, aveva fatto la catechesi ma familiare, dal cuore. Poi, dopo il concepimento di Gesù, ancora una donna normale: Maria è la normalità, è una donna che qualsiasi donna di questo mondo può dire di poter imitare. Niente cose strane nella vita, una madre normale: anche nel suo matrimonio verginale, casto in quella cornice della verginità, Maria è stata normale. Lavorava, faceva la spesa, aiutava il Figlio, aiutava il marito: normale.

From her birth until the Annunciation, at the moment of the encounter with the angel of God, I imagine her [the Virgin Mary] as a normal girl, a girl of today, I cannot say a girl of the city, because she is from a hamlet, but normal, normal, educated normally, open to marrying, to having a family. One thing that I imagine is that she loved the Scriptures: she knew the Scriptures; she had carried out catechesis but informally, from the heart. Then, after the conception of Jesus, she was still a normal woman. Mary is normality, is a woman that almost any women in this world is able to imitate. No strange things in life, a normal mother: even in her virginal matrimony, chaste in that frame of virginity, Mary was normal. She worked, shopped, helped her Son, helped her husband: normal.

Leaving aside the triteness of these reflections, they constitute, first, a masked assault on the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which proclaims that “The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 494). While we cannot know the intimate effects of such “singular grace and privilege” on Mary’s being and consciousness, we are certainly bound to hold that she was no “normal girl.” Moreover, Bergoglio’s words can be taken to deny the perpetual virginity of Mary, in that while he speaks of her being “chaste in the frame of virginity,” he simultaneously regards her “after the birth of Jesus” as “a normal woman” since there are “no strange things in life.” Again, the Church affirms that although Jesus emerged from the body of the Theotokos, her virginity was not in any way altered. Now, if this is not a “strange thing,” that is, an absolutely unique miracle, what is? Bergoglio is constantly at work undermining the foundations of the faith to the benefit of post-modern skepticism and relativism.

Una ragazza normale? One could try to read this as an emphasis on Mary's humanity, or one might say that Bergoglio is a foolish man who doesn't understand the dogmas of the Church of which he is pope; but in the end I believe my learned correspondent is right: this is an insidious undermining of dogma and tradition. How could Bergoglio not know the doctrinal content in the Catechism?

For a man like me there are two main problems with the RCC, or rather two main impediments to my returning to it, as I would like to do, being a cradle Catholic. One is at the philosophical level: how is it possible that the dogmas including the Mariological dogmas (Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception, Assumption) be true? Suppose I solve this problem to my own satisfaction. Then the second problem, that of the corruption of the institution, jumps out at me. The church hierarchy and the rank-and-file priests are filled with unbelievers who apparently believe in the Church in precisely the way mafiosi believe in the mafia: it's their thing, a hustle that keeps them fat and happy in a worldly sense and allows free play to their concupiscence. I am alluding, of course, to priestly pederasty, pedophilia, and ephebophilia. How can I in good conscience support such a church by attendance or monetary contributions? If the Church is now just another pile of secular-leftist junk, and a haven for homosexuals, then it ought to be defunded.

Am I suggesting that for every priest the Church is a fraud and a hustle? Of course not. But as Rod Dreher has forcefully documented over many, many entries at the American Conservative, the rot resides in the hierarchy itself from Bergoglio on down. This fact makes the problem very serious indeed.

Humor Video: Hitler Reacts to Kavanaugh Confirmation

1:55

On Civility and a Concession to Hillary

Civility is a good old conservative virtue and I'm all for it. But like toleration, civility has limits. If you call me a racist because I argue against Obamacare, then not only do I have no reason to be civil in my response to you, I morally ought not be civil to you. For by being civil I only encourage more bad behavior on your part. By slandering me, you have removed yourself from the sphere of the civil. The slanderer does not deserve to be treated with civility; he deserves to be treated with hostility and stiff-necked opposition. He is deserving of moral condemnation.

If you call me a xenophobe because I insist that the federal government do what it is constitutionally mandated to do, namely, secure the nation's borders, then you slander me and forfeit whatever right you have to be treated civilly. For if you slander me, then you are moral scum and deserve to be morally condemned. In issuing my moral condemnation, I exercise my constitutionally-protected First Amendment right to free speech. But not only do I have a right to condemn you, I am morally obliged to do so lest your sort of evil behavior become even more prevalent.

Examples can be multiplied, but the point is clear. Civility has limits. One ought to be civil to the civil. But one ought not be civil to the uncivil. What they need is a taste of their own medicine.

One must also realize that 'civility' is a prime candidate for linguistic hijacking. And so we must be on our guard lest the promoters of 'civility' attach to this fine word a Leftward-tilting connotation. We must not let them get away with any suggestion that one is civil if and only if one is an espouser of liberal/left positions.

We now come to Hillary. “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about,” she said.

I agree with this one sentence. The Dems have transmogrified into a destructive, hard-Left party. We cannot be civil with these extremely uncivil and vicious and violent and mob-stoking scumbags who want to destroy what we of the Coalition of the Sane stand for and care about.

Under the rude tutelage of President Trump, some Republicans are making the transition from pussycon to warrior. One surprising example is Lindsey Graham whose stones have finally descended, to put it crudely. Too bad it took the outrages against Kavanaugh to set the cojones in motion.

Donald J. Trump, as uncouth and flawed as he is, is a necessary corrective to the extremism of the Democrat Party. We are very lucky he came along at just the right time.

Now read this: Trump Against the Pussycons.

The Problem of Dirty Hands

Here at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

It’s All Over for the Never Trumpers

One part of them acknowledges President Trump's manifold accomplishments, in particular his two SCOTUS victories, and will vote for him in 2020. The rest have or will let their mindless hatred of Trump the man drive them out of the Republican Party or out of conservatism altogether. Victor Davis Hanson:

The character assassination of Brett Kavanaugh by unsubstantiated rumor and gossip put Never Trumpers in a bind, or rather split them in two. Kavanaugh was nominated by the hated Trump, but his record and endorsements by the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society mainstreamed the choice.

[. . .]

To destroy a judge like Kavanaugh reflected that the New Left’s hatred of Trump had always been incidental to its essential loathing of conservatives in general. For a remnant group of Never Trumpers to oppose Kavanaugh, then, reflected the elevation of their own personal hatred for Trump over the critical elevation of a principled jurist to the Supreme Court. Supposedly, Kavanaugh was soiled by a Trump handprint, and therefore it was better to have a more liberal court than see Trump get any credit for taking the court in a direction only previously dreamed of by conservatives.

Never Trumpers had always assured their former conservative colleagues that Trump would either fail or prove liberal. But he has done neither. And as far as his demonstrable crudity and uncouthness, the hearings showed that the Democrats were far crueler and crass in deed than Trump was in word. So perhaps half of the small minority of Republican Never Trumpers, in horror at the Antifa tactics of the Democrats, retreated to the old adage of “hang together or hang separately.” Those who doubled down by joining leftists in opposing the Kavanaugh nomination revealed that they have crossed their Rubicon and now are either orphaned or unabashedly part of the new progressive Democratic party — at least until their useful obsequiousness no longer serves current progressive agendas.

The Canticle of Jack Kerouac

BY LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

Far from the sea far from the sea

of Breton fishermen

the white clouds scudding

over Lowell

and the white birches the

bare white birches

along the blear night roads

flashing by in darkness

(where once he rode

in Pop’s old Plymouth)

And the birch-white face

of a Merrimac madonna

shadowed in streetlight

by Merrimac’s shroudy waters

—a leaf blown

upon sea wind

out of Brittany

over endless oceans

There is a garden in the memory of America

There is a nightbird in its memory

There is an andante cantabile

in a garden in the memory

of America

In a secret garden

in a private place

a song a melody

a nightsong echoing

in the memory of America

In the sound of a nightbird

outside a Lowell window

In the cry of kids

in tenement yards at night

In the deep sound

of a woman murmuring

a woman singing broken melody

in a shuttered room

in an old wood house

in Lowell

As the world cracks by

thundering

like a lost lumber truck

on a steep grade

in Kerouac America

The woman sits silent now

rocking backward

to Whistler’s Mother in Lowell

and all the tough old

Canuck mothers

and Jack’s Mémère

And they continue rocking

And may still on stormy nights show through

as a phantom after-image

on silent TV screens

a flickered after-image

that will not go away

in Moody Street

in Beaulieu Street

in ‘dirtstreet Sarah Avenue’

in Pawtucketville

And in the Church of St. Jean Baptiste

Continue reading “The Canticle of Jack Kerouac”

Amazon Pricing

Bezos and the boys are asking a paltry $3,214.79 for a hardbound copy of The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology, but a whopping $34.95 for the same book in paperback.

Now I'll grant you that hardbounds are superior to paperbacks in point of longevity, but 100 times better?

There is something screwy about the Amazon pricing algorithm. But what do I know about such things?

James Soriano, The Sin of Silence

Yesterday I quoted Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State (1997-2001) in the Clinton Administration: "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other." The context was Albright's urging of women to vote for a woman, Hillary Clinton.

This just in from James Soriano, "a retired Foreign Service Officer who spent three decades in the State Department, most of them in the Middle East." (from his mini-bio):

I remember Madeleine Albright saying that a couple of years ago, and in a bit of rhetorical jiu jitsu I used the phrase as the punch line in an essay Crisis Magazine posted yesterday.

I was inspired to write the piece because of what Francis The Leftist said of the Vigano revelations: "I won't say a word about it." Francis has many opinions about leftist enthusiasms, but maintains radio silence on issues of great concern to traditionalists.

Francis' silence on critical Church teachings somehow reminds me of the scene in the Inferno with Ugolino, who was starved to death in a Pisan tower with his sons. He was a father who said not one word to his children in their pain and anguish. Bergoglio e Ugolino. I tried to twin them. The editor thought it was a bit of stretch, but the commenters seem to have gotten the point.

Regards,

Jim

Madeleine Albright, Chief of the Tribal Females

"There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other." Thus Madeleine Albright, urging women to vote for Hillary because she's a woman.

Now there is a reason that stands up to sober scrutiny. That's on a level with someone's refusing to vote for Hillary because of her pant-suited thunder thighs.

Albright is the gas bag who also darkly hints at Trump's being a fascist. But she lacks the estrogen to come out and say it. Does she know the meaning of that word or is she just using it as a verbal cudgel in the typical way of the leftist?

Tribalism is on the rise among the distaff contingent and it is not a pretty sight. The tribally female Dems are "un-freaking-hinged" to borrow a creative adjective from Rod Dreher whose Progressive Tribalism Beats the War Drums I invite you to read.

Kerouac Alley

A Northern California reader sends this photo of a street scene in the vicinity of City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco. I made a 'pilgrimage' to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's famous bookstore in the early '70s. That was before the Kerouac street sign was up.

Some of Ferlinghetti's poetry can be read here. To my surprise, Ferlinghetti is still alive at 99. By contrast, old Kerouac quit the mortal coil and "the slaving meat wheel" at age 47. He is, we hope, "safe in heaven, dead."

The Corruption of Institutions

Without institutions, where would we be?

But they are all corrupt, potentially if not actually, in part if not in whole, and constantly in need of reform. The Roman Catholic Church is no exception despite its claim to divine sanction and guidance.

When an institution abandons its charter and strays from its founding purpose and substitutes the purpose of mere self-preservation for the secular benefit of its members, then it becomes an organizational hustle and ceases to deserve our respect.

You should be skeptical of all institutions. Like the houses here in the Sonoran desert, they either have termites or will get them.

But institutional corruption reflects personal corruption. Institutional corruption is the heart's corruption writ large. So you should be skeptical of all persons, including the one in the mirror.

Especially him, since he is the one you have direct control over.

Addendum (10/8). Alfred Centauri writes,

I just read your recent post on the corruption of institutions and this jumped right out at me:

When an institution abandons its charter and strays from its founding purpose and substitutes the purpose of mere self-preservation for the secular benefit of its members, then it becomes an organizational hustle and ceases to deserve our respect.

For quite some time now, I've been thinking that this corruption is essentially an inevitable outcome. It's a slow process that few seem to notice but, over time, the original goals of the institution become goals in name only and the end becomes the furthering of the institution itself.

That is, there's an inevitable inversion of the means and ends that take place over time. Initially, the institution is a means to the end of the stated goals but, eventually, the institution becomes the end itself with the stated goals only a means to feeding and growing the institution.

It's reassuring to read that there are others that 'see the termites'.

The corruption does seem inevitable, but the inversion of means and ends is usually only partial and not total. Consider a charity set up to feed the poor. It may start out by fulfilling its founding purpose, but gradually it becomes corrupt as more and more of the contributions are used to feather the nests of the charity's officers and to perpetuate the operation in a building in a fine location with lavish furnishings, etc. Suppose 90% of the contributions go to so-called 'operating expenses' and only 10% go to the needy. Such an outfit is well on its way to becoming a pure 'hustle' although it is not there yet. Anyone who contributes to it is a chump.

I contribute $800 per year to St. Mary's Food Bank. According to Charity Navigator, it passes on over 95% of monies received to the needy. So I'm not a chump. It is a nice question, though, whether when one does good, one should let others know about it. There are plausible arguments on both sides of the question. I set a good example by advertising my alms giving. On the other hand there is Matthew 6:3: "But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth." (KJV)

Can bloated, inefficient Federal agencies justify their existence in terms of the good they do, if any? The Department of Education is mainly just a hustle for the benefit of the people who work for it. What about the Social Security Administration? Clearly not as bad, but . . . .

Examples are easily multiplied. It is a very large topic indeed.

Susan Collins (R-Maine), Profile in Courage

Here is the full text of Senator Collins' speech before the U. S. Senate. (HT: Bill Keezer)

The analog of military valor in civilian life is called civil courage. Senator Collins has it. My impression is that some Republicans are finally learning from President Trump how to fight, as witness Senator Lindsey Graham's finest moment.

Commentary on the Kavanaugh Contretemps

Malcolm Pollack, A Roundup of Reaction from the Right.

Most interesting to me is the following quotation from Pollack which embeds a quotation from Michael Anton on the "Gillibrand Standard" which well exposes the twisted viciousness of the contemporary Democrat Party (the bolding is mine, read it if you don't have the attention span for the whole thing):

Next, here’s Michael Anton, who as “Publius Decius Mus” wrote the critically important Flight 93 Election essay back in 2016. In this essay he writes about what he calls The Gillibrand Standard. Here are some longish excerpts, but you should read the whole thing.

The Left has created a new “standard” for American politics—indeed, new in the entire history of Anglo-American jurisprudence. Let us call it the Gillibrand Standard, after its most insistent advocate, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).

According to the Gillibrand Standard, accusation suffices to destroy. Not only is no corroborating evidence necessary, to ask for such evidence makes one just as guilty as the accused. Especially monstrous is to ask questions of the accuser; that is to repeat or compound the alleged crime. The accusation, once stated, immediately takes on metaphysical certainty. To doubt is to blaspheme.

Actually, “accusation” is too generous. Machiavelli distinguishes between “accusation” and “calumny” in order to demonstrate that “as much as accusations are useful to republics, so much are calumnies pernicious.” The difference is that accusations are public, subject to critique and refutation, and a mendacious or even inaccurate accuser pays a price. Calumnies, by contrast, “have need neither of witnesses nor any other specific corroboration to prove them, so that everyone can be calumniated by everyone; but everyone cannot be accused, since accusations have need of true corroboration and of circumstances that show the truth of the accusation.” A more incisive summary of the Gillibrand Standard cannot be found.

… There is but one limiting principle to the Gillibrand Standard: It shalt be used only against the Right and Republicans. Credible accusations—with evidence, witnesses, contemporaneous police reports—against Democrats and liberals are not merely to be ignored but also stonewalled and attacked, alleged victims and witnesses alike smeared. That is, until this or that liberal is no longer useful in the moment and safely can be discarded. Throwing an expired liberal to the wolves now and then is useful to maintain the fiction of evenhandedness.

This is obviously outrageous, unjust, unfair, and offensive to any conceivable standard of decency. Just as obvious, the Democrats and Left not only do not care, they welcome the weaponization of accusation. Their only conceivable regret is that it might not work this time. But even if it doesn’t “work” in the sense that Kavanaugh is not confirmed, they know that it “works” in other ways. It rallies their base. It drives fundraising. It degrades public standards of decency and credibility, making its effective use more likely in the future. It delegitimizes institutions—in this case, the Supreme Court, which, with the addition of Justice Kavanaugh, may later rule constitutionally and correctly in ways the Left does not like. And, most important for the nihilistic Left, it delegitimizes and dehumanizes—makes a villain out of—Kavanaugh himself.

It is hard to say what is the most shamelessly disgusting aspect of this affair. I offer as a candidate the following tactic. First, smear your target with uncorroborated, unprovable and almost certainly false allegations. After you have—inevitably—failed to substantiate those charges, insist that your target withdraw since his reputation will now forever be under a cloud and his rulings will lack popular legitimacy. This is akin to breaking an opponent’s arm before a sporting event and then insisting that he forfeit.

Rod Dreher on the Purveyors of ‘Progressive’ Poison

Here:

These people. They have to be stopped. They’re ruining life. Who wants to work for a company where you can become an internal pariah for standing by your old friend? Who wants to work in a neurosis-ridden hamster cage where you have to be afraid that the internal mob will turn on you for having the “wrong” opinion? Who wants to get involved in helping out at your local school when ideologically-charged activists rush in to politicize everything?

[. . .]

UPDATE: A reader who grew up in communist Czechoslovakia writes:

It may look like Communism but it isn’t. It’s worse. Nobody, and I mean nobody (perhaps with one notable exception of a very decent guy, actually), believed the communist propaganda drivel. I don’t recall anybody fainting at the thought of imperialist ‘diversants’ sneaking across the border, revanchists hiding in their closets. It was a mechanism to control, brutalize and destroy and both the brutes and the brutalized understood it as such. Our current situation is somewhat unique. We actually have a large class of people who take this garbage at face value. That’s scary.