Friday BookReview: "Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow" by David Chappell

(first published August 5, 2011)


Here are excerpts from David Pence's review of A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow:


Faith in God allows a man to see more clearly into the reality of things but apparently it has taken [the atheist] David Chappell to write this penetrating book defining the civil rights movement as a religious revival. He plays the righteous pagan Virgil in guiding Christian Dante through the biblical prophetic theology and working of the Spirit which signaled the civil rights movement as the third American Awakening...

Education was NOT the key to prophetic religion. God, judgment, conversion, sin, demons, and miracles constitute the vocabulary of the prophets. Reverend King's God was a highly personal God -- the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, not the god of the philosophers. He could be trusted in times of travail and prayed to in times of danger. Andrew Young was quoted: "The civil rights movement brought a resurgence of religious feeling in the South. When folks start shooting at you, you do a lot more praying." When Bayard Rustin was asked if King believed in the fundamentalist active personal God, he answered: "Oh, yes, profoundly; it always amazed me how he could combine this intensely philosophical analytical mind with this more or less fundamental -- well I don't like to say fundamentalist -- but abiding faith." As Thomas Gilmore, another civil rights veteran said: "The Holy Spirit guided us. I got strength facing the sheriff; he was the biggest man in the county, but I felt we were walking next to someone bigger. God is real, man." Years later Gilmore became the first black sheriff of his county.

Chappell has little time for the flatteners of history who in the name of "people's history" try to paint the civil rights struggle as the ever-present but under-reported fight of the common man against oppression. Chappell argues that something happened here that was extraordinary indeed; and the people who stepped out of the routines of their everyday lives to enter the political arena and national historical narrative were extraordinary people. He found the source of their courage and hope (that "stone of hope" they somehow chipped from the mountain of despair). What is unique about his study is that he does not stress the easy lesson that the biblical prophetic tradition was a foe to racism. He instead contrasts prophetic religion as a more effective and truthful actor for justice than position-paper rationalistic liberalism. What did those Baptist preachers (Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King, and Fred Shuttlesworth) know and do that eluded Gunnar Myrdal, John Dewey, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Lionel Trilling? Chappell's answer is that the civil rights movement was not the inevitable maturation and triumph of philosophical liberalism. It was not education for progress. Rather it was a Spirit-driven melding of characters and events living out the biblical narrative by confronting the soul of a nation. This prophetic witness employed a "coercive non-violence" necessary to confront evil and the men wedded to it. Such nonviolence is much more like war than pacifism, and is grounded in a realistic Christian anthropology which saw both struggle and an embrace of "unrequited suffering" as the redemptive route to justice. It was a stunning paradox of this fitting time that there was no group more convicted by this witness -- not into joining the cause but chastened to inaction -- than Southern evangelicals who were also seeking a renewal of lived-out religion in the daily life of the nation.

Returning military veterans of WWII and Korea -- as well as preachers -- infused the civil rights movement with the intersecting language and claims of religion, patriotism, and righteous warfare. The charismatic soldier-preacher Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham said in 1958: "This is a religious crusade, a fight between light and darkness, right and wrong, fair play and tyranny. We are assured of victory because we are using weapons of spiritual warfare." In 1964 the fire still burned in the man whose eloquence was only surpassed by his courage. "We have faith in America and still believe that Birmingham and Alabama will rise to their heights of glory in race relations. And we shall be true to our ideals as a Christian nation."

                                                       

                        
The civil rights movement "carried the Constitution in one hand and the Bible in the other." This crucial book by an atheist historian should challenge American Christians to distinguish the great religious awakening of the civil rights movement from the contrary spirits of black power and the sexual revolution. These profane pretenders have hobbled our national gait. Black and white evangelicals are now religious brethren separated into the voting army "bases" of two opposing parties. How long asked Elijah can Israel keep hobbling, divided between Baal and Yahweh? Can the third Great Awakening stir American Christians to be united again, promising a second Reconstruction more just than the first? Chappell's book gives no answer but he has led us to the question.

"I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

"This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope."
                    (Reverend King, 28 August 1963)

                                                           

Friday BookReview: Charles Péguy (1873-1914)

[first published September 4, 2015]

     "Faith is a great tree, an oak tree rooted deep in the heart of France."  (Péguy)

On the fourth day of September, in the early weeks of the Great War, Lieutenant Charles Péguy was killed.

(His father, a cabinet maker, had died in 1874 as a result of wounds received during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. His mother then returned to her work as chair-seat maker to support her family.)

Here are excerpts from a review by Robert Royal:

"When a true genius is born, nothing in the family or its circumstances allows us to predict the new arrival. Something mysterious and sovereign suddenly erupts with genius. That’s all there is to say." Among this century’s Catholic geniuses, no clearer instance of this mystery exists than the brilliant French poet and essayist Charles Peguy.

Like many other pre-Vatican II figures, Peguy has been in eclipse the past few decades, even in France. The secular world neglects him for complicated religious and political reasons. But gifted minds in their own right as different as the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel, the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the British poet Geoffrey Hill have tried to bring us back into contact with his great spirit...

Peguy was born in 1873 near Orleans, Joan of Arc’s birthplace, and grew up with a mother and grandmother who were basically illiterate. They earned a bare living recaning chairs sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. Peguy learned the trade and also helped out, well into his teens, with the annual harvests in the region. Though he showed great gifts the moment he entered school, Peguy was as close to a peasant as any major literary figure who ever lived.

The genius of Peguy lies mainly in the ways he tried to bring simple truths to bear on the whole modern world... His activity consisted in a wide-ranging attempt to retrieve an authentic spiritual life from the various incrustations that were making it difficult to find, even for simple people. Despite the underlying simplicity of his words, they have a brilliance and authority that revitalize politics, mysticism, war, peace, love, honor, and death. In him, the timeless depths of the classical and Christian past suddenly find a new voice that is also a prophetic and urgent message to the present.

Peguy was killed by a bullet through the head during the Battle of the Marne in 1914. He had anticipated his death in a poem:

Blessed are those whom a great battle leaves

Stretched out on the ground in front of God’s face,

Blessed the lives that just wars erase,

Blessed the ripe wheat, the wheat gathered in sheaves.

It was a dramatic end to a heroic life. He was barely forty.

                                   

In a different age, Peguy might have founded a religious order. As it turned out, he did something even more difficult: He lived a life of complete intellectual and spiritual integrity in the modern world.

Peguy is never a mere writer—what he called an intellectual—i.e., someone who stands outside life as an observer. He risked himself, his wife and children, and “the first of treasures . . . peace of heart” for the truth. Once, when someone was making a point, he interrupted: "You’re right, but you have no right to be right unless you are willing to pay the price of demonstrating the rightness of truth." Even eighty years after his death, for those who know him, Peguy remains a real presence. When you read him, your eyes don’t merely follow a string of words, you enter a passionate current of life.

As a young man in Orleans, Peguy gravitated toward simple workers and peasants who were interested in freedom and learning, even if they had to pursue them in the evening after long hours at work: "I consider it a personal blessing to have known, in my earliest youth, some of those old republicans; admirable men; hard on themselves; and good for events; I learned through them what it means to have a whole and upright conscience." Several sober intellectuals have disputed whether this exuberant portrait of the old France is accurate. Peguy was as skeptical as anyone of romantic fantasies, but he is there to witness that such people existed.

Many people today blithely invoke civil society as a counterweight to much that is wrong in the modern world. Peguy would have agreed, but for him popular virtues had deep roots in classical and Christian culture. Without that living support, even the peasants and workers became corrupt. By around 1880, he would argue, the old pride in hard work, productivity, and craftsmanship was beginning to pass.

Though Peguy was an activist for workers, he deplored the new attitude among labor groups of demanding the largest compensation for the least work and even, something unthinkable in the old system, of destroying tools and machinery during strikes. In the old days, there had been more independence and simple virtue: "When a worker lit a cigarette, what he was going to tell you was not what some journalist had said in the morning newspaper. The free-thinkers in those days were more Christian than pious people today."

                                  

Both the Church and the republic, he claimed, had contributed to this disaster in their mistaken attacks on one another. (Remnants of these attitudes surfaced when John Paul II visited France earlier this year: Five thousand people demonstrated when the pope praised the ancient king, Clovis, as if his visit were a prelude to restoring the ancien regime). For Peguy the true Catholic and true republican virtues were parallel achievements, producing saints on the one hand and heroes on the other. The decline of Christianity, he warned, was part of the same evil spirit leading to the decline of the republic, a lesson we still have not absorbed...

Jacques Maritain worked for Peguy as a young man in Paris. He spoke both from personal acquaintance and a just appraisal of Peguy’s heroic spirit when he addressed France as "ancient land of Joan of Arc and Peguy" and the French as "companions of Joinville and Peguy, people of Joan of Arc." In London, DeGaulle made similar appeals...

In 1952, Alexander Dru, the translator of Kierkegaard, published extended segments from two of Peguy’s greatest essays [see this review of Temporal and Eternal]. Several of the longer poems have been translated in full. But we still need a good-size anthology of Peguy’s prose in English. His reading of history and analysis of the real roots of our spiritual crisis alone would make such a volume invaluable. It would also reveal Peguy’s most salient trait—an unflagging passion for justice and truth whatever the cost...

Amid various struggles for workers’ rights and relief efforts, Peguy became a socialist of sorts because he believed that true socialism sought real brotherhood and respect among men. He was young, and the world had not yet seen any socialist regimes... Peguy was by nature incapable of the kinds of lies and partisanship that make up most party politics. His verdict about such things is a phrase known to many people who have otherwise never heard of Peguy: "Everything begins in mysticism (le mystique) and ends in politics." This formula summed up more than twenty years of political experience.

Peguy the socialist also became a supporter of Dreyfus, the French Jewish officer wrongly accused of spying for Germany. He started a journal, the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, to defend these and other just causes because he discovered at an international convention that the socialists practiced the same kind of partisan lying and injustice that he had associated with bourgeois conservatives...

For Peguy, the root of any mystique was remaining fidele (faithful) to truth and justice despite party commitments. He would refuse to impose an orthodoxy even on writers for the Cahiers: “A review only continues to have life if each issue annoys at least one-fifth of its readers. Justice lies in seeing that it is not always the same fifth.” 

... He even came to feel himself at odds with the Dreyfusards. They had begun in a mystical, idealistic mode, fighting for three mystiques: the Jewish mystique, with its long history of suffering for the right since Old Testament times (the Nazi collaborators were careful to hide this pro-Jewish Peguy); the Christian mystique, founded by a just man wrongly accused; and the French mystique, which in both its republican and Christian forms believed in justice for all. For Peguy, being a Dreyfusard meant the spiritual and moral defense of all three.

Unhappily, Peguy detected within the Dreyfusards, too, impure political elements at odds with its mystique. The socialist Combes government, for example, used the emotional repercussions of the Dreyfus case to close Catholic schools and monasteries (Catholics had largely supported the military and the charges against Dreyfus). As a man who valued discipline, courage, and the right use of military power in just causes, Peguy particularly detested what he saw as an anti-French, anti-military, near traitorous element among some Dreyfusards:

“Some people want to insult and abuse the army, because it’s a good line these days. . . In fact, at all political demonstrations it is a required theme. If you don’t take that line you don’t look sufficiently progressive . . . and it will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of looking insufficiently progressive.”

Somewhere along this path of betrayal by the socialists and Dreyfusards, Peguy returned to the Church. A friend stopped in to see Peguy when he was sick in bed at home. After a long conversation, Peguy merely remarked as the friend was leaving, "Wait. I haven’t told you everything. I’ve become a Catholic." No great explanations were later forthcoming. On the few occasions when he wrote of the conversion, Peguy didn’t even use the word, preferring to speak of the "deepening" of his passion for truth, justice, and brotherhood, which found its fullest scope in Catholicism.

But he did not find that the Catholic parties were doing much better than the others in keeping their politics from overwhelming their mystique. The Catholic Church seemed to have betrayed its mystique by becoming a temporal party in France and elsewhere. Peguy thought that if it dropped clerical politics and returned to its spiritual greatness and concern for the poor, the Church would enter into a period of massive renaissance. Fidelity to the Gospel, which in the realm of mystiques did not exclude what was noble and good in other traditions, now became the overruling passion of his life.

Peguy’s conversion brought with it not only spiritual renewal but fresh literary inspiration as well, including a turn to poetry. In 1909, he wrote his book-length poem The Mystery of the Charity of Jeanne d’Arc, a stunning evocation of Joan’s youth in Peguy’s own Orleans, which shows the peasant roots of her charity and how the story of Christ Himself needs to be seen in its simple, passionate, popular elements...

In God’s providence, Peguy found himself subject to new trials of passion and fidelity around 1910 when—without any previous warning—he fell deeply in love. Madame Genevieve Favre, Jacques Maritain’s mother, was close to Peguy at the time and has left a lengthy record of the "terrible hurricane" that struck him. For many years, the identity of the woman was kept confidential because of the various actors still living, including Peguy’s wife. We now know that she was Blanche Raphael, a young Jewish friend of Peguy’s since his university days and a collaborator in several projects. Once that passion ignited, it became, like everything else in Peguy’s life, as much an eternal as a personal question.

Unlike many men who undergo similar experiences at his age, Peguy remained perfectly fidele—to everyone—and therefore suffered immensely. He wanted to respect all elements of the reality that had been presented to him. He could not think of being unfaithful or breaking with his wife, even though he might have gotten an annulment because they had been married outside the Church. But neither would he simply ignore his feelings for Blanche, which he regarded as a reality to be acknowledged. For the four years until his death, therefore, even after Blanche’s marriage to another man, Peguy would struggle with himself and with God.

Most Catholics repeat, "Thy will be done," every day without noticing what they are saying: Peguy learned the cost of such prayers...

Once he embraced them fully, fidelity and abandonment to the divine will started to become a full-time job. When Peguy’s son Marcel fell seriously ill, he turned the son over to the protection of the Virgin and "walked away," promising that if Marcel recovered, Peguy would make a walking pilgrimage between Notre Dame in Paris and Notre Dame in Chartres, a good sixty miles. Marcel recovered and Peguy kept his vow. He would later repeat the pilgrimage for other causes. In the interwar years, as the cult of Peguy grew in France, thousands of people reenacted this concrete devotion yearly. Even today, when hardly anyone reads Peguy anymore and many ancient devotional practices have all but disappeared, large groups of fideles make the trek out of solidarity with Peguy.

                        

part of the interior of Chartres Cathedral

It was also around the time of Marcel’s illness that Peguy wrote one of the greatest and most unjustly neglected poems of the century, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope. For Peguy, both fidelity and hope are not static habits or concepts, but dynamic, living forces. It was an insight he had learned and developed from an early friend, Henri Bergson. Mere abstract doctrines of fidelity or hope may themselves become obstacles to the spirit. By contrast, real hope is the forward thrust of life; someone who is in despair, literally without hope, cannot be argued back into another attitude. Hope can only be received from God; it reconnects the hopeless person "to the source, to a reawakening in him of the child."

In the poem itself, which recently has been ably translated by David L. Schindler Jr., hope is portrayed as a little child, but a child of greater immediate urgency than her serious older sisters faith and charity. Besides, says Peguy (or rather, says God: Peguy is not afraid to put words in the Deity’s mouth), hope is one of the most remarkable things in the world:

The faith that I love best, says God, is hope.

Faith doesn’t surprise me.

It’s not surprising

I am so resplendent in my creation. . . .

That in order really not to see me these poor people would have to be blind.

Charity says God, that doesn’t surprise me.

It’s not surprising.

These poor creatures are so miserable that unless they had a heart of stone, how could they not have love for one another.

How could they not love their brothers.

How could they not take the bread from their own mouth, their daily bread, in order to give it to the unhappy children who pass by.

And my son had such love for them. . . .

But hope, says God, that is something that surprises me.

Even me.

That is surprising.

That these poor children see how things are going and believe that tomorrow things will go better.

That they see how things are going today and believe that they will go better tomorrow morning.

That is surprising and it’s by far the greatest marvel of our grace.

And I’m surprised by it myself.

And my grace must indeed be an incredible force.

Among many other firsts, Peguy may be the only writer in history to have God pronounce something "unbelievable," the even greater irony being that it is the force of his own grace that God finds so...

We have lost or mislaid a great portion of the riches of the Catholic faith in recent years. Some of it is so far gone that it will take an immense effort of preparation to put us in a state to recover it again. Peguy has been one of the partial casualties of that history. But unlike many other figures, he speaks with a directness and vitality about things quite close to our own experience. To reconnect with him we do not need anything other than eyes to see and ears to hear. This century has been a mess, and still worse for failure to heed prophetic voices like his. If we are looking for a Catholic renaissance and a restoration of our civic virtues in the new millennium we will find them only by recovering the work and imitating the lives of men like Charles Peguy.

UPDATE: Take a look at this stirring testimony of how Monsieur Peguy's book compelled a "New Age" man to radically change.

Friday BookReview: From the Soul of a Bishop to the Soul of our Nation

[first published December 26, 2014]



by Dr. David Pence


The Archbishop of Los Angeles, José Gómez, has dedicated this 116-page book "to an immigrant’s son and the first pope from the New World." Immigration and the Next America: Renewing the Soul of Our Nation is written in a very different voice than most public policy and philosophical works of Catholic clerical and lay intellectuals. As a generalization, conservatives tend to favor philosophical arguments while liberals employ sociology. This bishop speaks of the sovereignty of God and the destiny of nations. In his first chapter he takes a highly unusual approach in favor of immigration by arguing not for more porous borders and a more humanistic sense of personal identity; but for a deeper commitment to a thicker, more spiritual understanding of duty and national citizenship. He argues there can be no real immigration reform without a renewed and religiously grounded understanding of American citizenship. He does not want the immigrant to be a non-harassed free agent. He wants him to be integrated into a real civic fraternity bound by a sense of duty to the common spiritual mission of a renewed nation. That, really, is a different argument.
                     

Many of the reviewers of this book seem to pat the archbishop on the head, and bemoan that he wasn’t quite up to the tough specifics of policy reform. They missed the central deep currents of the book. In his second chapter ("The Greater America") he introduces us to Californian historian Herbert Bolton. Bolton believed the only way to understand the meaning of our nation was to consider U.S. history in light of the "larger historical unities and interrelations of the Americas." For Archbishop Gómez, if we look at "the greater America" we will see "America in light of the Christian mission to the Americas, from the top of what is now Canada to the ends of South America and across to the Caribbean. America is actually the historical product of at least three different 'missions' – the first ones of the Spanish and French Catholics, and the later settlements of the Puritans from England… It is the place where the main branches of European Christianity have met. Americans are both children of the Protestant Reformation which prevailed in England and children of the Catholic renewal or Counter Reformation which was centered in Spain and Rome... America was born from the Christian mission. This is not an article of faith or a pious wish. It is a historical fact. This nation was discovered as part of the great commission that Jesus Christ gave to his Church: to proclaim his Gospel "to every nation."

Bishop Gómez writes and thinks more like Saint Augustine and Catholic historian Christopher Dawson than any American prelate I have ever read. He understands that nations have corporate lives which play as large a part in salvation history as the struggles of one man’s soul. He quotes Augustine, "God can never be believed to have left the kingdoms of men, their dominations and their servitudes outside the laws of his Providence." He grants that his modern reader may not believe that America can only be understood in terms of God’s plan for history. But he correctly insists that the men who wrote "in the course of human events" and of "the laws of nature and Nature’s God" had entrusted their covenant of nation-building to "the protection of Divine Providence."
                       

The archbishop has a high view of the American Dream. He agrees with G.K. Chesteron that America is a "spiritual adventure" because "alone among the nations in history America has been engaged in a historic struggle to build a ‘cosmic commonwealth’ by molding many peoples into the visible image of the citizen." Immigration reform is part "of an even more comprehensive reform, a project for American renewal, aimed at forming a a new national identity and civic culture…We will need to seek a new 'patriotic grace' to develop a unity worthy of our missionary and immigrant heritage. It must be based on our founders’ dream of America as one nation of equality and freedom under God." Unlike so many Catholic intellectuals, Archbishop Gómez does not think civic understanding begins with a celebration of the dignity or rights of the individual. He quotes the German Lutheran martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer who had lived in New York during the 1930's: "American democracy is not founded upon the emancipated man but, quite the contrary, upon the Kingdom of God and the limitation of the earthly powers by the sovereignty of God." This is a crucial distinction in understanding the kind of Biblical and God-soaked language which animated the interracial brotherhood movement of the 1960's (see Stone of Hope, by David Chappell, on how that prophetic religious movement transcended the language of rationalistic liberalism.) That same language will be needed for a true renewal of America and a solution to the immigration dilemma. His emphasis corrects the strategic mistake of both the pro-life movement and much of the neoconservative political project. They ground political discussion in "the dignity of the person" which easily morphs into the reigning ideology of "the autonomy of the individual."

In assembling his argument for the American Creed, the archbishop battles no straw man but dissects the identity narrative of the late, and very influential, Samuel Huntington of Harvard. Huntington’s students include Francis Fukyama and Fareed Zakaria, while his books include the seminal description of multipolar world order after the bipolarity of the Cold War (Clash of Civilizations.)

The archbishop charitably dissects the professor's book on American identity (Who are We?) in which Huntington rooted American identity in the English language, the Anglo-Saxon legal traditions, and Protestantism. Both Huntington’s work and the Gómez critique are important to read in understanding this debate. (It is a curious aside that the historically literate and culturally nuanced Catholic political thinker Pat Buchanan seems much more the Boston Brahmin than an urban Irish Catholic in this conflict.)

Archbishop Gómez is clear that "in order to insure the dream, we will have to challenge the secularist, multiculturalist, and relativist consensus that in recent years has taken hold among elite thinkers and opinion shapers in our universities, cultural centers, and government." America has gone astray, he says, "embarking on an uncharted path -- trying to live without God." Immigration reform is essentially a religious project, in the original sense of the word -- religion as what binds us to ultimate things and connects us to one another.

Archbishop Gómez has written a book which he continues to say is about much more than immigration reform. He contends that the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in December 1531, "is the true spiritual foundation of America – and of all the nations of the Americas, North and South.” His book is a profound meditation on race as well as American citizenship and immigration. That is another conversation which we cannot have if we do not include God. Is it possible that forging interracial brotherhood under God may become what he means by the "deeper human ties and sense of duty" needed for citizenship? Is this not the missing language in the Ferguson (Missouri) and New York City interracial debates of December 2014? The full integration of black men in the citizen duties of urban protection led by local policemen might be another fruit of "renewing the soul of our nation." Understanding the shared political ('polis' = member of a city) identity and protective duty between police officers and black males is a religious notion of male citizenship. It is just the kind of elevated religious/political category that the archbishop has championed. He is carrying out his apostolic commission to baptize the nations.

The appearance of the Lady 500 years ago in the middle of the Americas came in an era of horrific blood sacrifice and interracial wars. She came as a woman of mixed heritage, a mestizo. She came to lift us up. The message of this book is to listen to her, and follow her Son, to deepen our social bonds through religious citizenship. Many roses will follow.

The message of this review is that Los Angeles has a new and very different bishop. We should listen to him as well.
                                                         

The Sacred and the Taboo: A Lesson from the Synod

by David Pence


Pope Francis in October 2013 called for a world-gathering of bishops in what was labeled an Extraordinary Synod (held in Rome October 5-19, 2014) to prepare reflections for a larger Ordinary Synod of Bishops to be held in October 2015. The synod included bishops, fraternal delegates (observers from the Orthodox Church and Protestant communities), and auditors (including lay couples).
         
There were 191 bishops representing five continents, including the heads of 114 Episcopal Conferences (national bishop groups), 13 heads of Eastern Catholic Churches, and 25 Roman Curia heads of dicasteries. Synods of Bishops are an ongoing instrument of governance and consultation uniting the Pope with the unique Catholic fraternity of local bishops across the world. If you want to find a social organism that thinks cosmically and acts locally, then observe the eucharistic and episcopal structure of the Catholic Church. The Pope meets with his fellow bishops as another local bishop (of Rome) but he is also Peter, the first among the apostles. As Pope Francis put it in his closing remarks to the bishops: "…I told you from the beginning of the Synod, it was necessary to live through all this with tranquility, and with interior peace, so that the Synod would take place cum Petro and sub Petro (with Peter and under Peter), and the presence of the Pope is the guarantee of it all.”

                                                                 

                                            Meeting with bishops of Ethiopia & Eritrea


This renewed collegial tradition of synods grew out of the worldwide Ecumenical Council of Bishops called by Pope John XXIII -- known as Vatican II -- from 1962 to 1965. The fraternal spirit of mutual recognition, formative dialogue and shared mission of the Fathers of that Council was a palpable spiritual experience. While it is the case that many have abused the “spirit of Vatican II,” it is also certain that there was a true Spirit of Vatican II that linked the world’s 2000 bishops in communion with each other and the first Apostles under Peter in service to Christ. To maintain that international spirit of apostolic fraternity, Pope Paul VI instituted synods so bishops could come together at the call of the pope, to pray and reflect on problems of the Universal Church.  There have been 13 Ordinary Synods and two Extraordinary Synods in the last fifty years. Extraordinary synods are called when a matter needs immediate attention or there is a special urgency. This extraordinary session was called to prepare and initiate worldwide discussion for the ordinary Synod of Bishops on the family and evangelization scheduled for October 2015.

In this synod the apostolic brotherhood took up their duty to provide a protected space for the Holy Family. The apostles have always honored that workingman hero Joseph, and the virgin mother Mary, who raised Jesus in the familial form of human community, which the Church dares propose for every culture and nation. Joseph and Mary by example, and Christ through the sacramental order, have brought man and woman back to the garden where the perfected union of the first couple can be lived again. The Catholic ideal of marriage -- faithful, forever, and fruitful -- is not one thing in Africa and another in Germany. God imprinted this form of communion in our mutual parents. It is part of the shared human nature of Asians, Africans, Australians, and Americans. Jesus granted that Moses had allowed divorce because of the hardness of hearts but he reminded his questioners that “it was not so in the beginning.” The Church under the priestly brotherhood protects and honors the countless couples who have shown us the beauty and sacrifice in this communion. Their witness points to the deep social union in which all humans will be reunited in the Body of Christ. Their lived out fidelity bequeaths their children the gift of stability in a mother and father to guide them in life. When the marriage of men and women of every land and class is treated as sacred, the Divine purpose of humanity is elevated. It is an ideal that is not easy, but it links the poor and the rich under a common discipline that lends the poor a high sacramental status and demands of the rich the leveling of sexual discipline. Ask Henry the Eighth, the patron saint of the divorced and remarried.
                                     

Marriage is first a gift of sacramental grace -- but then guarding our eyes, purifying our thoughts, and avoiding intimacy (where intimacy is forbidden) must protect it. Such a particular communion binding such a volcanic force can only be sustained if there are commandments, prohibitions, and taboos.

Catholic culture protects the indissolubility of this bond with a sacral brotherhood of celibate fathers. The same church with such a high view of "the marriage act" honors the virgin as the Church’s most fragrant blossom. It is a beautiful and serious teaching set against the brutality of some lands and the adolescent frivolity of others.

Before the bishops ever got to tell the Church’s symphonic tale of sexual love and duty, a mid-synod report was released to the world press with sentences treating homosexual relationships as worthy of esteem. Several European bishops engineered the report that besmirched marital love with an association that once “dared not speak its name.” For many it seemed a category error that bespoke a fundamental misconception of married spousality and an obsession with homosexuality. Why would anyone even bring up homosexuality in a synod on marriage? Italian Archbishop Bruno Forte (who authored the phrase) dared "speak its name" and sing its praises. From 'America' (the magazine and the country) came a hosanna from media star Father James Martin, S.J.  From Vienna came an alleluia from Cardinal Christoph Schonborn.

It is good that this has happened. The purpose of the Synod was to deepen concord among brothers through honest discussion. It was to be a continuation of the lived-out collegiality expressed among the fathers at the Vatican Council. Pope Francis has often said that collegiality was spoken of, more than practiced, since the Council. He decided to give brotherhood a chance.

Many conservatives were highly critical of the Pope for allowing the chaos of such publicized and confusing messages. But sharp debate does not trouble brothers. The Pope told the bishops in his opening remarks to act like brothers and “speak fearlessly and listen humbly.” In his closing homily he affirmed: “Personally I would be very worried and saddened if it were not for these temptations and these animated discussions; this movement of the spirits, as Saint Ignatius called it.” We should remember that the temptations he refers to here are false arguments. But the arguments MUST BE HEARD, as Christ allowed himself to be tempted by the words of the devil. The Pope was quiet and listened. He wanted a movement of spirits. He wanted fathers to correct errant sons when education was needed, and shepherds to refute hirelings when discipline was required. Wasn't it better that the scarlet-robed carriers of intrigue were confronted by the giants of the South -- Cardinals Pell and Napier -- rather than be allowed to magnify their import through secular press conferences and their NGO affiliates? Isn't it better that, for once, a 'rainbow bishop' was not the only authority in the room and was forced to confront a fellow bishop in an open forum? Isn't it refreshing that bishops finally were angry at deceit instead of sad about abuse? The synod corrected the intramural publishing duels of the pre-synod media campaign. The international fraternity of bishops particularly sifted out the figure of Cardinal Kasper, who in the run-up cast a large shadow in the secular press, but was considerably less formidable in the actual face-to-face. An honest Catholic journalist (Edward Pentin) played his important role, as well, during an interview showing the well-heeled prelate to be unfamiliar with the role of sexual taboos in protecting the sacred. The Kasper media bubble finally burst when he lied about what he had said about the African bishops, and was exposed by a tape recording in his own accent. The lesson for the evangelization portion of the Synod is that it is hard to preach a gospel dependent on the credibility of the witnesses when you are shown up as a public liar.

There is a great divide in the apostolic fraternity of the bishops. It is the central problem impeding the Church as a credible evangelical witness to the gospel. It is the major impediment of clerical witness to the heroic purity which protects the sacrality of married love and family life. It is the central problem which allowed a minority of sexual wolves to bypass the majority of emasculated shepherds to ravage the young teenage males of the flock. The divide is between those bishops who are deepening the fraternal love of fathers and sons which Christ willed for his apostles, and those bishops who would defend spiritual incest as a form of fraternity. This has nothing to with marriage between man and woman, and everything to do with fraternity among men. If we can clear the satanic smoke and look patriarchal fraternity in the face, there will be many fruits. Ordered masculine relationships strengthen the citizen bonds of male protectors for the cities and nations. Ordered fraternity cements in Christ the living stones of the pope and his bishops, an abbot and his monks, and the local bishops and their priests for the Church. What father with sons does not appreciate this?
                                                                     

We fathers must clarify what temptation has entered the garden. Throughout the modern West,  bishops, priests and seminaries of the Catholic Church have absorbed the sexual inversion ritual. The demonization of patriarchy and fraternity was an assault on Christ’s apostolic church, as well as the monarchical and republican forms of Christian nations. We have just lived through an unprecedented era of “welcoming ‘gays’" in our schools, chanceries, single-sex religious orders, and most disastrously the seminaries of our priesthood and episcopacy. Never have so many proudly-identified homosexuals been promoted to so many high offices in the richer precincts of the institutional Church. Precisely because the Catholic Church has built its clergy and religious orders on single-sex institutions and communal love relationships – this has been a disaster. The Lutherans have no sisterhood of virgins witnessing to Christ’s Second Coming. The Unitarians have no male celibate brotherhoods forgiving sins and casting out demons. Homosexuality does not strike at the heart of their organized love relations.

The homosexual subculture is so deceitfully entrenched in the priesthood that the despisers of brotherly solidarity often masquerade as straitlaced traditionalists or free-market libertarians. Open fraternity is the light that exposes them. They use the bread of the gospel as a stone against the poor and are especially disdainful in dismissing Latin models of solidarity as discredited Marxism, and poor countries' protests against global finance as organized envy. Their words seem right -- “rigidly right” -- but they know not brotherhood. And while they can be media stars to selected constituencies, they cannot be spiritual fathers to men or loving pastors to a parish. They continually pit the dispute in the clergy as one of fidelity or doctrinal adherence. They can never organize a cleansing brotherhood among their fellow priests because that is not how they relate to men. The debate is intellectual: the orthodox against the dissenters, the Nat'l Catholic Register against the Nat'l Catholic Reporter. They are media stars with circles of private companions. They know not public  brotherhood. Tradition certainly requires that the creed have a formula, but to transmit the Creed it must be spoken in a father’s voice. Christ is the Logos: the Word made flesh. But it is also true the word can be made brittle -- a stone to crush the sinner. Pope Francis described a “hostile inflexibility, that is, wanting to close oneself within the written word, (the letter).” Let those who have ears, hear.

It was not the "traditionalists," though, who disrupted the bishops' Synod on the Family. It was those who Francis said want to “pull Jesus down from the cross” to “please the people and serve a worldly spirit rather than the will of the Father.” The disrupters were men who felt they could “disregard the deposit of the faith rather than safeguard it.” They took the hard stone of sexual autonomy and tried to mingle it with the bread of life. They tried to bind the wounds “without first curing and treating them.”

In 2005 the Vatican issued a statement ordering that men with homosexual orientation not be allowed in seminaries. Ad limina visits to the seminaries were ordered; and significant reform followed. Many religious orders and diocesan seminaries, however, pushed back against the notion that seminarians who did not have the psychological integrity to be spiritually affective fathers should be barred from the priesthood. That hit too close to home. Pope Francis, on the day before the synod, emphasized the same truth in speaking of candidates for the priesthood: "Examine closely whether he belongs to the Lord, if that man is healthy, is balanced, if that man is capable of giving life, of evangelizing, if he is capable of forming a family and turning that down in order to follow Jesus."  

The very few bishops who used the transmitting tower of the synod to send a false signal to the world in the engineered mid-term report were not ministering to laypeople in second marriages. The divorced/remarried laypeople issue was, as Cardinal Pell said, "a stalking horse." The real fight was about the homosexual revolution of much greater interest ("obsessive" as the Pope has said ) to so many clerics of our time. Their rhapsody to the disoriented was stark evidence of shepherds caring for their own interests instead of their flock. Their quest was as transparent as James and John, and the brothers' status-conscious mother. They were trying to secure their place at the table. This was not about being kind to a confused adolescent, but about keeping life comfortable for well connected middle-aged homosexual clerics. The pedophiles are being run out of the priesthood. But homosexuals are not interested in children. They are interested in adult homosexuals and teenage males. The pedophiles are exiled while the "chicken hawks" abide.

The bishops have never faced the obvious corollary of the 2005 seminary reform by separating out the disordered priests already in the priesthood. What would be the consequences for the homosexual cabals in so many of our local dioceses and throughout the Vatican? The failure to deal with this huge network of deceit reared its head at the synod. It is the primary cause of an abuse culture in which 80 percent of the victims were not pre-puberty children, but teenage males. Let us thank God that Pope Francis has allowed the wolves to emerge. Let us discern the spirits. Let us hope that the bishops and priests, who are clearly being allowed to talk now, speak the truth about the wolves in their midst. Even if it is one's bishop -- the priest must speak up. Speak directly to your bishop "like a man," said Pope Francis, even if there might be a consequence. For bishops the duty is even more pressing. The soft forms of evil do not look like wolves. They almost always present themselves as champions of  someone else’s cause. The Psalmist warned: "His speech was smooth as butter, yet war was in his heart; his words were softer than oil, yet they were drawn swords."

We should be quite confident that the final document which will come from the October 2015 Synod on the Family and Evangelization will be scripturally and sacramentally sound. But the family cannot be protected by a document. The domicile needs a strong bond of men in public protective formation to safeguard its natural vulnerability in a dangerous world. This is true in the temple and true in the city.

The family needs the res publica. Just as marriage is based on the sacralized intimacy of the male/female couple, the res publica is based on the public communio of a duty-bound male group.There are two sacraments dependent on the sexual identity of the recipient. They both initiate a person into a deep communion. The male/female union of marriage joins spouses till death, while the sacral brotherhood and Divine filiation of the priesthood imprints a communal mark that conforms men to Christ and the original Twelve. Even death cannot wash it away. These communions are based on the anthropological truths of male-female original unity, and male group patriarchal fraternity that Jesus consecrated in His apostolic church.
We don’t speak enough of true public brotherhood in the Catholic Church. Our vision of the papacy and episcopacy has often been more monarchical than fraternal. Fraternity in the 1800's was a very dirty word evoking bloody memories of the severed heads of royalty and priests alike. But guillotines aside, the Church is a fraternity meant to establish the patriarchy of a Kingdom. That fraternity was experienced in the citizen militias of the American Revolution as well as the Grande Armee of the French. Brotherhood was evoked at the Second Vatican Council as an authentic part of its true spirit.

The initial failure of the bishops' synod to defend marriage was caused by men deeply confused about masculinity, fatherhood, fraternity, and the priesthood. This confusion emitting from a desacralized West is particularly disastrous for Christians of the global South. Hopefully, the African and Asian bishops will remind the modern northern intellectuals that male incest is always better treated with prohibition and taboo than dialogue and welcome mats. The social prescriptions known as taboos are not primitive practices from which we must evolve. Quite the contrary, they often represent social wisdom which is transmitted in a praxis -- not a principle. What good is it to have an international church, if we decide from the beginning that whole cultures "have nothing to say to us"?

Christians of the Mideast and Africa have a particular interest that the men of established Christian nations regain spiritual sensibility and moral courage. Much more than marriage counseling, Christians of the global South need the protective presence that only ordered brotherhoods provide. They face a brotherhood armed. They wonder where are the Christian nations who might come to their aid. They look to the atheist West, and they see fraternal protection dissipated by the spirit of incest among males and careerism among females. Marriage and family cannot be protected unless there is a strong fraternal bond guarding the domiciles and integrating young fathers into communal protection and production. The rupture of the priestly Eucharistic bond, no less than the fratricide of Cain and Abel, has separated men who should be brothers. May we restore that deep spiritual communion of male fraternity and build the Kingdom of God. Pope Francis has allowed his first synod to be a real Synod. Now, the bishops of the world can imitate Saint John Paul II and call their own synods in each diocese. The priests and bishop of every diocese have a lot of honest soul-searching and cleansing to do. Restoring the credibility and purity of the priestly fraternity would be the greatest gift our priests could give every family in the Church -- especially Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.


"Holy Family of Nazareth, may the approaching Synod of Bishops
Make us once more mindful
of the sacredness and inviolability of the family, and its beauty in God’s plan.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, graciously hear our prayer."
                 (Pope Francis prayer to Holy Family for the Synod)

                                   

Friday BookReview: Doctor Zhivago

Excerpts from a 1958 review by Irving Howe:



Doctor Zhivago, the novel which climaxes the career of the Russian poet Boris Pasternak [died in 1960], is a major work of fiction; but it is also—and for the moment, perhaps more important—a historic utterance...

The book comes to us in extraordinary circumstances. A great Russian poet who maintains silence through years of terror and somehow, for reasons no one quite understands, survives the purges that destroy his most gifted colleagues; a manuscript sent by him to an Italian Communist publisher who decides to issue it despite strong pressures from his comrades; the dictatorship meanwhile refusing to permit this book, surely the most distinguished Russian novel of our time, to appear in print—all this comprises the very stuff of history, a reenactment of those rhythms of brutality and resistance which form the substance of the novel itself.

Doctor Zhivago opens in the first years of the century, spans the revolution, civil war and terror of the thirties, and ends with an epilogue in the mid-1940s. On a level far deeper than politics and with a strength and purity that must remove all doubts, it persuades us that the yearning for freedom remains indestructible. Quietly and resolutely Pasternak speaks for the sanctity of human life, turning to those "eternal questions" which made the 19th Century Russian novel so magnificent...

[Pasternak] has turned back to the old-fashioned leisurely Tolstoyan novel. His aim is not to mimic its external amplitude, as do most Soviet writers, but to recapture its spirit of freedom and then bring this spirit to bear upon contemporary Russian life...
                             

Yuri Zhivago [is] the central figure of the novel and in some ways Pasternak's alter ego... As he is driven from the battlefields of the First World War to revolutionary Moscow to partisan fighting in Siberia, and then back again to Moscow, Zhivago tries to keep hold of a few realities: nature, art, the life of contemplation. No matter how desperate the moment may be, he feels that the preservation of his inner identity is still possible if he can watch a cow grazing in the fields, read Pushkin's poems and speak freely to himself in the journal he intermittently keeps.

It is this effort to preserve the personal basis of reality which forms the main stress of Zhivago's experience—an effort always secured in a radiantly intense feeling for nature. One of the loveliest episodes in the novel occurs when Zhivago and his family, to avoid starvation during the civil war, decide to leave Moscow. They take a long journey eastward, and at one point their train becomes stalled in drifts of snow. For three days the passengers work in the open, helping to clear the tracks. A light of joy comes over them, a feeling of gratification for this gift: "The days were dear and frosty, and the shifts were short because there were not enough shovels. It was sheer pleasure."

Somewhat earlier in the book Zhivago reflects upon his life while traveling homeward from the First World War:

'Three years of changes, moves, uncertainties, upheavals; the war, the revolution; scenes of destruction, scenes of death, shelling, blown-up bridges, fires, ruins—all this suddenly turned into a huge, empty, meaningless space. The first real event since the long interruption was this trip . . . the fact that he was approaching his home, which was intact, which still existed, and in which every stone was dear to him. This was real life, meaningful experience, the actual goal of all guests, this was what art aimed at—homecoming, return to one's family, to oneself, to true existence.'

... Zhivago's opinions reflect the direction of Pasternak's yearning, the long-suppressed bias of his mind; but there is, in the novel itself, more than enough counter-weight of objective presentation. Pasternak is extremely skillful at making us aware of vast historical forces rumbling behind the lives of his central figures. The Bolshevik revolution is never pictured frontally, but a series of incidents, some of them no more than a page or two in length, keep the sense of catastrophe and upheaval constantly before us—Zhivago fumbling to light an old stove during an icy Moscow winter while in the nearby streets men are shooting at each other, a callow young Menshevik "heartening" Russian troops with democratic rhetoric and meeting an ungainly death as his reward, a veteran Social Revolutionary pouring bile over the Communist leaders, a partisan commander in Siberia fighting desperately against the White armies. And as Zhivago finds himself caught up by social currents too strong for any man to resist, we remember once again Tolstoy's concern with the relationship between historical event and personal life.

Once Pasternak reaches the revolutionary period, the novel becomes a kind of spiritual biography, still rich in social references but primarily the record of a mind struggling for survival. What now matters most is the personal fate of Zhivago and his relationships with two other characters, Lara, the woman who is to be the love of his life, and Strelnikov, a partisan leader who exemplifies all of the ruthless revolutionary will that Zhivago lacks.

Zhivago himself may be seen as representative of those Russian intellectuals who accepted the revolution but were never absorbed into the Communist apparatus. That he is both a skillful doctor and a sensitive poet strengthens one's impression that Pasternak means him to be something more than an individual figure. He speaks for those writers, artists and scientists who have been consigned to a state of permanent inferiority because they do not belong to the “vanguard” party. His sufferings are their sufferings, and his gradual estrangement from the regime, an estrangement that has little to do with politics, may well be shared by at least some of them. Zhivago embodies that which, in Pasternak’s view, man is forbidden to give to the state...

Lara (Julie Christie) with Zhivago (Omar Sharif)

The novel reaches a climax of exaltation with a section of some twenty pages that seem to me one of the greatest pieces of imaginative prose written in our time. Zhivago and Lara, who have been living in a Siberian town during the period of War Communism, begin to sense that their arrest is imminent: not because they speak any words of sedition (Zhivago has, in fact, recently returned from a period of enforced service as doctor to a band of Red partisans) but simply because they ignore the slogans of the moment and choose their own path in life. They decide to run off to Varykino, an abandoned farm, where they may find a few moments of freedom and peace. Zhivago speaks:

'But about Varykino. To go to that wilderness in winter, without food, without strength or hope—it's utter madness. But why not, my love! Let's be mad, if there is nothing but madness left to us. . . . 

'Our days are really numbered. So at least let us take advantage of them in our own way. Let us use them up saying goodbye to life. . . . We'll say goodbye to everything we hold dear, to the way we look at things, to the way we've dreamed of living and to what our conscience has taught us. . . .We'll speak to one another once again the secret words we speak at night, great and pacific like the name of the Asian ocean.'

From this point on, the prose soars to a severe and tragic gravity; every detail of life takes on the tokens of sanctity; and while reading these pages, one feels that one is witnessing a terrible apocalypse.  Begun as a portrait of Russia, the novel ends as a love story told with the force and purity of the greatest Russian fiction; yet its dependence upon the sense of history remains decisive to the very last page.

Through a ruse Zhivago persuades Lara to escape, and then he returns to Moscow. He falls into shabbiness, illness and long periods of lassitude; he dies obscurely, from a heart attack on the streets of Moscow. Lara's fate is given in a fierce, laconic paragraph:

'One day [she] went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street at that time. She vanished without a trace and probably died somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that afterwards got mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women's concentration camps in the north.'

Like the best contemporary writers in the West, Pasternak rests his final hope on the idea that a good life constitutes a decisive example. People remember Zhivago. His half-brother, a mysterious power in the regime who ends as a general in the war, has always helped Zhivago in the past; now he gathers up Zhivago's poems and prints them; apparently he is meant to suggest a hope that there remain a few men at the top of the Russian hierarchy who are accessible to moral claims. Other old friends, meeting at a time when "the relief and freedom expected at the end of the war" had not come but when "the portents of freedom filled the air," find that "this freedom of the soul was already there, as if that very evening the future had tangibly moved into the streets below them."

So the book ends—a book of truth and courage and beauty, a work of art toward which one's final response is nothing less than a feeling of reverence.

UPDATE: The 1965 production, directed by David Lean, is one of the great films of all time.

One of the reasons was the supporting actors such as Tom Courtenay (above), who played Strelnikov; and Rod Steiger as the evil Komarovsky, a well-connected Moscow lawyer.

Take a few minutes to ponder these words of Fulton Sheen as you listen to some Russian liturgical chant:

"The lesson is not to be forgotten: in a not too distant day when Russia, like the prodigal son, will return to the father’s house, let not Western civilization refuse to accept it back or absent itself from the feast celebrating the salvation of what was lost."

Friday BookReview: Mr. McCullough on the pivotal year for General Washington's soldiers

                                             

The Grand Union Flag

"Also known as the Continental flag, it is the first true U.S. Flag. 

"It combined the British King's Colours and the thirteen stripes signifying Colonial unity. George Washington liked this design so well that he chose it to be flown to celebrate the formation of the Continental Army on New Years Day, 1776. On that day the Grand Union Flag was proudly raised on Prospect Hill, near his headquarters at Cambridge, Massachusetts."

Here is a six-minute radio interview with Mr. McCullough when the book came out a decade ago.


The 'Guardian' newspaper in England published this review:

Might the Americans have lost the War of Independence? They very nearly did. This book is the story of how close George Washington, as commander of the American army, came to defeat in the terrible year of 1776 which also saw the Declaration of Independence. At the end of that year, he assumed that the British, who had chased him all the way from New York, were about to cross the Delaware river and capture Philadelphia, capital of the revolution. He wrote that all the enemy were waiting for was 'ice for a passage, and the dissolution of the poor remains of our debilitated army'.

But Washington was wrong, as he frequently was about military things. David McCullough's account bears out the saying that this war was lost by the British rather than won by the Americans; the book could have been subtitled 'Failures to Pursue'. When Washington wrote those words, he did not know that General Howe, the British commander, had already decided that it was getting too cold to carry on fighting. The war season was over. He would go back to New York and mop up Philadelphia and the Yankee army the following spring.

Howe had thrown away victory before. In August, he had let the defeated American army escape after the battle of Brooklyn (or Long Island). But his failure to take Philadelphia when he could was worse. The British never grasped that it was good publicity which kept Washington's small army in the field, by producing fresh flows of volunteer reinforcements. As soon as Howe's incredible decision was known, Washington snatched the opportunity for a 'brilliant stroke'; he came back across the Delaware and won two small but dazzling victories over Hessian and British forces at Trenton [Dec 26, 1776] and Princeton [about a week later]. They were anything but decisive in military terms. The war dragged on until the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781. But after Trenton, the American public realised that they could win and must win. The corner had been turned.

A British reader has to know a bit of history before starting this book. McCullough is not trying to tell the story of the American Revolution or even of the whole War of Independence. The battle of Bunker Hill (1775) is over when the book begins, with the British locked up in Boston by a cheerful, disorderly little army with almost no gunpowder.

Fortunately for 'His Excellency', as George Washington was known, the British had not got round to occupying the Dorchester Heights above the city. The Americans, showing true inventive genius, went 300 miles to the abandoned Fort Ticonderoga, extracted its enormous guns and towed them back over snowy hills and frozen lakes [arriving toward the end of Jan 1776]. When they opened fire from the heights, Howe at once conceded checkmate and abandoned Boston.

Next came Washington's defence of New York. An enormous British force of warships and troop transports assembled offshore meant that Washington had no long-term hope of defending Manhattan. He hesitated and made bad mistakes. In their only stroke of first-class generalship, the British landed on Long Island and pulverised his army. But Howe's 'failure to pursue' allowed Washington to get the survivors back across the East River in small boats: 'America's Dunkirk'.

There followed long and complicated campaigning in what is now New York's outer suburbia, as the Americans evacuated New York and were driven slowly back, losing battle after battle, until they crossed the Hudson into New Jersey. From there, Washington and his dwindling, exhausted army retreated southwards to Newark and then across the Delaware. Congress had already fled from Philadelphia to Baltimore. Washington thought the army game was up; it would have to be guerrilla warfare in the Alleghenies. But then Howe stopped and blew a whistle for half-time.

This is a well written, conventional war history, illustrated with quotations from the letters and diaries of men and some women on both sides. The American witnesses are wonderfully observant and articulate; they were mostly well-educated volunteers who already 'enjoyed a higher standard of living than any people in the world', as McCullough reminds us. But narrowing the subject to one year has drawbacks as well as advantages.

The plus is that McCullough is offering one more irresistible narrative of a fabled Long March, from hope through despair to hope again... The minus is the lack of political background, which is perfunctory. So New York and Long Island were full of 'loyalists'? What were their own dreams for America and what happened to them in the end? So Washington was a slave-owner and a friend of liberty? Plenty has been written about that elsewhere, but at least a sample should have entered this book.

McCullough inserts profiles of his leading actors. Some work better than others. George Washington, a man of marble famously hard to penetrate, remains opaque. There's any amount of secondary evidence that his men adored him, that he had the gift of transmitting confidence. But why and how?

What McCullough does show is that Washington had the incredibly rare gift of learning from the criticism of subordinates. After Long Island, he discovered that some of his commanders thought he was hopelessly indecisive. He considered this, apparently agreed, and simply made himself more decisive.

In contrast to 'His Excellency', other leaders emerge in sharp relief. None is more appealing than the fat young Boston bookseller, Henry Knox, an Ulster Scot with a booming voice who already weighed nearly 18 stone [252 pounds] at the age of 25. Only in a revolution, and especially a can-do American revolution, could this [porker] turn into a wonderful general who began by thinking up and carrying through the mad feat of towing the guns from Ticonderoga and ended up as one of the victors at Yorktown.
                                             

General Knox

McCullough doesn't ask himself what would have happened if Washington had been crushed in 1776. But Knox gives the answer. America was already independent. What mattered was that Americans should realise it. The British could be dealt with, if not now, then later. Even if they still won battles, they were becoming history.

UPDATE: I have driven the highway route from the Albany area through the entire length of Massachusetts. Even though I was cocooned with plush comforts, it still seemed as if Beantown would never come into view.

What Knox and his men accomplished is simply astounding.

What was their toughest stretch? Traversing the Berkshire Mountains once New York was behind them.

                   

Let's close this out with an appropriate colonial fiddle tune.

                                                                                                 

                                                             

Religion, Nations, and Geopolitical Review: Saturday May 11

                                               by A. Joseph Lynch and Dr. David Pence

                                                                   WEEKLY BRIEF
 Senators Run for President:Abandoning their Post while the Nation Veers Toward War
The United States has no reason to go to war with Iran(see arguments below). Both Israel and Saudi Arabia for their different reasons desire lethal hostilities between the US and Iran.  The US Senate is the constitutional institution which declares war for our republic. It might even be called a "constitutional crisis" that our Senators are not asserting their deliberative role in debating this pending war. The  media and partisan hatred toward President Trump is preventing serious criticism of his alliance with the venomous hatred of the Wahhabi Saudis for all things Shiite.
We need a foreign policy debate about the US and Iran and Israel far more than an examination of  the Byzantine world of the President's past taxes. Senators who distinguish themselves in a real foreign policy debate might offer themselves as candidates for the Presidency arguing a counter strategy.  But for too many of our public officials, the purpose of being a Senator or a Secretary of State is to add a bullet point to a resume in order to run for a  higher office. The next career step is a far stronger magnet than the present duties of office. Careerism and partisanship has replaced the noble profession of politics. In fact politics which means acting as a CITIZEN( a man of the city or body politic) has become the dirty word which  we should reserve for the infighting and backbiting of "factions" or careerists. Our federal government is populated at every level by power couple careerists.  Washington DC and New York City however have social networks of much more accomplished men than the Marco Rubios and Chuck Schumers of nightly news soundbites. The  global megacities are the hunting grounds of aggressive men of other countries like Britain, Israel and Saudi Arabia who are functioning with national interests in mind. These nation men like leading corporate executives who work in the same stratosphere are very good at manipulating the narrow concerns of partisans and careerists for the bigger goals of their own institutions. Our pygmies are no match.
An experienced British patriot spy like Christopher Steele played our agency heads (Brennan, Comey and Clapper) like Kim Philby played our CIA after WWII. It is true that  Philby helped the USSR while Steele opposed Russia but in both cases British intelligence officers sabotaged our country's interests while promoting their own.  British foreign policy supports an Anglo alliance of the white countries of the British Empire (The Five Eyes consortium). As a national policy they are against a revitalized Russian-US alliance. There are more agents than Christopher Steele who wanted to bring down Donald Trump. Remember they are acting in concert not as careerists or because they got money from the DNC. They are acting as British patriots trying to stop an American Scotch frontiersman from going rogue.
Saudi Arabia wants the US to fight Iran and the Shiite Houthis of Yemen.  Israel wants weak and divided neighbor states. President Trump wants a nationalist foreign policy with strong nations keeping order in  their respective territories. He is opposed by globalist careerists who don't think like nationalists and he is staffed by neoconservatives who are bellicose for "Western Judaeo-Christian values". That is actually another form of globalism with the US military fighting and Israeli intelligence directing the project of saving "the West". The Saudi royal family supplies money and a Muslim cover. This is not American nationalism.
50 years ago the Democratic Senator from Minnesota was Eugene McCarthy. He ran for president to debate the war in Vietnam and the approach of the US to the post colonial wars of national  independence. He first used his Senate seat with other Senators to debate the policy of the war. Debating the role of America among the nations was even more important to him than constituent services. In this era the Democratic Senator from Minnesota is Amy Klobuchar. She too is running for President. Her office is remarkably adept at constituent services even if she must tyrannize her staff to keep her friendly, available, next door neighbor image intact. Like a lot of feminist careerists, who are already in an office that dwarfs them, she sees moving one more rung up the career ladder as her next logical step. She has taken the path of Hillary Clinton when Minnesotans needed another  Eugene McCarthy. America needs a public discussion of war and peace.  Journalists and citizens can all help focus this serious conversation but in the end it is our Senators who must do their duty.

I. POPE FRANCIS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

POPE ISSUES MOTU PROPRIO ON ABUSE: This short clear reform mandates a reporting and investigative mechanism in every diocese as well as the use of metropolitans (the archbishop of an ecclesiastical province which includes adjacent dioceses) in the reporting chain for complaints against bishops of that province. This is a stunning and necessary decentralization of governance for abusive clerics. We have advocated establishing a "promoter of justice" in every diocese as the basic mechanism of reform. This initiative describes what is needed in many less words than we used.  All Clergy are obligated to report offenders (mandated reporters in civil law - this is a huge expansion of eyes and ears). Laymen have a new and ready instrument where we can send our own investigations and reports. Clerics are mandated reporters; laymen are invited reporters. This is a sea change from the old clerical culture that argued that since only a pope could depose a bishop only the Vatican could  initiate investigations of bishops and cardinals.  Abuse of sisters and seminarians is included as reportable in the same category as crimes against minors - that will offer an important path for reform  against the McCarricks, Nienstedts and Maradiagas of the Church.
 The Pope's first emphasis is, "I desire that this commitment be implemented in a fully ecclesial manner..."  His emphasis is like the American military officers who refused the advances of feminist Senators who tried to establish a civilian commission to judge military officers in cases of sexual harassment.  The generals argued this would destroy the military chain of command. The Pope has saved us from American hysteria about "lay reform" that would have compromised the priestly character of the Church.  The Pope has left open wide use of lay staff members and lay initiative in reporting clerics, but the policing is with the consecrated priesthood and flows from the diocesan bishop. This is in the true spirit of Vatican II which was very much about an ecclesiology centered on the Eucharistic office of the local bishop. The Eucharistic office includes Christ washing out Judas on the night before He died. His insistence on the personal authoritative duty of local bishops to rule is a major part of his approach to annulments as well.
Putting 60 and 30 day time limits on responses from  Vatican dicasteries is also revolutionary. The definition of minors is reestablished at 18 after the craven maneuvering of Pope Benedict's man at CDF - Cardinal Levada. Levada, part of the San Francisco contingent of the American bishops' lavender mafia,  reversed the Pope John Paul II definition of minors as younger than 18. He inserted "younger than 14" in the definition of child pornography on computers. This brazen act has been unnoticed and unreported by the mobs so busily filing their briefs against Pope Francis and the many very bad men at his side. ( Scroll down this link and read: The Levada Loophole)

These new mandated local reporting and investigative agencies can easily become diocesan offices of "promoters of justice" which at a later date could add clerical consensual homosexuality as a reportable punishable offense. The Pope has acted. Now let bishops, metropolitans, and national conferences respond. Let a thousand investigative offices arise! We should not let our knowledge that there are so many corrupt bishops misdirect our efforts to abolish the apostolic priestly character of Church governance. The Catholic Church is "a holy nation, a royal priesthood". The pastor of Rome has resisted the mob and reinforced the ruling functions of the Shepherd Bishops. His battle against the shroud of clericalism is not a war against priestly identity. The sacred fraternity in every diocese finds their identity as shepherds when they act out their protective and punitive duties of spiritual fatherhood. The Pope has has given every diocese a new book of matches. We will see who responds  by burning off the old wood of clericalism to cleanse the stone altars where priests celebrate the Holy Mass.

FR. HESBURGH - AMERICAN PRIEST: A great interview with Fr William Miscamble, the Holy Cross priest author of the new biography of the Notre Dame legend. Fr. Hesburgh was a prototypical American - "Let us get enough of the right people in a room together and there is no problem we cannot solve". This fascinating profile by an astute historian reminds us that Fr. Hesburgh always was a priest first in his own mind. Did he interrupt his jet setting for daily Mass? "Everyday of his life but Good Fridays." Try to listen to this interview in the critical but fraternal spirit of the author. There is lots to learn about this man with a spine(especially during the student protests of the late sixties). He   sought the recognition of the Rockefeller class in elevating Notre Dame as a Catholic institution of the highest academic order. He made a deep fundamental error in where he sought social recognition. But Fr Hesburgh did something very difficult and very noble  for his Protestant country and his Catholic Church.  What a gentleman scholar priest is Fr. Miscamble! Something very holy and strong  will come from the Notre Dame which housed both other Hesburgh and Fr Miscamble.

POPE ON FEMALE DEACONS: They are not part of the sacramental ordained priesthood. But let the study continue for there is not full agreement. There are female roles in history and the present where women have a special charism. The service of women did not lead to the altar. He closes the discussion with his praise and thanks for the religious sisters he encounters as the living motherhood of the Church. {The obsession of the "Westerners" with an ordained role for women downplays the beautiful multifaceted feminine love found in religious orders throughout the world as they live out every spiritual and corporal work of mercy in their distinctive communities.}

SALVATION OUTSIDE THE CHURCH: A messy debate not totally clarified here.

II. PRESIDENT TRUMP AND AMERICA

III. THE NATIONS

WHO WANTS WAR WITH IRAN? Pat Buchanan agrees with Iranian security advisors that there is a B-Team: Bolton (John of US national Security) Benjamin (Netanyahu of Israel) and Bin Salman (the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia with his father's blessings) who want war. The fact that the US sent a carrier battle group to the Persian Gulf as a warning to Iran because of a tip from the Israelis should not give US citizens much comfort. Every target listed in this article as a potential place where the US considers Iranians to be threatening our interests consists of armed Shiites who wish to defend and govern their own lands. Religiously, Shiite rule is anathema to the Salafist Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. Iran and Hezbollah are strategic problems for Israel. American nationalists will not be harmed if Iran and Lebanon are strong nations with allies in Iraq and Syria. These are the best nationalist defenses against the radical jihadist form of Sunni Islam now ruling the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. Islam has been warped by the Salafists of Mecca and Medina in league with the Saudis. Idi Amin found refuge in the Kingdom but they are not true friends of Christianity, the American nation, or most Muslims. US policy at the highest most dangerous level is being swayed by foreign interests - they aren't Russians. Americans are blinded by partisan hatreds that are preventing us from seeing our national interests. Hatred of President Obama by conservatives has prevented us from understanding the strategic breakthrough of his Iran initiative. Hatred of President Trump has prevented his initiative with Russia that would help us withdraw from Afghanistan and Syria as well as see the international landscape with new eyes.
(AOA on bandwagoning with the big powers vs the "three encirclements").

IRAN AND IRAQ: Iran moves missles into Iraq. The US moves a battle group into the Gulf. War with Iran could involve the US or Israel in bombing Iraq. A US War with Iran is the hope of Israel and Saudi Arabia. Persia is 90 million strong. They are making a new alliance with Pakistan, the one Sunni power with serious nuclear weapons. Pakistan's greatest ally is China. Iran's ally has been Russia. John Bolton has to understand he is no longer at a think tank making tough statements to the blondes at Fox News showing how conservative men are much tougher than Barack Obama.

CHINA-INDIA-PAKISTAN & NUCLEAR WEAPONS: The pro Pakistan-Chinese strategy is an old one. India labels a terrorist in Pakistan. China doesn't veto.

SOUTH AFRICA: New players in elections.

RUSSIA AND CHINA: Civilizational states.

IV. CULTURE OF LIFE, CULTURE OF PROTECTION

DRESSED TO MODEL: Halima Aden is a beautiful Minnesota woman ethnically Somalian born in a Kenyan refugee camp. Her breaking boundaries by wearing clothes for Sports Illustrated is something beautiful. William Kilpatrick is the go-to writer on all things Muslim for Catholic neocon sites Crisis and Catholic Thing. Here is his embarrassing take on the Hijab. We reviewed Mr. Kilpatrick's very interesting, very worthwhile, very flawed book on Islam, Atheism, and Christianity.

THE MEDAL OF FREEDOM: A short history of Presidents and their recipients. One interesting cultural observation is that President Eisenhower elevated honor to God on our currency and in our pledge while JFK found a way to elevate "freedom" in the status code.

HOMOSEXUAL BULLY GOES AFTER PRO-LIFE WOMEN: Brian Sims is an elected official - he sees praying pro-life protesters as scum. He is a man of action. Do Christian men really owe "respect" to the death cult of sodomy and abortion? It seems respect is the last thing we owe them. This is where the culture war begins and ends - Who shall we honor? Who shall we shame?   

THE COMMON GOOD AND SEXUAL MORALITY BY ANTHONY ESOLEN: The  Dean of American Catholic letters is Professor Anthony Esolen. Here is more proof. An excerpt:

"It is a contradiction in terms to suggest that one can have a private sexual morality, because sex by its very nature is social, as is morality. You can no more have your privilege in that regard than you can have a private language or a private culture. Sexual morality is biologically for the begetting and raising of children, and the protection of families and groups of families. That protection is enabled in large part by the teamwork of male groups, undistracted and unconfused by the eros of buggery, formed to get difficult and dangerous things done; and with all our sophisticated tools, we still depend ultimately upon construction workers, road crews, truckers, fishermen, farmers, miners, quarrymen, linemen, soldiers, lumberjacks, longshoremen, masons, and so forth, and this is true even of the well-paid feminist professor driving her man-made automobile powered by man-drilled petroleum products and shaped by man-mined metals over man-laid roads to teach in man-raised buildings about the wickedness of men who make her job possible."