ALL WELL FOR FALWELL?

Over on Salon Alan Wolfe has an article about the demise of Jerry Falwell (“The stone is cast”, www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/05/15/jerryfalwell/print/html). Enough to say that if We haven’t figured out that his treacherous antics were not Christianity and that he set the cause and quality of American Christianity back centuries, then We really have come onto the world scene bringing the proverbial knife to a gunfight.

But Wolfe asks an excellent question: How did this man ever become a public figure in the first place? Just as the South was considered so profoundly warped that the rest of the country politely avoided it, or averted their gaze when such virulent whackjobs as Theodore Bilbo held forth, so the Fundamentalists were held at arm’s length by mainstream Christianity – if we can use the phrase.

We know that politically the virulence of the Revolutions of the Identities opened the hell-gate. They were not just figurative ‘revolutions’ in the mid-60s’ Boomer, pot-whacked, adolescent, self-flattering and self-hyping sense, their content being so ‘cool’ and ‘right’ that embracing them was a sign of vast enlightenment. Rather, they were revolutions in the sense of actual praxis ala Russe: truly Soviet-style revolutionary methods, whereby in the name of abstract ‘downtrodden masses’ and in the service of abstract Perfections, anything and everything must be done away with that would oppose or hinder the quickest possible establishment of the regime and prevent any further questioning of it. And this method is hell-and-gone from American democratic process.

We know that the Democratic Party itself was terrified that the loss of Southern voters consequent upon the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and that the impending decline of the mostly male Northeast industrial-worker demographic, would utterly undo the New Deal coalition forged by FDR 30 years before. The Party was desperate to raise up new reliable voting blocs.

We know that the media – high as a kite on the heady wine of forsaking boring and stodgy ‘objectivity’ and deploying their powerful strength ‘in a good cause’ – did not want to go back to the corral after the civil-rights struggle reached its democratic zenith in 1965.

We know that French “Theory” was looking for a home, bringing in the luggage its insistence that there was no Truth, no Objectivity, no Tradition, no Common Sense, no Virtue(s), no ‘higher’ dimension to existence, and surely no real and actual “God”: there was only Oppression and there were only Oppressor-classes or -nations, who deployed such capital-letter abstractions for the purpose of keeping the oppressed, their ‘victims’, down. And that the high-road of life was to wage a perpetual struggle against Oppression and Oppressors, including the struggle against the malicious illusion that there was any other dimension except this one or that there was any other path (or content) to human fulfillment except the achieving of sufficient political power to avoid being oppressed. (Theory never really got around to the massive irony that a nation or a group that had achieved ‘un-oppressability’ was – human nature being what it is – ripe for going over to the dark side and becoming an oppressor itself. But then, for Theory there was no such thing as ‘human nature’).

In the previous Post, “Bad Therapy” I adverted to another crucial element back there in the cauldron of the later-1960s that led to the witches’s brew that precipitated out in the 1990s: “… a ‘valorization’ of ‘victimization’ that had just recently been professionally amplified in a public relations spin blitzed over here by the newly assertive Israeli state: we’ve been most awfully and uniquely victimized and therefore we can never be doubted and to doubt us is to join the victimizers and by being thus victimized we are owed whatever we feel we need to get over it and by being victimized we can do whatever we feel we have to in order to ease our fears of it ever happening again.”

This was the lethal approach: the Outraged Victim Whose Unique Pain Permitted ‘All’ For Assuagement, for Vengeance, and for Future Protection; and the corollary that to doubt or even discuss the validity or applicability of the Victim’s demands (or in the Israeli praxis, the acts already committed to create ‘facts on the ground’) was to endorse and even collaborate with new Oppression and Victimization.

It would not take more than a moment’s reflection to realize that such a position was utterly incompatible with deliberative and democratic political process. And not only in the field of international relations but also in the realm of American domestic politics.

But in the event the nascent but richly-supported Advocacies, springing up to professionally advance the assorted Identities that were to comprise the new voting blocs the Democrats desperately sought, embraced both Theory and the Victimiste conceptual web now vigorously spun on behalf of the Israeli state.

‘Oppression’ and ‘outrages’ were duly discovered here, there, and everywhere in American society and culture, each demanding and permitting only the response of ‘outrage’ and utter and total sympathy for, and acquiescence to, the demands of Victims; a built-in bias toward emotionality and away from skeptical or even critical evaluative thought. The toxicity of this brew for the health of the American body politic cannot be fully comprehended, but conceptually it should have been clear from the earliest manifestations. And it was, but a newly deployed ‘political correctness’ prevented rational or even reasonable critical evaluation, or even deliberation and discussion.

The effort began to succeed: Trying to induce a link in the minds of the citizenry between ‘Slavery’ and the Holocaust with each new ‘outrage’ specific to each new Advocacy. And that constituted not only an embrace of substantive inaccuracy but also a symptom of increasing corrosion of the citizenry’s capacity – or even willingness – to assess, deliberate, and evaluate. The People were diminishing; ‘failing’ even.

It is a persistent – we might even say perennial – question whether any other historical phenomena can be ‘equated with’ the Holocaust, even metaphorically. That the government of a reputedly civilized nation, enjoying the plenum of power and capability accruing to a modern industrialized state, would decide to exterminate an entire group of human beings as a matter of official policy and to also cast this programme as a positive and absolute Good … has not happened more than once in history, to my knowledge. Pogroms and razzias extend back as far as can be seen, and the enslavement of militarily defeated tribes and peoples as well. But they are not the same thing.

And the ‘politics’ deduced by the Israeli state from that unique and monstrous event – as described above – are equally unique. They cannot be introduced into a democracy on the basis of a shrewdly-obfuscated and metaphorical ‘link’ that justifies such an introduction.

Indeed, one might say that the Holocaust has created an ‘anti-politics’ as one of its most lasting (and lethal) consequences.

And this lethal anti-politics, variously dressed-up as ‘revolutionary progress’, as just another New Deal coalition, vastly and deeply corroded Our polity. And when extended to foreign policy, it has led to Iraq (and perhaps to Iran).

It took less than five years for the vigorous efforts of the Advocacies to bear poisoned fruit. Having watched the Emotional and the anti-Rational and the anti-Reasonable do so much for the Democrats’ new cadres – and thus morphing into what is now called the ‘Left’, the Republicans began to embrace this apparently winning formula. But where the Democrats historic ‘far left’ had been pretty well squashed by the anti-Socialism and anti-Communism of the previous 40 years, the Republican ‘far right’ – paranoid, irrational, unreasonable, undereducated, intensely religious, and overlorded by a still-breathing Southron elitism and militarism that had survived the hard century since 1865 – was more or less ready, willing, and able.

It was Falwell and his ilk who saw the way not simply to harness modern technology such as television to raise larger wads of cash from larger ‘congregations’ but to harness the power and passion aroused in the already predisposed ‘far right’ masses in the service of politics. Falwell and his ilk shrewdly aroused the outrage of those masses at the true-enough anti-religious assertions and consequences (intended or not) now flooding into American society at the hands of the assorted ‘revolutions’ and demands of the Identities over which the Democrats had now – haplessly – lost any semblance of modulating control and in whose behalf the Democrats now – perforce – had to take their stand.

Harnessing irrationality and emotionalism on the right as the revolutionary praxis of the left had already exalted them, Falwell did not seek to improve the consciousness or souls of his followers or further the Gospel of the Christianity he overtly flaunted. Instead he raised them up as an army of pawns to counter the equally anti-rational equally anti-political ‘bra-burners’ and aborters and the ‘godless’ (fill-in-the-blank).

Having already abandoned objectivity, the media increasingly lost its way, and the egregious Rupert Murdoch simply erected that drift into a business plan, putting media in the service of the Right (as it exists now) just as the mainstream media had, starting in the late-1960s, put themselves in peonage to the Left.

It seems to me that Congress realized early on that they had created a monster. In 1976 or so they allowed Political Action Committees to make campaign contributions, as if they realized that they had so fractured the American polity that they weren’t ever going to be able to reliably raise cash any other way, including the ‘old-fashioned’ way of individual voter’s contributions. The lobbyists arrived in town shortly after, and in Reagan’s Administration the 1980s became a vampires’ feast. In 1996 Congress, by then debauched, allowed corporate mass-holding of media, although by this time there was precious little objectivity to be had in journalism, and – the citizenry having lost a lot of its civic capacity to assess, deliberate, and debate – the pols and their corporate johns saw little need for an objective media anyway. Outrage and Fear and Emotion and Non-reason already ran the show.

And if Falwell and his spawn were to believed, it was all in the name of Jeezuzzz (whose angels, it was to be inferred, wore American flag-patches on the shoulders of their robes).

If those angels wear any flag-patches at all, I’m foursquare in the conclusion that it is a patch of the Cross. This opens up a vast unexplored – or at least presently unexplicated - abyss between American and Divine praxis. If the Fundies are right about anything, they are right that such an abyss is never a good thing. But they are profoundly incapable of mustering the moral imagination to envision that God and American praxis might not e on the same sheet of music. Now them Kathliks had a lot of ideas about this sorta thing happening. But the country is not disposed to think about such ‘depressing’ stuff and the bishops have other things on their collective mind.

If We are all Americans (no exceptions: bra-burners, sex-offenders, fill-in-the-blank) then We all need to look to Our polity. The Ship of State is hugely holed and taking on water, while now engaged in a hot-lead slugging match that cannot be won. Prayer and some very wise and good works are in order. And sackcloth, and ashes – and let the dust that was Falwell return to its Creator for appropriate disposition.

WHEN VICTIMS GO BAD

I’d like to move beyond this matter, but things keep developing, and the whole thing is important not only for itself but as a template for other and even larger national policies – foreign as well as domestic – and as a source of reflection as to how We came to be infected in the first place .

In “Commonweal” magazine, Mark Sargent has a piece entitled “When Abuse Victims Squander Their Moral Authority”, which tells us so very much more than it intended to (http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=1915).

Apparently there are now flying squads of members of an organization called SNAP (Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests). These units have taken it upon themselves to target those “about whom the diocese [of Wilmington, Delaware] found ‘credible or substantial complaints of sexual abuse of minors”. That diocese had contributed to the tribulation by releasing the names of twenty or so former priests in that category. Most of them were ‘former’ by means of having died (thus facing a Court without SNAP input and quite possibly therefore the self-declared victimery would not accept Its findings).

At least one of the twenty was still above-ground, although he had ceased serving as a priest 20 years ago or so, and lived now in another state. Apprised of his residence within their ‘jurisdiction’, that local chapter of SNAP “went door to door in his neighborhood distributing a file of documents with the title ‘Community Notification Project: Protect your children from a credibly accused sex offender’”. This last despite the fact that the gentleman has never been charged with, let alone convicted of, a sexual-abuse crime. A similar deployment in another state resulted in a priest whom the FBI and local police had investigated and declined to charge being “hounded” into resigning his pastoral duties and leaving the state.

There’s as much to say about the magazine as there is about the SNAP-squads. But first it has to be noted that nobody who lived through the era of Mao’s Cultural Revolution (the immediate progenitor of Our own unruly brood) can be surprised except by the queasy realization that “it” is most definitely happening here.

The magazine is to be commended for sticking its head up out of the media formation and actually addressing (however delicately) the heretofore sacrosanct and unask-able question of the behavior of some of these groups. Still and all, no reader aware of our modern American reality can read the article without making the necessary mental bracketing: Who has declared any member of these groups a “survivor”? On what demonstrable authority is the privilege claimed? For, after all, to ask such a question is not merely to be flint-hearted in the distribution of sympathy; these ‘victims’ apparently consider themselves above the law or beyond it – perhaps because the ‘emergency’ of priestly sexual-abuse has over-ridden the rule of law for quite a few years now.

The SNAP-pers apparently feel that ‘sexual abuse’ is such a pressing and outrageous emergency that any scruples about slander or libel are irrelevant, that concerns for ‘accuracy’ are indications of “sympathy for a devil” (to borrow a phrase), and that no DA in his/her right mind would dare to bring charges against them anyway. No doubt behind this thinking lies the old soviet presumption that members of the class of oppressors and ‘objective enemies’ by definition cannot be ‘victims’, and conversely that no class of ‘victims’ can victimize. You can’t say that the soviet system really had an appreciation of the unsleeping duality of human nature. Now the Catholic Church did and – buried beneath a few decades of smiley-faced goo-goo fluff – still does.

And of course, what is the definition of ‘sexual abuse’? This question does not represent a ploy of ‘denial’ or ‘minimization’, such as would get you a sound verbal and emotional thrashing if you raised it in group-therapy. This is the urgent and grave question of what precisely is it that is being targeted by the criminal law and its penalties, in order to assure a just and accurate conviction and a punishment proportionate to the act(s) proven to have been committed. Thoughts? Words? Deeds? What sort of deeds? How old is the ‘child’? (The ‘child’ could be a day or two from starting military recruit training).

There is a price to be paid for a lascivious use of the criminal power. For one thing, society is deprived of whatever contribution the convicted might have made or might make (especially nowadays, when having paid one’s debt to society or even having been adjudged as not having a debt to pay is no guarantee that a flying-squad of ‘victims’ will not appear to wreak a ‘service’ that in an earlier and more candid time was called ‘vigilante justice’. Further, society creates enemies for itself if it becomes lascivious in its deployment of the violence of criminal justice; and if in addition that society were to dispense with Truth, with accuracy, with Justice itself, then such Enemies thus raised up would be formidable and relentless indeed. Has that not become rather clear from Our experience on the Eastern front?

The magazine has also failed – though it is hardly alone in this – by accepting the essential premises of the Maoist script: when a bunch of Red Guards/Victims show up on its doorstep muttering and wailing, the magazine instantly adopts the submissive posture of the ‘discovered’ or ‘uncovered’ (so to speak) counter-revolutionary or ‘revisionist’ who is respectful of his heroic discoverers and now wishes only to be allowed to apologize to ‘the people’ for his errors of (fill-in-the-blank) and will gratefully accept any re-education that the heroic vanguard of the suffering masses might choose to impose.

Or – at least – the magazine is willing to accept that ‘the priests’ are guilty and join the baying chorus. Which is not quite so courageous.

This is a trahison, no matter how thickly cloaked in ‘sensitivity’, ‘contrition’ (justified or not), and ‘open-ness’. Certainly, a priest who has been proven to have had sexual relations with a child is responsible for great criminal and moral and – let’s not mince words - supernatural consequences. But in the criminal law there is no legally usable ‘class’ of such priests whose ‘members’ are instantly and indubitably certifiable by their very nature as criminally guilty. Perhaps this is why the victimists harbor a barely-hidden resentment toward any of those keepers of the criminal law who still insist on the traditional stringencies of evidence and proof to determine guilt in each individual case.

For the victimists, the civil law is an easier nut to crack in theory and has proven hugely useful in practice. Once they permitted actions to be presented as a ‘class’ action, then the courts instantly created two ‘classes’ in the public mind: the class of ‘victims’-before-the-proof and the class of perpetrators-before-the-proof. With such a boundary crossed, the conceptual possibilities of monetary remuneration increase exponentially, and if somehow the ‘class’ can be determined to have a common and large asset, then attorneys of a certain sub-specialty will join the cause.

Once the media have joined in, responding to your PR spin of an ‘outrage’, an ‘emergency’ and ‘a hidden conspiracy unmasked among us’, and with sex thrown in on top of all that … once you’ve got those conditions going, then a good old southern California wildfire and firestorm are inevitable. Nobody who has seen those tornado funnels of dark hot fire up close rising up hundreds of feet in a spiral of ferocious destructiveness can fail to appreciate the tremendous energies unleashed by the properly nurtured combination of elements properly set alight.

If then the courts yield their ancient trust and loosen up rules of evidence, statutes of limitation, and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, if indeed the courts or – worse – the legislators, grant an initial characterization of a claimant as a ‘victim’ or a ‘survivor’ before any adjudication or verification of such a claim has taken place, then several more of society’s defensive firebreaks are overrun – abandoned, actually.

And by the time all of that is ‘going good’, then only the hardiest bishop would want to risk the monstrous and dubious expense of defending each civil claim. But each such acceptance of a ‘class settlement’, though well-advised from a purely legal point of view, reinforces the completely undemonstrable assumption that each ‘claim’ thus settled was real and accurate. And it is that intensifying public misperception which thus toxifies the atmosphere for the (relatively very few) cases that come to the probing test of a criminal trial.

Not surprisingly, numbers given out by media – based on numbers given to the media by advocates and ‘experts’ – don’t seem to add up or don’t add up to percentages that stand out from the norm. This point, of course, is countered by the dual claims that a) in a church that claims its priests are so ‘good’ then any deviation at all is ‘horrific’ and b) if we base our expectations on ‘zero tolerance’ then it’s worth it if ‘only just one’ potential victim is saved. But should we invade a foreign country because the government has declared ‘zero tolerance’ for (fill in the blank)? Should we invade a foreign country in order to ‘save only one’ victim of (fill in the blank)?

And while the Church has high expectations of its priests, the Church has never lost sight of the fact that human beings can fail to live up to their calling.

Indeed, it is precisely the Church’s patience and tolerance of weakness that have been seized upon voraciously by the victimists as proof that there is a ‘cover-up’ massive in proportion and sacralegious in nature.

The bishops have not responded well, indicating that John Paul II’s great purge of the episcopacy that brought in dozens of ‘doctrinally strong’ prelates did not bring in particularly strong men. The Maoist ballet – the performance of which requires two – was greatly abetted by the cravenness of the American episcopacy, the ecclesiatchiki who yielded their priests to the victimist furor as easily as they betrayed their pope to the war-mongering of the Bushist Imperium.

The heavy burden of the Church, that She bears through the ages and will ever continue to do so, is to bear witness to Sin and Grace, sinfulness and redemption, the crooked lines with which God writes the history of humankind. For every one bishop who ‘covered up’ a monster, there were a half-a-dozen who tried – ineptly as often as not – to maintain some decent connection to a struggling soul.

Certainly, priests who err must accept the consequences. But those consequences must be proportional to the crime that has been proven to be committed. The Church owes that to Herself – to betray that is to betray Herself and Her mission. And if it is the instant retort of the victimists that the Church has clearly betrayed Her nature and mission in these sex scandals, then the Church would be the first to admit the imperfectness of Her efforts.

But in the modern Moment in which Americans consider the failures of the Church (whatever their actual proportions), We can hardly ignore the monstrous betrayals of nature and mission, of character and of integrity, that have gut-shot the whole Iraq effort, undermined the economy, and de-centered the government’s administration of Justice and Law and its adherence to Truth and Integrity of Character. We must soon face up to the fact that enacting mass-media autos-da-fe does not build the moral strength and integrity – individually or societally – that enables Us better to People the Republic and its government. In fact, the indulgence of such sustained demonstrations may well have contributed to the massive erosion of Our seriousness and competence, Our ‘gravitas’, as a People.

In the matter of all of these accused priests I would propose the following questions? Was his guilt determined by a trial and finding by a jury? What specifically was the act with which he was charged? (‘Abuse’ or ‘molestation’, those revolutionary buzzwords, therefore are not sufficient). If he was simply lumped together in some sort of civil ‘settlement’, then I would refrain from coming to any conclusion until fact was clearly established If I saw ‘numbers’ I’d pull out a pencil and do a little math for myself.

And if I found out that my priest was indeed ‘guilty’, I’d want to know whether it was of child-rape or something else altogether. On the basis of a laudable and visceral public rejection of sex with children it seems that a lot of other things have been tossed into the net to fatten up the final figures touted to the press.

It was the old soviet ploy to recoil from the foregoing type of proposal like a vampire from holy water, effecting a pose of righteous indignance and braying that such requirements would interfere with the administration of ‘justice’ against these class enemies of the people. That ploy cannot be indulged. We cannot afford it: legally, culturally, morally.

The Catholic Church in this country, it seems to me, has been the target of a Cultural Revolution masquerading as A Hundred Flowers Blooming. Its hierarchy has not performed well, its ‘elites’ are divided and fractious, and – so American – none of those involved are able to take the Long View (‘Long’ in Catholic time, not Bush-Pentagon time). Nor for that matter – again, so American – are those involved able to take the High, the Wide, and the Deep View. And there are other forces in contemporary society that do not favor a robust Catholic presence.

And yet the world and even We are in great need of a wisdom that can sustain through times of genuine mass privation and horror. The biblical lean years are coming, and will no doubt arrive long before the far more adolescent-friendly End Times. As adults or adults-to-be, each American needs all the help s/he can get to sustain a mature and robust humanity and civic competence.

The search – relentless and squinty – for ‘purity’ is, historically, not a ‘Catholic’ obsession at all, but rather a Protestant one. Just as the Catholic Inquisition was begun as an intellectual inquiry into heresy, and it was only at the time of the Reformation that witchcraft became an overriding subject of inquiry (not improbably because the Protestant Reformers simultaneously needed to maintain a usable ‘enemy’ to bolster religious fervor while avoiding too deep a concern for ‘heresy’ since they were all, pretty much by definition, liable to that charge). The Catholic ethos became the ‘primitive’ earth-besotted, emotionally and materially besotted archaic miasm out of the darkness of which the pure and dedicated Reformers and their flocks created themselves from an act of focused will in response to a new Exodus and a refined Covenant.

The Church, though male-dominated, remained committed to and rooted in a Vision of human existence that is robustly Incarnational, respecting the blending of Spirit and Matter that reflects the human reality as Created, that is patient with the human instability that etches those myriad crooked lines – some so stunningly bloody and deep – that mark our history as a species. I will not reduce matters to the current specious conundrum of ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’; the Church’s Vision seems profoundly human. The world as We know it, the world as it will or might or must become, cannot afford to lose It.

SEX STRAWS

I know, I know. But something’s happening. When “The New York Times” writes an editorial saying that something – anything – that has to do with this sex-offense stuff is not a good idea, then we are looking at a sea-change. And that’s what they did yesterday (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/opinion/13tue1.html?_r=1&oref=slogin).

It comes just as I finished with Noman Cohn’s informatively researched “Europe’s Inner Demons”, a 1973 book that traces the very curious history of witchcraft crazes in Medieval and Early Modern Christendom.

Cohn notes that there is almost a predisposition in that (but not necessarily only that) culture to 1) accept quickly the possibility of a secret society within the larger society, and 2) that the carryings-on of said secret society (i) constitute a threat to the larger society and (ii) are comprised of acts which are in themselves abominations (having weird sex or using the ashes of dead children, for example). This sounds like Hofstadter’s presumptions in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1965); Cohn is writing not so long after him and may well be familiar with his thought; and the roots of American religion (and hence politics) certainly extend back to the Medieval era in Europe.

Cohn goes on to observe that the dynamics of the witch-craft excitements are solid fodder for psychology and for the sociology of persecution. Surely, the multiple, simultaneous gratifications of persecuting ‘evil others’ are immediate and deep: the visceral satisfactions of exercising violence; the moral satisfaction of exercising that violence against ‘evil others’ for the safety of the community; the social satisfaction of serving that community while at the same time both assuring and enhancing one’s status within it; the psychic satisfactions of ‘rescue’ and ‘prevention’; and the more diffuse satisfaction of having had a ‘high’, of having climbed – for whatever length of time – above the fog of the quotidian mediocrity and boredom of life and self. That one might purchase the compleat package with (to all appearances) very little danger of retribution or ‘blowback’ to oneself simply frosts the marvelous cake.

Interestingly, witchcraft crazes did not just spring full-blown from the early Christian/Catholic church. It started after the Early or ‘Primitive’ era of the Church, after folks had lived until the millenium in vivid expectation of Christ’s imminent and compleat return in glory. It began around the turn of the first millennium with individuals in their villages complaining of demonic annoyances; especially, women reporting the presence of an ‘incubus’ – a male demon who lay with them – in their beds. (Cohn does not pursue the verrry curious implication that there is gender distinction among demonic entities.) This type of complaint was handled by the parish priest and perhaps the local lord and his sheriff or seneschal, to the extent that it could be handled at all. It was only the woman who could attest the facts – such as they were – of the report, and the demon was only temporarily corporeal and thus subject (even if only in theory) to this-worldly jurisdiction.

In the 1200s the Church became concerned about heretics. These were not non-Christians and ‘non-believers’ but rather Christians who (perhaps out of impatience and disappointment that the End Times failed to arrive promptly) began espousing and in some cases devising their own variations on accepted Catholic doctrine.

Local bishops were authorized to start cracking down, and then after a bit Rome set up its own Inquisition, independent of and (theoretically) superior to the inquisitional efforts of local prelates. But then … but then … in Mainz one Conrad of Marburg, a fanatical type of personality with a particularly outgoing assertiveness, was appointed to oversee the local inquisition. He somehow became convinced or convinced himself that heretics had congress of some sort with the Devil or with demons – which added an entirely new twist to the proceedings: from sustained theological droning the ‘cases’ became pepperpots of accusation and ‘testimony’ and ‘evidences’, titillatingly sexual.

And, with the Devil now being involved, matters were too urgent to leave to the deliberations of theologically-inclined inquisitorial committees who both insisted on proper academic procedures in order to deliberate and legal procedures (still rather rudimentary) in order to prevent the miscarriage of God’s justice. God’s justice, for Marburg, was a quick and decisive burning. And to hasten that felicitous end, he tended to accept accusations at face-value and had no problem authorizing torture to extract confessions (extracting ‘truth’ or ‘facts’ were objectives too abstract and time-consuming for the great task before him) … but those were primitive times.

And history being as dynamic as it is, none of this took place in a vacuum. In a multiple-warhead (MIRVed) bid both to grab power and wealth within his own kingdom and take the Pope’s authority down a peg or three, Philip the Fair of France – in the first decade of the 1300s – decided to dissolve the powerful and wealthy military-monastic Order of the Knights Templar, a left-over from the Crusades that had outlived its original purposes but had set itself up in business with great success. Not having the authority himself to just break them up (only the Pope could do that), the king arranged accusations of heresy and – you can never have too many arrows in your quiver – of immorality and debauchery both sexual and more generally hedonic.

And, in a masterstroke of opportunistic creativity, the king included some witnesses to the effect that the Knights were in league with the Devil, an accusation that would force the Pope to take decisive action and which – given the difficulties of gathering ‘evidence’ - would prove either impossible to prosecute or impossible (the king’s plan) to defend oneself against.

Helpfully, the king authorized torture to extract confessions from the Knights, not a few of whom quickly admitted – now that the king was asking and the pokers were very very hot and sharp – that they had been leading monstrous double-lives of vocational betrayal for as long as they could recall.

When on top of that the Papacy moved to Avignon in Southern France under the leadership of a French pope … enough to say that the Knights didn’t have a prayer.

Before long, this or that local inquisitional court – and not at all to the Popes’ liking – was finding itself faced not with doctrinal issues but with villagers turned in by their fellow-villagers, accused of having consort with the Devil. This was hardly surprising: elderly widowed women, children, and the average peasant male, were not likely to claim that their own reading of the original sources led them to believe that Moses did not pre-figure Christ, or some such. But who couldn’t credibly be suspected of congress – even sexual – with demons? And the accused’s promotion to hell or glory meant one less mouth to feed from the village stores.

But it wasn’t until the 1500s that the final piece was put into place: witches, it was concluded, could fly invisibly. Prior to the discovery of this ‘knowledge’, it was impossible to see the occasional witchcraft accusation as more than an isolated – if authentic –instance of human debauchery and evil. After all, if this weren’t simply a matter of the occasional village crone, nor of the single, isolated village witch – then the roads of Europe should be filled with witches traveling from one sabat-gathering to another for their purportedly numerous convocations; but the roads weren’t filled and nobody reported seeing bands of traveling witches – on foot or on horse – criss-crossing the continent.

But once it was established ‘knowledge’ that witches could fly and remain invisible at the same time, then all limits were off as to the number of witches’ sabats that could be held and attended. A witch could attend one a night, from one end of Europe to other, and the ‘numbers’ of such purported sabats quickly increased exponentially. And so did the ‘threat’ they posed and the ‘crisis’ that demanded decent folks to take action. The very air above decent folks' heads was now – it was imagined – full of invisible witches flying back and forth on errands of dark and bloody purpose. And if witches could remain invisible, then where else might they be? In your home, your room? And if they – famously – ate or otherwise required the services of children, then who was safe? Decent society was suddenly made a sideshow, and an endangered one at that, forced to play second-fiddle to a demonic society busily and robustly conducting its evil affairs right - as it were - over their heads. Decent folk needed to take back the night.

And thus they were – as is said at Santa Anita – off.

So I cannot help thinking that We here in this country have undergone something of the same nature in the past quarter century. Were it to be established that some other monstrousness of the Medieval era had come back in strength to plague us – the Black Death, for example – then modern folks would be jolted into action.

But oddly – demonically? – this witchcraft dynamic has returned and remained and battened upon our society and our culture for more than 25 years, and yet it is taken as ‘knowledge’ and the very cutting-edge of scientific and psychological and political praxis.

It has deformed our society and laws domestically. And as has been noted elsewhere on this site: it cannot be coincidence that having watched Us fall for the stories of legions of rapist-priests traveling around the country and over state-lines to prey and predate upon children – and boys at that – while abetted by a secret hierarchy of bishops here and in Rome and arond the world ... then the Unitarium shrewdly (and thankfully) concluded that We could be safely relied upon to fall for the urgent claims that Saddam was a monster as great as Stalin or Hitler and that he was in possession of usable and imminently deliverable nuclear weapons. And – it would have to be said – the Unitarium was right.

So all this sex-offense stuff, and what’s going on with it as time goes on, is – I think – critically important for Us as The People: it is not only in itself a cultural disease but an agent and a symptom of an even more crucial political weakening that may well lead Us and this Republic to the Rubicon.

The “Times” is doing some very high-grade stuff in this editorial. It can’t come out and limn the full outlines of what makes this whole thing tick: that would create an uproar among sex-offense-dependents and would delegitimize the “Times” at a time when its potential for recouping its position and role is not utterly lost.

The ‘civil commitment’ aspect of the current sex-offense wave is what’s “wrong”, according to the editorial. And that’s the truth, surely – if not the whole truth.

I still find it hard to accept what has to be accepted: that in the Year of Grace 1980 or so, and up until the present Year and continuing, and while I was in possession of my majority and of a majority of what marbles I have, this country experienced an outbreak of a Medieval plague that was clearly described even back then, and available to be researched by even the modestly educated among the citizenry.

We let it get by. As We did – who can deny it? – the pre-emptive war that is now this nation’s Eastern Front.

What should give us great pause is the thought that now in these sex-offense matters, politicians with neither the wits nor the guts to explore alternatives will simply keep scraping up law after law and speech after speech to try to keep on doing what they’ve been doing and which has borne few useful results at all. The sex-offense ‘mentality’ that helped sire the Iraq War will now lock this country into a failing strategy in regard to the already dubious and newly-hatched monsters called ‘sex-offenders’.

I agree with “The New York Times”: we do not need to be going down this road. Again.

CATCH OF THE DAY

I’m rummaging through the net here. We have the Catholic bishops, in convocation assembled, coming out with an antiwar statement, sort of. Kinda curious, since they had published their agenda before they went in and it was mostly housekeeping. Then Robert Waldrop took them – rightly – to task for almost total collective failure to speak out against the invasion of Iraq, even when their reputed Boss in Rome spoke out against it (http://www.justpeace.org/). One of the prelates, from the Great State of Jawja, actually categorized the Pope as simply another foreign diplomat, and dismissed him thus. Now, suddenly, the bishops have barely unpacked their neat cone-hats and – presto – an antiwar statement (sorta).

I say sorta because actually they’re only calling for a “responsible transition” in Iraq. Curiously, it’s just a week after – at long damned last – The People generated sufficient political will and insight to rebuke the Incumbency, if not renounce all its works and all its pomps. And it’s just a day or two after the New York Times (a newspaper in New York) editorialized to much the same effect (www.truthout.org/docs_2006/111606B.shtml).

Pity the poor bishops. They’ve had a hard time of it. Not unprecedented. When Kirk Douglas led the slave revolt against Rome, bursting out of Capua with his self-liberated gladiators freeing slaves as they went, Robin Hood without any tights at all, the first official opposition he encountered were City Cohorts. The City Cohorts were units of Roman troops stationed permanently in the larger and medium-sized cities of Italy; they were big on parades, highly polished armor, and basically beating up – when necessary – on the urban poor and any obnoxious members of the peasantry. Not so different from some of their modern descendants. Overfed, picky, and a little leery of the dark, they were not the legions. They were not employed for such challenges as Spartacus flung at them, and they were speared flat in no time.

Thus the bishops. Raised to the prelacy at a time when the Catholic Church in this country was still coasting on the long-ago-earned laurels of its early missionaries and the remarkable energies of the immigrant generations of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, they were picked for their ability to hew to the doctrinal line and ‘administer’ stuff. The American Church having mastered the ‘Protestant threat’ back in 1960 and simultaneously proved its patriotic bonafides by its many youth sent off to the wars Great and Good and not so much so, its attention was now focused on in-house problems.

And they were and are legion. There are traditionalists who want Time turned back, women put back into Kitchen, Children, and Church (it works better in the original German), the gays outed and out, and some who doubt the validity of the election of every Pope since Pius XII died in 1958. There are ‘liberals’ who want the Church run democratically (defined as whatever seems The Thing To Do in the U.S. these days); womanists who want men out of the priesthood or at least themselves in, and the right to an abortion should the need arise; and a shrinking corps of priests, many of whom – serving out there in the bush – appear to Rome to have gone somewhat native.

Although a quarter-century ago the bishops had risen up, or been chivvied up, by some vigorous prelates, to majestically defy the early Reagan era’s facile brandishing of nuclear weapons, and not without success, yet since the fall of the Soviet Union – in which events the Polish John Paul II played no small part – they had been busy with the consequences of the Revolutions of the Identities as those storms roiled even the protected harbors of Church polity. The seas beyond were lost to view in the spume of the surf.

When the country started the long wrack of the sex-offense craze, such an ominous sea change was not noted in the protected fortress-harbors of the American Church. When the fundamentalist Ascendancy separated from the more modest, less alarming evangelical phase and assumed the characteristic trajectory and tactical movements of a vessel of war, this too was hardly noted.

There was a jolt in the early-90s when several priestly-rape cases made the news. They were treated from a purely internal point of view, the coincidence of the publicity with the nascent but now-clearly identifiable Ascendancy not even noted. For reasons variously prudent, cowardly, greatly uninformed, or just plain witless, each Cohort Commander – authoritative within his diocese – tried to deal with matters according to his own lights. The initiative quickly passed from them, although not before – individually and collectively – they had demonstrated no large ability. But within a year or so, the wrack had passed. They assumed that, having survived a frightening case of it, they were now inoculated and – ‘dues’ having been paid to the increasingly sensationalist culture – they would now be allowed to pursue their occasions, unmolested as it were.

That was not an unreasonable assumption: American society has been wracked by crazes of various nature since the first Great Awakening, and with the development of urban concentrations and various types of ‘press’ (including the dime novels, the crime broadsheets, and the ‘yellow’ press that brought on the Spanish-American War) these things came and went. That in the crucible of the culture wars of the post-civil-rights era these waves were becoming more intense and reaching further and further into the main ground of the culture and the society and the law, and were not dissipating even after receding … none of these facts were noted, much less evaluated. That there might be a number of interests served by their substantive discomfiture the bishops never even imagined. That these interests might exist both within and outside of the Churchly sphere equally escaped such notice as they ever took of matters.

Almost a decade went by. The sex-offender storm had retained its strength, though it had moved on from the territory of the Church; out of sight, out of mind. In New York, the patriarch of a family that had raised up a major newspaper retired and in the best tradition of the grand monarchies of yore, he let his kid take over. In time, said scion – having given the seasoned, experienced, mature professionals on staff more than a little scare – purchased a smaller paper. And as these things go, and have always gone, he appointed a satrap for the new province, one who wouldn’t outshine his master.

Said satrap needed to make his bones, however. Having faithfully hewed to the organizational line in the matter of supporting war in the East, he also needed to distinguish himself on his own. He would need a sure thing, and one that would have a wide support. He would need a target that would be fat, dumb, and happy in the run-up, and equally so in the stunning assault, such that victory would be a slam-dunk and he would be greeted as a liberator. Where he conceived of such a plan … who can say?

Thus in January 2002, the satrapy revealed that during the months leading up to and following 9-11, it had devoted the bulk of its limited investigative resources to exposing Catholic priests and sex-offenses. The Cohort Commander in Boston, one of the most prestigious among his peers, sallied out secure in the impressiveness of his burnished chariot and ceremonial armor, only to find that he was now assailed from within as well as from without. He was choppered out from the roof, without vowing to return.

When just last year the satrapy took a victory lap in an article reporting the contestable conviction of a priest who had apparently advocated sex with young boys in print, it published figures which – if one did the math – indicated that since 1940 .065 children – variously defined from birth to the age of military recruits – per year were in some form or other abused, molested, assaulted or raped by priests of the Archdiocese. The variety of verbs required is partly occasioned by the fact that such acts cover a gamut from an untoward comment – perhaps not even delivered in person – to aggravated and repeated rape. The curious obliqueness of the article leads one to think that the great majority of the cases were at the lower end of that spectrum. And if one totes up the number of interactions between a diocese’s priests and its ‘children’, and then the number of ‘abuse’ incidents, it looks like the percentage of incident-free events would surpass the US airline safety percentages. Most curious.

It is for a future historian to explore the coincidence of this type of investigating and reporting with the goings-on in the by-then deteriorating expedition to Iraq: WMD not found, elastic definitions of the offense, elastic definitions of the objective, elastic definitions of the enemy, elastic definitions of applicable law and laws, and – as a lubricant to smooth the intense frictions created by the foregoing – a stentorian insistence that the word of the government be taken without dispute, dissent or – most vehemently – further investigation. But we digress.

The bishops have spent the past four years in a rather early-Medieval way, each trying to protect whatever is within the walls of his fortress-city, risking the arduous journey to attend equally risky convocations, where nothing can seem to placate or appease their accusers, whose Desired Outcome recedes every year tantalizingly just over the horizon. Hardly surprisingly, Their Worships have not found the time or inclination to make significant pronouncements about – oh, say, the morality of American involvement in the world community. One – the afore-mentioned Jawja prelate – spoke only to demote his Pope to the status of foreign diplomat, and another – the one in charge of all the Catholics in the armed Services – broke radio silence only a couple of weeks ago, to issue what amounted to a Pentagoon talking-points lecture on how things are swell, if the media would only get on-board (see “Bishops Bomb” elsewhere on this site).

And so now, the elections having – as they say – ‘sent a message’, the bishops convoke yet again. And as afore-noted, although it wasn’t on their agenda, they suddenly issue a statement against the war (sorta). It’s anybody’s guess whether they got their notes from the Pentagon or the New York Times, but I’m sure that at this point they’d be happy to be allowed to sit at anybody’s table and not have … It … brought up.

And it woulda been embarrassing: a Vatican prelate made a speech on Tuesday making the unkind, but hardly inane, observation that within the lifetime of the same generation that saw the Berlin Wall come down the U.S. is putting a fortified border wall up. No doubt the Vatican, which has a habit of thinking things through and thinking ahead (those wily, inscrutable foreign diplomats!) quietly sent an advance copy over here by diplomatic pouch or fax. And over here such active folks as Robert Waldrop at Romero House has pointed out to the bishops that their silence does not speak well of them nor does it bode well for the Church.

(The vigorous and outspoken Archbishop Romero of San Salvador, one recalls, was killed by right-wing hit-squaddies in 1980 while saying Mass at the altar of his own cathedral church. That such a descent into Medieval massacre is an awefull signal of the increasing regression to debauchery of our modern world was lost upon the usually logghorreic Catholic traditionalists for whom by his concern for justice for his flock the Archbishop had apparently demonstrated to their own satisfaction that he was not validly an Archbishop; in this he joins a distinguished company of churchmen comprised, among others, of John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II.).

But back to our American bunch. They want to get back into the mainstream and be allowed to sit at the table with the Macher (bless the Yiddish!) in this country; and they need to prove to Catholics here and to those foreign diplomats in Rome that they are worth their salt. Otherwise, even when eating alone they’ll face a thin gruel. So they issue a thin gruel of their own, suggesting that justice now requires that we act responsibly in Iraq and that in the face of that debacle we think deep thoughts. Hardly inappropriate sentiments, although the card and the flowers have arrived a couple-three years after the funeral. But then again, just as the whole earth is the grave of honorable men, so too every day marks the funeral of an honorable man; not a few of them members of the flock presided over by the Pentagon’s command-bishop. O tempora, O mores!

Meanwhile, back at the capitol, the House passes a bill that classes certain animal-rights tactics as ‘terrorism’. Now, that’s reely reely an elastic category! Unwashed, glaze-eyed animal-lovers, citizens all, are somehow in the same class as the beady-eyed Islamofascist suicide-bombers and Middle Eastern masterminds who perpetrated 9-11. Can Congress do this – I mean, to the language? Can you just – whoosh – pass a law and declare that birds are large mammals? Well, sure you can. For the purposes of legal fiction: like the one that a corporation is a person and has all the rights and protections of an individual human-type citizen. Or that Congress-members can read. Or think.

But seriously, this is another example of that elastic definition that was mentioned above and that has helped many another craze keep itself afloat. Slaves – it will be recalled – were not considered to have Constitutional rights, not being considered in any real way human, except when the State in which they were held in bondage was counting heads to qualify for Congressional representation, in which case – magick! – each slave was defined and counted as three-fifths of a white man. Have we matured intellectually since those days? Sex offenses, if we take the trouble to notice, can run a gamut from peeing in the park to multiple premeditated abduction-rape-cannibalistic murders of children by strangers (of which the vast majority of “sex offenders” are probably not at the high end of the scale; I have to speculate because curiously there aren’t any reliable figures on just what each of the country’s sex-offenders was actually convicted for). And you need not be physically present. Or commit a sexual act. The basic dynamic is that so long as the offense can be expanded to compensate for small or shrinking numbers of actual perps, then the Emergency can continue. And on the basis of that Emergency (see elsewhere on this site) some of the most fundamental pillars of Western Justice can be undermined or ‘reformed’. Following the same game-plan, later on, such an elastic definition can expand to cover the too-obvious lack of results in a failing, hugely misconceived, dishonestly begun war in the Middle East.

But then again, it was only a rhetorical exercise to propose that Congress-members can’t read. I think they most certainly can – most of them. In order to qualify as ‘terrorism’, the law continues, you have to do something that “causes a loss of profits”. Ah. As American as apple pie, and just in time for Turkey Day. We are regressing to the 1880s in so many respects: not only the Robber Barons and a prostitute Congress, but the increasingly obvious deployment of the Federal police power by the government in the interests of those who pay its Executives and legislators to play. Do they study the labor history of the 1880s to WW2 in school these days? This may be a great opportunity to get back beyond the gauzy, muzzy, mawkish aura of “The Good War” to the brimming, frothy, earnest and deadly serious stewpot of America before the smiling rigidity and willing conformism of the postwar National Security State. Democrats take notice.

BISHOPS BOMB

There is a report that the Catholic Archbishop in charge of all the US military was in Rome for a meeting of his opposite numbers from other nations, and that he has been using the Pentagon Power-Point talking points in making comments about the activities ongoing in Iraq.

What we have here is an instance of a much larger problem: that of professionals in the military.

A ‘professional’, traditionally, is someone who has gone to great trouble to acquire knowledge and expertise in some area that is of particular use and need to society, and makes that knowledge and expertise available to persons who need it. This discipline of service becomes a life-project, rather than a one-shot got-my-ticket graduation rush. And when properly undertaken, it shapes a life as well as creates a daily schedule. In theory, then, professionals are not motivated by quite the same level of self-interest and greed and calculation and lust as the average person. Consequently, society accords them a certain respect. In a way, professionals become like spacecraft, orbiting above the hot turbulence of the planet’s atmospheric envelope, doing their good things from above the ordinary fray.

But because human need is so great in this darkling world we call ‘life’, the professional’s availability must be relied upon by persons in emergency situations, in tight spots that demand a more-than-ordinary bond. In the service of such persons in need, the professional must sustain the focused deployment of all that knowledge and expertise. The professional cannot be a ‘summer soldier’, but rather must sustain an all-weather capability to serve. And to sustain that level of service, the professional commits to a higher plane of being. The doctor serves Well-Being, the lawyer serves Law and Justice, the clergy serves Love and God.. In fact, all of them may serve God as well as their respective Ideal, but the clergy commit to God – through some religion – in a more focused way. But however it’s sliced, professionals serve a Higher Law, and that commitment is fundamental to their status and their role in society.

Which brings us to the problem of professionals in the military. The military is an organization that has its own Law, an iron one: Victory. And to achieve that object, all the members of its orderly hierarchy must accept the orders of those above them and then work their hardest to do their bit in achieving the objective. That’s how it’s done and it is done in no other way. Militaries, like the governments that are their masters, acknowledge no Higher Law than their own. They may pay lip service to Higher Law, they may piously burble and bray all the old slogans, but when it comes right down to it, they are seeking only to Win. Once they have Won, then they can write the history of how they so decently did it. If they lose … well, losing isn’t an option. The respective guilds of professionals operating in the military are thus well-advised to make sure that their particular capital-letter word does not get in the way of the military’s capital-letter word. Not ever, nohow, nowhere, no time. Not if they want to be considered a team player. Not if they want to stay on the team.

Now for quite some time the American military and professionals have mutually managed to skate over this abyss. In peacetime, or when America was winning, or at least when that fantasy could reasonably be indulged, there was no need to look the horse too closely in the mouth. And things have worked out cozily enough. The military gets to own its own doctors and lawyers and clergy. The various professionals get all the bennys accruing and appertaining to military service, especially in the officer ranks: status and rank, decent and steady pay with a nice enough benefits package, medals and ribbons and decorations, the chance for travel, and the priceless boon of being considered a heroic patriot simply by getting out of the rack in the morning and putting your butt into one of those great uniforms. Of course, the professional butt is not often ‘out there’. It’s the little people (and upon them be many blessings) who do the heavy lifting. It is the little people whose butts are out there where the lead flies, where the superannuated or experimental aircraft fall out of the sky, where the under-armored combat vehicles encounter explosive devices, where the aluminum-alloy ships suffer magnesium fires.

But situations other-than-victory have a way of concentrating the public mind. Before 1942 very few Germans felt they needed to know just how the Fuhrer made his signature sausages; by the end of 1942 many of them had started wondering – even if they didn’t ask openly – if the Fuhrer hadn’t somehow not got the recipe quite right. Not everybody responded to History’s evolving challenge by looking more closely at things, of course. Not a few German civilians were killed by Party members who would entertain no doubts, who were actually galvanized by the lack of victory, who would tolerate no dissent from the great delusion. Even as the Soviet tanks blew through all the west-bound stop signs in Budapest and floored it, towing Stalin’s particular version of Hell behind them.

Thus recently we have seen some curious official positions taken and statements made by national professional organizations. The American Bar Association is in a tight spot indeed. Many of its membership gathered unto themselves the aforementioned bennys by serving as the high, middle, and low priests and keepers of the sacred and unknowable mysteries of military justice.

It might seem strange that a profession dedicated to Justice could so entangle itself in a system where one party – and that party the government in its military mode – owns the judge, the jury, the police and investigators, the prosecutor, most of the witnesses, and the defense counsel. And where the conviction rates are only tenths of a point below the achievements of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao in their prime. We are assured however, that the lawyers would not betray Justice, for they are honorable men (and women). And we are further assured that their commanders would never require them to betray Justice, for their commanders are honorable men (and women). And, in the general glow of War’s forge, they can all be seen to be heroes, in the dusk with the light behind them (as Gilbert or Sullivan put it against another generation of honorables).

Recently, some of the highest of those priests, still on the take or retired and trading on their glory in new pastures, made a great show of the fact that they have opposed the regime all along, and are deeply concerned for Truth, Justice, and all those good things. One might wonder where these patriotic Perry Masons have been for the past five years, but it’s a war and should one really ask? One might wonder if these same honorables would be standing tall today if we were Winning in Iraq. If Justice is so important to them, why didn’t they stand tall five years ago? But no. Only now. Once upon a time, in a certain capital, high-ranking officers suddenly began to wonder how their records would look if reviewed by unsympathetic eyes. You can still see the results in the old newsreel clips: when they met each other, the same correct and hearty Prussian bonhomie; but the necks didn’t quite fill the gold-encrusted collars, and the splendidly tailored tunics now hung loose on their shoulders, even on the porkloin Keitel.

You might think that the media would pick up on this, but since it’s hard to get a soundbite out of a Virtue, or a photo-op with one, and most media types consider themselves every bit as professional as a brain surgeon, if not more, then the wise citizen is well-advised not to expect much from that quarter at present. There’s always room for improvement, however, and the prospect of not being taken seriously might concentrate the media’s collective mind wonderfully. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

The American Psychiatric Association has prohibited its members – all doctors – from participating in torture. First, one must do no harm. The American Psychological Association – not doctors – has also declared it unethical for its members to further torture … except when they do, which they should only do at the behest of the command. After all, aren’t they there to provide their expertise? What good are they if they’re not there to advise and instruct when the occasion arises? Nor do they wish to attract the attentions of the justice system over which their fellow guild presides. They might add that the Romans themselves, the great lawgivers to the West, said that ‘contra armas silent leges’. And anyhoo, hasn’t God pretty much Deputized the American nation, the US government, and its warrior forces, as His instrument to bring to the entire world, by force of arms, the blessings of Love and Democracy? Yah, the damned commie drug-loving hippies were for filling the world with Love too; but those sumbees didn’t know how to really do it. The big boys, the real men, are in charge now. And they’re Deputies. It says so on the badge here.

Which brings us to the chaplains. One would think that of all the professionals the chaplains would have been precisely attuned to the problem they faced: the clergy’s Higher Law has been known to be rather demanding, jealous, and – when crossed – irascible. And very very personal. Up closely so. But no. The chaplains are right in there along with the rest. And the manner of it is on this wise. There is a fundamentalist ascendancy in the chaplain corps of the several Services nowadays (the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy; the Marines use Navy professionals, who then get to own and wear a set of great Marine uniforms as well as a set of Navy uniforms. Ditto the Coast Guard.) The Ascendancy, undistracted by a hierarchical, world-encompassing Church or a complex system of sacraments, or a vast body of accumulated thought requiring familiarity with a great deal of reading material, must find some other peg on which to hang its assorted uniform hats. This is not a new problem; humans have many times sought divinity or its intimations in assorted livestock (bulls and eagles being especially popular), golden totems of the foregoing, or – in our more enlightened modern era – governments.

Thoroughly modern, the Ascendancy has chosen a government, ours in fact. And for this government, and with this government, it will preach, it will struggle, it will pray, and it will abide until the Final Trumpet (or just moments before it). And unlike the Kathliks, it heroically refrains from sin, with occasional but prayerful forays into gay sex and crystal meth, in the abiding quest for an ecstasy that attains the spiritual while rooted in the physical.

And that brings us to the Kathliks – or Catholics, as they pretentiously prefer to spell it. One would be forgiven for imagining that no greater potential threat to the Ascendancy of a quasi-sacramentalized earthly government exists than the spirit of Roman Catholicism. Historically, a large footprint, hugely experienced – the oldest surviving organizational entity on the planet, the font of Western civilization. Conceptually, an intricate, delicately but sturdily webbed Vision of life and this world, nuanced but logical, and immovably connected by hoops of Spirit to that Higher world, that Higher Law, that God Who is Himself the font of Being. And He has Deputized the Church, although for a mission more of Light and of Love than of Darkness and Conquest. I cannot think of any entity that would antagonize an earthly government more.

But the Catholic Church, especially in America, has been on the ropes for a bit. It has its enemies, and they are as numerous within as they are without. Within the Church there are traditionalists who want the gays out, the women back in their place, and Time restored, preferably as it was in the Twelfth or Thirteenth century. There are womenists who want the men out of the priesthood or at least themselves in, and others who want the right to an abortion should the need arise. There are slothful priests, there are sleazy priests, there are drunken priests, there are loudmouth priests, there are gay priests, and none of them are perfect. Only in a transport of fundamentalist ecstasy or calculated duplicity could any serious student of humankind deny that the Church is humankind writ small, but in Capital Letters.

At the higher levels of the hierarchy, a different problem arose. The late John Paul II, marvelous in his popely prime, became a little less so in his later years. Possessed of a physical constitution that outdistanced LBJ and was closing in on Churchill, he wanted to ensure the safety of the Church by appointing conservative and strong bishops. He made the mistake – nor was he the first human being to do so – of presuming that being of sound conservative doctrine automatically conferred a strong character. But what one espouses – even if it is honestly espoused – does not automatically bring with it strength and the several Virtues of character. Grace has been known to do the job – often splendidly – but we live in a thoroughly modern postmodern age, where fairytales are only for children and high-level conferences.

To its enemies, the Church seemed to be low-hanging fruit. And they purposed to pluck it. This has been partially achieved in the past few years, the fruits vigorously pursued with great hue and cry. Advantage was taken of the Church’s tremendous patience and circumspectness and patience, evolved over the course of millennia, in dealing with the most fundamental foibles of human beings, who stagger in having broken themselves or something or someone else, seeking whatever might be done for them. The Church’s wisdom has been to try to patch up what can be patched up. This is not the typical path of many Prophets in the Old Testament, but the peasant wisdom of the Church has been that even Hosea only had to live a single lifetime; when you’re in it until the End, you’ve got to pace yourself. Unwilling to be a bull in a china shop, the Church has sometimes avoided sweeping up as much as could be wished. But whether wielded with brooms or bombs the dangerous – perhaps fatal - unwisdom of aggressive pre-emption and swift judgment has been more than amply demonstrated of late.

Thus the present Archbishop for the Military Services. He met with his peers in Rome a few weeks ago. Each nation has a bishop – called an Ordinary – for its military services (smaller countries get a lesser hierarch). Our own seems to be worried, as he is quoted, that the good news isn’t getting out. By that he does not mean the Good News, but rather the earthly variant: that things aren’t so bad over there in Iraq, and would be better if the media were a little more honest and less biased (or more based in the right way).

What can he be thinking? Is he thinking at all? Is he suffering from a lack of spine? Or does he see himself as the government’s personal chaplain, as Laud saw himself the King’s? Or has he so identified himself with his charges that he has taken for his own their views? It would be nice to think it’s the latter: Catholics have always had a better ‘trench/foxhole ministry’, probably because their clergy are bred to sustain a constant round of ministry (all those sacraments and all the times they’re needed) whereas the main fundamentalist punch comes in a preach, which need only be sustained for a few minutes or – on a roll – hours.

But he’s a little too clever by half. Stunningly, he justifies the presence of Catholic chaplains not by their sacramental ministry, but by their role as ‘ethicists’. On first glance this simply looks odd, but maybe interesting, and in the absence of any overtly offensive wording it would be glanced over and the reader would move on. It has a vaguely familiar ring to it, and so it should: hospitals now have ethicists on staff and there are very specific procedures required by policy when a difficult medico-ethical choice comes up and a special committee is, in due course, convened. All well and good. But such a role hardly applies in a military setting, for three reasons.

First, there’s no place in the crush of events where one would have the space to ethically intervene: a small patrol under fire out in the field, probably not having the chaplain with them, will hardly have the time or the inclination to have one or several choppered in for a conference, and on the other end of the ladder, colonels and generals are not going to be asking for ethical advice when making strategy – hell, they don’t even take it from the military lawyers, who speak from the slightly more tangible authority of the Geneva Conventions.

Second, in the hierarchical, Victory-oriented organization that is the military, ‘ethics’ counts for little unless a particularly canny chaplain can convince officers senior to him (always a techy job) that ‘being ethical’ will bring a better prospect of Victory. Stalin may have said it out loud, but just about any modern military boss operates on the assumption: the Pope has no divisions.

Third, chaplains who get into the habit of raising ‘sua sponte’ the distractions of ethical questions will soon find themselves dis-employed or worse.

And would it have done any good? Did Harry Truman consult with then-Archbishop Spellman before he atom-bombed Japan twice? If so, either the good prelate was overruled or – sorta like now – the good prelate told Harry he was doing a heckuvva job. More recently, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, a prelate in Georgia allowed as how Yes, the pope and other foreign diplomats were against the idea of invasion, but they were … well, foreign. This from a man elevated and consecrated to the episcopacy by a papal authority which he now acknowledges – as if by inadvertence – as merely another whiney foreigner. Now I am referring here not to Georgia over there in the old Soviet Union, but Georgia the Great State Of, the one General Sherman went through.

At any rate, to imagine all of the worthies seated under a Michelangelo ceiling somewhere in Rome, discussing their work, cannot but bring to mind French and German bishops, each supporting their respective nation’s troops. What would happen to this meeting if word suddenly came that this and that nation had suddenly declared war? Or, in the evolved modern usage, one government had simply decided on its own to start shooting at another. What would the X bishop and the Y bishop do? Does their Churchhood mean more to them than their nationality? Does their consciously declared service to the Higher Law override the commitment arising out of the particular accidents of their birth?

One hopes that the Military Ordinary is not so ordinary. But the current hiring practices of both Rome and Washington do not encourage. Meanwhile, who will speak for the Higher Law? Who, even, will speak for America – as she committed herself to be, two-hundred and some-odd short years ago?