"The Old European Festival, Pagan and Christian"

As Chesterton put it: "that trinity of eating, drinking and praying that to moderns appears irreverent", unused as the modern mind is to "the holy day which is really a holiday."

Arturo Vasquez writes:

"He saw himself as a son of the Catholic Church, which he did not regard as simply one of several Christian confessions, but as the great collecting tank of all religions, as the heiress of all paganism, as the still living original religion. That the Church after Vatican II no longer corresponded to this ideal, was more painfully aware to him than to anyone. And so, that much more easily did he decide to emigrate from the present, the analysis of which, of course, helped him to formulate his fragments of an “eternal anthropology” against it."

-Martin Mosenbach, regarding Nicolás Gómez Dávila

The superficial reflection of the week on my part is that I find sedevacantists to be a very sympathetic group of folk. Sure, I would never hang around them in person since I find that they are crazy enough in print, but I know where they are coming from. They love Catholicism more as an ideal than as a reality. I don’t know how one could love the reality without having had at least a minor lobotomy. Nowadays, educated people who speak of what they like about the Catholic Church speak only of an ideal, and if that is the case, one should become like the sedevacantist and go all the way. Or be a vagante bishop saying Mass in his garage.

But if I am to love an ideal, I will love it for the right reasons. The most prominent voices in modern Catholicism seem to portray the Roman Church as the wayward stepchild of rabbinic Judaism. I have nothing against rabbinic Judaism in comparative terms: it seems to be rich in folklore, cultural color, and magic. But once Catholic parishes start offering Passover seders and classes as to why everything in Catholicism has its type in Judaism, it is there that I realize how low the Faith has sunk. The genius of Catholicism is not that it is Gentile Judaism for Jesus, but that it was up to very recently the last great pagan Western faith. Yep, it’s just like Jack Chick suspected, since even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Whatever shape “Patristic Christianity” actually had, what emerged fairly quickly was a cult to angels and heroes (we call them, “saints”) that could fill the imaginational void that other Abrahamic religions tend to create. Even to this day, theorists will decry and mourn the fact that people’s allegiance to the Church is superficial, and that the Church militant is not as militant as it should be. How many bishops will say that the goal of the Church is to give people “Jesus”, as if Jesus could be separated from two thousand years of history and beamed right into the heart of believers as a burning in the bosom? Perhaps people shouldn’t be robbing, lying, and fornicating as much as they do, but does all of this still entail that people are too hung up on “superficial things”, missing the Jesus forest in the ecclesial trees?

To be honest, maybe people should not listen to me. I could give a rat’s ass about evangelization, and my drive to convince people of anything is so non-existent that I seem cynical. The truth is, I consider the truth to be greater than its institutional manifestation. Indeed, my own conception of history is not that of the triumph of the Church over her enemies, but of an Ideal making itself manifest in space and time. Unlike Hegel, however, I do not think this is a progressive movement. History moves in an inverse motion: we are experiencing a Great Unraveling, the Kali Yuga (the Age of Aquarius?)

If I could give that ideal a name, perhaps I would call it, along with Mosenbach’s characterization, “paganism”. Not a purification, or some external revelation that hit the world as a complete novelty, but the completion and repository of the elan of ancient religion. And perhaps, in this sense, what came around and out of Vatican II was the beginning of the end of this religion, at least in the developed world. Even those who pretend to some continuity with tradition have a substantially different worldview from what came before. But of this we have written too much before.

What is for sure is that what I seek to do is also build an eternal bulwark against this decadence. Whether this is portable to others or whether people completely “get it” is not my main concern. What is for sure is that the rhetorical bricks for this bulwark will be different from those of “institution-speak”.

What a curate's egg. The attractions of sedevacantism are lost on me; Mosenbach and Gómez Dávila are a different matter.

But Catholicism is the fullness of the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire, each of which now exists only as Christianity, of which Catholicism is the plenitude. Judaism and Islam are Semitic reactions against this, the former no less than the latter, and if anything even more so, since it explicitly denies even Prophethood to Jesus. There are also reactions by ostensible appeal to the Classical tradition apart from the Church without which, as much as anything else, that literature would have been entirely lost.

And the initial recapitulation makes possible the endless identification and inclusion of the (ontologically identical) true, good and beautiful elsewhere, a making possible which depends on the loss of no part of the fundamental Biblical-Classical synthesis. Neither Christmas nor Easter derives from any pagan festival at all, whatever some middle-brow pub bore may identify himself by telling you. But it matters not a jot that, uniquely, the English word for Christ's Passover has such an origin, and it is only to be expected that they meet the human need for winter and spring festivals respectively. That need is of God, and it is for God. God duly provides for it by, in, through and as His Church.

Of course churches throughout the world, and not least throughout Europe, are built on converted communities' pre-existing holy sites. Of course there are shrines of Our Lady and the Saints where once were centred the cults of all manner of Saint Paul's elemental spirits, which are Saint John's fallen angels. Even if certain folkloric practices may, in some corrected form, have been carried over, nevertheless no properly instructed member of the Church is thus be practising any such cult, while the Church, as such, actually cannot do so. There are, however, no such folkoric continuations in these Islands. As it happens, next to nothing is known of the pre-Christian religions here, and the charge of paganism is a purely Protestant one against things that are Medieval, and usually Late Medieval at that.