Toil and Trouble

Yes, the liberal wing of the Church hates me. Such is the crossover between the old Labour and Catholic heartlands that that institutionally dominant wing overlaps very considerably with the right-wing Labour machine. Hey, ho. Matthew 5:11-12.

So I expect it, of course. What really disappoints me is the connivance of hierarchs, sometimes held up as bastions of orthodoxy, who dare not stand up to these covens. Who is the Successor of the Apostles here? Who even can be?

And covens is what they are. There is nothing more horrific to them than the intellectual relationships between older and younger men, relationships that are entirely beyond that kind's control and which are in fact the basis of civilisation itself. Some of us just happen to have the gift for those.

Considering that I am still only 42, I have a remarkably long history of collecting protégés. I cannot deny that I enjoy the intellectual admiration of clever younger men, albeit clever younger men who have not always been well-served by the covens. Saint John Henry Newman also revelled in that, so I could not be in better company. If, as seems to be suspected, I am about to move into another phase of that life, then such is grace.

But as for the conservative wing of the Church, it is if anything an even greater barrier to the radical economic, social, cultural and political implications of Catholic orthodoxy, and it is controlled in this country by Damian Thompson, which is why I now intend to publish in the United States. Material such as this has to be self-published in Britain, because its author has no intention of ever sleeping with Thompson.