Pange Lingua Gloriosi

I am very glad that the Corpus Christi Festival at Ushaw College went well last Sunday, and I was touched that quite so many people missed me, in several cases recalling my role in the event's revival rather more years ago than I had realised. You know how this one goes. Once again, certain persons had been planning to attend in order to have me arrested for being in the same room as them. Once again, the plan had been that I would have been back in prison that night. The last time that I had been there, then they had put a hit on me, but the hitman had taken such a liking to me that he had given them their money back. They must have found a more reliable one this time.

Although one dares to hope that a dip into the waters of Eucharistic Adoration may have had some effect on them, there is no faction more vicious than either the liberal wing of the Catholic Church or the right wing of a nominally leftish party. In the English-speaking West, those are symbiotically related, essentially and effectively a single entity in what were once their common heartlands. Here in the North East of England, at least, that machine wants me dead, and it wants me sent to prison for the purpose of killing me. Not for the first time, I can only wish it better luck next time.

It has all been burned as per, but over 50 priests, mostly young or youngish, independently wrote to me in prison, often saying exactly what they thought of, well, let's not. On my release, there were emails in my inbox from three times that many, including from every diocese in Great Britain and from every continent except Antarctica. And that was just the priests. Then there were the political activists, also mostly young or youngish. In both cases, I was surprised that a lot of those letters ever reached my cell.

I had had no idea until then, having always assumed myself to have been a romantically obscure figure who might at best have hoped to have become influential in death, but it turned out that my decades of beavering away in the cause of Catholic orthodoxy as the only reliable basis for the radical politics that in turn followed inescapably from it had not gone unnoticed. I had known that I had had at least played some part in the conversions of a certain number of orthodox Catholics to the struggle for economic equality and for international peace, and of a few activists on the Left to Catholic orthodoxy. I had also been told from time to time that meeting or reading me had crystallised what people had already been thinking. But it came as a complete revelation that I was so valued by hundreds, most of them younger than I was.

It turns out, however, that the Liberal Catholic-Labour Rightist Mafia was perfectly well aware of who and what I really was. It has someone lined up for the Labour nomination here at North West Durham, in which Ushaw College is located, although of course its main focus is on Consett, a place that it clearly does not understand. I know who that candidate is. I found out this time last year, while I was in prison. It is not clear that that person is aware of it even now, but if it is offered to you, then that will let you know. Among other things, it will let you know that you were the puppet for whom they were prepared to bump me off in order to give you a free run against Richard Holden.

Much will be made of the fact that, unlike me, you were a cradle Catholic. Your theological opinions will falsely be presented as being in line with present Papal Teaching while mine, it will be asserted, were not. And you will of course be presented as part of the far, far wider division and weakening of the Left by means of the proposed reversal of Brexit, the astroturfing of purported support for the elite's preferred wars and regimes, the anti-industrial Malthusianism and misanthropy of the Green agenda, the treatment of identity politics as equal or superior to class politics, the treatment of gender identity as equal or superior to biological sex, the cancel culture of which our people have always been the principal victims, the erosion of civil liberties, the stupefaction of the workers and the youth, the indulgence of separatist tendencies in several parts of Great Britain, and the failure to recognise that a sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency had as much of that currency as it chose to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore needed to be under democratic political control.

Be in no doubt, though. We are the future, one way or another. In 50 years' time, the very latest that I might remotely realistically be alive, either we shall have won, or we shall have been driven underground or into exile, those of us who were not in prison or martyred at the hands of your economic and social liberalism that enforced itself by the use of very hard power at home, while also deploying that in order to spread itself across the whole wide earth. And 50 years after that, and 50 years after that again, and so on until we had prevailed.