Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam

The Church and the world are crying out for Ignatian spirituality, and for "men for others". But what goes around, comes around. This Pope is already 85. His successor might be, so to speak, Clement XV, to whom an aversion to what might be seen as churches within the Church was not only sauce for the goose, but also sauce for the gander.

We all know the meaning of the dread phrase, "consultation exercise". Lo and behold, in preparation for a Synod that no one would bet on ever meeting, practically every diocese in the Western world, and certainly every one in this country, has managed to produce the same document more or less word for word, in perfect conformity to the undergraduate experience of its signatories half a century ago. Why, it is as if they had been assembled by Ptolemy II Philadelphus.

Should it ever make it that far, then this would all be laughed out by Africa, Asia, and much of Latin America. The Global South leads, not only its own liberation struggle, but also that of the internal colonies such as those which rose up in 2019 against the imperialist yoke that expressed itself as the right wing of the British Labour Party, a faction that is symbiotically related to the liberal wing of the Catholic Church in what were once their common heartlands.

Across the English-speaking West, at least, wherever they have both been strong historically, then the liberal wing of the Church and the right wing of the notionally leftish party are essentially and effectively a single entity, vicious and corrupt, sexually depraved in general and pederastic in particular, violently anti-intellectual, the colonial oppressor at home in league with the colonial oppressors abroad.

Mercifully, that is a vanishing world, although it is all the more spiteful for its knowledge of its impending fate. 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.

If you know anything about either Catholic orthodoxy or radical politics, then you must have taught yourself, since you would certainly never have been introduced to either of them on a school curriculum, and probably not even as part of the formal content of a university degree. The rising generation has never known life without the Internet, and since the same or similar disaffection would lead its members to go in search of what turned out to be each of Catholic orthodoxy and radical politics, then it is not surprising that a certain number of them are arriving at both. They then begin to formulate a synthesis. To my utter astonishment, I do appear to be an influential figure in that phenomenon of the age.

Be in no doubt that we are the future, one way or another. 50 years' time is the very latest that I might remotely realistically be alive. Here in Britain, for example, either we shall have won by then, or we shall have been driven underground or into exile, those of us who were not in prison or martyred. And 50 years after that, and 50 years after that again, and so on until we had prevailed.