Thursday 29 June 2023

On This Rock

Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam Meam.

If your authority either on Ken Loach or on the Pope is David Baddiel, then while everyone has to be the Holy Father’s target audience, let us just leave that there while asserting confidently that you are not Ken’s.

This is very difficult for the Labour Right, which is symbiotically related to liberal Catholicism in their common historic heartlands such as the North East of England. For the first time, people like that must miss Benedict XVI. He would also have done this, but that would have been far easier on them.

And Baddiel really is their idea of an intellectual. Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home) is high art to them. If you imagine that I am joking, then you have never met them. They think that The Masque of Anarchy was written by Jeremy Corbyn, and that it is therefore rubbish. They have no more seen a Ken Loach film than read a Papal Encyclical. But I digress.

Considering the claims that the See of Rome makes, then, while individual Popes might be or have been charlatans or lunatics, the institution itself is either telling the truth in making those claims, or else it is indeed the Antichrist, and any professing Christian who does not submit to Rome on Rome’s own terms must believe it to be so.

Who will call good evil by pointing to the Papacy’s defence and promotion of metaphysical realism, of Biblical historicity, of credal and Chalcedonian orthodoxy, of the sanctity of human life, of Biblical standards of sexual morality, of social justice, and of peace, and by then saying, “Behold, the Antichrist”? That is the question.

Ah, Faith of Our Fathers. Father Faber, like a striking number of Tractarian or Tractarian-influenced converts, had an ancestry that was largely Huguenot, as is part of mine, although another side is Highland Catholic. So his “fathers chained in prisons dark” were not quite as his thoroughly rousing hymn would suggest. I have no idea why people think that that hymn is Irish. Faber actively disliked the Irish.

Buy the book here.

2 comments:

  1. “Considering the claims that the See of Rome makes, then, while individual Popes might be or have been charlatans or lunatics, the institution itself is either telling the truth in making those claims, or else it is indeed the Antichrist, and any professing Christian who does not submit to Rome on Rome’s own terms must believe it to be so.

    “Who will call good evil by pointing to the Papacy’s defence and promotion of metaphysical realism, of Biblical historicity, of credal and Chalcedonian orthodoxy, of the sanctity of human life, of Biblical standards of sexual morality, of social justice, and of peace, and by then saying, “Behold, the Antichrist”? That is the question.”

    Absolutely brilliant.

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