Trespassers Will Be What?

A long time ago, I became a Catholic, so I left the Church of England. I would have become a Catholic anyway, and I have never looked back. But you called the people around me mad, bad or both when they said that once women were addressed liturgically as “Mother in God”, then you would end up unable to say “Our Father”.

They pointed out that that was already happening in your North American operations, and in the episcopally organised state churches of Scandinavia. They faithfully reproduced the published words of your leading minds. Yet still you would not have it. Well, look at you now.

As for our own, relatively minor but not absolutely negligible, diversions, 25 years ago, and smugly assuming that their views were the consensus, members of the WASP elite on at least three continents invoked their nth generation club rights to demand that their church change to suit their specifications.

They are still screeching abuse at the insolent colonial darkies who were having none of it. Such Baby Boomers were then in their pomp rather than in their early dotage, and Western Europe, North America and the Antipodes had yet to feel the full effects of mass immigration from outside each other.

When their sociologically indistinguishable Catholic contemporaries from the same regions and from the whitest parts of Latin America, including Argentina, have the same experience, then they will have it from a far weaker position at home no less than abroad.

Meanwhile, the Western world is crying out for fidelity to the Magisterium, and is increasingly discovering it, only to be confronted instead with a “cultural Catholicism” that has little culture and no Catholicism. But should the Synod ever meet, and the Pope is already 86, then it would roar that fidelity from most of the world, as if the very questions from the old, rich, white people were silly and bewildering. 

On that basis, it would then get on with discussing the things that really mattered, whether the living links to the last days of Empire and of Jim Crow liked it or not.