That Was The Synod That Was

The dying countries' obsession ignored, and the dying generation's hobbyhorse sent to the knacker's yard. Apart from that, wittering gibberish, soon to be forgotten by the tiny few who had ever noticed it.

Been there, done that. Smugly assuming that their views were in any case the consensus, members of the WASP elite on at least three continents once invoked their nth generation club rights to demand that their church change to suit their specifications. 26 years later, 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. Their sociologically indistinguishable Catholic contemporaries from the same regions and from the whitest parts of Latin America, including Argentina, have now had the same experience, and they have had it from a far weaker position at home no less than abroad.

Thank God for that. Without a robust material realism, there can be no pursuit of economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, led by those who suffered most as a result of economic inequality, namely the working class, and led by those who suffered most as a result of international conflict, namely the working class and the youth.

Yet much of the Left has succumbed to gender self-identification, which is a flat denial of even the most blatantly obvious material reality. Demonstrably, then, dialectical materialism has failed to provide that robust basis. Nor, in itself, can natural science, which cannot prove the ontological existence of material reality, but rather presupposes it and works from there.

What is needed is Thomism, which by definition exists within the wider Augustinian tradition. Fundamental to both is absolute fidelity to the Roman Magisterium, which is itself irrevocably committed to the Thomist metaphysical system, within which its own indispensable role precludes any degeneration comparable to that of the ancestrally Marxian Left into gender self-identification. Philosophy needs the Rock of the Petrine Office no less than Theology does.

Just as there can be no meaningful claim to be pro-life without an active commitment to economic equality and to international peace, so there can be no such commitment without material realism. There can be no secure material realism, nor, therefore, any science, without Thomism. And there can be no Thomism without the Roman Obedience, which one adopts either entirely and at whatever cost, or not at all.

Applied to the present situation, this has implications that are vastly more egalitarian economically, vastly more pacific internationally, and vastly more democratic politically, than anything that Marxism could ever devise, much less deliver. This is not to build the house from the roof down. Fidelity to the Magisterium requires Thomism, which entails material realism, which compels a critique of the present economic and geopolitical order such as leads inexorably to the pursuit of equality and peace through democracy.

For example, my paternal grandfather was born before such working-class men could vote, and my maternal ancestors included African slaves, Indian indentured labourers, and Chinese coolies. We who come off the lower orders and the lesser breeds, and perhaps especially those of us who are disabled, know perfectly well who would be euthanised, and how, and why.

Even if we had made it past the industrial scale abortion that disproportionately targeted us, then we, as a people, would face euthanasia as yet another lethal weapon in the deadly armoury of our mortal enemies, alongside their wars, alongside their self-indulgent refusal to enforce the drug laws, alongside police brutality and other street violence, alongside the numerous life-shortening consequences of economic inequality, and alongside the restoration of capital punishment, which has never been more likely than under a Prime Minister who was a former Director of Public Prosecutions.

All this, and the needle, too? This is class and race war, and we must fight to the death. That death must not be ours, but the death of the global capitalist system. Having subjected itself to that system to a unique extent, Britain is uniquely placed to overthrow it, and to replace it with an order founded on the absolute sanctity of each individual human life from the point of fertilisation to the point of natural death. That foundation would and could be secured only by absolute fidelity to the only global institution that was irrevocably committed to that principle, including the full range of its economic, social, cultural and political implications.

You laughed for half a century that we opposed the poisoning of women to make them permanently available for the sexual gratification of men, and instead celebrated the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. But those Catholics who abided by that have now visibly outbred those who did not even in the handful of countries where it was ever an issue. And right here in one of those countries, the wider debate now recognises that the lowest fertility rate since records began was a national emergency.

As with the mounting realisation that if there were too many people, then you had to explain which people there ought not to be and why, so there is a mounting realisation that if some people should be assisted to commit suicide, then you had to explain which ones and why. Mr Speaker Hoyle has his faults, but he is a good friend of Saint Helena, and we have seen again today that he is a forthright upholder of the precedence of the House of Commons. He should do so by berating the failure to publish the text of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. 100 Labour MPs are known to be undecided. If you are undecided on something like this, then at the very least you cannot vote in favour of it, and you really ought to vote against it.