It is an emotion, as close as emotion as written words on the Internet can get, that sticks with us. I read in quite a few places a growing emotional attachment to a vision of the Catholic Church that would afford security and certitude for all.

It is the idea of the infallible Church as forged by the nineteenth-century anti-liberal Church under Pius IX and reinforced over the decades by Pius X, Pius XII and Paul VI, interspersed with the “liberal” pontificates of Leo XIII, Pius XI and John XXIII. It is perhaps not so much the Popes trying to get back the old absolutist image, but the conservative Catholics in the pews.

I have observed things over the past thirty years, ever since a time in my life when religion held relatively little importance other than cultural (it was church music that I liked, and I held a respectful distance from the clergy). At first, I swallowed the conservative apologetics, as they seemed to represent the fulfilment of a dream, the Philosopher’s Stone that brought Truth into an uncertain world. Just convert everyone to the Pope and all will be well. I saw a resurgence of this kind of thing with the Ordinariate movement, except with memories spanning over thirty years. One thing I realise is that I am not alone, but our testimony must be eliminated and trashed. There must be no corporate knowledge, no accumulated experience. Corporate knowledge is a management term. It is something that can be as useful as damaging or threatening to an authoritarian structure whose power depends on innocence and lack of acquired experience.

One difficulty with the TAC was its containing “failed converts”, or those who, like Archbishop Hepworth, had become Anglicans and had assimilated the Anglican ethos. Such people lacked the expected naïveness and failed to go through with the self-sacrifice. And now, some are surprised to see us standing up again after having reeled from the last punch! The thing about pigs in a slaughterhouse is that the poor creatures don’t know what’s happening to them.

Another thing I notice is profound disillusionment with the “optimistic” paradigm of the 1960’s and 1970’s, the years corresponding with the pontificate of Paul VI. In the 1970’s, I knew little about Roman Catholicism, but I had the idea of Paul VI as a reactionary and an authoritarian. I was certainly given a false and distorted idea, but I failed to muster enough curiosity to know any more about this figure. What I did know is that his Novus Ordo was just as bad as our Series III and sex was to Roman Catholics what pork is to Jews!

With this disillusionment, it is natural for us to seek something authentic, and so we project our wishes onto something that just doesn’t correspond. Going by some blog postings, Orthodoxy’s claim to be that “one true Church” seems to have that little bit more credibility in America. Not here in Europe where it remains “foreign” and “exotic”. They seem to have kept their folk religion – precisely by keeping us radioactive western people out!

“As Pope Benedict recatholicizes the church…”? We constantly read the words of hope in the blogs – Brick by brick, the Pope wearing the fanon or red shoes, or anything that makes him look like going back to the old days. The Tiara was really too much to hope for. Now the poor man is past the age at which John Paul II died, and the glooming anxiety will be what kind of successor we get. So it will have to be a Pontiff who maintains the ban on contraception and tells us that we would be holier if we were poorer and more respectful of (clerical) authority.

First time round, it seems convincing! Thereafter, it’s too hollow…

Young Fogey has a much more subtle way of thinking than I thought, and sees the hollowness in the conservative line. I quoted something the other day about conservatives conserving the stuff hashed out by yesterday’s liberals and refusing any kind of corrective work. He tries to introduce a distinction between “traditionalists” and “conservatives”, defining the former as adhering to immemorial custom and organic change (as in Newman’s theory of development). He begins to see the limitations of simplism characteristic of so many of his outre-Atlantique countrymen, and I am that much further away from the assumptions I entertained as a cloistered seminarian amidst the baroque splendours of Gricigliano so many years ago. He mentions the quote from my old parish priest – “They (the traditionalists) are not what we used to be”. The Church was strict in the old days, but easy-going. Was it? Certainly the bureaucracy and blockages we have today just weren’t there sixty years ago.

As the years go by, the one thing I am most afraid of in myself is taking on the cynicism and nihilism of the elderly. They were unable to make any difference, so why should the young people? That is probably the thing I fear most about becoming old, and not so much the declining health, not being able to do things as before, becoming dependent and so forth. I fear losing the capacity to marvel, of finding joy and freshness. As some become old, they become curmudgeons and cynical about everything – they wouldn’t be happy even if someone blew up the planet with a thousand atom bombs! I will mention no names of those who trash and shower with contempt as others begin to emerge from their debilitating sufferings and start building.

My thought about the blogging of the usual spots over the past few days can be resumed in a few words – Out of gas! I haven’t heard that one in a long time… The Ordinariate people have embarked on their new course, and I can only pray they will find their joy before cynicism and disappointment set in for whatever reason. I would say the same for anyone else, for those regrouping in the remnant TAC, soldiering on as independent priests, those prepared to jump through the hoops of Church of England bureaucracy.

Every minute of the day, we fight against the spirit of cynicism and nihilism as we see few things that bring us joy. It is easy to envy the “freshmen” as they discover what we discovered thirty years ago and found not to be what they were hyped up to be. I remember a line from Robert Bolt’s The Mission, with the old Jesuit Cardinal musing about whether the native people of South America would not have been happier had the greedy and fanatical Europeans stayed away!

A few days shy of Christmas, I remember what Christmas is to a little child, how parents would go to great pains to preserve the wonder of this day for little children. Now, we are confronted with the sickening sights and sounds in our supermarkets and shopping malls for the entire period of Advent – and we are gorged with it all. The story of Christmas seems so dwarfed, and the probability is that the historical birth of Christ was very different. In the history of the Church, it was all about sanctifying the Sol Invictus, the old pagan feast of the Winter Solstice. It’s strange that no one has been able to commercialise Easter to the same extent. Perhaps the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox has less hold over our imagination than the Sol Invictus.

Is it time for it all to go away? The failure of the end-of-the-world prediction of yesterday must have come as a bitter disappointment to those who thought they would survive an extinction event like mega tsunamis or the earth getting hit by a massive meteorite. This is something about human nature that I find so difficult to comprehend.

The key to the whole thing is within ourselves. It can be nowhere else. We look for reality and truth outside, but neither are anywhere other than in ourselves. I saw this fascinating video on Youtube:

See more about Robert Lanza‘s theories – mind-boggling stuff but also mind-opening.

What if everything we know: matter, time and space – are illusions. The thought may be unbearable for many of us, but it certainly does cast our certitudes and all the things we thought we owned in a new light. We are reminded of that other famous quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet – There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

It is from the moment we have the courage to leave Plato’s cave that we will find a new reality, a new light and a new enchantment.