Haircuts as Punishment

Posted on Saturday, 7 February, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Someone truly understands the historical and psychological symbolism of long hair and cutting or shaving it to degrade victims! The French did this to women who had been involved with German soldiers or officers in 1944. Throughout the ages, prisoners and slaves had their heads cropped, and the tonsure is a part of monastic asceticism.

Georgia barber offers free ‘old man’ haircut as punishment for misbehaving kids

I suppose this is another bright idea from the Christian right, from the kind of red-necks I had to deal with not so long ago when discussing the Islam question.

I came from a country when the punishment in vogue in schools at the time of my childhood was the old-fashioned six of the best with a cane or slipper, or at home, a couple of smacks by my father’s hand. Corporal punishment has rightly been frowned upon – now illegal in many places – due to the many abuses that happened, not excluding the possibility of adult perversion in some cases. Parenting is not one of my skills, but I believe that better results can be usually obtained via positive character building and instilling a sense of care for other people.

This barber proposes a service that involves making a child look like a bald man! What is the child in question to think of bald men? Do men become bald because they did something wrong in life? Is their baldness shameful? Of course the barber squirms out of scrutiny by saying that it was to be a very extreme punishment, but less so than spanking or whacking. Shaming a child has been standard practice in schools, such as having the child stand in the corner. Shaving the head leaves the child punished for at least two months, the time it takes for one inch of the hair to grow back.

The more I hear about things like this, the more I encourage men to grow their hair long if they feel it to be a part of their identity and way of life. Mine is coming on just fine, thank you…

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Mirror Mods 3

Posted on Friday, 6 February, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Mirror Mods 3 by courtesy of David Sumner is now up and running.

It shows the standard Mirror dinghy with a true gaff rig (as opposed to the original gunter rig). The mainsail is more easily reefed for strong wind sailing and is increased for light wind conditions with a topsail not requiring its own halyard. It is clipped in two places to the top of the gaff, and is raised with the mainsail. It would be interesting to see this done at sea. As it is a device for light conditions, I see no essential problem. It’s a rather interesting setup. He had a mainsail specially made to replace the original cut-down Mirror mainsail.

My immediate concern about this gaff rig is its complexity, more things to go wrong or get damaged or tangled in rough conditions. I’ll need to see this video a few more times and find out more about how well David’s boat does in time.

It is very interesting to know that what I call the “chicken gybe” is actually called “wearing ship”. In strong wind conditions, gybing can expose the sailor and the boat to a broach and a capsize. Instead of gybing, the boat is eased up to the wind, tacked and then reaches or runs on the other tack. I have found the term “chicken gybe” from the idea of using an easier or safer manoeuvre because a gybe would be risky.

Here are some examples of gybe-broach-capsizes in racing dinghies in a 25-knot wind. Cruising does not involve this kind of “thrills and spills”, because this is where reefing the sails comes in. With the equipment we carry on-board, we avoid capsizing at all costs (speed for example).

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What readers are looking for

Posted on Wednesday, 4 February, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Just a little flit to my stats page. I was quite struck with “hippie charicature” (the word is spelt caricature). Quite a few people these days are causing problems for barbers by depriving them of business! Oh well, each to his own…

“relationship between augustinianism and jansenism” – Oh yikes, my brain hurts! It’s all that difficult stuff about nature and grace, election and predestination. I wrote a few posts a while ago about Calvinism and some of the things you find on the internet from converts to low-church Anglicanism. I don’t want to reignite the flames.

“concept dinghy” – That is an interesting way of expressing it. The dinghy is usually defined as a small boat, often used as a ship’s boat by a larger vessel. Dinghies are sailed, rowed or propelled by an engine. The recreational sailing dinghy was developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and takes many forms and designs from the stout wooden cruiser to the high-tech regatta boat for today’s whizz kids.

“john hepworth” – I dare say many are still asking questions. I’m still not over it emotionally just yet. We are left with so many questions of why it happened the way it did, and we really come to the same conclusion – that we had to move on.

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Don Gregorio

Posted on Wednesday, 4 February, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

One or two people have written in on the subject of Fr Gregor Hesse (1953-2006). The bare bones of this priest’s life inform us that he was born in Vienna (Austria) and studied at the Angelicum in Rome to earn doctorates in theology and canon law. He was ordained a priest by Archbishop Aurelio Sabattani in St. Peter’s Basilica, officially incardinated in the Diocese of Wagga Wagga in Australia through the good offices and wrangling of a Czech bishop in Rome helping traditionalist seminarians who wanted an alternative to Archbishop Lefebvre’s seminary at Ecône. He worked as a secretary for Cardinal Alfons Maria Stickler in the Vatican Secret Archives.

He lived for many years in the USA as an independent traditionalist priest and died from diabetes in 2006, aged 53. Rad Trad published an interesting article on him in November 2014. As I knew him in Rome in 1985-86 – we called him Don Gregorio – Rad Trad’s write-up seems fair. I also spent a week with him in 1990, because I was employed as a sacristan at St Augustine’s chapel in Lausanne during my last year of studies at Fribourg, and he was asked to come and celebrate Holy Week. That was quite an experience!

This chapel is now run by the Fraternity of St Peter, and is certainly the better for it.

Fr Gregor’s talk was rather “hard” and lacked diplomacy of any kind. It did not, however, lack humour. Sometimes his language was extremely harsh – … questo stronso di Paulo Sesto, which I will leave untranslated for the benefit of English-speaking readers. His doctrinal position was something more or less between Archbishop Lefebvre and the sedevacantists.

He was at one time running a kind of “rat line” to get traditionalist seminarians ordained through the official Church and within canonical norms. Don Gregorio seems to have been the origin of a group of priests associated with the chapel in Lausanne I mentioned above. This group found various ways to claim the title of Canon, and two of them were the founders of the Institute of Christ the King in Italy, dressed up to the nines in blue robes. In 1990, the priest in charge of the chapel in Lausanne had been asked to leave by the local Bishop and later ended his own life in France in shameful circumstances. I was asked in the spring of that year to look after the chapel by the lay owners of the chapel, and welcomed visiting priests who celebrated Mass for us. A kind of ecclesiastical Scarlet Pimpernel, Don Gregorio knew the right people in Rome, Bishop Pavel Hnilica in particular, and it would appear that he set up the Institute of Christ the King through the Diocese of Mouïla in Gabon. At some stage, there would have been a parting of the ways between Fr Hesse and Fr Wach as the former became more radical and the latter more conciliatory with the authorities in Rome.

When I knew Fr Gregor in Switzerland, he spoke excellent English with an American accent and spoke highly of his life in the USA. He strongly sympathised with American conservative politics. He taught me during that Holy Week of 1990 how to taste good red wine and all about steam railway locomotives and trams in cities like his native Vienna and Zurich. His vocal imitations of steam locomotives were quite realistic and he was still a small boy at heart. He was also a fan of the Munsters and often hummed the theme tune as he went about life:

Don Gregorio was indeed an eccentric character between a very strict, scholastic and legalistic kind of Roman Catholicism, his love of red wine, The Munsters, steam trains and city trams. His clerical dress and manner betrayed a certain nostalgia for the baroque era of the Latin and central European world. He was quite a character when one got him talking about the railways in Austria with the old steam trains! Even I don’t get that crazy about sailing boats! In terms of red wine and cooking, he was to the priesthood what Rossini was to the opera. Perhaps he felt a need to stand out from the American melting pot and the more excessive conspiracy theorists and religious nutcases in the USA! I lived for more than two years in the equally eccentric seminary at Gricigliano, an egg that was hatched from the same clutch. It all probably gave me my own unusual outlook on life.

Oooooph! Ooooooph! Ooooooph! Choooooo! Chooooo! Cheers…

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Nice Sailing Blog

Posted on Sunday, 1 February, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I often look wistfully at my boat laid up in my back yard, wintered and covered with its tarpaulin. I had some nice weather a few days ago and opened the tarpaulin, and found that a little rainwater had seeped through the tarpaulin and into the boat. I also needed to take some measurements for the boom tent I need to make for next May. All the things in the boat are dry and OK – the rudder, spars and registration plate for towing the boat on the road. I took the sails and lifejackets out last autumn to put them in the house together with my sailing togs and my new waterproof smock. Things can gather mildew quite badly in a wintered boat.

Another bit of encouragement in these long dark winter months is a nice sailing blog, Daisy II. Julian Merson, the blog owner, has a nice looking gaff-rigged twenty-two foot Drascombe Coaster, and has just acquired a tiny folding dinghy, which is most intriguing. I discovered this blog, because it links to one of my articles on neat gadgets for boats. I recommend this blog to sailing enthusiasts. Mr Merson’s cruising narratives are most fascinating.

Soon, very soon now. Who knows whether we might get some nice weather for the end of February…

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Tra le sollecitudini

Posted on Sunday, 1 February, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

The title of this post came into my mind, Italian for “between concerns”. It was the title of a piece of legislation by Pope Pius X about church music. Though I am concerned about church music, I am also concerned about things that can cause worries. We are living in an uncertain world. Many of us see the current events in the world leading to a new world war, because they go far beyond the immigration of Muslim populations into the formerly Christian western world. Ukraine is heating up and tensions grow between the NATO countries and Russia. I am no expert on these events, and readers are advised to consult blogs written by specialised journalists and analysts. The war will not only be military, not excluding the possibility of nukes, but also financial.

There is a lot of junk on the internet written by religious fanatics, and I am quite amazed by the many “prophetic warnings” issued by Evangelical preachers of every kind. It seems to be the modern equivalent of an odd type I once saw in Oxford Street in London wearing a sandwich board saying The end is nigh. We need to learn healthy scepticism and the critical faculties recommended by such as Voltaire in the eighteenth century. We might not know much about everything, but some things seem more plausible than others. Experience of life often teaches us that things don’t go with a bang, but are damp squibs that go with a whimper. We need to seek the inner meaning.

I have already mentioned blogs that claimed in some way to “out” me from some dirty little secret. Anyone who searches for my name on the internet will find traces of my religious life of before my joining the TAC ten years ago, and then the ACC a little less than two years ago. After leaving the Roman Catholic Church, to which I had belonged by conversion for about fifteen years, I was ordained a priest by an independent bishop in France (1998) and consecrated a bishop two years later (2000) by another independent bishop in Belgium. It seemed right at the time, but I gave up the episcopate as I “reverted” to Anglicanism and my priesthood is now regular.

Several bloggers and commenters would like me to go into some of the more controversial subjects here on my blog. I was struck by the atrocity in Paris early in January this year and wrote what I believed to be measured reflections. I began to get a number of near-troll comments, and this rocked my own certitudes. It was better to take the whole lot down and give it all another think-through. Such would also delete the comments that seemed to be at the borderline between trolling and legitimately expressing an opinion. I was also motivated by the consideration that a blogger is legally liable for comments written by others which offend against the limits of the freedom of expression (promoting racial hatred, defending terrorism or crimes against humanity, etc.).

I refuse to move into a simplist paradigm according to which immigrants in western Europe and other countries have to be expelled or even killed. At the same time, I recognise that there is a problem with large populations of people who will never do an honest day’s work or try to assimilate into the country that has accepted them on humanitarian grounds. They are a burden to the Social Security system and the taxpayer. Those who are violent represent a real problem of security, which the police finds difficult to keep under control for the sake of public order. You will find these problems debated between politicians and in the media. You will also find extreme suggestions of solutions. These matters can be discussed without hatred. It is very uncertain ground for me, as much as for any discipline in which I am not well informed.

As a priest, I am not inclined to become politically committed in any way to extreme or “mainstream” politics. My life as a priest is a lot less clerical than when I was a Roman Catholic deacon in a seminary or on pastoral assignments. I am married, self-employed as a technical translator and spend my entire life with ordinary folk. I live in a country where I am allowed to live and work on the basis of being a EU citizen (that might not last if the EU breaks up), but I remain a foreigner in many ways. I would never be able to move back to England on account of the prohibitive cost of real-estate or even of rented housing. I have no sympathy for the French political establishment, in remote terms going back to the Revolution and the Jacobins and having gone through all the historical transformations from the two empires and the five republics. It’s a confusing mess, the present system essentially going back to General Charles de Gaulle and France’s liberation from the Nazi occupation in 1944. Things have changed and the French way is very different from my own English cultural and political references. For example, French socialism is something very different from the Christian socialism of Victorian England and the Anglo-Catholic slum priests. In France like many other countries, the State is everything and the human person is very little, though admittedly a little more than in National Socialism or Stalinist Communism.

I have read very little on the one party in France, the Front National that might please some of our Confederate American friends, but which might displease them on account of its essential Socialist and Statist manifesto. I am not interested in it and I a fear that that cure might be worse than the disease! They might win in the next Presidential Election (2017), but again they might not. My wife and I were deeply disappointed by the last Sarkozy term that seemed so promising at its beginning, and François Hollande has gone down like a lead balloon. Politics is all about money and the richest and most corrupt keeping what they’ve got. Whether the lolly belongs to the State or private multinational big business, it’s all the same for us ordinary folk. They are sucking us dry! But, for the moment, those guys are pulling the strings and are stronger than any of us.

I have been fascinated by the history of the twentieth century since having had a very good history teacher at school who gave a series of lessons on the rise of Nazism from the Versailles Treaty. It is bad taste to compare everything with Nazism, and often entirely inappropriate, but some patterns are repeating themselves. The most significant is scapegoating. All society’s problems have to be blamed on a particular group of people. Hitler seized on the ambient anti-Semitism of the early twentieth century with its roots going back many centuries in Europe. Hitler made it the core of his ideology, together with cranky esoteric and “philosophical” ideas to justify the single issue. This is why I am sceptical about blaming Muslims for everything, even though some Muslims commit terrorist acts. Many others do too, including Christians. American right-wingers tend to go for blacks, though segregationism is now a little out of fashion among most decent people. These are valid points of comparison. Scapegoating and hatred are not the way to promote the future of humanity.

I am only an individual person, and my views are insignificant. Something will happen over the next few years, and I fear the possibility of a world war or an interconnected series of civil wars. Many will die. Perhaps I will be one of them. May God receive my soul in his mercy!

There may be something in theories of critical masses of immigrant populations. The “white” status quo is hardly Christian or something to die for! Europe is no longer Christian, even though many of us try to keep our Christian faith and life going. We are a very small minority and hardly in a position to declare war or a crusade against anyone. The idea is absurd.

Like most people I read articles and books, and watch documentaries. I try to understand the issues as best as possible by attempting to find what opposing viewpoints have in common. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis according to the dialectical method of Hegel. The voice of truth and common sense is difficult to discern amid the noise and hubbub of those clanging their weapons and baying for blood. My role as a priest, other than pastoral ministry properly speaking, prayer and the Sacraments, is to seek the basis on which peace can be built and a new way for humanity to seek grace and good for all. We priests do so, not by fighting and killing, but through our knowledge of philosophy and history and our seeking for wisdom.  Our role is not political, but philosophical and any tiny bit of good influence we can bring.

We may be facing the “big one”, World War III, or something much more subtle. Will they use nukes and kill us all? Will they fight a war they believe they can win? Who are the “goodies” and who are the “baddies”? I fear that I live among the “baddies” and this time, we are the Axis and the “others” (Russians, Chinese, etc.) are the Allies. Could this be so? Would I be prepared to fight for a “side” in whose cause I did not believe? Many will ask these questions – if it is not a matter of the two opposing sides pushing the red button and it all being over in ten minutes!

My thoughts and emotions this week have been like those who faced war in 1914 and 1939. How can a good God allow such evil? War destroys faith in God and humanity or brings us to draw near to God to see a way over the present anguish. May God grant us courage and faith in the tribulations ahead, and above all let us pray and work for peace and justice.

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Political Philosophy

Posted on Friday, 30 January, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Political philosophy is an academic discipline in its own right, and like any other, takes years of study and work. I have studied other things in life, and am not inclined to go into this in a big way. Some of my recent misfortunes have been due to making forays into the world of people who have very different ideas from my own liberalism (a word that needs careful definition).

I have come across a very credible idea in an article expressed by a simple digram.

Read the article and agree or disagree with it as you will.

This morning, I received an e-mail with a link to a highly interesting blog called The Archdruid Report, not the emeritus Archbishop of Canterbury but a person in America with some interesting ideas and practising Druidism. The USA is supposed to be a country of religious freedom and this man’s religion is not my concern. He writes some very interesting articles for our reflection and instruction.

In view of my recent reflections, I find this little series of articles very apposite:

This blogger seems to base his thought on the end of the industrial age and the theory of peak oil. It does not seem to be an unreasonable idea that our present way of life can only last so long with everything that threatens it from scimitars, blunderbusses, our own carefree consumer way of life to farting cows causing global warming! Sorry to be facetious but satire seems the only way to express our concerns. There are hundreds of comments to each posting, and it will take a long time to read it all.

I have nothing much to add to these reflections, not having studied political philosophy or law at university level, which you can consider as you see fit, except the idea that political philosophy is complex and words mean different things to different people. I think of liberalism in particular. I believe that small-scale societies should agree to what extent A’s freedom has to be limited by B’s freedom and vice versa, but not crushed by an anonymous and impersonal entity like the State or some form of bureaucracy. Others would confuse liberalism with progressivism, understood as the rejection of tradition and other values (both”good” and “bad”) of the past. That seems to be often what happens.

I invite my readers to break the ice, read and think about these questions and ask themselves how they fit in with things. It’s always complex. Don’t believe anyone who claims to have a simple solution or any privilege or entitlement over and above what millions may have to suffer in one situation or another.

Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi
finem di dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios
temptaris numeros. ut melius, quidquid erit, pati.
seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam,
quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare
Tyrrhenum. Sapias, vina liques et spatio brevi
spem longam reseces. dum loquimur, fugerit invida
aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.          Horace, Odes 1.11

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Smoke of Satan

Posted on Thursday, 29 January, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have been discovering some new blogs. All blogs reflect the opinions of those running them. Mine does too. I could easily take offence at some of the comments concerning my person, but I take time to find out why I am of such interest to them. It is intriguing to be associated with the “liberal” tendency of the mainstream churches, and even with the lady who has recently been promoted to the episcopate of the Church of England. I am partially responsible on account of publishing a photo of myself in non-clerical dress (what I wore for sailing my boat in a gathering last summer) and a full head of hair.

I have already written posts on hyper-masculinity and my critical attitude of it. I have allowed myself to be influenced by some of the writings on psychoanalysis by Jung, and have discovered that our spiritual development comes in a large measure from reconciling opposites. There are some parallels with the notion of transfiguration of the lower by the higher. It is good for a man to have some feminine characteristics. I am not talking about people who have their bodies mutilated to look like a caricature of the opposite sex, or even acting “camp”, but assuming one’s own identity by assimilating the opposite and the other.

For some time now, I have studied a notion called psychological androgeny. I bring up this subject which generally has nothing to do with homosexuality or certain physical medical conditions like Kleinfelter’s Syndrome. It is not even a matter of the so-called gender theory that is often bandied about. It is a matter of our inner selves as men and women. My own experience is that of a male.

Most of us are brought up to be masculine, to climb trees, to be interested in cars and sports, and typically in competition. It’s exactly what they taught us in the English public schools, even when there were no abuses like excessive punishment or worse. We are brought up in a binary culture of male and female, at least in certain periods of history. At other times of history, small boys had the same long hair as girls and often dressed as girls. Only then did they move on towards a more masculine identity. Some of us escape the rigid stereotyping. I certainly did through my distaste for competitive sports and preferences for music, literature and “churchy” things. We had daily chapel, and one thing that made me join the choir was my distaste for the contempt most of my house-mates had for chapel services. Christianity for me spoke for what is fine and human, not brute force.

Some of us are more sensitive and are concerned to create and experience empathy for others. There are many human qualities that should be present in all of us, male and female alike: care for the weak and vulnerable, sensitivity, an ability to adjust our place in the group. If we are capable of adjusting our response to the complexities of the world and society, we would make the world a richer place. I have come to a stage in life when I don’t care what people say. I’m a man and do masculine things, just as I did as a boy. I also enjoy beauty and harmony, and I sew and cook reasonably well. I don’t think anything of it. I also love the quasi-infinity of the sea and nature. Admittedly, the long hair is a little provocative, but I know some very masculine guys (by way of a competitive nature and muscular physiques) who have long hair and also have wives and families. Most men in the LGBT world have short hair, sometimes very short. If a reader really wants to go into the question of long hair on men, he could consult this article. For me, the hair is a part of my masculinity and my human identity. I think John Wesley was no limp-wristed wimp in his time! I firmly reject the caricature of masculinity that developed in the twentieth century.

In the natural order, human instincts seem not to be very different from those of some non-human species. The dog is man’s best friend for a reason. Dog and man are similar in the social aspect and the hierarchy of dominance. The alpha gets his food and choice of a sexual partner before the others. It is the survival of the fittest, the strongest and the most competitive – the very thesis put forward by Darwin. This is the central idea of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Might is right. It is only by brute struggle that the strongest will prevail. Christ came to turn that system upside down. Strength is henceforth in weakness, the weakness of women, children, the sick and handicapped, those who are soft in the head. Christ said that those souls would inherit the Kingdom. The alpha man said that all those categories have to die in order for the pure and strong to live.

What I find interesting is that Christianity is perceived to be an obstacle to the conquest of the world by the like of Mussolini and the Nazis. Certain Christian ideas could be exploited, like the success of the Constantinian Church and the moral power it held over entire populations. The Church ceased to be Constantinian, since no state in the world supports a Christian theocracy, and has had to revert to the actual teachings of Christ. Such a religion is useless for waging war and killing without mercy!

Some of the blog comments I have been reading probably represent only a very marginal tendency in American society. The American idea is very complex. There are several contributing themes. The main one seems to be the adoption of an adapted form of the French Republic in reaction against British imperialism. Another is “melting pot” multiculturalism. Anyone is welcome in to escape the oppression and persecution he suffered in the old world, to work hard and be free in a society that is constitutionally neutral in religious and ideological terms. The American Civil War divided the country ideologically between the Yankees and the Confederates, the former aligning themselves with principles of democracy and modernity, and the latter remaining in a strongly authoritarian and segregationist ideology, something like English in the days of Empire. The blacks were useful when they were our property, and now they are free, we have to fight them and chase them away from our lives.

There is something very unhealthy about the hyper-masculinity, the private collections of guns and the “prepper” mentality. I have read some of those sites, and the idea of societal collapse seems plausible. We get taken over by Big Brother, annihilated by someone else’s atomic bombs. The whole financial and banking system goes down. Ebola or something even worse manufactured in a biological weapons lab becomes a pandemic. What do we do? There are some films about such scenarios, and they invariably illustrate the worst of predatory human nature. The guns are all about the haves in such a post-apocalyptic world protecting themselves against the have-nots. In actual fact, those who are speculating about what they would do in a post-apocalyptic world are doing it already in this world – exercising an absolute right to private property as the spoils of war and victory in the competitive struggle. It is a primary ideology based on hatred and fear.

There is a universal feeling that the world we know cannot continue forever. There are human threats and we are poisoning our planet for greed. We may soon arrive at a point where less than 1% of humanity owns more than 60% of the world’s resources. That obscene situation is opposed by various forms of socialism and nationalist socialism – and by the poorer populations of the world. When different groups compete for the same thing, that is the origin of war. Who do we want to see winning that war?

Some find it strange that I should be seen working for the preservation of Christian culture and spirituality, yet fail to see the need to combat encroaching Islamism by means of authoritarian politics. The alphas might be preparing for war, but they fail to identify the fact that humans are not designed for living in “mega societies” like the nation or the state, but in smaller entities in which they know each other. All the forces preparing to fight against terrorism and aggression coming from the Middle East are statist. The Front National here in France is just as statist as the various socialist and Gaullist tendencies. They might expel large numbers of illegal and non-naturalised immigrants from France but what good would come out of it all? I don’t see any scenario by which Islamism would get into mainstream politics or seriously challenge the present democratic ideology. The French as I know them are motivated by their own freedom. In this country, there are groups of traditionalist Catholic thugs who torch abortion clinics and cinemas showing blasphemous movies, but they are marginal. Most French go along with the mainstream and manage to live with it as best as they can.

I am a priest in spite of my many eccentricities. I am not an alpha, and have never been interested in competitive sports. I certainly look like a sissy with my long hair – I don’t care what they say! Life in this world is limited and our days are numbered. Why bother with old liturgical rites, music, literature and sailing a battered old boat? It is my life. My regret is that little or nothing will remain when I die. Perhaps I will have the will and strength to write a book or two and some music, but in a world that seems to be going to hell. It is difficult to be motivated. The key is obviously seeing things at a different level. The level of faith and knowledge we experience in this life is not all.

A part of our Christian way is to be concerned for this world and the people who live in it. We do need to read the signs of the times and keep an eye open. The smoke of satan, an expression used by Pope Paul VI when he saw noble ideas being made banal and venal in the Church, is an image that can describe anything that appears to be good but is made perverse. Christianity itself was twisted beyond recognition at some stage of its history, and the conflicts go right the way back to the beginning. There was no pristine golden age. Christians were knocking each other off from the beginning.

What makes us believe in Christianity? There is a central message of hope that no other idea has been able to bring. It is a message of hope for those who are not the strongest, the most aggressive or even the evil of this world. It is a message of love and the ability to embrace those whom the laws of evolution and natural struggle would eliminate. That is the Christianity that convinces me as which I wish to serve as a priest of Christ. It won’t win any wars, but it will receive God’s blessing.

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Rocks and hard places

Posted on Wednesday, 28 January, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

A dear friend wrote to me this morning observing that my blog had been quiet of late. I have to admit that I was quite stirred by the growing uncertainties of our world. We suffer from a saturation of information and having no way to assess the veracity or moral rectitude of anything. We don’t know what is going on in the world. All we know is what people with their ideas want to tell us. I don’t know what to believe any more. Isn’t that always the case with mass media and propaganda?

The ultimate of human perversity came home as I watched a series of documentaries over the last couple of days about the “philosophical” background of the Holocaust, not only concerning about half the Jewish population of the world but also all the other categories of mankind the Nazis wanted dead. We have all seen the grainy black and white films showing the piles of emaciated bodies they showed at the Nuremberg Trial. The subject becomes banal for many, as the same horse has been whipped for seventy years. What was new this time was the way the documentary showed the development of the Nazi ideas and the precisely calculated methods designed to carry out the “ethnic cleansing” pogroms of Europe. It is the coldness and Teutonic efficiency of it all that causes the most pain to us, even those of us who were born long after these events.

The seeds are still there, and the old saying is that much more relevant “Those who will not learn from history are condemned to repeat it“. The same lines are being repeated now as in the 1930’s from the crisis of capitalism to the rise of state totalitarianism and religious fanaticism. As a Christian, I believe that only Christianity can do some good in this morass of evil, but it will not do so in military or political terms. It can only transform each of us from within.

I am brought back to the ideas I have often expressed about going beyond the Christianity of the Constantinian Church and connecting with something much higher. Oscar Wilde said that being sent to prison did not make him a better man, but a deeper man. It gave him insight through suffering, and not what the conventional Victorian mind considered as someone who was to be morally reformed through punishment. Few understand that subtlety. I do. To be a disciple of Christ, we have to let go of our materialism, the shallowness of our religious bigotry or the religious consumer’s supermarket. We need to go from the daylight of secular reason to the midnight sun that gives a different kind of light.

All these thoughts about man’s inhumanity to man can bring us to a new level of consciousness or consign us to hopelessness and nihilism. There is a beginning of a way that is not of this world. We may be at the doorway of a new world war. Millions will die. The cultural heritage of centuries will be destroyed and faith will be laid waste as in 1918 and 1945. May we be delivered from such a scourge, whether it is the ambitions of American politicians and businessmen, the faceless bureaucracy of the European Union, Russia, the worsening situation in the Ukraine and the Middle East. Perhaps, in the way of Providence, the love of Christ awaits.

Perhaps I see things too pessimistically. One thing the French documentary about the Holocaust brought home was that the pessimistic European Jews got out whilst the going was good. The optimistic ones thought it would all blow away, until they were put out of business, made to leave their countries without money or property – and finally sent to the death camps. We have to try to get the right kind of information – and that’s the rub.

I still feel quite burned out, but I struggle to my feet yet again. The idea is still the same, that of finding a higher and more noble way of living as a Christian and telling others that this is possible. I don’t always get to put a fine expression on things. It is a life-long struggle.

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Rumours of Vatican III

Posted on Thursday, 22 January, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I don’t know if this is true, but Charlie Hebdo‘s pencils will be poised for a feast of satires! They don’t only draw smelly old men in turbans with flies buzzing round their heads…

Stay tuned and I’ll stay out of it as much as possible.

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