Mummeries of superstition
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - april 10 ]
Beatification of Newman
Papal Tanks on the Lawn
Hocus Pocus, Dominocus
Black Legend Proves True
Priests' Hole for Sale or Rent
Berlusconi Capo di Tutti Capi
Viral Version of Hitler to Visit
Holy Roman Empire to Expand
Foxeís Book of Martyrs Burnt
Protoantidisestablishmentarianism
Blair Becomes Mackerel-Snapper
Massacre on St Bartholomewís Day
Saying Mass No Longer Capital Offense
The Pope has invited Anglicans to hook up with the Roman Church in a last-ditch effort to save the Faith in order that Saints Augustine and Jerome's efforts shall not have been in vain.
In the 19th Century, educated upper-class English people were a closed, traditional, religious society. They all read the same books and journals, which shaped and echoed their attitudes. They were suffering through the Enlightenment together.
Matthew Arnold (1822-88), poet and critic, is considered to be perfectly representative of his social class and time. He was proud to serve as an inspector of schools, and for 10 years he held the chair of poetry at Oxford. Arnold thought that poetry had the power to save us in a world where religion no longer worked, so for him literary sensibility and the ability to read critically was the goal of public education. He believed poetry must replace religion at the center of personal life. At a time when the old myths no longer had validity, educated people would "turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us."
He is best known for lines from the poem 'Dover Beach'. The roar of the waves on beach reminds him of universal faith, the Sea of Faith that once encircled the world, but that now is retreating in melancholy dread.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-92), poet laureate (1850), wrote about keeping the Faith in God in the light of scientific evidence that casts doubt on the significance of any individual person, and in spite of the apparent chaos of history, the defeat of goodness, and the futility of moral efforts. The sudden, premature death of his best friend and classmate at Cambridge University, Arthur Henry Hallam (1811-33), and the desolating facts in Charles Lyellís Principles of Geology threw Tennyson into despair. He pleads for us to keep the Faith in spite of science.
The desolation of In Memoriam A.H.H. OBIIT MDCCC III
Strong son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove...
Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest life in man and brute;
Thou madest death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull that thou hast made...
The problem of evil always remains, no matter the faith or poetry.
Another Victorian who tried to escape and live was John Henry Newman (1801-90), Cardinal Newman, the renowned Anglican priest whose mystical assurances of the validity of the theological foundations of the Roman Church gave him the "rational faith" necessary for conversion. He looked around him, saw the best and brightest turning into Doubting Thomases (John 20:24-29), and thought he had better flee back into the fold where his faith was safe. He once had found Roman Catholicism "polytheistic, degrading, and idolatrous," but later he saw the light.
"Rational faith" is a fine oxymoron. "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed," Jesus said, affirming the point that faith is not rational.
Newman reasoned: If one does not know, and is not saved through inner conviction, he must remain agnostic, but if one has the "knowledge" of religious truth, if one one is happily mad, then he is bound to become a Christian and a Catholic.
Charles Kingsley (1910-75) had this to say about Newman's Apologia:
Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon which heaven has given to the Saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage. Whether his notion be doctrinally correct or not, it is at least historically so.
So today the Pope is gathering up crumbs to make a cake, now that the Eastern Church, Byzantium, is lost and gone forever, to serve as a reminder of the Savior. In Québec, which is perhaps the most Roman Catholic country outside the Vatican, in the grocery stores they sell bags of crumbs, paper-like scraps from the manufacturing of sacramental wafers, to give to children as a reward for good behavior.
