“Order is the first need of the soul.” – Russell Kirk
It’s also the first need of human society of any size, beginning with the family. I would even go so far as to say that the particular *kind* of order is, generally speaking, not as important as the *fact* of order itself. You can organize a library in many ways – by author, by subject, by date of publication, etc. – but it’s better to decide on an “inferior” classification system than to endlessly feud about what kind of system there will be. And once settled, if it works well enough, leave it alone. Now you have an established basis for true *freedom* in a library.
Some conservative thinkers jump directly from order to freedom. I think this is a mistake. Between order and freedom is the need for goodness and justice. While many particular kinds of order will be sufficiently functional to enable freedom in a healthy way, it’s also true that *some* kinds of order are so inferior as to be counter-productive and harmful. For example, both monarchies and republics, if organized justly, can provide a decent enough order for human flourishing – even if one may be regarded as superior to the other. But Communism and Islamism are fundamentally unjust systems, and the “order” they provide is too inhuman for genuine freedom (and let us remember that freedom means freedom to do good, or else it is useless). There is no fixing them. Perhaps the conservative says “the order we have is sufficient”, and maybe it is — but if not, we need the reactionary or the revolutionary to say “the order we have is destructive and must be overturned”.
Getting all of this right is no easy task. Revolution and reaction are dangerous. Temperament and ideology are unreliable guides. Natural law apart from divine revelation is radically inadequate. The Catholic Church alone provides the necessary values and the right priorities, ordered in justice, and as Catholics we are not free to ignore them. Recognizing this makes you an Integralist.
In the Name (+) of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
OUR FATHER
HAIL MARY
GLORY BE
V. And the Word was made flesh.
R. And dwelt among us.
O Divine Redeemer Jesus Christ, prostrate before thy crib, I believe that thou art the God of infinite majesty, even though I see thee as a helpless babe. Humbly I adore and thank thee for having so humbled thyself for my salvation as to will to be born in a stable. I thank thee for all thou didst wish to suffer for me in Bethlehem, for thy poverty and humility, for thy nakedness, tears, cold and sufferings.
Would that I could show thee that tenderness which thy Virgin Mother had toward thee, and love thee as she loved thee. Would that I could praise thee with the joy of the angels; that I could kneel before thee with the faith of Saint Joseph and the simplicity of the shepherds. Uniting myself with these first worshipers at the crib, I offer thee the homage of my heart, and I beg that thou wouldst be born spiritually in my soul.
Give me, I pray thee, the virtues of thy blessed Nativity. Fill me with that spirit of renunciation, of poverty of humility, which prompted thee to assume the weakness of our nature, and to be born amid destitution and suffering. Grant that from this day forward I may in all things seek thy greater glory, and may enjoy that peace promised to men of good will. Who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end.
Sweet Babe of Bethlehem, I praise thee, I bless thee, I thank thee.
I love thee with all my heart.
I desire to worship thee.
And to be like thee in all
Thy holy and blessed ways. Amen.
O Holy Mary, as I here adore thy Divine Son, pray for all little children, that they may be protected from all harm and danger, and that they may grow in grace and in favor with God and man.
We pray thee, O Father, that the holy joy of Christmas may fill our minds with thoughts of peace, and our hearts with a sense of thy great love: hasten the time when war being done away, we may love as brethren, and bring in the reign of the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ thy Son, Our Lord. Amen.
In the Name (+) of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
I live in a neighborhood with streets named for various characters associated with old California – Dana Way (for Richard Henry Dana), Harte Way (for Bret Harte), Helen Way (for Helen Hunt Jackson), Murieta Way (for the famous outlaw, Joaquin Murrieta), and Joaquin Way (for Joaquin Miller, who named himself after Murrieta and preferred to spell the name with one “r”). Dig a little deeper, and we find Rosita Way (for Murrieta’s murdered wife), Carmela Way (his wife’s middle name), and Salvator Way (presumably for Salvador Mendez, the bandit who identified Murrieta’s severed head in court). These, at least, are the associations I see, although it’s possible that whoever named the streets had other people in mind. But the pattern is fairly obvious.
“The Robin Hood of El Dorado”, written by a Chicago journalist named Walter Noble Burns in 1934, seems to be the first serious effort to write a genuinely historical account of Murrieta’s life. Burns cites places, names, and dates, and claims to have obtained hundreds of oral testimonies from those who knew Murrieta or his victims – or were close to those who did. His most important historical claims seem to be specific enough to have been falsifiable in 1932 if they were, indeed, false. Consequently, I take the general outline of his narrative to be generally accurate. But Burns is no historian: there are no footnotes, and he does a lot of “filling in the blanks” that required some imagination on his part. Which makes for a rollicking good read, if a bit on the gruesome side. But the literary inventions are not what trouble me: the truth of Murrieta’s legend is unsettling on many levels, to the point of shaking one’s faith in humanity, if one ever had any.
After Joaquin Murrieta married young Rosita Feliz in Sonora, Mexico, they fled to the California gold fields and settled in a mining camp called Sawmill Flat. Murrieta was believed to have been a modest, polite, hard-working, all-around decent fellow. He was known to have built a house for his bride, to have staked a claim and done some prospecting, but mostly for “dealing monte” with an honest hand in the town’s saloon. There are no accounts of Murrieta making trouble for anyone before tragedy struck. One day a group of surly American miners came through his front door, uninvited. Amdist a flurry of racist anti-Mexican taunts, they ordered him to pack and leave town. They told him – falsely – that his claim belonged to Americans now since California had just been “sold” to the United States. Murrieta knew his rights and refused to leave. The miners proceeded to beat him unconscious. While the men were attacking Joaquin, Rosita grabbed a knife and tried to kill one of them. The miners left Joaquin for dead and turned to Rosita. After brutally taking turns with her and satisfying themselves, she finally lost consciousness, and the yankee miners left her for dead as well. Murrieta revived and called out for his wife. He found Rosita and laid her on a couch, where she also revived long enough to speak to him – and then he helplessly watched her expire.
Months later, the decaying corpses of five miners from Sawmill Flat were found in a ravine with one bullet through each of their skulls. Their bodies were too decomposed for identification, but somehow everyone knew.
After exacting justice for Rosita’s murder, Murrieta was evidently done with killing and moved on to greener pastures, settling this time in Murphy’s Diggings to be near one of his brothers. He wanted to live a quiet life. But the yankees weren’t about to leave him alone. Anti-Mexican sentiment was high in the American mining camps, some more than others, though it was by no means universal. In any case, this time Murietta was falsely accused by a belligerent miner of stealing a mule. The baffled Joaquin protested that he was borrowing his brother’s recently purchased mule. He and the miner agreed to meet, with Joaquin’s brother, in Murphy’s Diggings the next day to settle the dispute. The miner showed up with a mob of nineteen rowdy Americans, in various stages of inebriation, eager to hang a couple of Mexican thieves. Some of the more respectable Americans showed up, too, vigorously defending the Murrieta brothers and testifying to their innocence. But their protests were futile. In the end Joaquin could only watch helplessly while his brother was crudely hanged by the mob. His own life was spared, but he was flogged into a bloody pulp with thirty-nine yankee lashes on his bare back – while tied to the same tree.
This pushed Murrieta over the edge. He was forever a changed man.
In the weeks that followed, eighteen of those twenty men in the lynch mob were found dead. Their tortured bodies seemed to reveal a pattern – lassoed and dragged by a horse, rope burns around the neck, small stab wounds all over the body, and an “M” carved into the forehead. The remaining two also died violently. The instigator was shot down in the street by an American miner who witnessed the lynching and flogging and was outraged by the injustice.
The rest of the story is a flurry of criminal genius and organization, casual cruelty, and outrageously daring bravado. The idiot who wrote the back cover of my copy of the book – and who obviously didn’t read it – says that Murrieta’s campaign was all about “defending Hispanos against violence and dispossession by rampaging gold rush miners”. On the contrary: Murrieta created a vast network of loyal bandits who killed for gold, for horses, and for fun. It’s true that he had a special contempt for American miners and unleashed his vengeance on them. But it seldom had anything to do with defending Mexicans. He raided peaceful ranches that had little to do with miners or mining or Mexicans, and for some perverse reason, he targeted the most vulnerable miners in the Sierras, the hard working Chinese, who never bothered anyone and who took abuse from all directions, leaving a sea of blood and tears in his wake. Murrieta had acquired a taste for killing, discovered he was very good at it, and found that he enjoyed it. He assembled a band of outlaws known as the Five Joaquins that terrorized the state from one end to the other, though he was the undisputed leader.
Murrieta apparently had a flair for dramatic effect. He often went to town in costume, to gather information about his enemies, or just to have a good time. There are countless stories of his daring and bravado. But what endears certain criminals to the public mind – what makes folk heroes out of them – is their humanity when it shows up in kindness. We love a bad man who has a tender side and does good deeds now and then. While Murrieta avenged every treason against him, he is also said to have rewarded every kindness shown to him, no matter how small. In many of these stories he appears indifferent to the gold and loot, and gladly gives it away. If you gave him lodging and a meal without protest, he was as likely to reward you as to kill you: flip a coin. Honestly, though, from the dozens of stories recounted by Burns in this riveting book, I have to wonder how certain it could be that Joaquin Murrieta is the outlaw of every story. His gang consisted of hundreds of men and dozens of small bands with their own leaders, and there were at least four more Joaquins besides, so I have think that positive identification was not a slam dunk.
A deputized sheriff by the name of Harry Love was commissioned by the new state of California to organize the California Rangers for the purpose of stopping Murrieta and his savage partner, Three Fingered Jack. Love and his men found them in a canyon on the Coast Range, prevailed with gunfire, and for purposes of identification decapitated Murrieta and cut off the hand of Three Fingered Jack. For years these relics were displayed around the state, finally resting in San Francisco, until destroyed by the earthquake and fire of 1906. Legends of Murrieta’s buried gold persist to this day.
What is the reality of Joaquin Murrieta? The folk hero that some Hispanic or “Chicano” activists have tried to make of him is untenable. If he was ever a good man, he definitely went bad and there is no whitewashing this fact. I do think it likely that Murrieta was, at first, not a man with a criminal disposition, and that the injustices he suffered helped to propel him to a life of crime. We applaud the justice he brought to bad men when the law was absent. We are charmed by the mercy he showed, at times, when he could easily have done what by then came naturally to him. Like all criminals, and indeed all men, he was not a one dimensional personality. He was, like most of us, someone who alternated between his better and worst instincts — but his demons won in the end.
In any case, the most disturbing aspect of this book was not the terror inflicted by Murrieta’s outlaws, as awful as that was, or even the idea that a good man could turn so bad due to circumstances beyond his control, but rather the morally depraved milieu of the gold rush itself. This is not news to me, or to any student of California history. However, Burns makes it come alive in a way that caught me a little off guard. Think about it: California’s non-Indian population went from about 12,000 in 1848 to 380,000 ten years later. By some estimates the newcomers were over 90% male. So, the gold rush was an overwhelmingly male phenomenon, lacking the feminine influence that is necessary to tame and domesticate the average man. That’s already a problem. But it might not have been so much of a problem if these were average men. The ’49ers were not average men. They were, by and large, the greediest, the rowdiest, the most ignorant, the least moral, the least religious, the least educated, etc. of the men in the place from which they came. The more respectable among them still found nothing wrong with leaving wives, children, farms and businesses behind in order to undertake a dangerous journey in a fanatical quest for more wealth and riches than they could possibly use. The mining towns were essentially organized for greed and debauchery. It was not uncommon to have multiple brothels and no churches. The overall tenor of the Sierra foothills was greed, violence, debauchery, drunkenness, and very little respect for life. “Fire on the Mountain” by the Marshall Tucker Band is an accurate portrayal.
It’s true that there were good men, too, whose motives weren’t entirely debased. Many were more interested in adventure than gold. Gen. John Bidwell, the founder of Chico, comes to mind. He was well educated and made his fortune mining the Feather River. Once that was done he turned to farming and ranching, married well, treated his Indian workers well, and founded a new city. He was a deeply Christian man, and his disappointed biographers, two hard-bitten cynical journalists, declared that despite all of their research they could find no “dirt” on him to report.
I suppose that, under the circumstances, one should be surprised to find so many remnants of civilization in the mining camps. The vigilante committees are known today for their excesses and injustices, but they helped bring order to chaos, and they included many genuinely fair-minded men. Burns recounts a number of vigilante trials where the accused is acquitted and released despite popular opposition. He also reports many incidents where fair-minded men stopped, or tried to stop, intemperate vigilante “justice” in the mining camps. Although the lawlessness of the gold rush ceded to the forces of civilization, in part because the miners themselves had grown tired of it, the untamed spirit of the ’49ers remains in this state under various guises. You might say that California is still paying for its original sin.
I’ve long entertained the idea of a California-specific political party. This little exercise was long overdue. It took me only about three hours, so it definitely needs some editing and polishing – but I think you’ll get the point. It will remain a fantasy (there is no “we” or “us”, only me) unless some of my fellow Californians take it and run with it.
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The California Renewal Party
The California Renewal Party (CRP) is a single-state political party. Our goal is simply to foster the Common Good in California through the election of men and women of character, vision, and sound principles to public office at all levels.
Californians are largely disgusted with the two major parties that have dominated the American political scene for generations. The corruption, cynicism, and overall nastiness of contemporary politics have left most Californians feeling disenchanted, if not disenfranchised. The CRP is determined to change this by radically improving the quality of candidates put forward. Candidates will be recruited and endorsed not only for their competence, but also for their moral character and conduct. All candidates will sign a pledge that commits them to honesty, integrity, and decency in their campaigns and in the fulfillment of their duties once elected.
Contemporary third parties tend to have long and excruciatingly detailed platforms, which in our opinion dooms them to permanent marginalization. The CRP, on the other hand, wants to be a relatively big tent. Every party must stand for some common principles that unite its members – and the CRP is no different – but on most issues our members will be free to disagree, debate, promote, and defend their own positions.
The California Renewal Party believes in the primacy of culture. As the culture goes, so goes government and economics and civilization itself. But culture is synergistic: government is not only influenced by culture, but is also a source of cultural influence for better or worse. Therefore it is critical that government be a positive contributor to culture rather than a passive reflection or, worse yet, a destructive engine of cultural decline.
Religious belief and practice play an indispensable role in the lives of Californians. Our state is inhabited by millions of people representing every nation, tongue and creed. This is due, in large part, to the specifically Catholic origins of the Golden State and Christianity’s persistent influence over the years. In a certain sense, California is the only state founded by a Saint, the great Franciscan missionary St. Junipero Sera. The Franciscan charism is future oriented: it’s a spirituality of new beginnings, ongoing conversion, radical generosity, and compassion for the poor and the stranger. The Franciscan emphasis on solidarity with all of God’s creation has taken root in California as well. We therefore call upon July 1, the feast of St. Junipero Serra, to be declared a state holiday.
It was General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo who, in reconciling himself to the inevitability of American immigration, believed that California’s increasingly diverse population could find enough common ground to flourish in peace and brotherhood. Although he was betrayed by the naked and unscrupulous avarice of the newcomers, his optimism was well founded. California today is the most diverse society of its size on the planet. In order to preserve this functional diversity, we believe it is necessary to preserve the Catholic ethos of St. Serra and Gen. Vallejo that made it possible. While the California Renewal Party welcomes people of all faiths – as does the state we love and are proud to call home – we embrace California’s vital religious heritage and strive to conform to Catholic social teaching.
The CRP firmly believes in the doctrine of subsidiarity, which holds that “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co- ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.” (Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo anno I, 184-186.)
For this reason we affirm – as our immigrant origins prove – that the family is the foundational unit of society, and its flourishing is a primary concern of the state. The CRP supports policies that strengthen the family, increase its independence, protect its children and elderly, and prevent its dissolution. We oppose government sanction of behaviors that undermine the sanctity of marriage and the innocence of children, by which we include everything from pornography to same-sex “marriage”. We favor parental choice in education, policies that strengthen home schooling, and policies that support private and religious schools.
The California Renewal Party supports the dignity of all human life. We therefore oppose legalized abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, in-vitro fertilization, and all medical and research practices that result in the intentional death of a human being created in the image of God. We also oppose the inhuman and unconstitutional practice of long-term solitary confinement in our prisons.
The CRP favors the liberation of small business enterprises – many of them family owned – from unjust taxes, crippling fees, stifling regulations, and unscrupulous competition from large corporations. While we recognize the advantages of large economies of scale in some industries, we favor policies that encourage a wide distribution of productive property, incentives for mega-corporations to reduce their size and influence, incentives for large corporations to pay their employees a just wage, and incentives for economic collaboration and cooperation in the private sector.
The CRP promotes creative, pro-active and vigorous policies that provide the unemployed, homeless, and mentally ill with the help they need to live with dignity according to their abilities. We favor an effective social safety net for the poor and disadvantaged, and with compelling incentives to leave dysfunctional lifestyles. We favor strong public support for the aged and infirm who find themselves without resources and in need of long term care. We believe that quality medical care should be available to all, without regard to financial capabilities or pre-existing conditions. We encourage innovative solutions to the crisis of soaring health care costs, declining quality, and limited availability – solutions which preserve market incentives for providers and producers, but do not exclude non-market interventions.
These are the core principles of the California Renewal Party. There remains a great deal of room for debate on the finer points of specific policies. Many others issues remain unaddressed, and this too is by design. CRP candidates are free to adopt their own positions on environmental protection, higher education, immigration, drug legalization, gun control, capital punishment, single-payer health care, tax policy, foreign policy, various schemes for breaking up the state, and so forth. But our platform is enough to assure us that men and women of good character will find the California Renewal Party attractive, and will join us in the fight to renew the unprecedented civilization that has taken root on the west coast of north America.
“I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God’s fool, and all His works must be contemplated with respect.” –Mark Twain
I read novels so rarely these days that it’s become a matter of embarrassment. A novel is hard for me to justify given the pile of books about “real” things waiting for me on my reading table. It’s not that I haven’t understood the place of great literature, intellectually, but the silent prejudice directing my personal reading habits has been this idea that a novel is an inferior device for communicating reality. (In my younger days I read some hideous novels.) It is long past time to disabuse myself of this notion: Michael O’Brien has forced me to turn the page, so to speak, which is something he is skilled at doing.
“The Fool of New York City” is a feat of the imagination. It’s not the strangest novel I have ever read, but it comes close, and the strangeness is all the more pronounced because of it’s very plausibility. “This is New York City, after all”, says one of his minor characters. O’Brien takes the reader on a gripping journey of mystery, adventure, tragedy and romance, with a knack for inserting the reader directly into the shoes of his protagonists. And who are these protagonists? The first is a giant nearly eight feet tall, a wholesome Iowa farm boy who landed in NYC on a basketball scholarship, but also a man with secrets; the second, a tormented soul he found nearly frozen in an abandoned building, an amnesiac with a cosmopolitan background and a tragic past he can’t remember. Together, they set off to discover the amnesiac’s true identity …
I can’t say much more than this without getting into spoiler territory. Read this delightful book. It’s comparatively short for an O’Brien novel, and it is infused with realities that one does well to contemplate.
I can think of no better poem for entering into the spirit of Lent than this one. The author may not approve of my mentioning his name, so I will merely link to his website.
A Sonnet to the Sorrowful Jesus
Let me mingle these, my tears, with Thine, Whose tears roll down Thy face’s cheeks so fine.
Let me share my sorrows, Lord, with Thee – And, too, Thy sorrows, prithee, share with me.
Let me know the love between us twain, Who, lovers true, do share each other’s pain.
Let compassion, common, given be; And thus shall I the love between us see.
Let me walk along, O Lord, with Thee, Along the paths of this Gethsemane;
Let me be condemned with Thee and whipped, And of the cup of sorrow take my sip;
Let me wear Thy holy crown of thorns, Along with Thee endure the soliders’…
“In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more.” – St. Augustine
“Christ has created you because He wanted you. I know what you feel – terrible longing with dark emptiness. And yet He is the one in love with you.” – St. Teresa of Calcutta in a letter to Malcom Muggeridge
Generally speaking, modern people choose their religion so as to conform to the lives they are living. They believe as they live, rather than live as they believe. This attempt to quiet their consciences can seem like a brave act of individual liberty in a society that glories in religious pluralism. But in a more Christian age, men did not deny the incongruity of their faith with the follies of their own lives. They knew that truth wasn’t going to change to suit them, and they forced themselves to live with the tension in the hopes that one day they would reform. Malcom Muggeridge was this pre-modern type of man. He lived badly for many years, but God refused to permit him the illusions modern men seem to enjoy.
The outline of Muggeridge’s life is well known. The son of a middle-class Fabian socialist, Malcom became impatient with the gradualism and hypocrisy of a socialist elite that didn’t have the stomach for revolution and, despite lip-service paid to egalitarianism and the plight of the working class, enjoyed lives of globe-trotting luxury and indulgence. He became a staunch communist and an open admirer of the Soviet Union. Upon graduation from Cambridge he traveled to India where he taught in the colonial schools, studied Hinduism and Islam, sympathized with Ghandi, and promoted Indian nationalism. Returning to England, he found work as a journalist and was assigned foreign correspondent to Moscow by the Manchester Guardian. He relished the opportunity to see Soviet communism up close. But what he learned in this revered “worker’s paradise” turned his enthusiasm into horror. Despite his own rhetorical excesses, Malcom discovered in himself a fierce hatred of cruelty and injustice. The barbaric inhumanity he witnessed in the name of atheistic communism turned him against every kind of mass ideological movement. He was furthermore aghast at the calculated dishonesty and, in some cases, the self-delusion of the Western intelligentsia when it came to the Soviet Union, upon which they projected their hopes and aspirations. It was also clear to him that these westerners relied upon the “success” of Marxism-Leninism for their reputations.
Malcom was the first to break the story of the Stalinist famine in the Ukraine, wherein four million perished by starvation and disease while their food – not only grain, but the food in every pantry! – was hauled away to feed more cooperative Russians. Those who resisted, or who were suspected of resistance, were simply shot. To keep the word from getting out, the border was sealed so that Ukrainians had no escape. On a clandestine and unauthorized trip to the Ukraine, Malcom watched starving peasants being loaded onto cattle trucks at gunpoint with their hands bound behind their backs. The story was censored at first, but Malcom would not be silent and became an implacable foe of communism for the rest of his life.
This courageous but unpopular act nearly cost Malcom his career. Still a man of the political Left, by this time the Left would no longer have him. He was barely employable as a journalist in England in all but the most pro-establishment Tory publications (which he detested politically) and gossip columns. His family struggled as he tried to pay the bills with various desperate writing gigs. The war came and he joined the armed forces as an intelligence officer, serving honorably. He returned to England and, by a series of unlikely employments and promotions, ended up a media star himself, landing finally at the BBC. During this time his politics moved further away from those of any party and developed into something that resembled a pragmatic libertarianism. He was clearly a gifted wordsmith, a master of the language, and an incisive commentator. The quality of his writing was recognized as superb. He was surprisingly adaptable as a compelling television presence. Malcom became widely respected – and also reviled – for his piercing criticism of those in positions of power and authority. His transparent sincerity was part of his appeal, once admitting “I hate government. I hate power. I think that man’s existence, insofar as he achieves anything, is to resist power, to minimize power, to devise systems of society in which power is the least exerted.” Toward the end of his career his wit, humor, and voice were known to all Englishman. His highly televised face was recognized everywhere.
And yet, beneath all of this worldly success, Malcom had long been miserable.
Malcom read the Bible secretly as a child, enthralled with the Christ-figure. While at Cambridge he embraced the religious skepticism of the day, but found himself drawn to mystics and even to the devout. His best friend was a serious Christian who became an Anglican clergyman. Malcom especially admired his asceticism and religious discipline. At the same time Malcom had fallen into the casual homosexuality of the elite, a phenomenon that was rife in England at the time, though he was still in love with a girl back home. (The extent to which casual male homosexuality was a staple of upper class English life has always eluded me, but it seems to have been ubiquitous for several generations even as it remained illegal. This must have had severe psychological effects on many of its practitioners.) His passions became unruly, particularly his sexual passions. When he married Kitty Dobbs, as good Fabian socialists they seriously considered having an “open marriage”. It might as well have been. Malcom’s sordid infidelities are too numerous to count; Kitty’s are less numerous but no less tragic. This compulsive behavior went on for decades, all through the highs and lows of his career. It always left him feeling empty, despairing, and lost. He and Kitty fought bitterly and constantly. As his family grew, he sought escape in projects that took him far from home. He attempted suicide at least once. He agonized over religious questions, and though he couldn’t bring himself to believe, he couldn’t bring himself to reject God altogether either.
Part of Malcom’s inner torment was his self-image as a permanent outsider. Painful in his youth, he tried hard to belong without success. Later he came to see his outsider status as having important advantages. He was in that sense a free man. As a writer he could say what he wanted to say, without worrying about who it might offend. He relished attacking the “establishment” and its acolytes, but extended his range of targets to anyone whom he felt exercised undue influence over others. Maintaining this posture required a spirit that lacked generosity. He was outside by choice now, and developed a sort of contempt for insiders. This gave him his freedom. Insiders are not free: they have to bow to their institutions and defend their absurdities. Or so Malcom thought. As applied to the Church, Malcom could not see himself accepting a set of doctrines that were above criticism or deferring to churchmen who were, in his estimation, just party men like all the others. The extreme patriotism after the war ended turned him off for similar reasons. You would never find Malcom Muggeridge waving a flag or a pom-pom. But his independence came at the price of arrogance, to the point where, after his acceptance of the Christian faith, he could no longer stand to watch himself on television, deploring this “terrible man” with a “certain arrogance about myself” and “completely lacking in humility”.
Malcom’s exceptional intelligence, energy, and productivity was driven by a force he didn’t understand. The sheer volume impresses – books, plays, documentaries, interviews, hundreds of articles. He interviewed everyone from Churchill to MacArthur to Stalin’s daughter. His literary circles included all the men of letters of his time, being closest to George Orwell. He described his friend Graham Greene as a “saint who is trying unsuccessfully to be a sinner”; Hilaire Belloc as “not at all a serene man” nursing decades old grievances, and of whom, “having written about religion all of his life, there seemed to be very little in him”; and of Evelyn Waugh he said “I have formed the impression that he does not like me”, which was evidently true, although in fairness Waugh was a misanthrope who didn’t like anybody. Apart from Chesterton, whom he admired, the English Catholic literati did not impress Malcom as men whose Catholicism had changed them for the better. They left him curious but uninspired.
Behind the scenes of this busy public life was a titanic internal struggle between the flesh and the spirit. Even as Malcom gave in to the flesh, he would not surrender his mind. He began to see with increasing clarity how the ethos of liberalism had poisoned his own life, making himself and his loved ones miserable. What was previously a slow awakening became a torrent of awareness. He decried the comfortable materialism of his circumstances and longed for poverty and asceticism, for “the simple life”. He saw the rise of sexual promiscuity (with the implied dismissal of marriage), contraception, abortion, and euthanasia as signs of a decaying civilization with a Freudian death wish. He understood that the decline of Christian faith and respect for the Church was the source of these evils. He professed these insights publicly even as he continued to live according to his old habits.
Malcom plunged himself into research about this Jesus, this Man who haunted him all of his life and wouldn’t leave him any peace. The painful alienation and longing for God expressed in St. Augustine’s “Confessions” resonated with him acutely. He recalled with amazement the serene faith of the peasants he encountered in churches behind the iron curtain. He traveled to Lourdes and Palestine and was inspired by the faith of the Christian pilgrims, mostly of humble origins. He befriended a holy priest who ministered to the severely disabled. Finally, he sought out Mother Teresa, bewildered at this woman who accomplished so much with so little, who didn’t shrink from loving the unlovable, or touching the untouchable, and not for an idea or a set of abstract social principles, but for the love of a Person. The publicity-shy nun permitted him to make a television documentary about the works of her Missionaries of Charity, and to write a book about her – “Something Beautiful for God” – bringing her then obscure work to the attention of the world. Still unable to grasp Christ directly, Malcom was permitted to see Him through the life of a genuine saint, and in the faces of the world’s forgotten ones.
And then, in the twilight of his life, the old familiar pain of being an outsider looking in returned to him. He wanted what these Christians had, Who these Christians had, but didn’t know how to possess Him. He wanted to be counted among them, but still couldn’t bend the knee.
Malcom spent the remainder of his career defending and promoting a Christian worldview at every opportunity. Yet he remained apart. Malcom’s difficulties with the Catholic Church were a surprising combination of two things: 1) He was shocked and disappointed at the changes in the Church that seemed to have resulted from the Second Vatican Council. He saw religious life collapsing everywhere and moral teachings abandoned. 2) He was still a theological skeptic himself. Despite the post-conciliar liberalism that had no regard for doctrine, he was an honest man and would not join the Church if he didn’t accept its dogma. It’s not clear that he connected theological orthodoxy or liturgy with the moral precepts that concerned him. Nor is it clear that he worked very hard at theological understanding. This biographer suggests that Malcom was bored by theology. Although a reluctant moralist, he was fundamentally a poetic soul who seemed content with a mystical approach to the person of Jesus Christ.
Despite his distance from the Church, he began to call himself a Christian and tried to live like one. He established a daily prayer regimen. He gave up his womanizing, and further still, his drinking and smoking. He ate sparsely and became a vegetarian. He repaired his marriage to Kitty and tried to make things up to her. Their marriage became something beautiful and attractive, a hard-won prize. Their final years were spent in love, enjoying one another’s company and the company of friends, often reading the Pslams aloud to each other. Kitty would later write: “It is inevitable that in the course of time trouble and strife between man and wife should occur. This is for the most part due to our human vanity and egotism; but these differences can be overcome, and every reconciliation strengthens the bond of love.”
At long last, Malcom and Kitty received a letter from a respected priest and friend. In between formalities, the letter contained only one substantive line: “It is time.” Now 79 and 78 years old, respectively, this was all they needed. Malcom and Kitty Muggeridge formally entered the Catholic Church in November of 1982, finally at home and at peace. In July of 1990, Malcom suffered a crippling stroke. The state of his soul as a Christian penitent is manifest in the words he shouted that first night in the hospital: “Father, forgive me! Father, forgive me!” He died from complications four months later.
MY DEAR FRIEND GARRISON: Up to this time, I have given no direct expression of the views, feelings, and opinions which I have formed, respecting the character and condition of the people of this land. I have refrained thus, purposely. I wish to speak advisedly, and in order to do this, I have waited till, I trust, experience has brought my opinions to an intelligent maturity. I have been thus careful, not because I think what I say will have much effect in shaping the opinions of the world, but because whatever of influence I may possess, whether little or much, I wish it to go in the right direction, and according to truth. I hardly need say that, in speaking of Ireland, I shall be influenced by no prejudices in favor of America. I think my circumstances all forbid that. I have no end to serve, no creed to…
The hysterical and unhinged Brooke Baldwin, purportedly a CNN “news” anchor, probably represents the views of a good many Americans in this segment. Nevermind that she crudely mischaracterizes the facts; let’s just focus on her misplaced outrage. How is it possible, she asks incredulously, for anyone to think that pornography is a greater public health crisis than assault weapons?
It’s very simple: pornography destroys more lives, with far more collateral damage, than assault weapons ever could. Pornography fuels a host of criminal activity from sex crimes to serial homicide. Pornography is strongly linked to political violence and radical ideologies from Nazism to Islamism. Pornography destroys marriages and families and nurtures a culture of promiscuity, resulting in a tidal wave of abortion, post-abortion emotional trauma, mental illness, abuse of women and children, and millions of fatherless young men whose numerous pathologies include higher rates of suicide, drug abuse, and criminal violence (such as, for example, shooting up schools with assault weapons). Most tragically, and quite unlike assault weapons, pornography unfailingly extinguishes the life of charity in the souls of its consumers.
Whatever one thinks about gun violence as a political issue, pornography is by far the more dangerous and urgent public health threat. And unlike the ownership of firearms, there is no moral or constitutional justification for allowing the dissemination of pornography on any level. Nothing much will change when it comes to America’s social ills – including gun violence – until the truth about pornography is frankly acknowledged and its proliferation effectively suppressed.
My oldest son is a graduate of Thomas Aquinas College, a “great books” school that rejects textbooks and lectures. Students read only the great books themselves, and the classroom utilizes the discussion method. The professors, who are called “tutors”, are present only to facilitate the discussion and keep it on track. Furthermore – and this surprised me at first – the college discourages reading outside sources as class preparation. The idea is that one is supposed to grapple with the text itself, not someone else’s interpretation of the text. Students are trained to ask “what does the text say?” and “what does the author mean?” without prejudice.
When I first attended one of their junior classes as a parent-guest, I found myself extremely impatient with the discussion. I had the answers, or so I thought, and wondered why the students would spend so much time on a single sentence when the meaning was obvious to me.
I have since been humbled. The meaning was only “obvious” to me because of the prejudices in my head derived from other sources and my own rash judgments. These students, by their junior year, were mastering the discipline of putting all of that aside for the sake of authentic understanding. What does the text say? What doesn’t it say? What can we learn from the context? What is the author’s perspective? How do we really know? Furthermore they were forced to listen to each other, to be challenged and corrected, and sometimes embarrassed by their own mistakes. By their junior year these young scholars were thinking clearly and methodically, choosing their words very carefully, and best of all, in true Thomistic fashion, interpreting each other’s words in the most reasonable sense possible. It was a beautiful sight to behold.
