Theatrocracy

From an email from a reader with a Canadian great-grandmother:

"You might tell your readers that the first American to respond to your reminiscences did so by saying that Canada ought not to exist, and if he had ever been president it would have been invaded and subdued in the blink of an eye."  

From the point of view of a free and sovereign people, this was an extraordinary thing to say, so I indicated that my country would not, in fact, have been subdued in the blink of an eye but would have put up a protracted defence, one in which women and children took an active part. 

The answer to this was, "Just freeing you from your unwanted British overlords, Ma'am."

Extraordinary. However, it is not unprecedented for I was once told by a fellow student in Boston that the USA allowed my country to retain her independence "on sufferance." 

I wonder if anyone ever says this to Mexicans? At any rate, I highly recommend no-one ever say this to a Pole, for he would be duty-bound to punch you in the snoot. 

I found the concept of "theatrocracy" in Chapter 8 of Integralism, "Forms of Polity." Chapter 8 impresses upon the reader that this really is not a beach book. It is, rather, a text book, and if you are a student of either Fr. Crean and Dr. Fimister, the way forward is to write down all the theses on cue cards and memorise them for exams. However, the book is also a good training for minds gone soft and squidgy from the internet. 

The entertainments of this Chapter are few, unless you find the appalling strangeness of Thomas Hobbes entertaining. I should not have invited him to dinner parties myself. There is much discussion of monarchy, aristocracy, democracy and mixtures of all three. "Theatrocracy" turns up right at the end, and it is great fun for reflection. 

"Finally, Plato coined the term 'theatrocracy' to describe a city where poets had corrupted the judgements of the citizens by vicious music. We may borrow that word and use it more generally to describe a state of affairs where men are ruled by those who possess the means of mass communication, and who by dint of frequent repetition cause them to believe whatever these rulers desire, even the most absurd or shameful things," write the authors. 

This is quite obviously our current state of affairs, and I remember my dear mother lambasting me for the amount of time I spent seeking manufactured entertainment. Entertainment is addictive, and indeed a useful carrot for tempting the undisciplined through dull but worthy or necessary work. However, entertainment also lulls the mind into a state of receptivity. This was not terrible when the primary form of entertainment was Sunday sermons (and in Edinburgh of the 1960s, both Catholics and Protestants went to more than one church service on Sundays, for there was as yet nothing else to do). However,  the primary form of entertainment is now "vicious music," if not internet p/r/on or spectacles published on Youtube or Netflix.

Meanwhile, I believe America's about-face on homosexuality was caused by the television show "Will and Grace" and by the film Philadelphia. Tim Curry in Rocky Horror was nothing on Tom Hanks in Philadelphia when it came to winning hearts and minds. Ru Paul's Drag Race is currently teaching children to throw off the shackles of gender conformity, modesty and taste. 

But I would be remiss if I did not talk about The News, especially as I work in The News. I read The News every day, so that I can pass along the most pertinent information to pro-life, pro-family readers, and I find sorting out truth from falsehood a difficult and dispiriting task lately. Whenever I read the MSM coronavirus "news," it tempts me to the heretical despair of believing that the truth cannot be known, for it is drowned in a torrent of supposition, rumour, error, and calculated self-interest. 

For the record, I do not believe either B.A. or I will either die or become very ill of coronavirus, and while obeying the temporal authority, I refuse to live in fear anymore. I still believe that the elderly, the asthmatic, and those who work in hospitals and care homes should be particularly cautious, however. I don't envy those who live in either London or New York.   

Another interesting word that leapt out at me was "Suffrage", for I was longing to know if I would still have the vote in the Integralist state. The answer is no, for I have a husband. In short, the idea is that, the building block of society being the family, heads of families represent themselves, their wives and/or their minor children. (Widows can be heads of families and, so, I imagine, could the adult orphaned sibling left in charge of his or her minor siblings.) Unmarried adult children do have the vote, which means that, in one sense, women lose the vote when they marry, but in another means that their vote is joined to their husbands', and the husband votes on both his and her behalf. 

I am sure this is all very galling if you hate your husband. However, life itself is a burden when you hate your husband, and the franchise isn't much of a comfort. 

But it is 10 AM, so I must say good-bye to Integralism and go back to The News. 

Dawn in Indiana

Alas, our discussion of Integralism, Chapter 8, "Forms of Polity" will have to be deferred until tomorrow because I have been sitting with the book since 8 AM and am only on page 150. It's not the book: it's me. My mind is distracted by many thoughts, overwhelmingly about the young Welsh farming family forced to sell their prize-winning herd of cattle to settle their late father's ex-wife's claims to his estate.

Wendell Berry's On Farming and Food arrived this week, so I am thinking about farming again. The Prince of Wales has also appealed to the country to take up work as farmhands to bring in the crops.  I love the idea of city folk sailing out to the countryside to rescue the harvest like the "little ships" to Dunkirk to rescue the British Army. I even had a look at the relevant webpage to volunteer to work weekends, but that doesn't appear to be an option.

I have also been thinking about the concept of understanding the United States of America, the subject having been raised in the combox.

Paradoxically, I first visited the United States before I was old enough to understand anything except hunger, satiety, discomfort and amusement. At the time, I had rather more family there than I have now. I am not sure which state that was, but it was probably Indiana or Illinois. I have stayed in Indiana and Illinois more often than in any other American state, if we don't include my two years in Massachusetts. Usually I travelled in the back of a car through New York or Michigan to get the midwest, so it is just possible I have been more often in upstate New York than in Indiana.

Driving through Detroit in the late 1970s and early 1980s was rather thrilling. ("Kids, lock your doors!")

Multiculturalism was strongly enforced in my elementary school, but oddly American ancestry, like Newfoundland or other Maritime province ancestry didn't "count." A difficulty is that Canada tends to define itself as "Not American" and has never forgotten the Fenian raids of the 1860s, let alone the War of 1812. Canada also felt rather uncomfortable sitting between the Soviet Union and the USA during the Cold War, and watching American invasions of other neighbours was a mixed blessing for the adults. I noticed that in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century cartoons Canada no longer existed, and we learned about Manifest Destiny at school.

Most Canadians are not fans of the Manifest Destiny concept.

My family watched American news over both Canadian and American TV channels and read it in American magazines, like Time. We also took Scientific American and National Geographic. We read Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Trixie Belden. We watched "Wonderful World of Disney" on Sunday nights, "The Flintstones" if we came home from school for lunch, at "Batman" at friends' houses, as we weren't allowed to watch it at home. We studied American History in Grade 8 before an exciting trip south along the eastern seaboard to Washington DC, and I studied American History once again in Grade 12.

The availability of American periodicals, music, films, television, food and all kinds of other things originating in the USA in Canada may be why newcomers have difficulty discerning the differences between the two countries at first. A newcomer would have to be told that 35% of all music played on the radio has to be Canadian and to see the big banners in Indigo to identify our authors. We don't provide guides to constitutional monarchy in the airports, and our various unsuccessful rebellions weren't as bloody or exciting as either the American Revolutionary or Civil wars.

However, I am running out of free time so I will trot out my most recent memory of Indiana.

In short, I was travelling from Buffalo to Minneapolis-St. Paul by train and, joy of joys, had a berth in a sleeper car. But it was summer, and at some time rather early in the morning I woke up. I looked out the window, and I thought I must be imagining things because the city we were passing through looked very familiar. I may have actually pinched myself. I looked and wondered, recognised and doubted, and then the name of the city appeared on a sign.

It was my grandmother's city.

How's that for a coincidence? I hadn't been there in 15 years.

At any rate, I don't know if I understand the United States as well as a non-American who, like the British Tim Stanley, has made a special study of it. But my relations fought in the War of Independence, the Civil War and the War in the Pacific all the same, and because of this I retain a fondness for the place. As a reaction to a crisis in my then-young life, I fled to Chicago, and whenever I now go to USA on business, I tell B.A. not to bother having me shipped east or north if I should perish but to put me with my people in the friendly earth of Illinois.

Do We Take Our Passports?

Good morning! It is a beautiful day, promising to remain fair and to become warm. There are no snails menacing my lettuce and radishes, and my repotted courgette has survived the night. So far so good.

This morning I applied myself to Chapter 7 of Fr. Crean's and Dr. Fimister's Integralism. It is entitled "Law," and although some of is great fun, some of it is heavy going. Here is the sentence upon which I almost foundered:

"Government being natural rather than conventional, the temporal polity is a juridical person in natural law with same sort of obligations towards God and towards His revealed will as the individual man" (page 140).

I think perhaps a definite article has been left out and perhaps a preposition, too. Meanwhile, I think this juridical person must be a king or queen, but I am not entirely sure. What I am sure about is that this sentence is in a paragraph about the Common Law and that the authors like Common Law better than Civilian Law. More on that anon.

Natural Law

The entertainments of this chapter include definitions of natural law, divine positive law and human positive law. Divine law and natural law take precedence over human positive law, and so pharmacists must not sell pessaries and registrars must not record same-sex so-called marriages. The entertainments also include Fimister & Crean siding firmly with Feser & Bessette on the death penalty, whose book they endorse in the footnotes. Provocatively, they quote CCC 2267 (1997) in the footnotes  without including the recent Argentine embroidery.

Punishment

Another interesting argument is that even if you disobey a law that is unjust, you should still accept the punishment. This point is made on page 132, and footnote 40 leads one to St. Thomas apparently agreeing with it. The possible illustration that came to mind was that a young American man in 1968 who objected to the law compelling him to be drafted to fight an unjust war against the North Vietnamese should have gone to prison rather than chosen to flee to Canada. I may be wrong about that, though. A more personal example is that a pro-lifer who refuses to budge from in front of an abortion business when told to disperse by police should, if charged and found guilty of an offence, accept the punishment without a murmur instead of running away. Again, I may be wrong. As you can see, I am rather dubious about unjust laws having any rights over innocent people.

(I will add, however, that being jailed for pro-life witness is considered an honour amongst pro-life witnesses, whereas running away is not. A segment of a video of a pro-life demonstration in which two of our comrades can be seen sedately walking away while police dragged others along the pavement never failed to rouse mirth amongst the Metropolitan Toronto Students for Life who watched it.)

Custom

There is a section on custom, for which I wish there were more examples than that of how the understanding of a British Prime Minister came about. I was alarmed to see that custom, including a majority of people simply disobeying a law which is not enforced, has the force of law. The Code of Canon Law says that "legitimately observed customs obtain the force of law after thirty continuous years." This seem to means that we are stuck with altar girls, communion-in-the-hand, and the various novelties that crop up in the celebration of the Novus Ordo of the Latin Catholic Mass.

Change to the Law

Here the authors seem to agree with the dictum of Hilary White that "Change is Bad."

Equity

Equity is when you may set aside temporarily positive human law for something all sensible people will see is a greater good. The authors' example is breaking traffic regulations to take a dying man to hospital. The  Canadian pro-lifer example is often entering, uninvited, your neighbour's property to rescue a drowning child from his swimming pool. (That this is the Canadian pro-lifer example underscores to me the Canadian and American horror of trespassing, one not shared by the Scots. Scots seem to trespass in every conceivable outside space, often using their incontinent dogs as an excuse. I am surprised more of them are not shot when they travel to the USA on holiday.* "Get off my land" is engraved upon my own heart and doubtlessly on any number of American gravestones.)

Common Law versus Civilian Code

This section is hard to understand, but it gets darkest before dawn, for at the bottom of the tricky page 140, the authors feign sorrow for the existence of the Civilian Legal System, while clearly loving it, for it affords them the opportunity to point out the superiority of Anglo-Saxons to the French.

In short, Common Law recognises God as the author of law, and Civilian Law thinks that the state is God.  "The subject of the Common Law has liberties empowering him to do everything that has not been positively forbidden by reason or statute. The temporal power constituted by natural law is limited by natural or divine law," say Fimister & Crean.

In contrast, "the subject of the Civilian Code...has 'rights': a list of things he is allowed to do by the 'State'. For everything else he must ask permission," Crean & Fimister observe.

The example the authors use brought great joy to my heart because it explains why, when we holiday in Italy, our Italian hotel or landlord has to register us with the police, and where it is we have to take along photo ID on a walk. In short, the police countries governed by the Civilian Code get to know all about the people in them, whereas in countries governed by Common Law, the police have to have a very good excuse even to ask you your name.

So to answer the title of this post, we don't have to take passports when we walk about the United Kingdom, but we DO when we walk around Poland, Italy, and France. Drivers' licences probably work those who have them, but we don't. Take it away, Vera!

*Update: That was tongue-in-cheek but, unfortunately, this does happen.

Slept In--Back soon!

No blogging this morning. Must work.

The Christian Prince

VR

Happy Victoria Day! In Canada this weekend is sometimes called the "May Two-Four Weekend" both because Victoria Day falls near May 24, the late, great Queen Victoria's actual birthday, and because it is traditional to travel one's holiday cottage (if one is lucky enough to have one) with a "two-four" of beer.

In celebration of Victoria Day, I have the day off from work and an excuse to eat delicious croissants from our nearest independent bakery. Lo, I was up early this morning to take my exercise there, and I was first in the queue outside the bakery door.

Also in celebration of Victoria Day, I will mention The Elements of Organic Gardening at Highgrove, Clarence House & Birkhall by her direct descendent, HRH The Prince of Wales (with Stephanie Donaldson). The Prince of Wales has had a deep and abiding concern for Creation for 30 years now, and it is very interesting to see how one can run three royal estates on organic lines.

I try not to factor in how much all this must cost HRH, a multimillionaire in his own right, and whether or not the gardens pay for themselves. I think he has some very good ideas. I would not go so far as to refer to Nature as "She" or "Her," however, as he does in this book. But I think he and Pope Francis could have some good conversations about the stewardship of the earth, if HRH's Spanish is up to the task.

Does Britain have a Christian Prince?

Whether HRH is himself a Christian prince in name only is beyond the purview of this blogpost. Certainly HM the Queen is a Christian queen albeit one who has sworn an oath to uphold the Protestant religion:

[Anglican] Archbishop of Canterbury [in 1953]: Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England? And will you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges as by law do or shall appertain to them or any of them?

Queen: All this I promise to do. 

Thus, HM the Queen is not the sort of Christian ruler envisioned by Fr. Crean and Dr. Fimister.

HM the Queen very properly visited Pontiffs until the Revolution of Tenderness wearing a black mantilla, for the privilege wearing of  white to visit the Pontiff belongs solely to Catholic queens. The hue and cry when former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's very unpopular wife Cherie wore white to visit Benedict XVI went up from the UK Catholics like a flock of startled birds. Cherie, to the disgust of the orthodox, wrote that her youngest child was conceived because she was too embarrassed to bring her birth control method on an overnight trip to Windsor Castle, lest the servants unpack it again.

Why bring up poor Cherie and her contraceptive device ? Well, I have read Chapter 6 of Integralism, which is entitled "Temporal Authority (II): Its Scope," and it occurs to me that in the Catholic realm the authors envision, Cherie's device would be illegal and her husband would have had to become a Catholic before becoming PM, not after he had safely retired.

Incidentally, the snarls over Cherie's regal white turned into groans when Tony converted to Catholicism. Both events happened before I got here, so I was startled by the deep antipathy of my new British Catholic chums for the former PM and his wife. Interestingly, the dislike pertains to their traditional spheres of influence. Cherie is disliked for her birth control advocacy, and Tony is disliked for getting 185 people killed in that dodgy campaign in Iraq.

But now I really must get down to Integralism's Chapter 6, which is surprisingly short, given the list of 20 theses at the end. And it is really a lovely chapter, for after it instructs godless authorities in their responsibility to direct their subjects to God, it describes the duties of the Catholic ruler or (as I prefer to think of him/her) the Christian Prince.

But first here is Integralism's warning about what is going to happen to us if we carry on in our Broken Britain way:

Comprehensively secular societies are ... inevitably of short duration, and prepare the way for their own replacement by new cultural and social forms imbued with a greater vigour and religiosity (whether of an authentic or a distorted character).

My own pet fear is that when self-worshipping China takes over, B.A. and I will be put on a Highland reservation to do  folk dances for tourists. Someone replied that this sounded fun, and I said it would not be fun, it would be against our human dignity. We will instead flee to the most Catholic state we can find. I am informed that the country most closely approaching this in its constitution is the Dominican Republic.

Temporal Rule Outside Christendom

Fimister and Crean state that the temporal ruler (however heretical) must "remind his people of their duty to worship the one God." As a matter of fact, George VI did do that 76 years ago this coming Saturday, for he requested that the following Sunday be observed as a Day of Prayer. That Sunday coincided with the rescue of the British Army from Dunkirk, a miracle comparable to that of the Vistula in 1920.

To quote Beowulf, þæt wæs gód cyning.

Interestingly, Fimister and Crean side with error having rights in the temporal realm, stating that "no monotheistic cult may be forbidden, unless it involves elements contrary to natural law." However, this has nothing to do with tolerance but entirely so that inherents of those religions can make a free choice of Christ, as F&C make clearer when they talk about the Catholic state.

Even outside Christendom, leaders are called to prevent errors contrary to truth about God, "human nature, virtue and the goal of human life, as far as these things are knowable by reason..." All "external actions contrary to natural law are of themselves apt to be prohibited." I wonder what F&C mean by "apt".

Meanwhile, temporal authority binds subjects "not only under pain of a penalty, but in conscience and under pain of sin."

I wonder what this means in relation to the lockdown. If the primary end of man on earth is to worship God, and if this is most properly done through personal presence at the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and if the personal presence at the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass has been declared an offence by temporal authority, is it a sin for me to present myself at the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass?

Complicating this intolerable paradox is that Catholic bishops have instructed priests not to permit the presence of the Faithful at the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass ...  Dear heaven, I will have to start reviewing the steps of the Highland Fling.

But "[t]emporal authority confers the right to oblige subjects...to act in view of the common good" say Fimister and Crean, which leads me to conclude that there is nothing to stop temporal authority from banning the manufacture of single-use plastic and other horrible things contrary to the good of nature and stewardship of the earth.

Meanwhile, temporal authority can take children from parents if the parents are abusive or neglectful. F&C recommend placing the removed children with families as "orphanages and similar artificial institutions"are in no way equivalent, let alone superior, to families.

Also the EU had no right telling British farmers how to farm or British fisherman how to fish or British craftsmen how to craft. It's all there on pages 112-113. The "principle of subsidiarity" got a heart symbol from me.

Temporal Rule Inside Christendom

Christendom is a great place to live if you're Catholic, I gleaned from this part of the chapter. You can live there if you belong to the Orthodox or Evangelical traditions, but you can't take public office or attempt to convert anyone to your sect. Jews can live there, too, under the same conditions, and the chapter is very clear that Jew-baiting is not allowed:

"Since the law of Christ forbids both hatred and suasion toward baptism by temporal threats, the unbaptised must be placed by law at no disadvantage save that which is necessary to preserve the Catholic harmony of the realm, and outrages against them must be severely punished."

Fimister and Crean approach St. Thomas Aquinas' attitude towards "other non-Christian cults" with some caution.  In short, they argue that monotheists who are neither Christians nor Jews may be admitted to live and worship in the Catholic realm unless their cult is "practised by bodies which have a history of violent opposition to Christianity or of aggressive proselytism."

Who could that be?

However, it looks like milder, more peaceable sects of Islam could live and worship in the Catholic realm, enjoying, like the Jews, freedom from abuse and coercive attempts to convert them.

"The reality or even the appearance of coercive proselytism must be assiduously avoided,  nor must a power to police the interior acts of its subjects be inadvertently attributed to the temporal power which impedes the right of all men to discover and embrace the true religion," the authors state.

The non-Catholics are, of course, allowed to educate their children and bring them up in their own faith, but they are not allowed to encourage them in such blasphemous outrageous as stealing consecrated hosts.

This post is almost longer than the chapter. I shall now take a cod liver oil capsule and plant out my princely courgette.

Update: One answer that I'm afraid of is the response to the question, "In the Integralist state, who holds the franchise?" I suspect the answer is "Heads of families" as the basic unit of the Integralist state is the family. This would mean that some women (e.g. widowed mothers of children) have the franchise whereas some men (e.g. unmarried men, or men without issue) might not. It's an interesting idea.

B.A. and I argued about Integralism for half an hour, and it seems to us that unless a large number of Integralists all astonish  a lukewarm Catholic populace by immigrating to their state and persuading them to vote in an Integralist leader, it seems very unlikely that there ever will be an Integralist state again.

A Splendid Saturday Walk

(Thoughts on Chapter 5 of Integralism are in the post below.)

Eventually it dawned on me that British temporal authority had given permission to its subjects to take automobiles to the countryside to take their exercise there. We don't own an automobile, so now we pay to get to the countryside by public automobiles trundling along for such essential services.  The Spectator's Melissa Kite, who objects to people taking automobiles to the countryside, would shake a fist at us. However, she doesn't live in our county, so we are spared the sight.

What we did yesterday was take the country bus to a small town well-known to us both and walked to the coronavirus outpost of another local farm shop. This farm shop is much superior to last week's in that it is devoted to organic vegetable, fruits and eggs, and the farm grows a wide variety of produce. It is not attached to aristocratic pleasure grounds, but we didn't care, as the area has its own charms, including a mill and a dovecot.

The mobile shop has also been placed quite near a rural outlet of our favourite North Berwick pastry shop, which was open. Thus, after I sat down at a garden table and filled in an order form for vegetables, and after the loud and friendly Englishwoman running the place went off to pick them for us, Benedict Ambrose and I went to the pastry shop down the road and addressed the be-masked young ladies behind the counter.

Outside the pastry shop little knots of households (mostly young couples or siblings in their 20s) were enjoying their treats while sitting on the long green grass under the bright sun. Inside the pastry shop, B.A. and I ordered our first takeaway cappuccinos since I don't know when. I also ordered a pastry stuffed with frangipani and B.A. asked for a piece of pecan tart. We paid for these delicacies (£11-something all together) by debit card and sat on a bench beside a stone wall, contemplating the fields on the horizon as we munched and slurped.

When we had paid (about £23) by debit card and packed our eggs and produce into our knapsack, we set off on our way home along a river. It is a route we know well. It goes through the small town where we first alighted, under a bridge with the most amazing acoustics, and past a ruined castle once owned by the family of the Historical House. The journey ends at a bus stop in the next town, one very important in Scotland of the Middle Ages and still splendid to look at. The views of the green and yellow fields and of the great chain of hills are stunning at this time of year, and our path was edged by wildflowers of a wide range of hues. When we were good and tired, we sat and ate our packed lunch, half-hidden from the nearest cows.

As I walked along contemplating the awesome beauty of our Scottish county, I experienced what my light reading calls "Maximal Happiness." It was enhanced, rather than diminished, by the thought of dying of the Vile Germ alone in a hospital, an object of fear to doctors and nurses, without the comfort of the Last Rites or the presence of a friend. If ever in danger of such a fate, I will draw upon the memories of recent and historic walks through the Scottish countryside with Benedict Ambrose and feel happier.

It seems to me that we are much more likely to get the nasty virus from Tesco, anyway. Usually we can walk that route without seeing another human soul, but this time there were a number of other people (and their dogs). However, we could all keep a "social distance" on the path (usually by moving towards the river bank or up the hill) in a way we simply can't in the aisles of a supermarket.

While I'm on that subject, there is nothing to stop a priest from saying Mass on the back of a flatbed truck in a large field while behind him Catholics stand in 2 metre square spaces. If we can queue for 40 minutes to get into a supermarket, we can certainly queue that long to wait to take our place in our assigned square for an outside Mass. This field does not have to be in the countryside. It could be the nearest football field, large park, or carpark. Free tickets could be obtained and checked. The Masses could all be said at the same hour to dissuade travel from one parish to the next. It can be done; why isn't it done?

But to return to our splendid Saturday walk, we got to our bus stop in the mediaeval town eight minutes before the bus arrived. We were then whisked at almost incredible speed back to our own high street. There we discovered that the neighbourhood's best chippie was shut, so B.A. went to an untested one even nearer home. He came back with a fish supper and a scampi supper, and we consumed them with white wine and the last two episodes of The Victorian Kitchen Garden.

It was a wonderful day despite the pandemic and my overset plans to be in Poland this weekend.

This morning went very well, too, as my gardens indoors and outdoors are thriving, and Fr. de Malleray had a splendid homily, as usual. I must ask him about the 10,000 people who watch the Warrington Mass on Sunday: does this mean those watching live or does it include people who watch the recording after the fact? How many viewers watch from Britain? How many from abroad? There are not a thousand Trads in Scotland, as far as I know; are there so many in England?

As usual Fr. de Malleray did not avoid controversy, seeming to acknowledge that there are a lot of bad bishops around but we have to defer to their authority anyway.

Apparently the way to increase our chances of having good bishops is to pray for them and to raise them up properly from infancy in the first place. I favour orchestrating fake kidnappings in which they think they are being offered the choice between infidelity and death. If they choose infidelity, they are sent to monasteries for a year to repent, and if they choose death, they are made bishops. I suppose, though, that such fake kidnappings would be wrong for many reasons, all of which are probably enumerated in a chapter of Integralism.

By the way, I would never have spoken so freely about bishops in my twenties, let alone in my childhood. I strongly remember refusing to write a column for a Canadian Catholic newspaper about reasons the Canadian bishops had to apologise. I was in my thirties then and said something pious and noble about never wanting to attack the bishops. Now that I am in my forties, I am simply bewildered about how and what to write. Embarrassingly, I once wrote about how Cardinal Keith O'Brien, Archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, surely wasn't guilty of homosexual misconduct. He publicly confessed shortly afterwards.

After watching Mass from 200+ miles away, I made brunch. We had delicious streaky bacon from the local butcher and omelettes fines herbes made from Scottish free range eggs and herbs grown by the farm shop. One thing that has actually improved during the lockdown is the quality of our food.

Gardening Update: The first flower has appeared on a broad bean: white and black. Six sweet peas have sprouted so far. The second courgette has grown since this morning. I am amazed. Tomorrow I will repot the first courgette, which is really quite tall now, outside. Tomorrow is Victoria Day in both Canada and Edinburgh, and the traditional Toronto day for planting out. That, of course, is irrelevant to Scottish gardens, except that if the danger of frost has passed in Toronto, it assuredly has passed in Edinburgh, too.

May We Shout at Boris?

Screenshot of Daily Mail May 11/12 article

Good morning and happy Sunday! I apologise to anyone eagerly awaiting my thoughts on Fr. Crean's and Dr. Fimister's chapter on the origins of temporal authority in Integralism. It is thirty pages long, and I finished it just now.

I am glad the authors provided an overview of each chapter in a list of "Theses" because readers like me who have not read the political philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas profit from a repetition of the key concepts.

Chapter 5 is thirty pages long and, as I said, while elegant and clear, it demands an attention span and depth of thought not encouraged by two decades of online reading.

The principal argument of this chapter (for anarchy-leaning me) is that temporal authority is willed by God and that it would be necessary even if there had been no Fall. The chapter usefully begins, however, with a distinction between Aristotle's concept of man's earthly goal and liberalism.

According to Aristotle, man's greatest good is carrying out the virtues of, firstly, "speculative wisdom"  and, secondly, "practical wisdom  and character". The highest action of the first is the contemplation of God. The second are ideally "practised in the company of friends, supported by a healthy body and by the minimum sufficiency of material goods, as a free citizen of a free and self-sufficient city where all the citizens know one another, a city possessing peace within and security without." So far, so Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

I am trying to imagine an Edinburgh in which everyone knows everybody, including the shifting sands of foreign students, and failing. In fact, it is hard to imagine everyone in my eight-flat building, let alone everyone in this street, knowing everybody in it. "We keep ourselves to ourselves" is an expression used in the area, which sounds very selfish, when you think of it. I suppose we are now keeping ourselves to ourselves with a vengeance, aren't we? A Royal Wedding or Royal Birth or even  a commemoration of World War II may be an excuse for street party in London or even Glasgow, but not here. Alas.

Liberalism, on the other hand, claims that "political authority exists principally to secure for each person the greatest possible exercise of liberty compatible with the freedom of others." Despite its defence by such great names as John Stuart Mill and John Rawls (whom I seem to remember from an MA thesis I once proofread), our Catholic authors pronounce the idea that free will, or free action, "is itself the highest human good" is "absurd."

"...[A] creature's free action as such cannot be its highest good, since this action can be evil. It is quite conceivable, and indeed often the case, that human beings freely render themselves miserable," state Fimister and Crean.

"Alas!" I replied with my pencil.

My next scribbles are a ? followed by another ? because I don't understand why adult human beings would have needed ruling if we lived in an unfallen world and were unfallen ourselves. Aquinas says that any social life needs someone to oversee the common good.

But when I think about it, Our Lady, who was sinless, was ruled by St Joseph, and moreover, Our Blessed Lord, who was God, permitted Himself to be subject to both His mother and His foster father. Goodness gracious, no wonder St. Joseph has nothing to say in the Gospel.

Thus, from the example of both Our Lord and Our Lady, it is quite clear that there is such a thing as the authority of a husband and a father even in the perfect society of the Holy Family. Dr. Fimister and Fr. Crean may use this argument for free. I am still not sure why Our Lord and Our Lady needed ruling, but apparently they did. Yes, it's all very well to say Herod, but a single angel would have been more than a match for him. In related news, Herod had a particularly horrible death.

The authors' write of the separation of temporal and spiritual power, including the thought that "it is very desirable and the pope not be subject, even de facto, to any temporal sovereign." However, he is a temporal sovereign, I point out. He used to be the temporal sovereign of the Papal States, and he continues to be the head of state for Vatican City.

Our current pontiff is not popular among some of my friends in Rome, and the first time B.A. and I were in Rome following his election, we were rather stunned by how freely our pals criticised him over a restaurant lunch a stone's throw from the Colosseum. I kept thinking some Scarpia-like figure was going to arrest us all and throw us in a dungeon.

My next thought was to wonder to what extent the pope should interest himself in temporal affairs, especially given the as yet unproven rumour that Pope Francis made a donation to Hilary Clinton's campaign and the regular appearance of such non-Catholic personalities as Jeffrey Sachs in the Vatican. Sometimes Catholics worry that the spiritual power of our bishops is subjecting itself to temporal power, instead of the other way around, as Fimister, Crean and Aquinas would prefer. But in Malaysia, I noted in the margins, the temporal authority supports rather vigorously the celebration of the Islamic Ramadan.

(Question: Is it better to live in Malaysia than in the United Kingdom?)

"Since Pentecost ... all temporal rulers must be subject to the authority of the Catholic Church," write Fimister and Crean, paraphrasing Aquinas, who said "To [the Roman Pontiff] all the kings of the Christian people are to be subject as to our Lord Jesus Christ Himself."

"But what if he's a bad pope?" I scribbled.

When I was at university, the answer to this was that however wicked in his personal life a given pope, he at least never messed around with the doctrines of the faith. We assured each other that messing with the doctrine of the faith was a step too far even for popes like Alexander VI.

(Amusingly, having just asked B.A. which is the pontiff  most notorious for his vices, he replied "Alexander VI,  but he never touched doctrine.")

I don't think I can do this chapter justice with a blogpost. There are too many concepts. Perhaps the best thing I can do now is write the questions that I wrote in the margins as I read.

Is temporal authority as we currently experience it in Britain, almost completely indifferent to spiritual authority,  like the licitness of a pagan marriage?

Could English Catholics have legitimately overthrown Elizabeth I?

Is not advising Catholics to put up with a tyrant analogous to telling a beaten wife in the confessional that she should put up with her husband's bad behaviour?

Did Henry IX ever actually renounce his claim to the thrones of England and Scotland and acknowledge the rule of the House of Hanover?

And now I must prepare to watch Mass online. Interestingly, in the situation of closing churches to private prayer, it would seem that the officially Protestant state took advice from Cardinal Vince Nichols in this matter, reversing a previous decision to allow Christians to pray privately in our churches. Given the idea that the primary temporal end of man is to contemplate God, and given that it is unproven that private prayer in a church opens citizens to infection, one really needs to scribble several question marks around all that.

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Update: After reading this chapter, I am still uncertain as to whether or not we may shout at the Prime Minister (or even at the "wee Jimmy Krankie woman") although I suspect not. I am absolutely sure that we must never shout at the Queen.

Update 2: Marking up a book with your thoughts can be dangerous if your husband is also reading the book.

"The husband's authority over his wife does not depend on his wife's continued consent to it," read B.A. aloud. "Sad face."