You may have noticed that I harp somewhat on the absence of Greek. This is not simply a historian's hobby-horse, though it started out somewhat that way — the lack of koine as belying their claims of "linguistic authenticity" and a supreme hubris, along with the ignorance of most Christians about the world of the Gospels it revealed, was a troubling thing from the beginning, because I couldn't understand WHY they would leave out something so (comparatively) well-known, in religious ed circles, and so easily provable.

It would be like doing a documentary on the Amish and leaving out the fact that they spoke German. It just made no sense.

Then it was explained, by a comment on the part of Rabbi Ira Youdovin, who pointed out what I already recognized but had not articulated explicitly — that this was a polemic primarily between modern Catholics who accept Vatican II and its reforms, and Neo-Traditionalist Catholics who want to roll them back. All the sudden it clicked — yes, and that's why they're ignoring the fact that the NT is in Greek. Because their flagship issue is, of course, the Tridentine Mass.

As I mentioned offhand earlier, my own experience with the Old Rite was signally disappointing. I could not have been more primed for it to be wonderful — after all, I'd heard only that for all the conscious years of my life, how sublime, how beautiful, how much more spiritual and ennobling and superior in every way it was to the wretched Novus Ordo. As I was going through an increasingly dry period in my spiritual life at the time, which as it after turned out was due to a long-standing untreated clinical depression with religious elements but also many other factors, it seemed to me quite hopeful that I would find what was lacking for me at my regular weekly liturgies in English. After all, this was "the language of the True Church" —! I knew all the rationale for praising the use of Latin over the local vernacular, from accuracy to metaphysics to the argument that since it was "dead" and unchanging and universal, anyone anywhere could understand the Mass no matter what their native language. The fact that I had always enjoyed Latin versions of the Novus Ordo, reading along and recognizing some of the words and phrases, made it all the more likely.

But — the bizarre thing was, that I couldn't hear any Latin. The oft-glorified "priest faces God, not the people," meant that all I could hear was a sort of buzzing mumble. For all I knew, the celebrant might have been reciting the Red Sox scores (this was Boston after all) or speaking pig-Latin. In fact, it was a disturbing revelation to realize that I heard more Latin regularly at my local Novus Ordo masses. Why, we even sang Gregorian chant not infrequently, and later medieval/renaissance works of hymnody and liturgical song. This had to be rethought. Even the excuse made by my escort, that well, it wasn't a High Mass, those were better, didn't help: after all, how many High Masses — that is, special ceremonial ones — would Joe Massgoer have had? Wouldn't the average '50's Catholic have had the same bleak, bland experience that I had had with the Tridentine Rite, on a daily basis? I walked out that Sunday disillusioned, in the literal sense, and struggling with the recognition that spiritually, I had always received more instruction, nourishment, and aid to meditation from the maligned Novus Ordo.

Sure, not all of the aesthetic experiences were good, or even sublime, and some were downright wretched — but then, who really thinks that every Tridentine mass was sublimely beautiful? No more than all medieval music, or all chant, or all medieval art, is sublimely beautiful — or helpful to devotion. Some of it, as Bishop Anselm of Canterbury complained almost a thousand years ago is really wretched, and the question of whether or not sensory beauty was even appropriate in church was hotly argued by saints and clerics back in the Middle Ages, some of whom were Low Church enough to make a Methodist happy, like Bernard of Clairvaux. This is the kind of stuff you find out if you read real history, raw, unpolished by ideologues — and experience first hand the stuff they were talking about back then. Pop-music masses based on hit tunes with irreligious lyrics were not unknown in the Age of Faith — ever heard of Missa L'Homme Arme? The original song's not about a Warrior Jesus.

But rereading the ideological defenses of the Tridentine mass, post attending, revealed something even stranger. It wasn't about participation at all. It wasn't even really about the beauty of the words. Read this defense of the beauty of silence. (!) It's all about divorcing the congregation from their faith, about disengaging them, and a magical link that bypasses the mind, the praise of silence — silence! — in which even the "dead language" issue becomes a non-issue, because ideally you can't even hear the words of the mass! (Did you know that the ringing of bells at the Consecration was not instituted for beauty's sake or nobility but to let the congregation know when it was time to stop talking and start paying attention, because there's no way to tell what's going on in the mumbled old rite, and that some clergy objected to the introduction of the bells even, back when, as an aide to devotion?) It's all about reinforcing the subject nature of the laity, and the god-king aspects of the priests, and a religion that really does depend on shutting off the reason, wallowing in pious emotions, and not daring to challenge one's betters, since submission and hierarchy are from God via Rome. Rome has spoken, the case is closed.

That's how it's being represented, by those who love it and want to make it the norm again! This is not a slander on my part, or anyone else's, this is their own defense of it! And this is what Gibson wants to restore! (Yes, I'm upset about this. I was raised to believe that reason and an engaged laity were crucial to the faith. I am an angry, betrayed Ex-Neo-Traditionalist.)

No wonder nobody really cared, by the 1960s! Of course, there were other things involved, but to blame it all on the contraception issue is wishthink and denial of the worst kind. And simply unhistorical, even by the lights of the documents and authors the Neo-Trad movement praises. If Belloc et al were complaining about how secular and slack things were almost a hundred years ago, that puts the kibosh to claims that those were the days, doesn't it? But they subscribe to an uninformed false historicism that claims things are simply on a continual downward spiral straight to hell — that things are "worse today in America than they were in the days of the Roman Empire" etc etc etc.

The fact that people have been saying this sort of thing at least since the days of the Pharaohs and the Sumerians, combined with the objective facts of things like unrestrained syphilis in the 16, 17, 1800s, the massive warfare brutalizing civilian populations throughout Europe during said Age of Faith and after, all this and more (fill in the blank with your favorite atrocity here) should wake them up to the realization that it's always been like this and to stop being "the idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone/every century but this and every nation but his own"— yes, this is a theme I harp on. It is very important, because bad history is used to justify action/inaction/persuasion to either, today. It's bad enough when the history is simply wrong through error, worse when the error is due to slovenly pride, and unforgivable when intellectual dishonesty is involved.

So why no Greek? Well, if it were in historically-accurate koine, then viewers might have the same experience I had, when I learned in college that Greek was the original language of the Christian community, even in Rome itself. Disbelief, because it was so counter-intuitive to what I as a good Neo-Traditionalist Catholic kid had always been taught, followed by research, followed by conviction that this was indeed true, as independent investigation made clear…followed by a questioning of the entire premise of the Latin Mass movement. Because if it was dulce et decorum to update the liturgy so ordinary Christians could follow it back when, then why not now? And why wasn't it done earlier? If the English mass was necessarily bad because it was a change, then the Old Latin Rite itself was jeopardized by that very premise.

It gets even worse, too, when you read the earliest Christian documents, like the Didache⁵⁰ and find out that originally, celebrants were allowed to improvize their own prayers of thanksgiving at the eucharist, and communion under both species (i.e., wine as well as bread, another hated thing among the Neo-Trad movement) was standard, as described in such guidelines as found in that little book of ethics and devotions written by 100 AD/CE per the annotation on an early ms. copy. The railing against things like the exact wording of the Consecration started seeming …disproportionate, and historically unwarranted. (But what did I know? I was just a laywoman, a young one, and not a university-educated priest.)

Both of these facts were things which I had sort of shut off, as irrelevant, to the spiritual realities of my daily life: I wasn't involved in the struggle, I went to mainstream liturgies, I was fighting much worse battles of faith personally anyway, with much more dreadful ramifications than arguments over whether or not the minister should face the altar or face the congregation, and it was nothing more than a niggling little doubt that occasioned scathing internal commentary when I would read issues of Latin Mass Magazine or The Wanderer and see them talking about the eternal celebration that was the Tridentine Rite, and it kicked in harder after attending one, but it never moved me to go out and argue about it, since the whole thing seemed both irrelevant and a done deal.

And now I find out that this knowledge, this random bit of trivial fact, concerning the ancient fluidity of liturgy among the first Christians in Rome, is a weapon against the promulgation of false doctrine, false doctrine which is being actively pushed for the first time by those with serious worldly clout, and I feel like I've been carrying around that flaming sword packed away in a box of odds and ends — and with it comes responsibility. So here goes.

The inarticulate Gospel of Gibson is designed to alienate — literally, to make foreign and unintelligible — the world of Jesus. Not to make it more real and vivid, despite the propaganda. Not to make it more accessible. The reduction of it to a mimed, minimalist spectacle, using the mantle of a feigned "authenticity" is designed to do one thing — reach the hindbrain and shut off the thinking aspect. Stupid, irrational people are closer to God, this is "holy simplicity" and the "spiritual childhood" that is praised by so many clerics, stripped of its fancy prettifying sentiments. And they don't challenge the hierarchy, don't ask awkward questions, don't wrestle with the cognitive dissonance of contradictory evidence, don't do anything but kneel down and put money in the collection basket.

And a passive, unquestioning laity is the ideal which the Neo-Traditionalist core wants, that which never existed in the past, really, but was always struggling against the authority of Church, State, and the unholy synthesis of the two. Why, pray tell, were all those Edicts and anathemas and bannings necessary, if the congregation were truly docile in those Good Old Days?

The logic of those who think they will be in power when they restore their Triumphalist Church to power is clear. But why those who want to be that sheeplike laity? Well, most people don't want to think, I've realized, after a life involved in education on one or another levels — they just want to be able to feel that they're doing the right thing, and better than their neighbors. This Neo-Traditionalist reduction of Catholicism to rigorism and outward forms of behaviour satisfies both, by laying down the rules, claiming that there are no nuances and gray areas, and giving permission to sneer at those who do not conform to this pattern as damned outcasts.

And then they are shocked, shocked! to find abuse going on amongst themselves. It isn't all outside, it isn't all bottled up in the dragons, it isn't only to be found in modernism liberalism loss of Latin women in pants — would you believe it, we few True Believers can be corrupted by worldly possessions and earthly power and sexual lusts! Gasp! Who'd have thought it?

Chaucer wouldn't have been surprised. Nor Dante. Nor Moliere. For all their talk about Western Civilization and the Glories of Literature Written By Dead White Males, they don't seem do be very familiar with that canon, do they?

The instances of abuse are not at all funny. But the intellectual arrogance and satanic spiritual pride that led those involved in this (and other situations) is very ironic. Bizarrely, however, none of those who are lamenting having been gulled, see that there is any connection between a) their elitism, b) their belief in the necessity of total submission to authority, c) being taken advantage of by unscrupulous Pardoners and Tartuffes. No, no, the evil is still out there, we have to find ways to explain it as Modernism creeping in and infecting even God's Elect. (I know way too many people from TAC to be surprised that the vain, arrogant graduates of Ojai Road are also incredibly gullible and vulnerable to modern-day equivalents of Twain's Duke and King.)

This inarticulate, masochistic spirituality of utter submission of self-will to superiors — this is why I call it Christian BDSM, this is the Counter-reformation "piety" of those Spanish statues, the swooning ravished handmaid language, the shut-up-and-pray ethos that brought on the climate of abusive power against which people have always protested, in every religion, the "dark side of feudalism" that is what the Neo-Traditionalists romanticize. Why are they surprised that those to whom they have awarded unlimited moral authority and earthly submission, should then indulge their appetites and apply that power to those given to their control? Or mangle doctrine to "prove" why these things are morally right to their victims? Have they never heard of the Borgias?

And the expression of all this, the artistic representation of it all, is the same as the tools of propaganda used to enforce it in the minds of those they would have convert to their way of thinking — this bloody fanart, this sacred abusefic that dwells on eroticized violence, subjectivity and suffering in isolation from any wider context, and deliberately eschews any rational interjection with indifference or even hostility. (And persecutes and mocks those who dare to challenge the aura of noble sanctity which they draw about themselves.)

***

Supposedly it's going to restore Christianity as well as convert the unbeliever. Yet, imo, Kierkegaard's questions of son-sacrifice and divine justice should, if anything, be more insistent after watching this film — taken so completely out of any Old Testament and Ancient World Context, the presentation ought to leave every viewer wondering why the Hell a loving God would demand this of a child — and why the Hell we ought to worship such a Deity: if this is Love, He can keep it, this is far worse than the most capricious and cruel gods of the heathens, who are at least honest in their cruelty!

Now, as I've tried to show, the Christological questions of atonement and sacrifice and all the rest are hideously complex and nuanced and great theologians throughout the ages have wrestled with them coming to various conclusions. Myself, I think that most devout Christians simply don't think about it, no matter how much they weep and shed tears over the fantasized number of drops of blood stated by some purported visionary; emotional excess is not thought. But Kierkegaard's disturbing questions — and I have read devout ministers supposed to be educators simply warning their students to stay away from Fear and Trembling lest their faith be troubled, in a Protestant version of the Index of Forbidden Books — are real and important, and I don't pretend to have an easy answer to them. What is faith? is a corollary to What is truth? and no easier to answer.

But there are two ways of respecting tradition. One is to regard it as a strong foundation, a way of making use of past discoveries, "standing on the shoulders of giants," honouring one's ancestors spiritual as much as or more than biological for what they began — and bequeathed to us to carry on — to regard life as a long-running play of incredible scope and ambition, never carried out to its ideal perfection, oftentimes signally lacking, in which the sets and costumes change, and even the lines are updated, so that as with a living organism whose cells are changed throughout its lifetime no less than its outward appearance, it grows and adapts — and yet remains substantially, recognizably the same thing.

The other way is to mummify the past — to strip out its guts, as it were, slather it in preserving chemicals and then paint its desiccated corpse to give it the appearance of life, adorn it with gold and precious gems and then lock it away safely so that no one may "desecrate" this thing which has all the outward seeming of the original (if one doesn't look closely, that is) and yet is nothing like it, being dead. This is, alas, the traditionalism of the Latin Mass movement and all its predecessors and offshoots, not just SSPX, but also the earlier Old Catholic groups who broke away from Rome over such controversial modern doctrines as the Immaculate Conception back in the 1850's, those for whom Rome was always too liberal and accommodating of everyday life—

I have been "in the world" long enough to realize that Joe Massgoer, let alone anyone not Roman Catholic, is largely unaware of this division (and this is they way it always was, that Joe Massgoer and Mrs. Joe and the kids just want to be able to do what they're supposed to and not worry about it and have the People In Charge take care of the heavy lifting, metaphysically speaking, which is part of the Problem of Vatican II™ in the first place)— the Mass is in the vernacular, and for most people alive now that's the way it always has been; Vatican II is a done deal, and something no more in the forefront of most people's minds than the Councils of Constance or Chalcedon — but it is very real and very passionately argued, among its small groups of infighting zealots (insert "Jewish People's Liberation Front" jokes here.)

It is very sad, yes — but at the same time there's something morbidly hilarious to me in discovering that there are groups of Sedevacantists — those who are so much more catholic than the pope that they don't even admit that there is a pope these days, and consider themselves free to go their own way with justification — and Feeneyites (followers of the excommunicated Rev. Feeney, who even back in the '40's was considered to be too rigorous and ungenerous in his definition of extra ecclesiam nulla salus by regarding all those not Roman Catholics as dammed) busy anathematizing each other for being too liberal! Watching these groups shrivel and contract the Gospels to a matter of worshipping a dead language with bells on, and like stereotypical old crones about the village well, shake their heads at the sins of others and lament how much more perfect everything was in the "good old days" — it's rather like watching people fighting over who is in charge on a ship fast sinking out from under their feet!

It's a good thing the Apostles were nothing like them — or there wouldn't ever have been any Church at all, since it would have foundered before leaving the Province of Syria in arguments over mandatory circumcision and the admission of Gentiles…

There were, and still are, those like the Gibsons who say that Vatican II "ruined the Church." I personally would be more inclined to say that Trent ruined the Church, by responding to dissent and dissatisfaction with a shoot-the-messenger policy of anathemetization, the Counter-Reformation's attitude of encouraging faith with wretched pop-art and mandatory ignorance, by initializing the Index of Forbidden Books, which was only stopped in 1958. 1958! Discovering that non-Catholic assertions of Catholic censorship and ignorance were not slander nor libel but all too true was a very disillusioning shock for me. This was not a medieval development, either, but a purely modern one (though efforts to censor, suppress, and ban dissent have always been around, and not only in religion, nor only in the West, as ancient Confucians could sadly aver.) But a Church that would forbid study of the Talmud and Kant and the reading of Les Miserables (without special permission) and condemned the author of The Power and the Glory for his negativity, all in the name of protecting the faith of "the little ones" is no Church that I can respect, nor have any desire to return to.

Nor have I much sympathy left for those who romanticize the Middle Ages as an "Age of Faith" — as an amateur historian, I have come to know too much about them! Yes, there were the Cathedrals — but the cathedrals were as much a sign of civic pride and social hubris as of devotion, like the building of huge sports complexes today. They were also (again like modern stadiums) built as sources of tourist revenue. And the same "Age of Faith" was also the age of the Goliards, the age of constant warfare and atrocity, the age from which we have the story of the hypocritical bishop, pressured to crack down on concubinage in his diocese, who decides to Make A Stand — until the clever mistress of one priest arranges to innocently meet him on the road, pretending not to recognize him, and chatting at the crossroads explains that she's on her way to bring a goody basket to the bishop's mistress, since they've just had a baby! —the Age in which it was not unheard of for priests to be so ignorant that they did not know the difference between St. Jude and Judas, and in which absentee bishops, given dioceses as cash cows by friends in high places, spent their days hunting and their nights partying — there is always a reason for revolution; reformers do not spring up from the ground without a prior sowing of dragons' teeth.

Things weren't that good — in any regard, btw, secular or religious — anytime since, either. (And not before, either, if you read the lives of the Early Church Fathers and Byzantine era saints.) Reading the laments of religious writers in the 17 and 1800s (like, say, in the Dolorous Passion) one finds ever the lament that this is an age of sin and disrespect, in tones identical to laments of corruption and worldliness from the 600s and 1100s, do not fail to note — and inevitably blaming the problems on sources outside, "modernism", "liberalism" and the Devil. ISTR a saying in the Gospels about beams and splinters and eyes, but perhaps I'm misremembering, being a modern Post-Vatican II Catholic and all.

Now, there were significant problems associated with Vatican II and its implementation — I know from personal history that better than many — but again, those were problems stemming from the cultures within and without Rome, and not unrelated to the lack of transparency and communication that had been a problem for a long time (I always am amused when I see bureaucratic inertia in the Curia praised as being a sign of the Church's wisdom, majesty, and her divine inspiration not to rush in. No, it's the same in Rome as it is in Whitehall or Washington or Beijing — the malaise of large organizations is not somehow sanctified by taking place in the Holy City.) There was also an awful lot of wishthink, combined with lack of communication, leading religious leaders around the world to a) not know what was going to happen or change, and b) assume that whatever changes they hoped for were certainly going to come about.

Personally, I would have not suppressed the old Tridentine Liturgy, however stultifying and soul-killing I myself have found it when at last experiencing the much-praised, much-sighed for Mystery (legally, licitly, in an approved indult, btw) — because I think this was a stupid tactical move on the part of the Vatican and created a polarization and a banner to rally around that would not otherwise have been there. Instead it should have been permitted all along, to those who wished it, and allowed to thrive or fade naturally as Joe and Jane Massgoer gravitated towards whatever fed their souls most. It should, in short, have been given the same extenuation as has been granted to the Byzantine Liturgies, to be held in their original languages and forms, the right to exist that was not granted to the old European rites, the Celtic and Gallican, which were suppressed in favour of a unified Roman format back in the early Middle Ages. Then the casus belli would have been eliminated, and there would have been no way to romantically lump it in with other and completely different issues with less sentimental appeal, or claim that all reforms were invalid because the Mass mandated by an earlier Pope had been superseded (as if it was not a development itself.). But all that is blood under the bridge.

At any rate, reading raw, uncensored first-hand history and commentary from The Good Old Days When America/Canada/Ireland Was Catholic and women wore veils and nobody talked in church and everyone did just what they were told, and pigs ran around roasted with forks in them, — it's clear that problems were brewing for centuries beforehand, and trying to solve them by forbidding people to read dissenting works instead of addressing the underlying problems had the results that Princess Leia predicts to the officers of the Empire in Star Wars: "The more you tighten your grasp, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." Ignoring problems doesn't make them go away: they come back larger and meaner with tusks and companions to trample you, is all.

It's also clear to me that neo-Traditionalists like Gibson will never accept this, because there is no easy breaking down into Villains on that side, Us on the other. The "ethnically Catholic" will keep going to church and not questioning and not obeying just as they went to church and didn't question and didn't obey what they didn't feel like, back in the 1940s and the 1920s and the 1890s and the 1790s — and yes, religious toleration and plurality did, I think have a detrimental effect on fervency — but not for the reason that "Traditionalists" usually give. In countries where (for example) Buddhism either legally or de facto the national religion, people are very blasé about it, to the dismay of foreign neophytes who have only just discovered and converted and are enthralled with the chanting and the habits and the incense and the colour and the theology and legends of saints and so forth. To Li Templegoer, it's what you do because your family brought you up to do, that's all. But in Thibet, where that faith is persecuted, parents walk miles through hostile territory to get their children a religious upbringing.

Persecution creates both a fervent affection and a defensive unity towards what was once humdrum, and all the more so when religion and ethnic identity are combined. Take that away, and let it become mainstream, and the pressure to defend at all costs against hostile outsiders is replaced by less stridency. I don't say that it's necessarily consciously so, in the sense of being cynical propaganda ventures, but I do think that there is an instinctive sense of necessity in the "Traditionalist" movement's constant search for The Enemy and definition of that as widely as possible, extending it from those who are actually hostile, to those who have no idea that Tridentistes exist and would be surprised to know that they are Evil Minions of Satan, or Misguided Fools, at best. To have an Us you need a Them, or better yet, lots of Thems, so that you can see yourself as ringed by hostile armies, cast yourself as the hero of your epic drama, waiting for In Hoc Signo Vinces…
 

The thing that is really driving me up the wall throughout, to doubtless the bemusement of many, is the unquestioning acceptance that the film is as it is because it is historically accurate. How do we know that it is historically accurate? Because the Bible tells us so, silly! —No, actually, it doesn't. And this is where it gets very funny, to me. The story from Aesop about the pig-imitator comes to mind.

Why is this important?

Because it goes to show how ignorant even of the very Gospels they profess to slavishly and uncritically embrace most Christians actually are. There are so many violations of canon, and replacements of canon with fanon, and specifically with Emmerich's fanon, that it boggles the mind that only a few cranks on the Protestant fringes are complaining about its "Romish" character. I can see it from the Catholic perspective — after all, the old canard that "Catholics don't read the Bible" is no canard at all, in my experience. They also don't listen very well in church, since we hear a lot of it there, and that's where most of my bone-deep (i.e., original, not acquired by deliberate study) knowledge of Scripture comes from, having heard it read in three excerpts every week for over three decades, along with a sense (not much, but a sense) of how much Christianity depends on the Old Testament, despite the dismissive efforts of Christian teachers to minimize the TANAKH as superseded that I have largely encountered, and the assumptions of so many regular churchgoers that there is little in common between Judaism and Christianity. (The biggest argument against the vernacular Mass might be that there's no point, it might as well be in Latin for all that Joe Churchgoer cares. Or Ugaritic.)

But for the evangelical⁵¹ establishment to embrace the film, with all their brags of being sola scriptura, and knowing the Bible inside and out — that's just mindblowing. I guess they don't read it all that much either, except maybe while hunting for proof-texts and that's no way to internalize a story. I'm less surprised about the ignorance of even basic archeology, but even that is somewhat shocking in that most Near Eastern archeology has its roots in believers looking for "proof rocks" so to speak, even to this day. In other words, people who appeal to Strong's and know about Robinson's Arch in Jerusalem have no excuse for themselves.

This brings me back to the question of how much is lies, and how much stupidity, and how it really doesn't matter all that much in the end. The operative question is why — why are they all jumping on the Gibson bandwagon? The Catholic League, which makes such stupid assertions that no Muslim or Jew has ever protested a Disney/Miramax film (hullo? Short term memory loss? A flick called Aladdin?) and is composed of people who think that any movie which has any slight against Christianity⁵² as a whole is made by people with an anti-Catholic agenda, let alone those which are overtly critical of Rome (they attack Sedevacantists as anti-Catholic frex), is contradicting the Vatican's declaration that no, the Pope didn't endorse it. to defend a schismatic/heretic who rates private revelation over scripture, which is and always has been a big no-no to the Catholic Church. So much for those "defenders of the Faith" — but then ideologues in my painful experience always believe that Truth trumps facts, and anyone not for us is against us, except for those people who are bedfellows of convenience and let's not talk about that.

The sorts of people who want to excommunicate Messrs. Lahaye and Jenkins for saying that some Catholics, if sufficiently Protestant in their beliefs, might be Raptured too and that Narnia is evil — you wouldn't think that there would be much admiration for so explicitly and narrowly Catholic a piece of fanart from this crowd. Yet as observed, only a very few have complained about this problem, and most Protestant commentators — ministers no less than laity — that I have read praising the film are oblivious to the unscriptural quality of it in their gushing praises. —Praises which often consist of claiming that its accuracy, its truth claims, are "proven" by the sheer number of dollars it has made!

There is a pathetic cast to all this — the corollary of the false scholarship that is Faith Seeking Validation, but this is a case of Faith Seeking Validation through Popularity Contest, while at the same time wanting to be the martyred elite. Folks, you can't have it both ways. You can't claim that Christianity (of whatever blend) is obviously true because it's persecuted and you're so few — and then turn around and say that obviously it is true because so many people are supporting it and just look, LOOK at how much money Passion is making and now they'll HAVE to pay attention to us. It's like the phony triumph that is supposed to be so heart-warming in the song Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer — the desperate need to be affirmed by the "real" world, the secular world — the insecure geeks (unlike us happy slans⁵³ who are mildly annoyed at being hassled by coworkers for not knowing who was booted off the last episode of American Idiots, but in no wise motivated by this to go out and watch TV instead of writing and reading and making things) not simply resentful of, but longing to be accepted by, the popular crowd. Those "sour" H'wood grapes turned sweet awful fast, didn't they?⁵⁴

But there is a darker aspect, beyond the pathetically silly neediness of such Christians to be the Head Boy, the Homecoming Queen, admired and wonderfully-run-after by those who used to scorn them or worse yet, ignore them. These people want to run the world. In an earthly sense, that is, as well as a spiritual one. They think they ought to, some of them think they (or their spiritual ancestors) actually once did, and they think they deserve it and are going to. And this is true of all the Christian Zealots (and I use Zealot here metaphorically, but with a deliberate reference to its historical meaning) regardless of whether they are RC or not.

Left Behind is the most well-known of the Apocalyptic Wish-Fulfillment Fantasy — but there are plenty of Catholic versions. The one I managed to read all the way through, Pierced By A Sword, is not atypical — not least in that the author, Bud MacFarlane, uses deception to claim a greater success for the book than ever it enjoyed, due to the fact that it was vanity published, and given away by the boxload for free. So his bragging claims of how many copies are out there are not indications of its true popularity, but more pathetic wannabe-worldly-success. In it, the End Times come starting with an earthquake that destroys Manhattan for the sins of the world, much preachage goes on, particularly about the need to control both sexual activity and unwomanly women, noble saintly survivalists (all ex-Marines) and reformed sinners band together to save their friends and families from the mayhem which ensues as the tribulations fall, by praying the Rosary and passing the ammunition, and among the signs and wonders is a plague which devastates the pagan godless lands of China and the rest of east Asia in hideous ways, described with smarmy laments covering the gloating imagining of its consequences; and a sequence in which the Vatican is destroyed during the subsequent nuclear war — but the Pieta is miraculously untouched in the crater that was Rome, thereby proving yet again God's love for Mary.

I wish I was making this up. But I'm not. Go check amazon if you don't believe me.

Now, this is going to sound alarmist. And it is. I have become alarmed, by people I used to dismiss as harmless (at least in the sense of harm to the fabric of society) cranks and loonies. But when you read the stuff they've written, and put it all together with the access to the inner discussions of their groups which I, erm, enjoyed for the first two decades of my life, and with the access to history — both the external versions, and the self-censored wishthink versions — as well as current events regarding Christian churches and secular society throughout the ages — the overarching picture looks pretty scary. And I have a fair track record at beating the official pundits to the analysis of a situation, when I have access to any amount of information. I can tell a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is easterly.

The American Neo-Traditionalists (again, I don't know about European ones) want to take over the world. Remember I mentioned RC Inquisition Denial earlier? It takes two forms: the more usual one, which is shameful enough, is to make the (true) point that anti-Catholic propagandists have and continue to exaggerate the extent and scope and fail to make historical distinctions about real legal differences — as if this mattered a whit. "It wasn't that bad, and besides, the Church didn't execute anyone, that was the European secular governments so the Church is blameless!" they argue, in a neat bit of handwashing, considering the hand-in-glove relationship between the religious and secular authorities for most of the past 1700 years. As if it mattered that "only" several thousands of people, not several ten-thousands, were executed for not believing in, and preaching against, Transubstantiation frex.

But at least it's a disavowal, even if it attempts to minimize as well as distance from.

The second version, which is much scarier, and which does tinge, I have come to realize, even the first sort, is to say "It was a Good Thing, and necessary, and surely any reasonable and devout Catholic will realize that" —!

It's really hard to accuse anti-Catholics of paranoia, when those who claim to be the only true Catholics are endorsing a Reconquista as preparation for an Inquisition. I know that if challenged the authors and publishers of that article and like ones would weasel out of it, the way the hierarchy try to weasel out of responsibility with the excuse that "they're teens, not children" — but there's no way around the implication that ideally, America would be "restored to faith" by a Reconquista, in that statement that it's too late for an effective Inquisition. The Reconquista, for those not part of this loop, or history majors, is the Spanish project completed by Isabella and Ferdinand to kick out or forcibly convert all non-Catholics in Spain, and was followed up by making sure, via the Inquisition, that the latter, along with all cradle Catholics, didn't backslide or start having second thoughts. What a wonderful world it was then may be gathered by from contemporary records.⁵⁵

You see, those who support the Inquisition have an Orwellian attitude towards language: "love," which Gibson professes to hold towards everyone, can include burning them at the stake and breaking their kneecaps, keeping them in solitary confinement and confiscating all their property. They really think that you can do anything, absolutely anything, to people for their own good, and what greater good is there than Eternal Life? By torturing them into professing the approved version of faith, you're saving them from eternal flames. By burning a few false teachers, you're saving the souls of all those people who might be corrupted by false teachings and led astray. (What a fragile, hothouse faith such folks have!) Only the most "wholesome" spiritual foods — by which they mean those that will not occasion doubt or intellectual reflection, nothing contradictory or challenging — can be permitted. And "freedom," in their Oldspeak,⁵⁶ means "the freedom to do what is right" because that is what true freedom consists of — after all, if you're choosing to do something wrong it's because there's something wrong with your mind or your hear, therefore you're not acting freely, really — so it's all right to force you to behave properly since that's what it is to be free…

(It's only coincidence that this happens to also support them on a high level of material prosperity, and to enforce the social secular status quo, wherever it is found. The synthesized Church-States of old Europe were hardly godly places, as anyone who knows anything about the royal dynasties of Spain and France can attest, but that's okay since they were part of the True Faith. God is on our side, and if you disagree we'll kill you. Flashbacks to Dostoyevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor" segment of Brothers Karamazov are appropriate here.)

There's another reason they reject Vatican II and its reforms: among those reforms have been many resounding affirmations and theological defenses of human rights against physical and sexual abuse (the irony, I know) and mental coercion, even into believing the "right things." Freedom of conscience may not be ignored. Check out the new Catechism, and the current Pope's statements on things like workers' rights and the death penalty — which "Traditional" Catholics like Justice Scalia feel free to reject…

Things like The Passion of the Christ will, according to this worldview, move people into submitting to True Religion — and thus, automatically, to the rule of those in religious authority, and said religious authority and the secular will merge into one seamless garment of Theocracy. And everyone will be Happy all the time, the Kingdom come on Earth as it is in Heaven, and everyone will know his or her place, and there will be no dissenters, no unhappy people, and God will smile upon us forever and ever… (Pratchett ObRef to Disney parody most definitely intentional.)

And those who laud the apocalyptic visions of the world of Left Behind (which I am informed is called Millennial Dispensationalism, which sounds like a disease) and claim the need to legally enforce Christianity even at the cost of the laws of the land, as a preventative for society blowing apart, are no different in principle, however different in practice they may be, from the Protestant side.

So they've made alliance over this issue of "saving" America from LiberalFeministHomosexualHumanists under the banner of Gibson's film.

The big problem is that they haven't thought it through. Since all these sub-sects think the others are damned heretics, what are they going to do once they have rid America of everyone who is not Christian by their definitions of Christianity, plus the "Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and other pagans" and also us liberals, feminists, agnostics, atheists, secularists (baptized or not) along with the homosexuals and the insufficiently-obedient to God's Laws about gender identity, the stay-at-home dads, the working moms, the guys who would rather walk twelve miles than be forced to attend a sports event, even if they do have a girlfriend, the gals who wear short pants to rock-climb with their male lovers, and all the other crypto-queers that "Christian" authors like E. Michael Jones loathe?

Obviously, we go back to the 1500s, when Protestants and Catholics burned dissenters, their own as happily as each other, at the stake or partially, post-hdq, making religion and political loyalty one thing as they had been for centuries, and fighting tremendous power struggles over tithes and property and mental loyalty that are the backbone of organized religion.

Because those who think that they have the One True Faith and no other may be tolerated, and that they have a duty to make all of America "Bible Christian" or "Roman Catholic" and who can't even agree internally on what that means, the Sedevacantists vs SSPX, Remnant vs Opus Dei, those who think the Church of Rome is the Whore of Babylon out to take over the world, those who think the Church of Rome needs to take over the world, the Protestants who have declared Dr. Norman Geisler a damned heretic for his teachings on justification — these people aren't going to be able to peacefully co-exist once they've succeeded. Have they thought about that?

Well, no, they haven't, I don't think. Not in any way that qualifies as thought. I mean, they don't have any real plans (in the sense that any plan that requires the AMH box on the flow-chart is a plan) for Converting The World, and on the Catholic side these are largely people who believe that lots and lots of rosaries is what brought down the Berlin Wall, and don't study history or politics or anything, and on the Protestant side these are largely people who believe that they can force the End of the World to happen on their watch by getting the Temple rebuilt in Jerusalem (and thus have a vested interest in having a Sudetenland or Kurdistan happen in Palestine), so magical thinking, rather than logistics, is the order of the day. Face it, their idea of an ideal, "cleansed" America back to the Good Old days of Apple Pie and Stay-At-Home Moms (I think about my own pioneer family history, and how unlike their mythos it is, and laugh) isn't ever going to happen. Utopian movements on a grand scale need better organizers and logistics personnel to work at all — the Soviet Union inherited a vast entrenched apparatus of spies and secret police and had a lot of practical people to put its ideology in practice, it wasn't starting from scratch — and mirantists have a hard time doing anything, even holding conferences, efficiently. (If I were not bound to silence, the stories I could tell from within of Christian inefficiency would require coffee & cats warnings.)

This doesn't mean they can't do a lot of damage and cause a lot of grief in the meantime, of course. But thinking they can succeed in rewriting human nature is the delusion that will bring them down, because God hasn't shown any signs of doing that in the past 4000+ years of written history, so to assume they can make it happen today because "these are the End Times" which we heard 1900 years ago, is silly. Eventually the universe will end. In the meantime there will probably be global catastrophes again which shake up civilization. This is not news. A professor I couldn't stand did nonetheless make a good point once, which has stuck with me ever since — the warnings in the Gospels that all these signs — wars, earthquakes, floods, famines, etc — will herald the end of the world, actually means that it's going to be same-old, same-old until the last minute.

That's the point. Fact: the Mediterranean is riddled with fault lines. Fact: lots of it is very dry. Fact: it's full of people who want each other's stuff. Result: earthquakes all around that "Ring of Fire" as such zones are called by geologists, which in turn cause floods often enough; other floods are caused by dry earth and sudden rains they're called flash floods and there's nothing miraculous about them; natural disasters cause economic hardship and political instability, which exacerbates the likelihood of wars on small or large scale, which go on all the time anyway in one guise or another. Wise up, people — the message of the warnings is not to defy the Gospels and try to figure out the day and the hour down to the last millisecond, or to, God forbid, try to force the Eternal's hand (Good Omens flashbacks here) or even to go around all panicky because omigosh there's been another natural disaster, and somebody's fighting, the End is Near! will I be Left Behind? Should I take the kids and run for high ground, or kill them? — but to go on making dinner, punching the clock (grinding meal, in the fields) and not worry about the Eschaton but about doing the job right, about being a good human being in the herenow, because the odds are immensely high that your personal Armageddon will come thousands of years before any cosmic system crash.

CS Lewis' essay The World's Last Night is a very good reflection on this and should be required reading for paranoid Christians angsting about the Millennium (Y2K was a hilarious display of human idiocy and gullibility and the lack of critical thought, and showed that Christians aren't any less dumb as a group than anybody else). As to the hope that somehow Rebuilding The Temple will force the Eschaton — well, not only is it BLASPHEMOUS (and yes, I do mean the shouting there) to hope that Creation, that God explicitly and repeatedly said "WAS GOOD" will be obliterated, as if it were just a crummy backdrop for a school play painted on cheap paper, to be wadded up and tossed aside without regret. But it's worse yet: it's magic of the highest occult order, the kind that the more rigorist evangelicals froth about even in imaginary depiction in fantasy. What is different between the act of copulation performed between the worshipper of ancient Sumeria and the representative of the god of the sky or the goddess of the earth, to ensure that the gods will respond by performing their own act of fertilization, and the effort to "create the conditions necessary" to bring about the Second Coming by building a physical building for a religion they don't even accept and installing the rites and rituals therein as recreated by yet another divided group of "Traditionalists" whom they too expect to either convert to their brand of Christianity or else go to hell?

When I first heard about this I thought it was a joke. I couldn't believe that there were people a) this stupid and b) this immoral and cynical, who thought that they had God so much in their pocket, a tame lion indeed. It's the stuff of farce — nay, worse, because not even Pratchett and Gaiman went that speculatively far in Good Omens.

For all the talk about "anti-Christian bias" on the secular side of things — that's not where the problem likes. The problem lies in those of us who, while claiming to be Christians, turn a blind eye to these nutcases and let them define what it is to be Christian. Don't like the fact that we're all tarred as bigots? Get out there and counter-protest the bigots then. Don't like the fact that it's the poisonous loudmouths who are the ones the "secular media" point to, not the moderates? How can anyone hear the moderates under all the shoutings of the Catholic League and Pat Robertson? Get out there and start shouting, you wusses! Don't just melt away saying — but I don't like to fight, I'm not confrontational, I'll just pray for it all to go away — tell other Christians to get their heads out of their asses and ditch the Utopian daydreaming and start working for justice, ditch the blasphemous End Times fixation, stop patting themselves on the back for being Saved By Faith Alone™ and get out there and prove that Christianity is more than just a club for a) whiny losers obsessed with the cult of their own victimhood, and b) those who have worldly power and will do anything, absolutely anything, including lie, cheat, and threaten the helpless to hang on to it. And stop blaming everything that goes wrong — all the sins of Christians, all the antipathy, all the failures — on The Devil. We're doing just fine on our own, no need to give Lucifer the credit we so richly deserve.

—Unless of course you who are reading this are one of those who would rather pray the Rosary and speak in tongues than think, and are afraid of Others, and interprets "watchful hope" as do nothing 'cause God will do it for me — in which case reread the second half of the above paragraph as a direct address.

Perseus Project
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
Too many ancient riches to believe here — source texts, dictionaries, thesauri, pictures, all cross-referenced — it can be a bewildering place, like the British Museum/British Library, to wander through. Use in conjunction with Google for best results; i.e. "perseus project" "Homer" to get right to where you need to go, since their internal search engine often seems overwhelmed.

Blue Letter Bible
http://www.blueletterbible.org/
If you aren't fluent in Greek (as I am not) this is helpful as well, since you can search through the English texts (KJV is the default) for a phrase or a passage, then click on the C and bring up the Greek verse, with some linguistic tools through Strong's - be warned, the words shown in the tables are not the "real" words in the NT, but the dictionary versions of them (ie verbs are infinitives, nouns etc not conjugated.)

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