"Bishops and Their Camels" A Sunday Reflection

 An old Arab idea: Camels know the 100th name of Allah...

...and that's why they wear so superior a look!

Father Hunwicke notes that Dom Gregory Dix reveals that while we, today, may think Catholic bishops are bad, they've been pretty bad before.

An excerpt:

"[I]t cannot be said that the episcopate as a whole had come well out of the universal crisis of the Diocletian persecution. 

"Few bishops when it broke out were men of much distinction. Eusebius, who as a bishop and a contemporary has some claim to be heard, says frankly that they were on the whole a poor lot, and ascribes the persecution largely to divine anger at their conduct. He is rather given to pious thoughts of this kind, which have not quite the value of historical judgments. But the precise and definite evidence of episcopal failure everywhere at this time can hardly be discounted ... The better bishops, of course, proved faithful and were martyred. But a shockingly large number at the first question turned traditor - i.e., handed over the Scriptures and sacred vessels to the authorities for destruction, the formal act required of them, which Church and State agreed to consider as constituting apostasy. Others denied that they had them in their keeping, but gave the names of the lectors who had them. Others again salved their consciences by handing over other books instead ...

An P again:

Read the whole article. Fascinating, depressing, and yet strangely comforting. If the Church could survive those idiots, she can survive anything, even Bergoglio & Co. As Belloc famously wrote:

"THE Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight."

Of course, I hasten to say those long-ago bishops were threatened with death, and in those days death was nasty, brutish, and long-drawn out. Most of today's bishops in the developed world won't face THAT sort of persecution, even though they wear purple because it is the color of blood and it is supposed to remind them that they're expected to be martyrs.

An Préachán

G. K. Chesterton's Cause for Sainthood dropped by the "fog of mediocrity"

I've been a fan of G.K.C's since high school, when I discovered his book Orthodoxy in a "Catholic Corner" of a Christian bookstore. It was a revelation. I had never read anything like it, and I had grown up (I mean through grade school) reading 19th century authors and then in high school, my two "go-to" authors were (kinda extreme) poles apart: H.P. Lovecraft on one hand and Plato on the other. (Lovecraft, I know realize, was channeling in Infernal, but I met Tolkien at some point in high school and J.R.R. drove out H.P., though one is never quite the same after one reads Howard Philips.)

To a very large extent, certainly on an intellectual level, I owe my Catholicism to Chesterton and Tolkien. The American Catholic Church taught me nothing, less than nothing, in fact. To these two Englishmen (and Chesterton was very English indeed, as Tolkien was -- one might say -- Old English) I owe my intellectual participation in the Catholic Church. Life is full of irony; I'm sure there's an Irish phrase for that. (BTW: there's a movement beginning for J.R.R.T.'s eventual canonization.) 

So, a few years ago, when I read that there was a movement to investigate Chesterton's cause for sainthood, I thought that was fitting. Quite fitting. He's certainly the patron saint of Catholic English-language writers, Catholic apologists in general, journalists and of course fat guys with mustaches and curly hair, and (let's not forget) beer drinkers. Seriously, though, he's certainly not an exemplary layman "martyr" saint, or a suffering layman saint like the lovely souls St. Gemma Galgani and now the Blessed Chiara Badano (http://www.chiarabadano.org/ ), but he is kin to Aquinas (another rather overweight fellow) and G.K.C. "channeled" St. Thomas for "everyman" better than any professional academic has ever done.

Gilbert was an amazing "Everyguy" sort of saint, a husband, a writer, trying to make a living as a (sort of) journalist, and saintly he was, in temperament: just compare him to his great friend, "Old Thunder", Hilaire Belloc. (A "suffering saint" if one may make so bold; one who didn't tolerate fools, however, whereas G.K.C. was kind to everyone, even George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells.)

And of course, Belloc had every reason (times 100) to be bitter. He coined the phrase I quote in the title about the Catholic bishops of England in the 1930s being "a fog of mediocrity". They still are! We languish in a soup of never-ending foggy mediocrity in our bishops! I cannot think of how I could chew up the modern hierarchy remotely like Old Thunder would have done were he still be alive today.

But as one of the people quoted in this Catholic Herald article says, it was "political correctness" that did in G.K.C.'s cause for sainthood. He was "anti-Semitic", you see. (Eye roll) So today, England has a huge anti-Semitic problem (Muslims, and Leftists, oh my!) and thus G.K.C., who would have been disgusted with both, is shut of his Church because of them. It is a calumny. Old Thunder would have thundered on and on about it, but not the kindly G.K.C.

An Préachán

PS: 

You can read a lot of G.K.C.'s work at Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=G.+K.+Chesterton

But I didn't find his St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox there. However, I located it at Gutenberg Australia: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100331.txt