This ae night, this ae night
Every night and alle,
Fire and sleet and candle lighte,
And Christ receive thy saule
“The Lyke-Wake Dirge”
The title of our opening lines, taken from an old English pre-Reformation (judging by its theology) ditty, literally means “The Corpse-Wake Dirge,” and it was sung at the mournful occasion its title suggests. Its lyrics, with their graphic description of the postmortem challenges facing the soul, are well worth meditating upon at this time of year, when the “October Country” (in Ray Bradbury’s poignant description) makes way for the Hallowtide Triduum, the All Saints Octave with its plenary indulgences for the dead, and November, the Month of the Holy Souls. It is a good time to think of our departed loved ones, our own mortality, and the final judgment, at which all things shall be revealed. The latter is something with which we want particularly to look at this moment.
We live in a time of endless deception. In Church and State, media and education, it seems well-nigh impossible to know who is telling the truth. The voices grow ever shriller as divisions grow ever deeper. One Catholic bishop after another tries to suppress the Mass of our fathers, while the worst British Prime Minister appoints a woman as “Archbishop” of Canterbury—doubtless as a goal for the authentic prelates to work toward. The temptations to hatred and despair are enormous—even as the devil would like us to.
But let us pull back, in this season when—as innumerable popular folklore and New Age like to remind us—“the veil between the worlds is very thin.” Now, whether you take that to mean this world and that of the dead, or Faerie, or simply nostalgia for the past as opposed to the present, it is an evocative term. We are, in the face of the world, the flesh, and the devil, preparing to celebrate a string of religious, familial, and civic observances which shall bring us from Halloween to Candlemas and Mardi-Gras. Those of us in particular who are Boomers (and this writer is one) will be remembering Halloween jack-o’-lanterns and trick-or-treating, Thanksgiving turkeys, Christmas trees and gifts, New Year’s Eve with Guy Lombardo, and on and on. We have a particular obligation to pass on as much as we can of this pleasure to the younger folk. We owe it to them.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
Sign up to get Crisis articles delivered to your inbox daily
This wonderful period is opened and closed with masks. Whether Halloween or Mardi-Gras, such masks should be obviously phony. Problems arise when they are too realistic. This is particularly the case when those who rule us, in either an ecclesiastical or temporal sense, wear masks. They are, after all, the ones who shape the conditions under which we live. How are we to discern truth from falsehood under these circumstances? Fortunately, in the recent past a great deal of truth was revealed. I refer, of course, to the days of Covid, when our masters had us put our masks on while they took theirs off. In three areas of life, certain realities became manifest.
The first is the nature of the modern State. What we were taught about democracy, republics, monarchies, dictatorships, or anything else is at best outmoded. The modern State is all-powerful and is strictly about power rather than ideology. It has the power to release and to imprison the entirety of its subjects. It is run purely for the benefit of those who run it—and so the struggle for control of its levers of power becomes ever more bitter.
body .ns-ctt{display:block;position:relative;background:#fd9f01;margin:30px auto;padding:20px 20px 20px 15px;color:#fff;text-decoration:none!important;box-shadow:none!important;-webkit-box-shadow:none!important;-moz-box-shadow:none!important;border:none;border-left:5px solid #fd9f01}body .ns-ctt:hover{color:#fff}body .ns-ctt:visited{color:#fff}body .ns-ctt *{pointer-events:none}body .ns-ctt .ns-ctt-tweet{display:block;font-size:18px;line-height:27px;margin-bottom:10px}body .ns-ctt .ns-ctt-cta-container{display:block;overflow:hidden}body .ns-ctt .ns-ctt-cta{float:right}body .ns-ctt.ns-ctt-cta-left .ns-ctt-cta{float:left}body .ns-ctt .ns-ctt-cta-text{font-size:16px;line-height:16px;vertical-align:middle}body .ns-ctt .ns-ctt-cta-icon{margin-left:10px;display:inline-block;vertical-align:middle}body .ns-ctt .ns-ctt-cta-icon svg{vertical-align:middle;height:18px}body .ns-ctt.ns-ctt-simple{background:0 0;padding:10px 0 10px 20px;color:inherit}body .ns-ctt.ns-ctt-simple-alt{background:#f9f9f9;padding:20px;color:#404040}body .ns-ctt:hover::before{content:”;position:absolute;top:0px;bottom:0px;left:-5px;width:5px;background:rgba(0,0,0,0.25);}body .ns-ctt.ns-ctt-simple .ns-ctt-cta,body .ns-ctt.ns-ctt-simple-alt .ns-ctt-cta{color:#fd9f01}body .ns-ctt.ns-ctt-simple-alt:hover .ns-ctt-cta,body .ns-ctt.ns-ctt-simple:hover .ns-ctt-cta{filter:brightness(75%)}The modern State is all-powerful and is strictly about power rather than ideology. It has the power to release and to imprison the entirety of its subjects. It is run purely for the benefit of those who run it.Tweet This
The welfare of the subjects is only relevant as it lends greater or lesser strength to the contending factions of the elite. There can be, in such a setup, no question of legitimate authority. Such is bestowed by God only upon those leaders who are willing to dedicate themselves to the common good and last end of the populace—and none of those concepts are accepted by any of the contending factions of power-seekers. The populace themselves are unaware that they have either common good or last ends.
The second is in the relationship between the Church and the State. Although that relationship varies from country to country, it has been based upon the idea that there is some sort of equality between the two bodies. This is why there are ambassadors between so many governments and the Holy See; why there are so many concordats between those two parties; why so many Catholic Bishops’ Conferences on the national and subnational levels maintain liaison offices with their corresponding governments; and why so many dioceses maintain justice and peace commissions. What Covid showed us is that this is all a fantasy.
The reality is that the modern State regards the Church as an entity to be regulated—like the Rotary or the Garden Club—an odd little interest group for those interested in that sort of thing. This is, of course, not only true of its view toward Catholicism; if anything, post-Orthodox and post-Protestant countries’ governments regard their established churches with even less respect than they regard ours. Church functions are far less important to the elites than, say, abortion mills. Public worship of Almighty God was unimportant; continuing infanticide was essential.
What is one to do in the face of these two realities? Well, on those levels—usually closer to local than State/Provincial or national—that elections matter and are allowed to have a real outcome, what candidates were doing and advocating during Covid must be made manifest. If a single city councilman somewhere on planet Earth loses his job because of his record during that time, it will be something worthwhile.
The third reality Covid revealed regards the Church. Now, for those who have eyes to see, it is one that has been apparent for a long time. But Covid allowed His Holiness the Pope, alongside Their Eminences, Graces, Excellencies, and Lordships, the larger part of the Catholic hierarchy, to shove our faces in it: with honorable and heroic exceptions, the larger part of the hierarchy do not believe in the necessity of the Church and her sacraments for salvation—exactly the kind of universalism Benedict XVI complained of back in 2016.
For many Southern California parishioners, this reality was made grotesquely obvious close to home. Parish website after parish website would offer three bits of advice: “Make a Perfect Act of Contrition” (as though that were easy); “Make a Spiritual Communion”; and “Donate Here.” Oddly enough, only the last was clickable. What could one make out of this advice save the obvious—one does not need the Church, objectively speaking. For some reason, numbers and donations dwindled.
The lack of faith this revealed was, as we have noted, no surprise to those who are observant. But the cream of the jest was that in the aftermath of Covid the same hierarchy that had hidden themselves during the pandemic emerged from under their beds with guns blazing, demanding complete submission and the extirpation of the Traditional Mass. Having abdicated their legal authority to the State and their moral authority to the individual, they now demanded a sort of twisted pre-Vatican II kind of clericalism. Had the display not involve sacred things that in fact do lead to salvation, the whole affair would have been both comical and pathetic. It also presents interesting paradoxes, such as demanding complete and unquestioning subjection to synodality—a contradiction in terms if ever any language ever meant anything.
Unfortunately, because these really are successors of the apostles, who do indeed wield apostolic authority and sacramental power—however little they may believe in either—the comedic element is reduced, even if it cannot be entirely eliminated. So in diocese after diocese, the Masses are shut down in accordance with the late Pope Francis’ diktat. The problem with that action in itself is that it forced Catholics to choose between the opposing views of two now equally dead pontiffs. The current Holy Father has made ending that kind of division a priority. Whether or not he does so will be another issue.
This nostalgic time of year cannot help but remind me of my childhood. In those far-off days, under the reign of Paul VI, it did not escape me that dissenters from Humanae Vitae were unpunished—even if they were National Bishops’ Conferences—whereas Traditionalists were routinely punished and harassed, illegally, as Benedict XVI would later point out. I asked my father about this, and his response was illuminating:
When Al Capone ran Chicago, son, his gang literally got away with murder on a regular basis. But the Chicago Municipal Code was still enforced, in the sense that parking tickets were still being handed out. Although Law has a dignity of its own, its actual operation always depends upon the honesty of those in charge.
“What if they are crooks?” was my immediate response. “Then you have to look after yourself and try to stay out of their way,” was his laconic reply.
Of course, while Al Capone is long gone, Chicago can still boast of Cardinal Cupich, who is perhaps the poster child for the kind of hierarch of which we are speaking. His recent comment calling the Traditional Mass a “spectacle” can only remind one of the old joke, “It takes one to know one.” His forbidding the Institute of Christ the King to offer public Masses at their American headquarters is beyond ridiculous—as with much else he has done. But one hesitates to single out His Eminence of Chicago for especial truth-telling, when so many of his brethren are as bad or worse, trapped in a mental and moral 1969 they never made? Needless to say, there is little point trying to inform our betters of their failings; as far as they are concerned, they have none—save perhaps hesitating to impose their wills swiftly enough. To be sure, our own sins and defects have in some sense conjured these creatures up. As St. John Eudes put it:
The most evident mark of God’s anger and the most terrible castigation He can inflict upon the world are manifested when He permits His people to fall into the hands of clergy who are priests more in name than in deed, priests who practice the cruelty of ravening wolves rather than the charity and affection of devoted shepherds…Instead of nourishing those committed to their care, they rend and devour them brutally.
To be sure, they and all my generation are rapidly approaching our ends, as this time of year reminds us. Soon we shall all stand before our particular judgment; however little much of the hierarchy may like it, the truths of the Dies Irae should always be uppermost in our minds—especially among those of us of the only generation I know of which grew old without ever growing up. I am, paradoxically, anxious to see us gone, that a young, more orthodox generation might take the Church and maybe even the State in a better direction than any I have ever known. Alas, as one comedian whose name escapes me pointed out, “when the Boomers go, they’re taking me with them!”
All of those higher considerations aside, however, apart from paying them on the basis of their service during Covid and possibly suing them in civil court if their actions led to actionable physical or psychological damage to us, at this festive time of year, let us put them out of our minds. Instead, let us focus on the joys and devotions of the season.
We can carve the jack-o’-lantern and welcome the trick-or-treaters on Halloween; begin our prayers of the dead on All Saints Evening and continue them through the Octave and the month; the 11th can see us honor both St. Martin and our valiant wartime dead; and so on, all the way through to the stroke of midnight on Ash Wednesday. All of these things we may do with family, friends, memories of the past, and hopes for the future, with little or no reference to those who prance about masquerading as our rulers. Above all, we can try to teach our children and grandchildren to be better than we were, in hopes that one day they shall be worthy of having true shepherds in Church and State.
