By GEORGE A. KENDALL
One of the things likely to be an obstacle to the reform of the Church (something which needs to be done yesterday) is a subculture that reigns supreme in the Vatican and is known as Romanitas. From what I am told, one of Romanitas’ principal effects on behavior has been a whole pattern of speech and communication where clear, straightforward speech is carefully avoided and would, indeed, be regarded as a serious breach of etiquette were someone so rash as to engage in it (something like the academic world, actually).
It creates an atmosphere where people talk around and around something without ever clearly specifying what the something might be (think of Dickens’ Circumlocution Office), where things are communicated by hints, by indirection (to avoid saying anything that you might be held responsible for, giving your rivals something they could hold you responsible for, maybe undermining your precious career), and so on.
I suspect, though I have no proof, that this is a kind of communication that comes more naturally to women (some of them, at least) than to men, especially when they are engaged in gossip, and thus may be more natural to effeminate men — i.e., homosexuals — than to normal men. That would explain a lot about the culture of the contemporary Vatican, dominated as it apparently is by homosexual networks.
Be that as it may, this whole style of speech runs directly contrary to the teaching of Christ. “Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from the Evil One” (Matt. 5:37).
Note: After I had written the above, I found the following in my journal for 2004. Even then, the underlying problem, which was about truth and untruth, was evident, but I’m afraid I didn’t fully appreciate how horrific the situation was —- I didn’t know the half of it. The text from 2004 appears below:
“I’m getting really sick of the idiocy at the Vatican about what the Pope did or did not say about Mel Gibson’s The Passion. Once again, we are confronted with Romanitas, the whole culture of confusion and unclarity which makes it impossible for anyone in the Vatican to say what he means and stand behind it. First, Archbishop Dziwisz tells Mel Gibson that the Pope, having watched the movie, remarked that ‘It is as it was.’ Then he backpedals and denies having said it or even that the Pope said it. Then Joaquin Navarro-Valls apparently tells Gibson by e-mail that he has permission to use the quote, then he denies having sent the e-mail.
“Obviously, someone is lying. It is bad enough that governments lie constantly, but it is an appalling scandal that officials of the Church apparently think it is perfectly all right to lie to us. This tells us that they have somehow gotten the notion that, as God’s representatives on Earth, they are not bound by the moral norms that bind the rest of us. This situation cries out for major reform. Christ tells us, when we communicate with others, to confine ourselves to Yes and No, and adds that ‘anything more than this comes from the Evil One.’ Obviously, the Evil One is a pretty powerful presence in the Vatican. Maybe it is time for an exorcism” (italics added).
For people like this, there always seems to be some plausible reason why the truth would just be too dangerous to the status quo and hence must be suppressed. The people who are supposed to represent the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and who are supposed to believe in Christ’s promise that “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,” seem to fear the truth more than anything:
“And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed” (John 3:19-20).
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Some thoughts on the parable of the wheat and the tares, a parable certainly having some relevance to the corruption in the contemporary Church. The Master (God), has his servants (angels), plant his field with wheat. During the night, an enemy (Satan) comes and plants tares (poisonous weeds) among the wheat. In the morning, the servants want to pull up the weeds, but the Master orders them to wait until the harvest (the end of time, the judgment), lest, in pulling up the weeds, they should unintentionally pull up some of the wheat too.
Of course, no non-parabolic farmer in his right mind would follow this procedure. He would quite sensibly pull up the weeds, and feel that the loss of some of the wheat would be, from a utilitarian perspective, a sacrifice worth making to be rid of the weeds. But that is not how God thinks. He is no utilitarian, either in His farming activities or when, as the Good Shepherd, He leaves the ninety-nine sheep who are not lost to search everywhere for the lost one.
Another way the parable is different from ordinary life is that, in ordinary life, every plant in that field is either wheat or a weed — the only difficulty is figuring out which of them is which so you can remove the ones you don’t want.
In the field of the parable, however, the situation is different. Here, there is indeterminacy, because free will is in play. Here the plants are like Schroedinger’s cat, which is in a kind of in-between state where it is neither dead nor alive, because to Schroedinger, the reality of the situation depends on its being observed, and in the conditions of the thought experiment that is impossible. (Yes, I know it’s confusing, and, as a non-physicist, I may have the whole thing wrong, but that doesn’t matter for the present purpose.)
Now, in the case of the indeterminacy attendant on free will, the observation necessary to make the indeterminate determinate, to make the cat either dead or alive, the plant either weed or wheat, is God’s final judgment, given only in eternity. While time lasts, each plant is in the in-between state where it is not definitively either wheat or weed. God has not yet judged it, and as long as free will is at work the question of which is which is not yet decided.
The worst sinner may be a future great saint (think of St. Augustine and many like him), and the apparently holy person (think of Judas when he was still a loyal disciple, even healing the sick and casting out devils in Jesus’ name) may be a future monster of evil. Only when time is at an end will the final judgment of the wheat and the tares be made — the one to be gathered into the barns, the other thrown into the flames.
This answers a question someone actually asked me the other day: “Why doesn’t God just come down and kill all the bad people?” It may also illuminate (a little) the mystery of why God allowed the near-takeover of His Church by apparently evil people. It will also caution us to remember, as we struggle to cleanse and reform the Church, that even as we need to remove apparently evil persons from power in the Church and punish them for their crimes, we cannot make the final judgment that these people are definitively beyond God’s mercy.
We need to pray for them and help them to be reconciled with God, if they show any inclination at all in that direction.
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I was dismayed last summer to see so little attention in the media to the hundredth anniversary of an event central to modern history and its meaning — the brutal murder of Tsar Nicholas II, with his wife and children, by the Bolsheviks, in the early morning hours of July 17, 1918.
The casual inattention by our worthless media to such an atrocity (“It was a long time ago, after all, and it really isn’t healthy to live in the past”) suggests a kind of forgetfulness, a kind of sleepiness, which we really need to be fighting against with all our strength. Events like the murder of the Russian royal family are events which demand to be remembered, which could be said to possess an inherent right to be remembered, as the Church remembers the death of martyrs in her liturgical calendar. Events like this have an inherent worthiness to be protected and enshrined in memory.
Eric Voegelin, in The New Science of Politics, very aptly quotes a passage from Richard Hooker to set the theme for his own work: “Posterity may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream.”
In a centuries-old monarchy, like that of the Romanovs in Russia, a monarch is not merely an individual who happens to be in charge of the government for a time. He is a man who has come into the world, from the beginning of his life, already part of a whole network of rights and duties, relationships, relating to the ruling of the nation. He is born into a particular relationship to his people. In his person he carries a whole load of symbolic meanings having to do with what Russia, or France, or England, means to the people of those nations. He embodies both the faith and the traditions of his people.
Tsar Nicholas carried in his person the whole meaning of the Russian people — known as Holy Russia — hence the reverence and awe in which he was held by those very people (if we don’t count the spiritually diseased ideologues among them).
Another way to think of this is to say that the monarch carries in himself, symbolically, everything that we today would call the common good, and everything that we would experience as sacred about the order of our society. Hence the reverence and awe which, even today, people who live under monarchies, however attenuated, experience toward their monarchs and royal families. Even here in America, when we see the fascination so many have for British royalty, one senses a certain nostalgia for something we have lost.
There is a sacredness to the community of beings in Christ as its light shines on a particular people through the prism of that people’s traditions, a sacredness which does not easily disappear just because certain spiritually diseased persons want it to. Ideologues want the world, including society, as God created it, to somehow go away and be replaced by a world of the ideologues’ creation, one incompatible with the sacred in any form.
It was this sense of the sacredness of man’s life in community under God that Lenin was so anxious to eradicate when he gave the order to murder the royal family. His intent was to murder Holy Russia.
Whether Lenin’s effort will turn out to have been successful or not is still unclear, because the drama has not yet reached its conclusion. The ability of all of us, Russian or otherwise, to remember the horrible reality of what was done to the royal family as well as the infinitely greater reality of divine love which can triumph over the power of evil, will determine the outcome. The memory of Holy Russia and its analogues in all the peoples of the world needs to be brought back into the light.
(© 2018 George A. Kendall)
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