Why the Excommunication of the SSPX Is Invalid

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Cardinal Fernandez

Those God Does Not Love

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The Folly of Excommunicating the SSPX

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Religious Funny Business

 Heaven? It is to laugh!

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Going to Hell

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Citizen Vigilante

I was able last night to watch “Civilian Vigilante,” the film that is causing a stir on the Internet—thanks, Elon!

I found it alarming.

The film is not anti-immigrant. Some of the malefactors in the film are immigrants; some are not. Surely we have a right to point out that there is a growing problem of immigrant crime. 

Nor is this the first vigilante movie. We have many films in which the audience is expected to cheer on a vigilante. Batman is a vigilante.

That is actually a bit of the problem: the audience is pre-conditioned to be sympathetic to a vigilante figure.

And he has a cool composure reminiscent of James Bond. We want to cheer him on.

However, there is a huge difference.

This vigilante does not just fight criminals. He also fights the government. In the film, he probably kills more figures of authority than criminals.

And not some historic or fictional government. This is not Sherwood Forest under King John. This is some unspecified government in Europe today. With references to the US and Canada included.

And the film allows the vigilante to make his case, forcefully, that our governments have betrayed us.

The protagonist, played by Armie Hammer, also plays fast and loose with morality. He doesn’t just bypass the law; he lies to his victims to suit his ends. He is shown having sex with a hooker.

It is, in the end, a call to revolution. And not just a call to revolution against the government, but also against conventional morality.

This is fundamentally a Nazi position. That is where this is going.

The film, and the stir it is causing, shows the bond of consent between government and governed is badly frayed. Where do we go from here?

Revolutions rarely end well. Anarchy is the worst possible form of government. Nazism is the next worse.

There is a heavy onus on those in charge to restore trust, before matters get much worse. 

True Believers

Ew, Canada!

I recently recorded a radio show for Canada Day, on historic patriotic poems. One participant said he would have to bow out unless we allowed him to read poems critical of Canada. Pressed, he was not prepared to say that Canada itself was a good thing; he was content to live here because there was no war.

It seems to me that we have come to a dangerous point when we cannot all agree on the essential idea of Canada. What then do we have in common? How can we function as a society?

Islam and the woke, neoMarxist left pose a grave and increasing danger to our democracies; and it is really in both cases the same problem. These two organized groups have substituted politics for religion. They have made their politics their religion, or vice versa.

Religion is at its core the assertion of supposed ultimate truth. Seeking truth is admirable; it is what we are here for. In response to these perceived truths, you bind yourself to a set of rules. They govern your actions. But the common sense of the matter, in liberal democracies, is that you do not impose these rules on others: religion must be entirely voluntary.

When politics is your religion, or your religion is political, that no longer holds. Politics is the exercise of power over others. So this means imposing your religion on others.

Can this actually ever be avoided? Since religion is definitionally the assertion of a perceived ultimate truth, mustn’t what is ultimately true automatically be the basis of all decisions, including all political decisions? Our current concept of religious liberty and the separation of church and state may be an illusion: it has been apparently possible because our true religion, over the past few centuries, has become liberal democracy rather than Christianity.

Granted that this is so, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism have found themselves capable of continuing within this liberal framework. They are at their core, perhaps for different reasons, “mystical” faiths. They do not expect to achieve a paradise in this world, and so they are generally content to leave this world to its own devices.

Political matters can therefore be discussed politely, in liberal terms. 

But Islam and woke neoMarxism, because they involve a specific political agenda, are not reconcilable with liberal principles.

This happens whenever a creed emerges that believes that heaven, a state of perfection, can be achieved by specific human political action here on earth; what might be called “millenial” movements. It then becomes a matter of ultimate importance to impose those specific political measures as soon as possible, a whatever possible cost.

Nazism is an obvious example: it believed it was creating a new species, the “superman.”

Marxism similarly believes that by following its precepts, we can achieve an Edenic state where there is no restriction on our natural desires, and we can all do whatever we want.

Islamism believes that we have an obligation to bring the entire world under the laws of Islam, which come from God himself.

Wokery, apart from Marx, is influenced by the postmodern idea that we create our own reality. Therefore the task of life is to force everyone else to accept our own reality.

I similarly fear Christian movements that focus on the “end times” and the apocalypse; at least as something dependent on any political action.

How to deal with such groups is an existential problem for a liberal democracy: for they reject the principles on which a liberal democracy functions. 

Such movements can be tolerated so long as there is no chance of them coming into power and ending liberal democracy. But I fear we are past that point, and the danger is clear and present.