Rod Dreher's Blog, page 210

Pope Francis Says The S-Word

Hello, I’m on the flight back home from Yurp, and as I’ve not been asked to give a press conference, I’d like to dwell for a second on the one Pope Francis gave yesterday, flying back from Madagascar. Here’s the full transcript. Look at this:

An anecdote, the first thing that I found yesterday, entering the chancery, was a bunch of beautiful flowers. Who sent them? The grand imam. To be brothers. The human brotherhood that is at the base and respects all believers. Religious respect is important. For this, to missionaries I say: do not proselytize. Proselytizing applies to politics, to sports, “come on my team,” but not to faith.

But what does it mean for you, pope, what does evangelization mean? It is a phrase of St. Francis that has illuminated me a lot. St. Francis of Assisi said to his brothers: “Preach the Gospel, if necessary also with words.” That is, to evangelize is that which we read in the book of the Acts of the Apostles. Witness. And that witness provokes questions. But why do you live like this? Why do you do this? And I explain to them: For the Gospel. The proclamation comes after the testimony. First to live as a Christian and if they question you, you say it. Witness is the first step. The missionary is not the protagonist of evangelization, it is the Holy Spirit that allows Christians and missionaries to give a witness. Then questions come or they do not come. But a witness of life. This is the first step. It is important to avoid proselytism. When you see religious propositions that go the way of proselytism, they are not Christian. They look for proselytes, not adorers of God and truth, of witness. I use [this moment] to say this about your interreligious experience, that it is very beautiful, and also that the prime minister told me, when they ask for help for one, we give the same to all and no one is offended because they feel like brothers. And this creates unity in a country. It is very important. Very, very important. Even at the meetings there were not only Catholics, but Muslims, Hindus, and other religions. Everyone was there, brothers.

I saw in Madagascar, somewhat, in the act of peace of the young people that the youth of different religions wanted to express how they live the desire for peace. Peace, fraternity, interreligious coexistence. No proselytism. They are things that we should learn for coexistence. This is a thing that I should say. Then, it touched me, and I made a reference.

I don’t get this at all. I agree that people of all religions should work hard to live peaceably together, but what on earth is a Pope doing telling people not to proselytize? I must be misunderstanding something. It seems clear from his words that he’s drawing a distinction between proselytism and evangelization. I don’t see the difference, except as a matter of politeness. If his had been the approach of the Catholic Church through the years, would the faith have ever spread? I certainly have encountered Christians whose pushiness in evangelism was quite off-putting, but I wouldn’t go as far as this pope does, and call what they did “not Christian.” As usual, I don’t get this guy. He would have condemned John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul as proselytes, it sounds like.

You can bet that the Evangelicals and Pentecostals who are drawing so many Latin American Catholics into their folds aren’t as fussy as Francis about proselytism.

But here’s the big news from his press-trip commentary. I’m going to quote the whole passage so there’s no confusion. The highlights below are mine:

Jason Horowitz (New York Times): Good morning, Holy Father. On the plane to Maputo, you acknowledged being under attack by a sector of the American Church. Evidently, there are strong criticisms, and there are even some cardinals and bishops, TV [stations], Catholics, American web sites — many criticisms. Even some very close allies have spoken of a plot against you, some of your allies in the Italian curia. Is there something these critics don’t understand about your pontificate, or is there something that you have learned from the criticisms [coming from] the United States? Another thing, are you afraid of a schism in the American Church and if yes, is there something that you could do, dialogue to help avoid it?

Pope Francis: First of all, criticisms always help, always, when one receives a criticism, immediately he should make a self-critique and say this: to me, is it true or is it not true, until what point? Of criticisms, I always see the advantages. Sometimes you get angry, but the advantages are there.

Then on the trip going to Maputo, one of you came… it was you who gave me the book?… One of you gave me that book… in French… yours? In French… The American Church attacks the pope… the Americans… No, the pope under attack by Americans… [Ed. note: he refers to the French book “How America Wanted to Change the Pope” by Nicolas Seneze of La Croix]. [A reporters’ voice: “How the Americans want to change the Pope”]. This is the book that you gave me a copy of, I’d heard of the book, I’d heard of it, but I have not read it. The criticisms are not only from Americans, they are a little from everywhere, even in the curia, at least those who tell me, who have the advantage of honesty to say it, and I like this. I do not like it when critics are under the table. They smile, they let you see their teeth and then they stab you in the back. This is not loyal, not human. Criticism is an element of construction and if your critic is not right, you [must be] prepared to receive the response and to dialogue, [to have] a discussion and arrive at a fair point. This is the dynamic of the true criticism instead of the criticism of arsenic pills, which this article that I gave to Fr. Vuela was talking about — throwing the stone but hiding the hand. This isn’t necessary, it doesn’t help, help the little closed groups that don’t want to hear the response to the criticism. A criticism that does not want to hear the response is throwing a stone and hiding the hand. Instead, a fair criticism, I think this, this, this… It is open to a response, and you build, help.

Before the case of the pope, “But I don’t like this of the Pope,” I criticize and wait for the response, I go away from him and I speak and I write an article and I ask him to respond. This is fair, this is love for the Church. To criticize without wanting to hear the response and without dialogue is not wanting the good of the Church. It is to go backward to a fixed idea, to change the pope, to change the style, to create schism, this is clear no? A fair criticism is always well received, at least by me.

Oh, brother. It has been years, but he still hasn’t answered the dubia, which were formal requests, made through the Church’s system, for theological clarification. And he has not explained in any detail his role in rehabilitating Ted McCarrick, or answered any of Archbishop Vigano’s pointed, detailed criticisms. The media have allowed him to get away with it, of course, but it is impossible to take Pope Francis seriously when he spites his Catholic critics while ducking legitimate criticisms and questions they offer (and yes, some of them are in bad faith).

More Francis:

Second, the problem of schism: in the Church there [have been] many schisms. After Vatican I, the last vote, that of infallibility, a significant group left. They separated from the Church, founded the Old Catholics, to be really honest to the traditions of the Church. Then they discovered a different development and now ordain women, but in that moment they were rigid. They were going backward to an orthodoxy that they were thinking the council had gotten wrong. Another group went without voting, silent silent, but not wanting to vote.

Vatican II created these things, maybe the best known break is that of Lefebvre. There is always schismatic action in the Church, always, no? It is one of the actions that the Lord always leaves to human freedom. I don’t fear schisms, I pray they don’t exist because there’s the spiritual health of many people [to consider], right? [I pray] there will be dialogue, that there will be correction if there is some mistake, but the path of schism is not Christian.

Schism is always and everywhere to be regretted … which is not the same thing as saying “to be avoided.” What about the matter of Truth? If schism is ruled out in principle, then how is that not saying that maintaining church unity is more important than standing for the Truth?

More Francis:

But let’s think back to the beginning of the Church, how the Church began with many schisms, one after another, it is enough to read the history of the Church. The Arians, the Gnostics, the Monophysites, all of these. Then it comes to me to recall an anecdote that I have told a few times: it was the people of God who saved [the Church] from schisms. Schismatics always have one thing in common: they separate [themselves] from the people, from the faith of the people, from the faith of the People of God. And when, at the Council of Ephesus, there was a discussion on the maternity of Mary, the people — this is historic — were at the entrance of the cathedral and when the bishops entered for the Council, they had sticks, they showed them the sticks and yelled: “Mother of God, Mother of God.” As if to say, if you do not do this, here’s what awaits you. The People of God always mend and help.

A schism is always an elite condition of an ideology separated from doctrine. An ideology may be right, but that enters into doctrine and separates and becomes ‘doctrine’ in quotes, but for a time. For this, I pray that there are no schisms. But I am not afraid.

This is a weird way of putting it. As I understand it, the US Catholics he has in mind as fomenters of schism are not criticizing him because they advocate some new doctrine. They criticize him because they believe that he has broken with, or is at grave risk of breaking with, the settled, authoritative doctrine of the Catholic Church. That Francis is disrespecting the “democracy of the dead” that is Tradition. Granted, in a hierarchical ecclesial polity ruled by an absolute monarch, it’s weird for anybody, especially that absolute monarch, to invoke “elitism” as a put-down.

Finally:

To help, but what I am saying now, you are not afraid I respond to criticism, I do all this, maybe if someone comes to him, something I have to do, I will do it. To help.

But this is one of the results of Vatican II. It is not from this Pope or from another Pope or that other pope. For example, the social things that I say are the same that John Paul II said, the same. I copy him. “But the Pope is very communistic, huh?” Ideologies and doctrine enter, and when the doctrine strays into ideology, there is the possibility of schism.

And also there is the behaviorist ideology, that is, the primacy of a sterile morality over the morality of the People of God, who even the pastors should guide, the flock, between grace and sin. This is evangelical morality.

Instead, a morality of ideology, such as Pelagianism, to put it that way, makes you rigid and today we have many, many schools of rigidity inside the Church. They are not schism, but they are pseudo-schismatic Christian paths that in the end finish badly. When you see rigid Christians, bishops, priests, behind them are problems; there isn’t the holiness of the Gospel. For this we should be meek, not severe, with people who are tempted by these attacks, because they are going through a problem, and we should accompany them with meekness.

Yes, Holy Francis, meek and mild. The man brutalizes those he sees as his enemies. He’s eviscerated the John Paul II Institute in Rome. And now the new team will include an Italian priest and moral theologian who favors contraception, and who has recently said that sex within gay relationships can be a moral good. Even if you agree with that position, you have to be honest enough to admit that it is very nearly a 180 degree reversal from what the Catholic Church has authoritatively thought since forever.

Yet theologically conservative American Catholics are the ones fomenting schism? Wow.

Phil Lawler wrote the other day about Francis’s new additions to the College of Cardinals, who, after their October 5 reception, will signify that Francis will have appointed a majority of those who will elect his successor. Lawler writes:

Father Adolfo Nicolas, the former worldwide leader of the Jesuit order, reported that Pope Francis once told him that he hoped to remain as Pontiff until “the changes are irreversible.” Packing the College of Cardinals with like-minded electors is an obvious step in that direction.

The liberal Jesuit columnist, Father Thomas Reese, wrote in 2016 that the Pope’s selections to the College were “the most revolutionary thing Francis has done in terms of Church governance.” He admitted that if he were a conservative Catholic, looking at the Pope’s selections, “Frankly, I would have been outraged.”

Now, two consistories later, the pattern is even more unmistakable. In his analysis of the Pope’s choices, John Allen of Crux underlines the salient point:

This is a consistory in which Francis is elevating a cohort of like-minded churchmen, positioning them to help advance his agenda right now and also to help ensure that the next pope, whoever it may be, isn’t someone inclined to roll back the clock.

Read the whole thing. I had no idea that some of the men Francis is elevating to cardinal rank on October 5 were so radical.

Who could have predicted that the Catholic Church would go from the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI to a pope who raises the possibility of schism. I remind you that two cardinals have warned in the past year or so that the Catholic Church may be facing the Great Apostasy expected in the Last Days. Here are some jaw-dropping words from Cardinal Gerhard Müller, who, until he was dismissed by Francis, was the Catholic Church’s chief doctrinal watchdog:

To keep silent about these and the other truths of the Faith and to teach people accordingly is the greatest deception against which the Catechism vigorously warns. It represents the last trial of the Church and leads man to a religious delusion, “the price of their apostasy” (CCC 675)  it is the fraud of Antichrist. “He will deceive those who are lost by all means of injustice, for they have closed themselves to the love of the truth by which they should be saved” (2 Thess: 2-10).

He was speaking back in February in his “Manifesto Of Faith,” clearly written in response to the doctrinal confusion emanating from this pontificate.

Let me ask Catholic readers of all theological orientations some questions:

Do you think there will be a schism over Francis’s teachings? If so, what form will it take? and
Do you think there should be a schism if things continue like this? Obviously schism is a grave condition, not to be desired. My question is whether or not you think that this Pope has erred, or will have erred, so much that he has ceased to be the Pope.

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The Flag & The Forgetting

Claire Berlinski posted to her blog a sober, even grim, 9/11 reflection from one of her readers, who asked to remain anonymous. The reader writes, in part:

With the forgetting comes the loss of emotive content. It is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the falling-away of emotion means we lose the felt sense of the only silver lining of the whole blood-soaked affair: the flowering of patriotism in the immediate thereafter. Those of us who lived through the bright autumn of 2001 witnessed the last mass expression of a common American patriotism of the twenty-first century. No moment like it has come since, and it is unlikely to reappear. If in this vein we are the people we were two decades ago, the evidence has yet to present itself.

That said, we should not over-valorize the people we were two decades past, either. The best of us rushed into burning towers in September or descended upon Afghanistan in October. The rest of us watched in stupefaction or satisfaction, or perhaps both. That goes even for direct witnesses of the great massacre, including me. We spectated. It was not two years later that the phrase emerged, not from Afghanistan but Iraq, that in the post-9/11 era only the American military was at war: the American people were at the mall.

It’s not a long piece, but it’s a gut punch. Read the whole thing. Except for the Pakistan part, about which I have no idea, I find it hard to disagree with any of it.

As regular readers know, I was living in New York City on 9/11, and through the bright sadness of that autumn. I’ve told people since then that as unspeakably horrible as that season was, it was also beautiful in a way I find hard to adequately describe. You really did have to be there. The sense of solidarity was overwhelming. I’m not talking about in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. I’m talking about for months.

Like Berlinski’s reader, I can’t imagine that we’ll ever see that kind of thing again. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t trust it. Having seen what our government at the time did with that feeling — I’m talking about the catastrophically mistaken Iraq War, which like most Americans, I supported back then — I would not trust anything that the president during some future 9/11 had to say about it.

Then again, people forgot the lessons of Vietnam too, and off we went to the Middle East. As Berlinski’s reader says, we’re going to get out of Afghanistan soon, and the Taliban will once again rule that miserable country. We will be right back where we started.

I once wrote the following on this blog. It seems appropriate to revive it today, in the spirit of Claire Berlinski’s reader’s thoughts:

On the morning of September 11, 2002, I walked over to Ground Zero for the solemn observation of the anniversary. I stood on the north side of the hole, at the perimeter, waiting for the service to start. The crowd was behind a fence; none of us had access to the site itself, which was reserved for families and dignitaries. It was important, though, to be there.

Suddenly, at the time when the first plane hit the World Trade Center, a powerful wind descended from the same direction of that plane. It was from Hurricane Gustav, which had come ashore in the Carolinas, and was rolling up the East Coast. Still, I was there, and the timing was very, very weird. It blew a fairly steady 60 mph all morning. A friend who had been watching the services live on TV said that one of the commenters called the wind “Biblical.” If you were down there in that wind, as I was, it seemed apt.

The wind was still blowing later that morning when I went into Trinity Church Wall Street for a memorial service celebrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury. At some point during the church service, we could hear a signal from adjacent Ground Zero, indicating that all the names of the dead had been read, and that the ceremony there was ending. Shortly after, the church liturgy ended, and I emerged outside to calm. The winds had stopped. I don’t know when the ceased to blow, but I can tell you it was in the relatively short time between the start and end of the church service.

If I had to bet money, I’d say that the winds stopped blowing when the last names were read at Ground Zero. It was that kind of morning.

Later in the day, I received a call from a friend I had run into at Ground Zero that morning. She was fairly freaked out, and asked me to come over at once. I made my way to her apartment. She led me into her tiny home office, and showed me a small American flag, so old and threadbare that you could see through it, framed and under glass, hanging on her wall. A tear ran through it, almost from top to bottom.

It wasn’t obvious to me what the issue was. Then she told me: she’s had that flag on the wall for years, and it was fine. It was position right across from her desk. She looked at it every day. But that morning — September 11, 2002 — while she was out in the crowd at Ground Zero, something happened to it. It had torn down the middle, even though it was sealed under glass, and nobody had come into her home.

This really did happen. I have lost contact with that friend, but I wonder what she thinks of it today. Both of us are believing Christians, and we could not help seeing it in light of the Biblical account of the tearing of the veil in the Temple when Jesus died on the Cross. That event has multiple meanings in Christian belief, and among them is a prophecy of the ultimate destruction of the Temple itself, which took place at the hands of the Romans in 70 AD. I left my friend’s apartment wondering if the tearing of the flag — assuming that there was symbolic meaning behind it — meant that there was a withdrawal of God’s favor on the US, and that 9/11 was the beginning of our end.

Granted, I have an apocalyptic mindset, and even if I didn’t, it was very easy to think in apocalyptic terms in those days, living so close to Ground Zero. On the other hand, I was also primed to think that 9/11 was going to summon up the strength of our great nation, and goad us to assert ourselves on the world stage. The United States was at that moment the sole hyperpower on the planet. We were at the peak of our strength. We would soon be going to war in the Middle East, that was clear by then. Now, finally, we would set the world to right. I was not eager to believe in portents that cast doubt on that project. I was in those days filled with patriotic righteousness — which is why the tearing of the flag was so eerie, and unwelcome to me.

That’s what I saw on 9/11/2002. Maybe it was just a fluke. Maybe that flag had come apart earlier, and my friend only noticed it on that morning. But: in light of everything that has happened since then — and that continues to happen — that torn flag seems to me like the omen I feared it was at the time.

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Vienna Postcard

This morning I left Budapest, headed to Vienna. I’m flying out of the Austrian capital early tomorrow morning (9/11 — ugh), so had to get over to the city today. I didn’t have much time at all, unfortunately, but I did have the opportunity to pay a call to the European headquarters of Alliance Defending Freedom, the religious liberty law organization, and take my friend Andy Thonhauser, ADF’s director of external relations, to lunch. ADF does terrific, indispensable work for religious liberty in the US, but did you know they also work internationally? Vienna is their base.

Andy is Austrian, and Vienna is his city. I asked him to choose a restaurant for us where we could have a proper Wiener schnitzel, and a dessert mit Schlag (with whipped cream). Andy took me to Café Landtmann, a Viennese landmark. It was Freud’s favorite cafe. Mahler drank his coffee here, as did Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig. I could have sat there all day, to be honest. I got my schnitzel for sure, and washed it down with a cold local Helles:

Vienna, Austria

You have seen above that I indeed received a slice of Apfelstrudel mit Schlag. Truly, no matter how doomy-and-gloomy I can get about the storm-and-stress of the world, nothing restores my inner harmony like good food. It’s the hobbit in me.

Speaking of Tolkien, how about this pipe I saw in the window of a shop (the one on the bottom):

It was so lovely that I almost wish I smoked so I could buy it and sit outside on a crisp autumn day puffing on it and drinking whisky. I didn’t notice until I saw the photo, but this pipe was designed with Tolkien in mind. There’s a whole line of LOTR-inspired pipes from Vauen, including this model. Any pipe smokers in this blog’s readership? Would it be difficult to smoke a pipe with such a long stem?

Oh, I forgot to mention that at the cafe, I met Andy’s boss Mike Farris, the CEO of ADF and a longtime hero to the homeschooling movement, and Kristen Waggoner, the top ADF lawyer who successfully argued the Masterpiece Cakeshop case at SCOTUS. They happened to be in the city on ADF business, and came by the table to say hi to Andy.

After lunch, Andy took me on a stroll of Vienna’s center. We stopped by the Capuchin Crypt, the resting place of Habsburg emperors, empresses, and high-ranking family personages since 1618. It was stunning to see the elaborate funerary designs on the tombs. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Look:

Did you know that the Viennese have long been cultish about death? I did not until Andy told me during our visit to the Capuchin Crypt, when I was agog over the morbid aesthetics. Here’s an article about it. Mozart, the greatest Austrian, once wrote to his dying father, to cheer him up: “Death is the key to our true happiness.” Mozart was 31 when he wrote that!

We walked over to St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the gorgeous Gothic heart of Catholic Austria, and I marveled over the priceless architectural and artistic gifts Europe has to offer to the church worldwide. The faith is in deep trouble on this continent, but nowhere in the world can you see the depths of Christianity made visible in stone and glass and color as in Europe. If you are a Christian believer, and visit Europe with eyes and hearts open to the immensity of the beauty that bears witness to the Age of Faith, it will deepen your own awareness of how we mortal creatures are immersed in holiness. At least I have found it to be so.

Andy and I said goodbye so he could keep his appointment with the dentist. I went off to buy presents for my kids. As I meandered through the center of town, I came across two noble dogs:

And:

Eventually, I made my way back to the ADF offices to pick up my luggage — I’m so grateful to the staffers who offered to stay late so I could leave my bags there — and Ubered out to an airport hotel (my driver, Kevin, was a nice young guy who dreams of going to America to work, because he’s sick of being taxed to death, and driven nuts by Austrian bureaucracy). Now I have to figure out how I can pack my bags to get home the kids’ presents, as well as the honey, the apricot preserves, the chocolate, the books, and the DVDs that people I met along the way on these past nine days gave me. There is no greater gift than having renewed old friendships and made new ones. That, and to have been trusted by men and women who lived through some of the hardest days of the 20th century, to be a teller of their stories.

More later, when I have the time. For now, I’m going to approve comments and then go off to bed — gotta be up before daylight. I am eager to return to Vienna, when I have time to explore at length the city of Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth. Andy gave me a book that features facsimiles of Zweig’s handwritten letters. If you haven’t read Zweig’s 1940s memoir The World Of Yesterday, you’re in for a melancholy treat. And Roth’s novel of the decline and fall of the Habsburgs, The Radetzky March, is one of my all-time favorites. In fact, I wish I had brought my copy to read on the long flight home.

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Caldwell Explains Orban

For those eager to learn more about Viktor Orban, I recommend this excellent primer from Christopher Caldwell, who is one of the best informed journalists on European matters. Orban is hated by the European political and media class primarily because of the stance he took towards migrants in 2015. Caldwell writes:

No English-language newspaper reported on it at the time, nor has any cited it since, but the speech Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán made before an annual picnic for his party’s intellectual leaders in the late summer of 2015 is probably the most important by a Western statesman this century. As Orbán spoke in the village of Kötcse, by Lake Balaton, hundreds of thousands of migrants from across the Muslim world, most of them young men, were marching northwestwards out of Asia Minor, across the Balkan countries and into the heart of Europe.

Let me break away from Caldwell’s article to quote directly from Orban’s speech, a transcript of which is here. Orban said in 2015:

I think that the phenomenon I’ve just described is no more or less than identity crisis. This seems to be bad news, but it is the first good identity crisis I’ve ever seen. Earlier we have talked about identity crises among ourselves: the Christian identity crisis, or the national identity crisis. But now, Ladies and Gentlemen, we are witnessing the liberal identity crisis. Viewed from the right perspective, the whole issue of asylum and mass migration, the whole problem of economic migration is nothing more than the identity crisis of liberalism. I’ll try to broadly summarize what it consists of. People in general – not only Europeans, but definitely Europeans – want to see themselves as good; but people can define “good” in a wide variety of ways. Liberals also want to see themselves as good. They also have an idea of ​​what it means to be a good person. And liberals can only live with themselves if they see themselves as good people. However, the liberal notion of what is “good”, as I described earlier, only exists at the level of phenomena: freedom of movement, universal human rights, and so on. Now this is producing disastrous consequences. But the particular quality of liberals is that while they want to be good people, they do not want to see their levels of welfare spending and standards of living falling; and so a crisis develops. This is the truly great challenge facing liberalism today: how to see themselves as good people according to their own principles, and at the same time how to protect the standard of living which they have achieved so far.

I am convinced that it is no longer possible in Europe to both see ourselves as good in the liberal sense and to live in prosperity. I might say that the most dangerous combination known in history is to be both rich and weak. There is no combination more dangerous than this. It is only a matter of time before someone comes along, notices your weakness, and takes what you have. This will definitely happen if you are unable to defend yourself. The liberal philosophy is a result of a Europe which is weak and which also wants to protect its wealth; but if Europe is weak, it cannot protect this wealth.

There is of course also a Christian misunderstanding. Like a sixteenth-century heretic, I must be careful in my comments on this, because I do not want to run the risk of offending our Catholic brothers and sisters; that would not be right, but all the same, if I consider the truly Christian voices – the really powerful Catholic voices – from the viewpoint of economic logic they confuse two different things. For if someone gives someone else something from their personal wealth, this is not only morally right, but it will not weaken the national economy. So to give someone something from my personal wealth will not cause economic problems. But if instead of giving from my personal wealth, I want the state to give something – for it to give care, welfare, jobs and benefits, and to guarantee a certain level of prosperity – I am ruining that which is ours, and I am likewise ruining our prosperity. Because the state has to either raise taxes or make cuts elsewhere in the usual social, welfare, cultural or other budgets; and the result of this is a shrinking economy. Helping others from one’s own pocket can also benefit the economy, but if we look to the state for this, and if we want redistribution by the state – shifting funds away from the state’s productive sphere and its economic resources – there can be no other result than weaker economic performance.

Therefore those Christian demands which are currently expressed as spiritual obligations are in my opinion correct when directed at citizens, but mistaken when directed at the state. And unfortunately I do not see a recognition of this difference in most of the statements from our spiritual leaders. Yet this is an important distinction, because the liberals are seeking to make sure that financial and moral expectations placed on individuals are instead placed on the state; this would, however, crush and destroy these states. It is therefore important to distinguish between personal, individual responsibilities, and those which belong to a modern state. We need to draw this boundary, because morally we will not find our way – we will not be able to both fulfil the Christian duty to help others – while at the same time expecting our state to defend what we have.

More — this is important, because it outlines why the Christian’s moral responsibilities begin with his family, and those closest to him:

Then came the need to incorporate another word, another term alongside Christian compassion: the expression of responsibility. It should be clarified that we did not do this from a liberal point of view – we know that the liberal feels responsible for the whole world because they are a good person, everything happening in the world causes them pain, and their soul feels heavy with the burden. In opposition to this approach, how does our identity stand up? I think that the Christian identity – although there are some here who can express this with greater theological accuracy than I can – reveals to us a completely clear order of importance or priority. First of all, we are responsible for our children, then for our parents. This comes before all else. Then come those with whom we live in our village or town. Then comes our country, and then everyone else may come. Christian thinking is not reflected in the kind of politics which invokes compassion and understanding, but which does not recognize this order of priorities; it is not reflected in the kind of politics which, in the name of responsibility for the world, destroys that which we can nurture in our children, the dignified old age we can give our parents, and, when possible, the protection we can give our country and culture.

Here Orban touches the third rail of liberal politics:

The second lesson. Hungary – and now I do not want to speak for other countries, but I would like to think that most of Europe thinks as we do – must protect its ethnic and cultural composition. This needs to be explained, because in the eyes of liberals today this is the main sin. Allow me to mention a conversation I had with a talented, experienced, but not very hopeful European politician, who was no longer in frontline politics, and who asked me to explain what I meant when I said that we do not want a significant Muslim community in Hungary. I said that the meaning of this sentence was the normal, everyday one. The reply I received was that one cannot say such a thing. I asked why not. Why can we not talk about the right of every state and every nation to decide on whom they want living on their territory? In Europe, many countries have decided on this – for example the French or the British, or the Germans with regard to the Turks. I think they had the right to make this decision. We have a duty to look at where this has taken them. We cannot even say whether the results are good or bad. We only have the right to say that this is something which we do not want – but we do have the right to say this. And we can say that we like Hungary just as it is. It is colourful and diverse enough.

I am convinced that Hungary has the right – and every nation has the right – to say that it does not want its country to change. One can argue whether or not this is the correct position; on whether or not this is fair; on whether or not this is humane. One can argue about many things. But we should not argue about whether a community has the right to decide if it wants to change its ethnic and cultural composition in an artificial way and at an accelerated pace. And if Hungarians say that they do not want this, no one can force them to do so. In the end – and keep this in your sights – in the very end this will be the battle which we must win. The question is whether there will be enough of us in Europe who say that every country has the right to change its ethnic and cultural composition as it likes, and no country or the Union has the right to force others to do this. We are now in a good position, and we must defend this position. In the end this is what will decide this entire battle. It is therefore very important who comes in. In the modern spirit of the age, if someone has come in and if you have let them in, from that point on what they represent is seen as a value. You will have to relate to the new situation, you will have to live with it and establish a form of coexistence, and you must also respect it and accept life alongside it.

And this part:

Finally, the fourth thing, which I think follows on from all this. Do not misunderstand me when I put it like this: everyday patriotism. This is not something of an intellectual nature, but a vital instinct, a daily routine: going into a shop and buying Hungarian products; when I want to employ someone, employing a Hungarian. It will not work if we cannot make this an everyday instinct, and if it simply remains a spiritual need for our national-minded intellectuals on the right. It will not work without you, of course, because for something to become everyday, it must be formulated to a high degree, something which can be expressed, and which will give us, its representatives, dignity, strength and self-confidence. But then it must be implemented on a daily basis, as I said: in workplaces, in shops, in conversations, and so on. I do not know in how many areas we have retreated; I do not know where, instead of healthy patriotism, some unrestrained, liberal, confused babble has taken over, and where we ourselves are unable to say why we make the decisions we do, rather than right, patriotic, national everyday ones.

The bad news is that when we do this, it must be characterized by the following words: modern, cool, trendy, sexy, upmarket. If we also try to cultivate everyday patriotism in language to the same level as that we use when talking to each other here, then the correct etiquette would be for us to all make the sign of the cross and simply look forward to the afterlife. But this is about the young generation. Our generation is fine the way we are, thank you very much, we have survived; but the situation is different for those coming along after us. If we cannot bridge the communication, cultural and other gaps, and if we cannot make everyday nationalism attractive to young people, rather than something chaotic, smelling of bad breath and the radical right, which sends shivers down people’s spines and puts them in a bad mood, if we cannot make it different from this with fresh and youthful language, then this is a battle we will not win. This is the biggest task. I cannot say exactly who are able to do this, because if I could, we would have already done it over the past few years; but the truth is that in this regard we have achieved the least success. We do not speak this language, this culture as we should, and those coming after us are somehow not strong enough or – heaven knows why – not effective enough. In this world, patriotic, nation-based, everyday life instincts, life advice and thoughts – together with the public opinions based on them – are not present in the debate. But we cannot avoid this battlefield, and if we do not rally to the call, it will be decided on the battlefield anyway.

Read the entire Orban speech here. It’s really important.

Now, back to the Caldwell essay. Caldwell says that Europe will either be ruled by Angela Merkel’s vision, or Viktor Orban’s.

As I said in yesterday’s post, the unexpected meeting my small group had with Orban on Friday was the first time I had ever heard him speak in English, or seen how he operates in person. I don’t follow Hungarian politics, but I know enough about European politics in general, and about how totally unreliable Anglo-American news media are on the subject, to assume that Viktor Orban had been unfairly presented by that media. The Anglo-American press portrays him like the Trump of the Magyars: brutal, aggressive, prejudiced, and so forth. I figured this was a lie, but I was not prepared for how much of a lie it is.

What I observed for 90 minutes was an extraordinary performance by a visionary politician who possesses raw intelligence and a palpable willingness to grapple with ideas, and their political implications, without diplomatic politesse. Caldwell writes:

He is blessed with almost every political gift—brave, shrewd with his enemies and trustworthy with his friends, detail-oriented, hilarious. …

His secret weapon, though, is his intellectual curiosity. As Irving Kristol did when he edited the Public Interest in the 1980s, Orbán urges his aides to take one day a week off to devote to their reading and writing. He does so himself, clearing his Thursdays when he can. Raised poor in a small town west of Budapest, preoccupied early by politics, he has had to acquire much of his education on the fly, as a busy adult. His ideas are powerful, raw, and unsettled. Orbán has changed his mind about a lot of things—unregulated free markets above all. Out of a regime of deep reading and disputation come his larger theories about the direction of Western civilization, and many people probably find voting for Orbán satisfying in the way that reading Jared Diamond or Yuval Noah Hariri is satisfying. Orbán believes that Western countries are in decline, and that they are in decline because of “liberalism,” which in his political vocabulary is a slur. He uses the word to describe the contemporary process of creating neutral social structures and a level playing field, usually in the name of rights.

Caldwell summarizes Orban’s problem with normative procedural liberalism like this:

This project of creating neutral institutions has two problems. First, it is destructive, because the bonds of affection out of which communities are built are—by definition—non-neutral. Second, it is a lie, because someone must administer this project, and administration, though advertised as neutral, rarely is. Some must administer over others.

Indeed, Orban told the small group of visitors of which I was a part that his core conflict with Europe’s liberal establishment is that they think it is a good thing for Europeans to become part of a godless, borderless, rootless mass — and he does not.

He might have added that when you put it that way (“liberals want Europe to become godless, borderless, and rootless”), it offends liberals, many of whom will deny it in good faith (that is, uncynically). Orban would reply that it doesn’t matter what their intentions are; this is the unavoidable effect of contemporary liberalism.

In his essay, Caldwell helpfully provides the economic back story for why Orban became so popular. First, Caldwell explains that the years 2002-10 saw the young Communist elites whose careers had been derailed by 1989 come to power in a new guise, led by Socialist multimillionaire Ferenc Gyurcsány . They wrecked the economy. Caldwell:

In 2006, Gyurcsány was captured on tape at a party congress explaining that “we lied, morning, noon and night” to stay in power. Protests arose. Police repressed them violently. Orbán’s detractors rarely mention any of this when they complain about the lack of an alternative to him. For most Hungarians, 2006 is the alternative.

Orban returned to power in 2010, and gained the trust and gratitude of ordinary Hungarians when he refused to accept the EU’s austerity plan, and kept banks from foreclosing on the houses of Hungarians who couldn’t pay off their loans. Orban’s Fidesz Party passed radical economic reforms, and began to buy back Hungarian industries that had earlier been sold to foreign investors at fire sale postcommunist prices. As one Hungarian explained to me, Orban did this to strengthen Hungary’s control of its own economic destiny.

Caldwell discusses in detail various constitutional controversies around Orban, and his party’s battles with the media. This is an interesting graf:

The opposition now turned to denying the legitimacy of the constitution altogether. Whenever thwarted in local political give-and-take, it summoned imperial help from outside the constitutional system: from the European Union and (when Barack Obama was in office) the United States. Last year the Dutch Green-Left party member Judith Sargentini submitted a motion to the E.U. Parliament alleging corruption and the violation of the rights of minorities and migrants. The Parliament condemned him for “a serious breach by Hungary of the values on which the Union is founded.” Orbán saw it differently: There was no clash of values, only of classes. He had kept Hungary from being bullied by bankers, bureaucrats, and other powerful rule-making foreigners. This naturally upset the powerful rule-making foreigners and their allies within Hungary.

I interviewed a pro-Orban intellectual this week in Budapest. He spoke about Hungarian politics in the language of culture war, though for him — and, clearly, for Orban — the culture war is much broader than the bounds we Americans place on the concept. The Orbanistas see Hungary as a little nation whose very existence as a distinct people is at stake. The Hungarian state was dismembered after World War I, and after World War II, the nation was dominated by a foreign power (the USSR) and a totalitarian ideology that attempted to destroy Hungarian national consciousness in the name of communist universalism.

So yeah, they’re sensitive. A Hungarian man I interviewed on Saturday afternoon recalled the communist propaganda films they were subject to in his 1960s youth. He said that they were all designed to make viewers hate Hungarian history, religion, and any source of identity outside of communism. Reading the Caldwell piece, I thought about this man’s words, and how Euroliberalism — which entails globalism, multiculturalism, and rigid secularism — is trying to accomplish the same thing, though not at the end of a Soviet bayonet. We in the West can’t see this clearly, because we think our own norms are neutral. The Hungarians don’t see it that way at all. For them, or at least for those who follow Viktor Orban, they are in a fight for their national life.

More Caldwell:

Still, since there would not be enough imported Hungarians to man the Hungarian economy, it seemed Hungary would need to do what western European countries had done: open the doors to mass immigration from the Arab world and Africa.

On this, Orbán would not budge. As he saw it, the combination of Anglophone Hungarian businessmen and waves of manual laborers disinclined to learn the beautiful, impossible Magyar language would mean the end of Hungary. Migration from the south, he believed, whether orderly or disorderly, would produce a special kind of country, of the sort that did not exist in western Europe until the most recent decades but which had been the norm in Hungary’s Balkan neighborhood until quite recently—not just in the Habsburg and Romanov empires but also in 20th-century Yugoslavia. Such countries, he told a group of Christian intellectuals in 2017, run the risk of having their culture wiped out:

They will become countries with mixed populations, with a Christian element and a non-Christian element which has a strong religious identity. And if I judge the laws of biology and mathematics correctly, the ratio between these two elements will continuously shift away from Christianity and towards the non-Christian religious communities…. [H]ow this will end is mathematically foreseeable.

Here’s a strong point:

Liberals in the immigrant-sated western E.U. countries found it bizarre that Hungary (like Poland) opposed immigration despite having very few immigrants by 21st-century measures. Orbán countered that it was perhaps only in low-immigration countries that one any longer had the freedom to oppose immigration. When he spoke with the leaders of western European countries where the migrant population exceeded 10%, they often confided that they were too fearful of rousing inter-ethnic hatred, or losing votes, to broach the subject. “If you’ve had such conversations,” he explained to a roomful of mocking journalists this winter, “you will have heard that they no longer talk about whether or not there should be migration. That is no longer a question for them: that ship has sailed.”

As I’m writing this, I see that my train is about to pull into Vienna’s main station, so I’ll need to wrap up. Caldwell talks about the George Soros controversy. Orban famously demonizes Soros, the megabillionaire investor and philanthropist who devotes his fortune to spreading liberalism internationally. Soros, a Hungarian-born Jewish refugee from Nazism, was in a position to spend a lot of money to dominate Hungary’s intellectual life — and was doing it. More Caldwell:

Soros personified opposition to the nationalist outlook Orbán had wished for in his 2015 Kötcse speech. In the wake of Merkel’s invitation to migrants in 2015 Soros published a plan to bring a million refugees a year to Europe and distribute them rapidly among neighboring countries for settlement. The plan would, Soros wrote, “mobilize the private sector,” but only to run the project, not to pay for it. The funding of it would be done at taxpayer expense, through a €20 billion E.U. bond issue. Orbán published a six-point plan of his own, focused on keeping migrants out. Soros complained that it “subordinates the human rights of asylum-seekers and migrants to the security of borders.” That description was exactly accurate —provided one understands human rights as global philanthropists, political activists, and the United Nations have defined it in recent decades. But there is a competing understanding of human rights in the old law of nations, which makes any right to immigrate dependent on the consent of the receiving nation.

More:

Orbán was very worried about the role of foreign money in his country’s politics. Some have mocked him for this. But obviously, when the most powerful country on earth has just brought its democracy to a standstill for two years in order to investigate $100,000 worth of internet ads bought by a variety of Russians, it is understandable that the leader of a small country might fear the activism of a political foe whose combined personal fortune ($8 billion) and institutional endowment ($19 billion) exceed a sixth of the country’s GDP ($156 billion), especially since international philanthropy is (through the U.S. tax code) effectively subsidized by the American government. An early version of the Stop Soros law proposed taxing foreign philanthropies.

Caldwell points out that the anti-Soros campaign arguably did traffick in anti-Semitic rhetoric, even though there was a strong element of truth in them:

Archetypally, the ads did resemble anti-Semitic campaigns of yore. They showed Soros as a puppet-master, a power behind the scenes. Of course Soros was a power behind the scenes. But Hungary was a country where 565,000 Jews—more than half the Jewish population—had been murdered after the Nazi invasion in May 1944, and a bit more circumspection was expected from its politicians.

Fair enough. Still, that completely justifiable circumspection should in no way justify averting one’s eyes from the fact that Soros really is using his considerable fortune to liberalize Europe, and to dilute European peoples. From Douglas Murray’s great book The Strange Death Of Europe:

In October 2015 the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, criticised Soros publicly as one of a circle of activists who “support anything that weakens nation states.” Soros responded publicly to confirm that the numerous groups he was funding were indeed working for the ends described by Orban. In an email to Bloomberg, Soros said that it was his foundation which was seeking to “uphold European values,” while he accused Orban of trying to “undermine those values.” Soros went on to say of Orban: “His plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle. Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.” The dialogues ceased before anyone could ask Soros how long those European values might last once Europe could be walked into by people from all over the world.

In 2016, I wrote about how Soros’s Open Society Foundation teamed with the US Agency For International Development to translate Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals into the Macedonian language, and distribute copies there to undermine the conservative government and the conservative values of that society. Again, to many Westerners, this kind of thing looks like value-neutral liberalism. But to these small, weak, relatively poor countries, they’re fighting for their national existence against cultural imperialists.

Read the whole thing. Yes, Viktor Orban — democratically elected, and re-elected — is a self-described illiberal democrat. When you take stock of what he and his country are up against, it’s much easier to understand him, and why he does the things he does.

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Viktor Orban Among The Christians

I arrived in Budapest on Friday to deliver a speech at a conference for Christian communicators from around the world. At the last minute, conference organizers alerted some of us that Prime Minister Viktor Orban would like to meet with us privately at the end of the event. We boarded a bus and headed to Buda Castle, where he received us in a salon. I assumed it would be a quick meet-and-greet. Hardly! He spoke with us for about 90 minutes, and answered our questions frankly. Here’s a shot of the group, whose number included John O’Sullivan and Philip Blond, two names familiar to Anglo-American conservatives:

Mind you, I think I John O’Sullivan and I were the only professional journalists in the room, so this was not a press conference. I did not know that we would be offered to opportunity to speak to the PM beyond saying hello, much less that we would be able to ask questions. Therefore, I didn’t prepare for an interview, and in any case I only had the chance to put a single question.

I tell you this so you readers don’t ask me why I didn’t challenge Orban on this or that policy of his government. I am perfectly aware that he is a controversial figure who has done things and pursued policy goals that are highly controversial for a number of reasons. However, this was a completely unexpected opportunity to be in the presence of one of the most extraordinary world leaders of our time, and to get a sense of his mind.

If the only thing you know about Viktor Orban is from Western media accounts, you would think that he was nothing but some kind of mafia thug. The Viktor Orban you encounter in person is very, very different from the Viktor Orban shown to Americans by our media. In Orban — who speaks good English — was energetic, fiercely intelligent, funny, self-deprecating, realistic, and at times almost pugilistic in talking about defending Hungary and her interests. Orban is what Trump’s biggest fans wish he was (but isn’t), and what Trump’s enemies think him to be (but isn’t). If Donald Trump had the smarts and skills of Viktor Orban, the political situation in the US would be much, much different — for better or for worse, depending on your point of view.

Orban begin our session with extended remarks about Hungarian and European politics, and the role of his Fidesz Party in them. He said that when he was elected in 2010, he had one mission: to save Hungary from economic ruin. By the time Orban’s 2014 re-election bid rolled around, the economy was stable, and he described the mission of his second terms as “to say what I think.”

“I realized in 2014 that I was the only free man among the prime ministers of Europe,” he said, explaining that by “free,” he meant that he had a strong, united parliamentary majority behind him. He added, “In Western political life now, you can’t say what you think.”

When the migration crisis hit Europe in 2015, Orban famously shut Hungary’s borders to Middle Easterners. Orban said that Hungary’s was the only government in Europe to respond to the crisis in its own interests, and in the interests of Christianity in Europe. With a population of only 10 million, and as a country where Christianity, as elsewhere on the continent, is fragile, the Hungarians concluded that allowing large numbers of Muslims to take up residence here would mean the death knell of Christianity in time.

This scandalized the European political class. Orban doesn’t care. He told our group that he understands that he is dealing with elites who believe that being a post-Christian, post-national civilization is a great and glorious thing. Orban rejects this. He said the main political question in the West today is how fractious pluralities can live together peaceably. He said, “Here the most important question is how not to have the same questions as them.”

Orban pointed out that the UK and France were once colonial powers in the Middle East. He added, “But Central Europe was colonized by the Middle East. That’s a fact.” He’s talking about the Ottoman occupation of Hungary, from 1541 to 1699. Orban told our group that the room we were sitting was part of a Church building that had been turned into a mosque during the occupation.

Explaining his decision to shut the borders to Muslim refugees, Orban said what tipped the scales was consulting the Christian bishops of the Middle East. Orban: “What did they say? ‘Don’t let them in. Stop them.'”

Middle Eastern Christians, said Orban, “can tell you what is the [ultimate] end of a society you have to share with Muslims.”

Sitting at the table listening to the prime minister was Nicodemus, the Syriac Orthodox archbishop of Mosul, whose Christian community, which predates Islam by several centuries, was savagely persecuted by ISIS. Archbishop Nicodemus spoke up, thanking Orban for what Hungary has done for persecuted Christians. Nicodemus said that living with Muslims has taught Iraqi Christians that they can expect no mercy. “Those people, if you give them your small finger, they will want your body,” he said.

“The problem is that Western countries don’t accept our experience,” the prelate continued. “Those people [Muslims] pushed us to be a minority in our own land and then refugees in our own land.”

Under the Orban government, Hungary frequently extends a helping hand to persecuted Christians.The archbishop exhorted Orban to stay the course in defense of Christians. For 16 years, he said, Iraqi Christians begged Western leaders to help them. Addressing Orban directly, Nicodemus said, “Nobody understands our pain like you.”

Philip Blond, the British political economist, suggested to the prime minister that he has a mission to re-Christianize Europe. Orban, who is 56 and part of the country’s Calvinist minority, said that his generation’s mission was to defeat Communism. Religious rebirth is a task for Millennials, he said.

According to 2017 Pew research, though 59 percent of Hungarian adults say they believe in God, only 16 percent pray daily. As Hungary-based writer Will Collins wrote in TAC earlier this year, only 12 percent of Hungarians go to church — a number that is no doubt much smaller among Hungarians under 40. In my on the record interviews and background conversations with Hungarian Christians these past few days, there is an acute sense that the Christian faith is fast fading among the young, who, like their co-generationalists across the former Soviet bloc, are far more drawn to Western materialism.

Orban spoke frankly about the post-communist religious state of his country. “It’s still not a healed society,” he said. “It’s still not in good shape.”

I asked the prime minister if he saw evidence of a “soft totalitarianism” emerging in the West today, and if so, what are the main lessons that those who resisted communism have to tell us about identifying and resisting it.

He said that the Soviets and their servants in Central Europe tried to create a new kind of man: homo Sovieticus. To do this, they had to destroy the two sources of identity here: a sense of nationhood, and the Christian religion. In order to survive, said Orban, “we have to strengthen our national identity and our Christian identity. That’s the story.”

Western peoples have decided to create a post-Christian, post-national, multicultural society. Peoples in Central Europe do not.  For Orban, re-establishing a sense of national identity and the Christian faith are the same project. It’s an attempt to reverse the damage done by Communism. The danger, obviously, is that Christianity becomes emptied of its spiritual and moral content, and is filled with nationalism. On the other hand, if a pro-Christian politician like Orban can at least keep the public square open and favorable to the ancestral religious beliefs of the nation, religious leaders can step into the space politics creates, and do their work of recovery.

Orban said that he wants Westerners and others who share these values to come to the Hungarian capital, where they will be free to speak their minds, and establish a base. “I’m trying to create a free place in Budapest,” he said. “Please consider Budapest as a kind of intellectual home.”

Last week, Orban’s government played host to a demography summit here. Reporting on it, the Guardian, as usual, called Orban a politician of the “far right.” Orban is certainly nationalist and populist (and popular here), but smearing him as some kind of right-wing extremist only demonstrates how cut off the liberal Western media are from common sense. One can certainly take issue with Orban’s illiberal methods of pursuing his policy goals — and the prime minister does not deny that he is an illiberal democrat — but the man understands his small country to be in a fight for national survival against globalist, anti-Christian multiculturalism coming from Brussels and other Western capitals. How, exactly, is he wrong?

Put in terms of contemporary American conservative politics, it seems to me that Viktor Orban’s party and movement is what you would see if Sohrab Ahmari’s side of the Ahmari-French debate actually won a mandate to govern. Ahmari’s integralism — as distinct from French’s classical liberalism — is a very hard sell in the United States, which is a truly pluralistic nation. Hungary, however, is far more culturally and ethnically homogeneous. As Orban told us, one of his goals is to make sure that the kinds of questions that are breaking multicultural Western polities never arise here. Again: is he wrong to want to protect Hungary from the disintegration that comes with Western-style liberal identity politics? Hungary has a million problems, but Parisian-style banlieues filled with angry and unassimilable Muslim migrants, vicious institutional combat around so-called “white privilege,” and endless fights in locker rooms and libraries over gender ideology are not among them.

 

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Maria Wittner Fears Nothing

I spent part of this afternoon sitting with Maria Wittner, a hero of Hungary’s failed 1956 Revolution against Communism. I interviewed her for my book project on how to resist the coming soft totalitarianism. Like every other person I’ve interviewed who lived through “hard totalitarianism” (that is to say, Communism), Mrs. Wittner believes that we are well on our way to a new and very different version of the same.

“Back then, you knew where your place was, and where the enemy’s place was,” she said, of the Communist years. “Those two were opposing each other. The present situation is a bit like when a young child has Play-doh. Originally there are distinct colors, but if the child keeps mixing them together, it all becomes one big brown lump.”

This is a familiar refrain from my interviews with former dissidents: that it’s much more difficult today to discern the enemy lines. This was not a problem for 19-year-old Maria Wittner when the anti-Soviet rebellion broke out in Budapest in 1956 (read her history here). She took up arms against the Communists.

She carried shrapnel lodged in her back for nearly 25 years. She spent 11 years in prison for her role in the Revolution.

She recalled jail thus:

Every single day we could hear the people being brought for execution. There was an execution either every day or every other day, by hanging. The people who were being brought to the execution, each one said their name aloud, and left some sort of message in their final words. Some sang the national anthem, others praised their country, there were people saying ‘avenge me’. There were days when several people were hanged, even seven a day. My friend Catherine was also sentenced to death. We spent our last night together in the cell. We said our goodbyes in the morning. The guards took her. The last sight I saw of her was that she straightened herself up, and went with her back ramrod straight. The door closed, and then I was left alone. I started to bang on the door, shouting, “Bring her back!” even though I knew perfectly well that it wouldn’t matter. Then I fainted. When I came to my senses, I swore to myself that I will never be silent about what I have seen, if I have the opportunity to bear witness.

Maria went on.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about fear, as such. What is fear? Someone who is afraid is going to be made to do the most evil things. If someone is not afraid to say no, if your soul is free, there is nothing they can do to you”

She looks at me hard, with piercing blue-gray eyes.

“In the end, those who are afraid always end up worse than the courageous.”

When you see politically correct bullshit, Maria Wittner, who went to death row in a communist prison because she wasn’t going to tolerate their lies, believes you should stand up and speak out. She put her finger in my face today to say so. She’s right. What a tough, tough lady.

This city has more than a few women like this. God, I love it.

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Saturday In Budapest

Mrs. Erzsèbet Kelecsènyi and Anna Salyi, in Mrs. K’s grand old Budapest apartment

Isn’t that a pretty image? It’s a shot of Mrs. Erzsèbet Kelecsènyi, a retired Budapest lawyer, speaking to my friend and interpreter Anna Salyi, in the living room of Mrs. Kelecsènyi’s grand old apartment near the city center. It’s a pretty magical place, I think; I kept thinking of the room — those ceilings must be 20 feet! — decorated for Christmas and filled with her grandchildren. I interviewed her today for my book about communism.

Here’s a portrait of Mrs. K., who was so welcoming to us:

She was the first interview of the Hungary part of my trip — if you don’t count the question I got to ask Viktor Orban in a Friday afternoon meeting at Buda Castle, but that’s a forthcoming post. The interview was arranged by Anna, who is coordinating them and translating for me. She and I met up at Central Cafe for lunch before heading over to Mrs. K’s. Here’s Anna, whose hard work for my project I especially appreciate because she’s pregnant with her and her husband Ormos’s second child, and it can’t be easy taking a visiting writer around Budapest:

If you must know, I had the chicken paprikash and a crisp Hungarian Riesling:

Alas, they didn’t have the full menu for lunch, just a short one. Too bad, because I would have eaten the pooyah out of the duck liver mille feuille. For dessert, Self ate the flodni, a traditional Jewish Budapest cake made from layers of apple, walnut, poppy seeds, and plum, separated by sweet pastry. It tasted like autumn:

What a great city this is! This evening I interviewed Anna’s parents, Tomas and Judit, both of whose fathers were political prisoners under Communism. It’s hard to reconcile the beauty and grace of these Budapest meals and domestic interiors with the hideous suffering Communists inflicted on the people of this country.

Judit’s father, for example, was diagnosed as insane by Communist physicians, because under the principles of Soviet psychiatry, political dissidents were by definition crazy. What had he done? In 1968, after visiting northern Romania and witnessing how horribly oppressed the ethnic Hungarians there were under the Ceausescu regime, Judit’s father tore down an image of the Romanian dictator on display in Budapest, and stomped it. For that, he was thrown into prison and administered 50 electroshocks over the course of his imprisonment. This left him mentally incapacitated, and permanently disabled. It destroyed his life.

Judit, who teaches at a local Catholic university, told me:

It has been a constant struggle for me to make people acknowledge what happened to my father. People don’t want to listen. They don’t want to know about that. Whether you live under oppression or not, it’s an ongoing and constant struggle for truth. Most people, or at least the average person, regards courage and high moral standards as a glitch, or a defect, or as superfluous. It has always been the privilege of the few to live by these values.

She added that she always tells her father’s story to her students at the university, because she considers it a sacred responsibility to tell the young what Communism meant. She had this message for my readers:  Tell these stories. 

More interviews tomorrow.

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What Pope Francis Unveils

The always-interesting Catholic writer Arturo Vasquez explores the meaning of Pope Francis’s “apocalypse.” No, he’s not talking about the End of the World. He’s talking about “apocalypse” in the sense of “unveiling.” He begins his analysis with an observation once made by Cardinal Ratzinger (later, Benedict XVI): that the Second Vatican Council was the French Revolution of the Catholic Church. Vasquez runs with it, and eventually arrives at this point:

The shock that conservatives have at Pope Francis, akin to the shock of the “forces of order” at 1848, is the nightmarish inverted mirror of the idea of the Papacy that Bonapartist John Paul II created: “L’Eglise c’est moi” (I am the the Church.) As in the game of chess, the conservative was always comforted that no matter how many pieces fell, as long as the king was still on the board, the game was not lost, indeed, they were winning. However, once the “other side” is in endgame against the king, a sense of foreboding finally emerges. There are those in the Church (the radical traditionalists, perhaps) who saw all of this ten moves ago. You cannot keep the Papacy clean when the rest of the Church has fallen into revolutionary chaos.

You cannot have a “Benedict XVI” Papacy in a “Pope Francis” rest of the church. That contradiction was bound to manifest itself eventually. That is the real “unveiling” of the Franciscan papacy: the actual church in its vast majority was closer to Pope Francis than it ever was to Pope Benedict XVI or even John Paul II. Pope Francis is the church you get in the confessional when the confessor doesn’t want to “hurt anyone’s feelings”. Pope Francis is the church where the one priest has six Masses on Sundays with the Ladies’ Altar Society constantly plotting against him due to a passing comment about a flower arrangement made three years ago. Pope Francis is the church of overflowing crowds of faithful at Christmas and Easter who disappear the next Sunday not to be seen again for months. And so on…

In other words, Francis is what you get when the actual church is Moralistic Therapeutic Deist. Vasquez’s insight makes a lot of sense to me in my own experiences. I mostly read my way into Catholicism in the early 1990s, and was therefore truly shocked to discover that the church of John Paul II, so to speak, was hard to find outside of books and my favorite religious magazines. Real parish life was way more like what we see today in Pope Francis. Understand I’m not making a theological statement here — I recognize that it’s the same church — but rather a statement about the phenomenon of Catholic churchgoing in contemporary culture.

I wonder, though, if there has ever been a time when the Pope was much like the rest of the Catholic Church, one way or the other. Vasquez goes on:

To be Catholic in our day is to have selective amnesia: What part of Tradition are you willing to forget? You can be consistent and jettison the whole thing. You can be slightly less consistent and believe that Thomas A Kempis and St. Therese also came to their views of the world singing bad Top 40 from 1972 knock-off songs in church every Sunday. You can be a little less consistent and think that maybe a little Latin is a good idea, and go even further and believe that the Sacred Liturgy was divinely handed to the Pope in 1962 only to be destroyed two years later. Or you can just descend into full consistent madness and believe the real Pope was locked in a basement at some point and replaced with an impostor. Spoiler alert: none of these is a good look.

Read it all. 

I used to read Vasquez years ago, but lost touch with his stuff. I can’t remember whether he stopped blogging, or I drifted away. But I’m glad to have discovered him again. Here he is writing last month about the churchgoing habits of the poor.

He says there’s a difference, especially in the First World, between “concern for the poor” and the “religion of the poor.” In Mexican-American barrios, says Vasquez, when poor people either get religion or return to religion, they usually don’t go, or go back to, Catholic churches; they go to storefront Protestant churches, or megachurches, or just pick up the Bible and start reading. More:

A lot of this is colored by my own personal experience, and some will protest of their own experience or that of loved ones. But demographics don’t lie. Numbers don’t lie. Half of Guatemala didn’t become evangelical Protestant because of deep dives by the masses into Reformation theology and the five solas. It became almost majority Protestant because Catholicism ceased being a “rock bottom” religion and became either a faith of the rich, a faith of social conscience (that doesn’t seem to solve anything), or a rote faith that one practices mindlessly.

Most of the Catholic conversion I have encountered on social media and the Internet over the past 20 years has been either very cerebral or zealously aesthetic. I count my own conversions as being of this nature. Seldom do I see people turning to Catholic Jesus in prison or because their wife left them or because they needed to kick their dope habit. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the Catholic intellectual and aesthetic convert, but they seem way more put together than many of the people I have known who became religious after a rough patch in their life. That’s why I am very pessimistic about the future of Catholicism in all of its forms in the First World. Even Pope Francis and his defenders seem to obsess about the poor and the outcasts when the poor and the outcasts are really obsessing about the megachurch pastor who might be one part prosperity gospel, one part self-help.

Is it possible that the Church of the Poor can obsess too much about being poor (in an act of “virtue signaling”) and not actually be something the poor want to be part of? Once you hit rock bottom, you don’t want to dwell about the societal and theological reasons you are there. You just want to climb out.

That goes a long way in describing how God pulled me out of my spiritual ruin as a Catholic, through Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy in the West is far more of a rarefied draw than Catholicism — I mean, something that attracts people who are cerebral and/or aesthetic. It’s not always that way — I know working-class folks who are Orthodox converts — but in the West, most of the converts I know are more or less middle class people who are unusually interested in theology. There’s nothing wrong with that. If it hadn’t been for the Orthodox church when I crashed and burned in Catholicism, I don’t know what would have happened to me. I’m not saying that to put down Protestantism, please understand; it’s only that intellectually and aesthetically, Protestantism left me cold.

I have discovered that Orthodoxy offers intellectual profundity and aesthetic beauty without parallel, but insists that there is only one way to know God: through personal prayer and repentance. You can master all the theological content in the world, but if you don’t pray, fast, and actively repent, it’s in vain. I have found that Orthodox Christianity is like learning how to play a musical instrument: you can read books to help you more deeply understand musical technique, musical history, and so forth, but there is no substitute for practice. This, as it turns out, is exactly what I needed to start the healing from the deleterious spiritual effects of my intellectual pride.

There are still some Catholics who want to take issue on an intellectual level with why I left Catholicism. I don’t deny that they have a legitimate case, but I can’t seem to convince them that for me in 2005, after three years of being jackhammered by scandal, I was at rock bottom as a Catholic, and didn’t want to dwell on the theological reasons why I ought to have stayed. I just wanted to climb out. Orthodox spirituality gave me a lifeline.

That whole experience gave me a different outlook on faith. It shattered the intellectual arrogance that had been far too much a part of my Catholic faith — a fault that belongs entirely to me, not to the Catholic Church. I’m serious: it was my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault. It was a fault of a man who had come to believe in God primarily as an intellectual and aesthetic adventure. I had never really suffered a dark night of the soul until confronted the abuse scandal. All those beautiful theories didn’t help me when I had fallen into a deep well and broken both of my legs, spiritually speaking. I learned through a lot of pain the limits of intellection in matters of the soul.

It’s why I don’t want to argue with people about why they ought to be Orthodox, or anything else. It’s not that I disbelieve that these theological reasons are important. They are important. It’s not that I devalue apologetics as a practice; thank God for effective apologists. It’s partly that I know how weak I am, and how I’ve blown any credibility I have for making intellectual arguments about faith. But mostly it’s just that I don’t care anymore. If you want to know how I hit rock bottom and God put me back together through praying and worshiping as an Orthodox Christian, I’m happy to tell you. If you want to know why I can’t imagine being anything else, I’m happy to tell you. Seriously, I am — and I do, though I don’t write about it in this space, because that’s not what this blog is for.

I told some Catholics in Slovakia this week that I hope I’m not a false ecumenist, but that I see my role as trying to build up Christians who are struggling to live faithfully within the Great Tradition (or, within C.S. Lewis’s “mere Christianity”) in a post-Christian world. Life is long and life is hard. I know Christians in every one of the traditions who are suffering, some of them greatly, under the weight of their particular crosses. I am too.

Reading Dante’s Purgatorio helped me understand how I should go about getting on with life after rock bottom. The pilgrims struggling up the mountain are weary and burdened, but they’re all so grateful to have been given God’s mercy, and so willing to help each other move forward. Nobody on the path up the mountain of Purgatory (which in the poem symbolizes the Christian journey in the mortal life) wants to stop and debate theology. They just want to talk about the love and mercy of God, and to help each other in their repentance.

Anyway, thank you, Arturo Vasquez, for making me think tonight. Here’s a link to Arturo’s page. His most recent post is about the meaning of the Eucharistic “Real Presence” in the Catholic faith, and the crisis of belief in it. I could write a whole post on it, but you just go read the original. I think what he says in his final paragraph is true. What an interesting and thoughtful writer on religion he is. I wrote about him here back in 2015, and about his belief that Christianity has to refuse modern rationalization, and become more “pagan,” if it wants to survive. First World Catholicism, he says, has become “politicized deism with props.” The man knows how to turn a phrase.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

I am always interested in anything you bring up around Catholic conversion, because I explored the topic from an educational angle in my master’s thesis, which I am currently trying to publish. And I am currently working on a Ph.D, planning to continue some of that research at a deeper level. Needless, to say I have spent a lot of time studying this topic from an academic perspective.

It is interesting that Vasquez states that most conversions he has encountered “are very cerebral or zealously aesthetic”, your apparent agreement with that assessment.

It seems that way, because of their out-sized voice, but it is in fact very wrong. The USCCB did some research some years back on the topic, and based on their study (which is by a long shot the best data available), the overwhelming majority of converts do so because they are married or engaged to a Catholic and most of them primarily come at it for mostly marital harmony reasons.

This ‘banality’ has actually an upside and a downside which I will get to. But the most important point I want to get at is that, understanding this context paints a very different picture from contrasting the two ends of the spectrum, which Vasquez does:intellectuals vs the ‘turn my life around’ crowd. Both sides of that extreme constitute a small, but very vocal type of conversion. And the reality in most converts is there might be a mix of little, a lot, or none of both. It’s really a false dichotomy. It doesn’t help clarity the actual situation any more that dividing Americans into “Trump fanatics” and “Bernie Sanders socialists” would paint a very good picture of US politics.

The fact is most people who convert are mostly catalyzed by their spousal relationship. They enter the church without particularly grandiose expectations or opinions, and for the most part don’t talk much about their conversion. I have met quite a few devout Catholic converts, who I otherwise never would have known it without prodding (including my own wife). These people internalized it, and moved forward with varying degrees of gusto.

So let’s talk about the good and the bad of that. Bad first: Most of those people who convert, (again, via the USCCB study IIRC), don’t really ever darken the door of a Catholic Church again after a few weeks. The ordinary circumstance of their conversion, leads not to a quiet, ordinary life of faith, but a checkbox to be moved on from. And why? Maybe they never cared, sure. But faith is a gift from God, and there’s no reason God wouldn’t have planted in them a seed of faith. The real question is were those seeds watered? The Catholic Church had them as a captive audience for a year or more during RCIA in addition to their attendance at Mass. By day I am actually a sales trainer, and this is what you call a hot lead! More than that even, these are people who actively inquired and agreed to go through the entire buying process.

But here’s the good. That’s actually easier to fix than the if it were the other way. Here is someone who throws money on the table and says feed me. They’re not saying, “Prove to me that you are the greatest chef in the world”. Just “feed me”. If good converts only came out of the stocks of “turned my life arounders” and “intellectual rigorists”, who had to be dramatically won over, wow what a small chance we would have.

I understand your shock at discovering what life in the pews was like after your intellectual conversion, but most people don’t come in with that expectation.They have a modest openness to hearing the power of a kind of “Little Way”. An orthodox Catholic faith etched simply onto their lives. Instead they are treated to worthless modernist, MTD rubbish, and they find themselves the door. Meanwhile the trads, explain that if only they had been blasted with Latin and splendor, they might have stayed. And the Evangelicals win over their crowds with a weekly rock show. But this problem is not really about that. It’s about tremendous wasted opportunity, because the fact is, for most people, a holy Christian life, should and could be a very modest, authentic, and unassuming existence.

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French-Ahmari: A Report From The Scene

[Note from Rod: I am in Yurp, and because of the time difference, could not watch the livestream of the David French/Sohrab Ahmari match-up at Catholic U. last night. My CUA professor friend and sometime TAC contributor Jon Askonas was there, and at my request, filed the following report for this blog’s readers. Thanks, Jon! — RD]

Last night, Sohrab Ahmari and David French met to debate the future of cultural conservatism, moderated by Ross Douthat and hosted by the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America. The large lecture hall packed over five hundred people (many standing) in to listen, with the air and energy of a Vegas prize fight. The debate wasn’t just philosophical — Ahmari’s original column had had something of a personal tinge, and you could tell that French was there not just to vindicate his position but to defend his name.

Much of the conversation revolved around Drag Queen Story Hour, as Ahmari’s original motivation and as a paradigmatic example of the “cultural crisis and a moral emergency” that Ahmari argues “David Frenchism” is unprepared to handle. It was a bit annoying that the debate didn’t much move off of this terrain, but revealing in a number of ways.

French’s response was, effectively, to categorize DQSH as something he might personally abhor but with which it was necessary to abide in exchange for “viewpoint neutrality” as a hard-fought principle of public access, which a tremendous variety of Christian organizations draw on (in order to, say, book rooms at a library to hold a Bible study). He also labeled it a fringe phenomenon, with only a few dozen chapters around the country.

Ahmari’s pushback was that French was underselling DQSH as a cultural phenomenon (or what you might call a condensed symbol) indicating who really controls the commanding heights of American cultural institutions, and that “viewpoint neutrality” was a sham if people engaged in self-censorship, which Ahmari held to be the real goal of the left, not formal legal censorship.

In the conversation that ensued, French defended the First Amendment, “viewpoint neutrality,” and due process as fundamental rights that protect Christians and religious groups more than anything (based on his legal work), even if it also protects things Christians don’t like. He pushed Ahmari to be specific about the legal tools he would use to fight against things like DQSH, to which he (Ahmari) did not have a great response.

French believes that these legal norms, vigorously defended, are enough to make a public space in which Christians can worship and evangelize freely. He sees a more-or-less upward trajectory in religious rights, based on decades of hard-fought battles, and sees any attempt to use the state to promote a cultural moral consensus as both unethical (he invoked the Golden Rule) and likely to backfire.

Ahmari, for his part, was strongest when he returned to a sense of cultural and moral emergency which suggests that something is wrong in American life, and when he focused on the conditions of belief or morality for the masses, not just the devout. He poked some holes in French’s originalist jurisprudence (hard to believe the Founders would have found DQSH to be protected speech), but struggled with the details, or to mount a sustained offense. It seemed like Douthat, the moderator, made most of his best points for him (in the form of “summations” of Ahmari-ism posed as questions to French.

In the ensuing hours, a few conclusions have congealed:

There was near-universal consensus that French mopped the floor with Ahmari, even if he wasn’t particularly persuasive for his position. He stuck to the legal and constitutional arguments he is most comfortable with and knowledgeable about, revealed legal flaws in Ahmari’s claims, and consistently pressed Ahmari to be specific in his proposals, which revealed a shallowness of thought in Ahmari’s arguments. Amongst the French-skeptical folks I spoke with afterwards, a main topic of conversation was who else might have represented the post-liberal/national conservative position better (Patrick Deneen was the most frequent name to come up).
There seemed to be something of an age divide. The older folks in the room seemed to more likely to be in French’s corner, whereas all of the Millennials and Gen Zers I talked to instinctually agreed with Ahmari (even if they didn’t think he’d acquitted himself well).
This was obviously personal for French, and Ahmari seemed far less prepared than French. (“You come at the king, you best not miss.”)
In some ways, the debate itself was emblematic of the divide in American conservatism. The classical liberal (French) was polished, rehearsed, and supported by the conservative establishment, arguing that we need to stay the course and not throw the baby out with the bathwater (or in French’s memorable analogy, not storm the cockpit United 93-style and choke out the pilot over a bit of turbulence). The postliberal (Ahmari) was combative, passionate, and full of spleen, but relied more on bravado than argumentation and didn’t seem to have a concrete sense of what he was for, rather than what he was against.
There was a palpable Catholic and Protestant difference in their arguments. French was explicitly concerned with Christians’ ability to preach a life-giving Gospel, even without equality in the public sphere. Ahmari was concerned about public religiosity and practice, and the impact of the public sphere not on firm believers but on the marginal, overworked working class family that can’t afford to put their kids in Christian school and maybe isn’t particularly educated or sophisticated about their faith.
The conversation revolved much too much at the highest levels of culture and law. Ahmari would have benefited from pushing the conversation towards the role of professional associations and “woke capital”: the American Library Association, American Bar Association, medical review boards, college accreditation agencies, HR departments, etc. What practical or ethical limits does David French see in rooting out the post-liberal Left in these institutions that actually shape the public space on a day to day basis?

—

Thanks again, Jon. Here’s a video of the event, which lasted 90 minutes:

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Happy Birthday Werner Herzog

It’s September 5, the birthday of irreplaceable German film director Werner Herzog. That means it’s Tweet Like Werner Herzog Day — also known as #Twertzog — so proclaimed by the irreplaceable Twitter account @wernertwertzog (it’s not really Herzog, but a parody tribute).

Here are some of this year’s better ones from the master himself. Nobody comes close:

Ladies: Find a man who looks at you the way Kinski does in “Woyzeck.” pic.twitter.com/M2aUZ2nGPM #Twertzog

— Werner Twertzog (@WernerTwertzog) September 5, 2019

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First, they came for the Nihilists, and I did nothing. That is all. #Twertzog

— Werner Twertzog (@WernerTwertzog) September 5, 2019

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