The Rearguard Pope

National Review ^ | 4/7/05 | John Derbyshire

[cartoonistx]

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

Brilliant!

The Monday-morning quarterbacking is all the more interesting when offered by those who didn't even bother to show up for the game on Sunday.

[Fudd Fan]

"Conservatives blame it all on the reforms of the Vatican II Council (1962-5); liberals blame it on John Paul II himself, saying that his firm traditionalist approach to core doctrines turned off the more open-minded Catholic laity. Both surely know in their hearts that the real culprit is the irresistible appeal of secular hedonism to healthy, busy, well-educated populations."

This was the most salient point made here. Otherwise he was all over the place.

[murphE]

mark for later read.

[cartoonistx]

Thank you! I mean, if I were Catholic!

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

Could be. On the family structure issue, yes. Unfortunately, we are starting to see some of the, "Here, Catholics, let me help you understand..." type of editorializations. You do actually have to have lived through the experience from the inside to understand what is going on. I take it he has already written his open letter to Prince Charles on how the C of E should be reformed. [?]

The families who have actually remained authentically Catholic are actually doing rather well in comparison with their aborting/adulterizing counterparts. Derbyshire omits reference to the anti-Catholic forces that account for much of the mischief within the institutional church. A major shortcoming for the proposed analytical claims.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

Thank you! I mean, if I were Catholic!

That could be arranged. [wink, nudge, nudge]

[phil1750]

JP2 = Pope John Paul II.

In the future, we can change that to JPtG = John Paul the Great (and well deserved)

[Godzilla]

What is JP2

JP2 = John Paul II

[Dominick]

Both surely know in their hearts that the real culprit is the irresistible appeal of secular hedonism to healthy, busy, well-educated populations. We live, as never before in human history, in a garden of delights, with something new to distract and delight us every day.

Well, in time hedonism loses it's charm, you get sick, fat, and a life of idle is hard on the joints. Then you wish you had spent more time on loftier pursuits.

If I only had the body of a 20 year old.....

alas it would do no good....

my wife would kill me if she caught me with her.

[kalee]

My Anglican priest says something like that every Easter.
"I welcome all who are here today and would like to let you know we do this all 52 Sundays of the year."

[AnAmericanMother]

As I told some folks in the choir the other day, "C.E. doesn't stand for Church of England - it stands for Christmas and Easter."

In return, I got a great joke I'd never heard before:

A Catholic priest, a Baptist preacher, and a Rabbi were talking over coffee. The preacher complained that he had a terrible problem with bats in the steeple at his church. He'd tried plastic owls, tape recordings, nothing seemed to work. The rabbi chimed in that they were nesting under the eaves of the synagogue, even a professional exterminator couldn't get rid of them.

"I've got not problem," said the priest. "I just baptized and confirmed them, and now I only see them at Christmas and Easter."

[ELS]

The rector assumed the pulpit, regarding the milling throng, and in his sweet Irish accent mildly observed, "You realize that we are here every Sunday?"

LOL!

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

It is a little hard to believe they have writers that naive and uninformed writing on Catholic matters. Not only is there no attention to the networks of anti-Catholic organizations and pressure groups who have been working mischief inside of Catholic institutions, there is no attention to the general anti-Catholic adversity that assaulted the Church. The failure to mention the "double tax" system in education which is anti-Catholic in origin and ideological inspiration is a major journalistic flaw in this analysis. If Catholics were not burdened with being forced to pay for a godless system of educational tyranny run by the state, while being denied their own tax dollars for genuine educational use, the statitistics invoked to account for Catholic data would be quite different. And so would those for the rest of America society which would be MUCH HEALTHIER and much better off if that portion of the GNP were allocated for the Christian education of American children.

A lot of homework to do here for this writer who thinks he understands Catholic matters.

[AlguyA]

"If being human means enduring sorrow, pain, grief envy, loss, accidie, loneliness, and humiliation, why on earth should anyone be expected to prefer a “fully human” life over a dehumanized one?"

And with this, we see Derbyshire know little of human nature and even less of God.

[NZerFromHK]

I used to be a regular reader of John Derbushire's articles regularly, but have since moved on to better authors with more solid moral clarity and foundations like Mark Steyn or Victor Davis Hanson, or his compatriot Paul Johnson. I have a feeling that Derbyshire is like a typical traditional British Tory type - already conceding the left, at least socially speaking, is right, but stays conservative because he tempermentally dissents from this leftist stance. Notice that he cannot offer a rigourous intellectual refutation to the secularism - he seems to me like an early 21st century regurgitation of Nitserzche but does not like the conclusion.

By contrast, Steyn or VDH can offer alternatives and hopefuls and a saying of why social leftism, for instance, is wrong. Not to say openly Christian or at least religious columnists like Mark Steyn or Churk Colson.

The only raison I sometimes still read Derbyshire is to look at how he views China in his capacity as a semi-professional Western Sinologist.

[NZerFromHK]

My apologies for errors in post 56. Read this one instead.

---

I used to be a regular reader of John Derbyshire's articles, but have since moved on to better authors with more solid moral clarity and foundations like Mark Steyn, Victor Davis Hanson, or his compatriot Paul Johnson. I have a feeling that Derbyshire is like a typical traditionalist British Tory - already conceding the left, at least socially speaking, is right, but stays conservative because he temperamentally dissents from this leftist stance. Notice that he cannot offer a rigourous intellectual refutation to the secularism - he seems to me like an early 21st century regurgitation of Nietzsche but does not like the conclusion.

By contrast, Steyn or VDH can offer alternatives and hopefuls and a saying of why social leftism, for instance, is wrong. Not to say openly Christian or at least religious columnists like Cal Thomas, Dennis Prager or Chuck Colson.

The only raison I sometimes still read Derbyshire is to look at how he views China in his capacity as a semi-professional Western Sinologist.

[murphE]

"Long live the papacy!"

Interesting, thanks for posting it.

[The Iguana]

Derbyshire is a good fun read as a rule, but when it comes to mattrs religious he's an old-school Anglican - the-sort-of-thing-that-one-must-keep-in-proper-perspective. Especially when it comes to Rome.

Some numbers that might complexify the picture he's painting, courtesy of Sherry Weddell:

In 1960, the pre-Vatican II height: 145,000 adults entered the Church

In 1975, the nadir: 75,000 adults entered the Church

Under JPII, the trend has completely reversed itself. Since 1994:

23,000 more adults have entered the Church every year than did in 1960:

An average 163,000 adults every year between 1994 and 2003. That's 1.635 million adult converts in only ten years.

If adult converts to Catholicism from those 10 years alone were a denomination, we would be the 16th largest in America, right behind the Episcopalians and ahead of the Churches of Christ and the Greek Orthodox.

Meanwhile, the liberal Protestant mainline denominations continue to shrink in *every* measurable category.

[NZerFromHK]

I think Derbyshire himself has admitted he is not even a Christian that he doesn't believe Jesus is God. He was baptised as an Anglican and occasionally goes there for cultural reasons. (Just like a sort-of "conservative" mirror image of Howard Dean)

His father and uncles were committed atheists but also baptised as Anglicans, I was told.