I just want to add something because, unusually, yesterday’s discussion stuck with me, and I have some thoughts I wanted to sort out by typing.
The thought that stayed with me was about love and how Catholics are to be loving. I’m a native English speaker, and I don’t have a second language. I’ve heard that English is one of the worst languages to discuss love because we have a single umbrella word, whereas other languages like Greek have several. I think most English speakers have a very vague and nebulous, wishy-washy, airy-fairy conception of love. Love as people in the West wax lyrical about tends to be the chemical dance between dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin occurring in the body to create a strong bond between lovers and ensure the propagation of the species. As discussed yesterday, love is really an act of the will, to will the good of another. Imagine not just how many Catholics but secular people are exploring the scriptures and their abundant calls to love and how they might struggle with it. Think about how deficient or possibly subhuman they might feel because they aren’t experiencing strong emotions caused by chemicals inside the body. I remember years ago when I was a kid the government launched a national ad campaign to address a mental health crisis sweeping the country. I was at the kitchen table with my ma, da, and brothers eating dinner, and don’t you know there was a small portable television in the corner. They were called portable, but they were actually fairly bulky and heavy, not like the flatscreens today. They were just portable in the sense an adult male could carry one unassisted. Anyway, an ad came on about a brooding teenager walking the streets alone. At the end of the ad a graphic appeared on screen displaying the slogan uttered by the narrator, ‘Look after your mental health.’ I stopped shovelling slop into my slop hole and very aggressively said, ‘How? I’m sick and tired of them telling me to look after my mental health and how important it is but never telling me how.’ I didn’t say this as a brief display of enlightenment but with a habitual, shitty, chip-on-my-shoulder attitude. My dad and my brother looked at me with grins that said, ‘The kid’s got a point.’ Just like mental health, people harp on about love and nearly always forget to explain what it is and how to do it. I think we got this a lot with Pope Francis. As I’m an English speaker, it’s possible that his meaning didn’t translate well for me, but whenever I read anything he said, there was a lot of love this and love that, poor this and poor that. It usually came across to me as very vapid and generic, with nothing that could be grabbed hold of. Imagine a secular person beginning to search for truth and finding him or herself exploring the Christian scriptures where they’re constantly told to love, but all they know of love is from their feelings toward their family and possible romantic interests. They might assume that because they’re not experiencing a chemical reaction in the body, they’re not loving. They’ll especially struggle with the call to love their enemies because strong chemically induced emotions are absent. It’s rarely, if ever, explained to them that love is an act of the will. If you can get yourself to the point where you can put your hand on your heart and say, ‘That chap may be my enemy, but I hope he finds God.’ Then well done, gold star for you because you just loved your enemy.
To circle back to what Pope Francis and much of the clergy were / are harping on about – the poor and caring for them – I have some thoughts on this, and I won’t be appealing to scripture because my thoughts are formed and shaped by personal lived experience and are simply my opinion. I live in a very urban and densely populated environment and have done so most of my life. The most abundant thing I’m surrounded by is social ills. There’s no shortage of alcohol, drug abuse, homelessness and crime where I am. This century, as well as the previous one, there’s a very left-wing conception of the poor and disadvantaged in that they’re a sacred cow immune from critique and correction, disenfranchised but inherently noble. This is not my lived experience. My personal lived experience has shown the poor and disadvantaged to be incredibly predatory, who practice a form of cannibalism in that they constantly steal and inflict violence on each other. The greatest immediate physical threat to poor people is other poor people. We can harp on about the likes of the Bank for International Settlements, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street all day and night, but the reality is at ground zero the poor and disadvantaged are terrorising each other. In my opinion, based on my personal observations, they don’t need more fake and gay FIAT currency because they squander it when they get it. I’m sure you heard the story about the person who gets a tour of heaven and hell, both are identical, a banquet with chopsticks, but in hell everyone is starving, but in heaven everyone is full because they use the chopsticks to feed each other. I think that’s true, we imagine there’s this vast cosmic distance between heaven and hell, but really there’s not. In my personal experience the greatest problem facing the poor and disadvantaged is they prey on each other instead of praying for each other. What they need first and foremost is the Church’s sacraments for their salvation but also the scriptures as a manual in how to live.
My ma is very devout. She’s a very simplistic faith, and she’s ignorant about much of Catholicism, but what she grasps, she’s fervent in. She goes to daily Mass and prays the Rosary religiously. She even goes to a weekly Protestant Bible study. Now, that’s shaky ground because they often offer interpretations contrary to Catholicism, but she’s just old and wants to be anywhere people are talking about God. There’s a story she tells often. She worked in a hospital, and one day a traveller, indigenous gipsy, was wheeled in on a trolley flanked by his family and friends, essentially his gang. His shirt was ripped open, exposing his bloody stab wounds and the sacramentals adorning his torso. Anyway, unfortunately he died from his wounds, and my ma was very conflicted about an obvious gangster wearing sacramentals (rosary, brown scapular, St Benedict medal), so she went to speak to the chaplain. He explained to her it's quite common and it’s not Catholicism, it’s superstition. Some people use sacramentals as talismans to ward off the consequences of their crimes and lifestyles. My opinion is there are not a billion plus Catholics in the world. I cannot fathom the world being in this dire a state if it were populated by such a significant number of Catholics. I reckon there are several hundred million superstitious people adopting some Catholic garb, and there are maybe a couple hundred million Catholics spread out across the face of the Earth. My understanding is that South America and Africa, but especially South America, have a rich history of entertaining communism and socialist attitudes. When the new Pope was elected recently, I was watching videos to try and get a read on the situation. In one video the YouTuber approached a woman outside a church who appeared to hail from South America. She asked the woman what she hoped for from the new Pope, and in broken English, the woman replied she hoped he continued Francis’ work. The migrant supports the migrant Pope, go figure. Don’t mind all the debates about heresy and damaging the Church. It got me thinking, are people like her actually Catholic, or are they more accurately communists and socialists who’ve adopted a bit of Catholic garb here and there? There’s nothing Catholic in demanding or expecting people in distant lands to do x, y, and z for you. If anything, that’s an empathic rejection of the example Christ and the apostles set, and their example was scientifically repeated by saints, who, if they weren’t born into austerity, made sure to inflict it upon themselves in imitation of Christ and the apostles for millennia. There was no difference in St Francis of Assisi when he was hosted inside a palace or a hut. I remember I was talking to a Venezuelan Catholic online, and I made a silly quip about him being forgiven for jumping the border to the U.S. He responded by saying, ‘Why would I go to Babylon?’ What a striking and enlightened thing to say! Why would a Christian go to Babylon? How would that help in his or her walk with the Lord? I remember another time I was talking to a Mexican, and I made the same stale joke. He said, ‘Why would I go to America? We grow the best grapes here, and it makes wine that tastes like you wouldn’t believe.’ Now, this is probably my ignorance showing, but I’d never put the words ‘Mexico’ and ‘wine’ together. ‘What a good man,’ I said to myself. I don’t know if he’s Catholic because it never came up, but I’ll tell you this, if he’s not, he will be one day because that’s such a Catholic way of thinking.
Catholics love Christ, the apostles, and the saints, but if a Catholic finds his or herself praising the way they lived but then condemns the same conditions they lived in as abhorrent, inhumane, and impoverished for the rest of us, then there’s something wrong there, it’s incongruent. What does it mean to be truly wealthy in this world? How do truly wealthy people live day to day? Well, for one thing, they have complete mastery over their time. They eat the best of food, and by that I don’t mean gourmet. They don’t get their food from the supermarket wrapped in plastic, fed a diet of God only knows what and receiving injections we have no idea about or control over like us. Like their time, they have absolute control over their food because they either husbandry it themselves or pay others to do so, and they know everything about its diet, living conditions, and veterinary schedule, and the same control goes for their vegetables. They’re breathing the best of air because they live rural and not in congested concrete jungles. Now, consider how many of the world’s ‘poor’ can make the exact same boasts. Try going anywhere in the West, especially Europe, where land is at a premium, and try to scavenge materials to construct an abode for yourself without taking out a mortgage and applying for planning permission, and watch how hard the State comes down on you for it. One of the great jokes of this world is how similarly the truly wealthy and truly ‘poor’ live. If you want to live as the devil intends you to live, then prepare for much heartache and to hop through many hoops, but if you want to live how God intends you to live, then you’re in luck, because He came to walk the land and show you how and poured out His grace on a seemingly endless number of saints, showing you how to go about it and just how accessible it really is.
