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I recently heard that there were about three billion websites now operating around the world, but instead of saying like a sensible person "That’s enough" I’ve decided that means there’s always room for one more, and here it is. I took its title from a sports column we used to have in New York which lives in the memory of all its old readers. It featured characters like Al Weill, the fight manager with the wonderful built (sic), Professor Ilitch of the Prosperity Institute with his Secret Play for beating the horses, available to the public for a reasonable price, Phainting Phil Scott, the English heavyweight, and other such individuals often found in the vicinity of Madison Square Garden or Belmont Racetrack.
Not to mislead, I don’t intend to write sports or introduce unusual characters found on my travels, but instead to deal in a general way with issues that bother me, and now and then to retail a joke or a story or a verse that will be a appreciated by a cultivated audience such as I hope to attract. How will I know they’re cultivated? Because I attracted them.
The benchmarks that will find me on a search engine are Catholic, ex-cop, law and order guy, tackles issues with originality and humor too. That’s me. The judges are you.
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Today I have to admit that I’m a little stumped for a subject for my weekly web contribution. This is a common affliction. David Brooks, who has a column in the New York Times confesses that he used to have normal drives, food, sex, etc., but since he took on the column they have all been replaced by the one great need -- finding something to write about for his next installment.
All the same, he has it easier than me or so I believe. He’s a professional observer of the world scene and everything that happens is grist to his mill. I’m not such and I hesitate a lot about expounding my views on international relations, the world economy, America’s future and all that because I doubt that people would consider me an authority on such things.
So I look for things that I know something about and try to get by. This week my old high school sent me the latest alumni magazine and gave me a subject; what the hell’s wrong with them? The mag was all about the honors they were according to one of their dropouts who had become a newspaper writer and achieved some notoriety at the game, so now he was due recognition by the school.
There was a hitch in this, though. This is a Catholic school and the honoree had made a career out of left-wing advocacy hostile in every way to Catholic views of life. I knew this continued at least until 1979 when John Paul II visited New York and my subject described him as a man in a “costume”.
Did he repent and apologize and confess his sins (against good taste if nothing else) or otherwise make amends for his anti-Catholic activities and thereby earn a Prodigal Son award? I don’t know. I hope so but for obvious reasons I’ve never followed his career closely so I can’t answer that question.
I did, though, go back to a subject I’d wrestled with before seeing any anti-Papal wisecracks like the one above. How did the Pope and the Papacy get to be the power projectors they have become since the low points reached in the late 19th Century from which they were never expected to recover? I’ve touched on this before. The year 1870 was such a low point in the Church’s history. The last of the Papal States was grabbed off by the new nation of Italy and there seemed to be a good chance that the Vatican Council of that year would be the last one ever to be held.
In the middle of all this uproar the Council suddenly decided to proclaim the doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope, This sent a shock wave around the world. What gall! What brass! was the reaction of all those who didn’t like the Church to begin with and now had even more reason for their aversion. But somehow the Papacy survived. It even got stronger, it seemed. It was the General Patton policy applied to religion: L’audace! L’audace! Toujours L’audace!
The Papacy had a history of taking the bull by the horns. It all began with the Bishop of Rome proclaiming himself the successor of St. Peter and therefore head of the Church. This was in the days of the Roman Empire. Rome was the capitol of the world so naturally it should be the capitol of the Church as well. This brought about an East-West split eventually but the West made out better since its kings and emperors were a lot more inclined to defer to the Pope than their Eastern colleagues were to the bishops and patriarchs there, who could never agree among themselves who should be their equivalent of the Pope.
Parenthetically, it can be said that this seems to be a recurrent problem of the Middle East. Today the Moslem sects have replaced the Christians, but exhibit the same tendency to diversification as they did. There is no such thing as a Moslem pope. Or rather there are too many of them. There are moderates and extremists and everything in between. They don‘t give outsiders any reason to think that an outrage committed by one branch is repugnant to another, no matter what claims are made. Without any central authority to speak definitively, outsiders can’t be blamed if they can’t distinguish between “good” Moslems and “bad” Moslems.
The Christians split too, as we know, but not as irrefragably as the Moslems. The Reformation increased the secular power as against the clerical by making the religious antagonists dependent on secular power for defense against rival religions and their state power. So the popes no longer raised armies and conquered cities but confined themselves to their own dependencies contiguous to Rome,
Otherwise the Popes retained their old standing. They now were followed by armies of pilgrims, not soldiers, and they took care to make themselves remembered by their visitors. The simplicity of the early Church was appropriate to its time, but no matter how people speak out for it, it’s not what they want for a steady diet. There has to be display, color, even magnificence on hand when ‘hearts and minds’ are to be reached because that’s the way people are. They want to belong to something strong and imposing, not a beggar band. So the Pope, to display Christian humility, rode a mule, not a horse in public processions. But it was a white mule with a better pedigree probably than the horses, and riders, that followed it.
Eventually the mule was retired and the Pope began to greet audiences from the “seda gestatoria” a chair carried shoulder high by members of the Roman nobility from which the Pontiff greeted the faithful as he rode through the crowds. I remember it quite well. I also remember the two Swiss Guards who stood behind the Papal throne with their ostrich-feather fans ready to drive away any irreligious bugs who had penetrated the Vatican. Today we have the Popemobile, another gesture to changing times, which is used to visit crowds in Rome and elsewhere. This is an example of simplicity and modernity bringing the Pope closer to the people than ever before. Simplicity however can only go so far. I do not expect that we will ever see the Pope driving himself through St. Peter’s Plaza to greet the faithful. |
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