At First Things, Nathan Pinkoski and Jean-Baptiste Pateron said that “conservative romantics who love the past” can be tempted to despair. After the Notre-Dame fire, for instance, much commentary showed “disdain for France since the Revolution, disdain for France’s successful transmission of the past into the present, and disdain for the faith of the French expressed in the sorrowful hours of the present”.
Such gloom is misguided, the authors wrote. Yes, the Revolution ravaged the Church, but the 19th century was the age of St John Vianney, St Thérèse of Lisieux and the Lourdes apparitions. These saints helped inspire public witness throughout the 20th century. “In 1984, when the socialists attempted to suppress Catholic schools, a million turned out to protest.”
Was the knowledge that built the great medieval cathedrals lost? Actually, no. For instance, several organisations kept alive the crafts and traditions of the medieval guilds. And nor was the faith dead: the crowds who kept vigil outside Notre-Dame exemplified “a quiet rise in self-confident, practising Catholics. For example, adult baptisms have increased by over 50 per cent in the past decade.”
St Augustine saves a writer from paganism
“Funny how Europeans assimilated, unlike Third Worlders demanding welfare while raping, killing Americans.” That tweet was a typical sentiment from the journalist Katie McHugh, who worked for publications such as the Daily Caller and Breitbart.
She now says that she was a racist, telling Rosie Gray of Buzzfeed: “I take responsibility for all my actions … Everything I said that was terrible was my fault.”
In McHugh’s long story of disenchantment with the alt-right, there was a turning-point. At a time when her allies were turning to pagan ideas, a friend lent her St Augustine’s City of God, an assertion of Christian claims against paganism.
“[The friend] thinks it brought her back from the brink. ‘She was like, oh, this book’s incredible,’ he said. ‘At that point, it was that she was not going to become a pagan, that she was gonna remain a Christian.’”
McHugh herself believes that there was a “titillating group shame” in belonging to a fringe political grouping. It reminds her of St Augustine’s “famous story about stealing pears in his Confessions – driven by seeking what others hated, alone in the world, but together.”
Imaginative ways to get rid of bad thoughts
At his website, Fr Dwight Longenecker said that God can help purify us from “the infection of the imagination through junk we have seen on the screen.”
Fr Longenecker related two imaginative methods for getting rid of bad thoughts. One person told him that when an unwanted thought occurs, “I give it to God. Then I imagine the Holy Spirit like a dove coming down and taking the thought and flying away with it.”
Another said: “I imagine there’s a door on the top of my head, and when the thought comes up, I press a button and the door opens and the evil thought flies up to God.”
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