I hadn’t realised until very recently how difficult it was to avoid stepping in time to the Benny Hill theme tune. The task was thrust upon me this week as I approached NatCon 2023 whilst a group of very British anti-Brexit protestors gave the conference a wonderful sense of occasion by playing music loudly, wearing top hats and waving empty bin bags under the noses of the attendees who had been dismissed as heartless Brexiteers by those seeking to tolerate everybody.
This cheap stunt juxtaposed beautifully with the profundity of what was taking place inside.
The ground of the Emmanuel centre in Westminster trembled under the weight of some of the greatest minds and prophetic voices of our time, as well as Michael Gove. Voices of people who recognise that, as Sebastian Morello (pictured) said, “Our country is deeply, deeply unwell”.
As to why we are so unwell, the diagnosis, delivered through a glass darkly by those whose lens was purely economic or political, was brought into sharp focus by those wearing the spectacles of faith.
Only this theological, and dare I say, sacramental lens gives answer to the deep religious instinct currently manifesting as, to quote Morello again, the “counterfeit religion” of “woke”.
This counterfeit religion encourages a sense of shame about one’s nation, its traditions, its language and its people, its core Judaeo-Christian social and moral norms. Shame does not unify but divides, is not fertile but sterile, is behind a drop in educational standards, a rise in suicide, and a reluctance to form families.
“The Church,” Fr Benedict Kiely declared, “must offer something better” before astutely observing that when young people are sick of what’s on offer, we don’t want to re-present what’s already been rejected”.
What the Church offers is not just something greater, but greatness itself. We are a people, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “made for greatness”, not because of our age, skin colour, educational status, bank balance, bodily or mental ability, or even moral rectitude, but because we alone have a unique calling and capacity to image God.
The freedom to answer that call does not lie in emancipating ourselves from society, from the putative chains of the oppressive patriarchy, rejecting family, faith and nation, but rather, in recognising what Morello sees, that “tradition and freedom are correlated principles”.
As Pope John Paul II writes in Memory and Identity: “… the nation and native land, like the family, are permanent realities … both the family and the nation have a particular bond with human nature, which has a social dimension. Every society’s formation takes place in and through the family. Catholic social doctrine holds that the family and the nation are both natural societies, not the product of mere convention”.
Those disparaging NatCon revealed the very problems identified by it.
Guardian critic John Crace exemplified the kind of spiritual blindness that has left us unmoored and unhappy when he wrote dismissively of the conference, “as for women, their greatest contribution to society was to have more babies” and “what is it with these oddballs? Everything always seems to come back to sex”.
To give life, to be mother of the living, is indeed the greatest contribution woman makes. And what a contribution!
Without it there would be no place for Crace. Without Mary’s fiat there would be no salvation.
This is the real ground of woman’s greatness, and it is ground being ripped out from under her by those who claim to defend women but who are really just male chauvinists, lusting for sexual irresponsibility, judging inner worth by outer performance, sacrificing being for doing, and placing identity in worldly careers not inner essence.
Why do we oddballs bring everything back to sex? Because sex is not an end in itself but a signpost directing us to love itself and is therefore true good and beautiful. Nowhere has truth, goodness and beauty been so twisted, perverted and distorted than in our understanding of sex. As Peter Kreeft says: “Almost no one defends terrorism, cannibalism, insider trading or even smoking, but if it has anything to do with sex we dare no longer be judgmental.”
One of the greatest perversions ever achieved is the reduction of sex to a recreational activity, separating the unitive from the procreative, and labelling the killing of babies in utero a “human right”.
It is a perversion and distortion of truth that NatCon is unafraid to address. This places it in a minority … for now.
But the further we travel into unreality, the deeper the hunger for the real. Now is the time to step in and serve real food that nourishes, food that will reveal the emptiness of the Milky Bars and Monster Munch we have been feeding on (other nutritionally vacant foods are available). We have, as James Orr said, “truth on our side” and we must reveal it.
“Don’t shy away from the ‘A’ word, abortion,” said Lois McLatchie. “Don’t shy away from furthering thoughtful positions on championing marriage, motherhood, fatherhood, free speech, freedom of belief for all. Most people believe that their family is important, that children deserve stability, that you shouldn’t go to jail for saying, or thinking, unpopular things, and yes, even that 200,000 abortions a year is too many, and that women deserve better. The more we act like these are unacceptable beliefs, the more they will become so.”
These things may be considered lost causes, but as McClatchie so poignantly puts it, “lost things can be found, they can be dusted off, touched up, revived into something attractive and meaningful, that will provide the foundations for future generations to thrive”.
NatCon offers a rare ground on which we can seek these things together, and our children will thrive because of it. The pro-life cause in all its fullness is not a lost cause.
(Photo: National Conservatism @NatConTalk)
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