As I listened to the latest Hardcore History episode on the Transatlantic slave trade (an article for another day), I decided to learn more about the natives who once lived in my area of the east coast of the US.
My reading quickly took me to Nora Thompson Dean, a woman who spent her life trying to keep the traditions of her people alive for the next generation after they had been nearly annihilated.
That sounds awfully familiar.
Contra modern trigger-happy folk, comparison is not equivalence. I can say that I have a very dim understanding and shared experience with the Native Americans without suggesting that the experience of my people is at all equivalent to theirs in terms of human suffering and cultural destruction.
As a traditional Roman Catholic of English descent, my culture and, to an extent, my people, have been eviscerated. I looked up how many pre-Henry VIII churches in England are Catholic today. The answer is two. Two! That’s all we have left of all of the churches of England prior to 1534.
Our sacred language of Latin is, of course, almost eliminated and ridiculed whenever it shows its face. This is even more the case with our sacred music of Gregorian chant. Incense and the Roman Canon aren’t faring much better. All of this is to say nothing of the richness of ancient liturgy beyond the rubrics as they were in 1955: public Divine Office, the processions, the salvation history plays, the architecture, the public feast days. Many traditional Catholic ways of life on every topic from fasting to fertility to lending without usury are almost gone. There are no truly Catholic countries left, and those who have tried to restore them (such as the Cristeros) have been quickly suppressed. And we haven’t even gotten to the fact that the churches are empty, most dioceses will have to close half their parishes if they have not already, modern styles are horrendous. The European motherland was subjected to successive rounds of destruction in the Protestant Revolt, Thirty Years War, French Revolution, then came back for more in the World Wars, before capping it off with the sexual revolution and turn to socialism.
It is just a handful of enclaves, who barely have the right to exist, who are struggling to preserve and hand on Catholic tradition to the fullest possible extent. Catholics are barely even allowed to live out the faith in a traditional manner in the modern world, even in historically Catholic countries with nominal freedom of religion.
Modern people have this hangup that the Catholic faith is all about rules. That is not true, it’s just that the few remaining rules are seemingly all that’s left.
And I feel justified in claiming some kinship with the Native Americans because it was often the same people who were responsible for both suppressions.
That the Protestant Revolt, with its accompanying iconoclasm and suppression of the monasteries, happened in the same century of the conquistadors in the Americas and the dawn of the transatlantic slave trade should tell you something. That England took over the majority of the transatlantic slave trade immediately after the “Glorious Revolution” chucked their last Catholic king doesn’t seem so coincidental. That the Catholic monarchs of Europe who built a dreadful slave empire in sugar plantations were the same ones who were bullying the pope and naming corrupt bishops left and right should come as no surprise.
The slave trade and the destruction of the American natives were not signs of the faith’s stranglehold on power but marks of its shocking decline through the preceding Renaissance period. It is not an accident that slavery rebounded in the 1400s as Europe’s best and brightest were abandoning the study of Catholic theology for pagan sages whose societies were propped up by slaves. Or that a society that perpetrated these atrocities with an eye toward riches was one that had abandoned medieval skepticism on money and commerce.
Obviously one must also be mature enough to confront the reality that a time and culture in which the faith was much stronger still failed to prevent the mass brutality experienced in Africa and the Americas by Catholics for several centuries. Still, a clear eye will see that matters were substantially worse from a moral point of view in 1550 than in 1200. And an open hear would hear that the popes, while doing nowhere near enough, were early voices trying to strangle these monsters in their cradle in writings like Creator Ominum, Sicut Dudum, and Sublimis Dei. The perpetrators, Catholic and otherwise, come off much like the Venetian marauders who sacked Constantinople in 1204, the (largely Lutheran) mobs who sacked Rome in 1527, and any number of other infernal groups. “They come with fire, they come with axes, gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning.”
Why even mention this? As a reminder of what can happen when a society loses its faith, a recognition of just how far we’ve fallen, and how we have more in common with seemingly foreign groups than we think. As someone who hopes to see Hagia Sophia and Canterbury Cathedral restored to bishops in full Communion with the Apostolic See and a liturgy that would make a Renaissance pope jealous, I do wonder: can we realistically hope for a restoration of our own property and culture without respecting the rights of others to similar restoration?
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