The Long View

Pick a Fight

The Vatican seems strangely reluctant to accept its newly assigned pariah status. Far from adapting to his role as the CEO of the tobacco company of nonprofits, the Pope is expected to create a new dicastery to re-evangelize Europe and the US:

Pope Benedict XVI is about to release a letter announcing the creation of a new Vatican dicastery called the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization. The new department will be aimed at bringing the Gospel back to Western societies that have lost their Christian identity...

We may take this as a healthy sign, even if we may doubt how much a new Roman bureaucracy will aid in the re-evangelization. When Europe was evangelized the first time, the Holy See's missions were effective in part because the Church was in a position to grant licenses to the new peoples for admission to Christendom. Who now grants licenses for admission to Western Civilization, or perhaps to global civilization?

There is also the problem that the existing Catholic infrastructure in the West for education and evangelization does its job poorly, but will perform prodigies to ensure that no one does it better. The matter is much on my mind, since I just got an alumni magazine from my old Jesuit high school. The Religion Department is focusing on teaching the students how to do microlending. I'm all for teaching accounting at the secondary-school level, but somehow I doubt the math department is devoting much time to the Hypostatic Union.

In any case, I would not suggest an evangelization campaign aimed at Youth. Youth is the past; youth movements are so 20th century. The challenge now, in this matter as in others, is not how to make tradition accessible, but how to make it attractive, something that one seeks to rise to. The danger to Christianity in such a strategy, of course, is that Christianity might succeed simply as a social cohesive in the reintegration of Western society. It has often done that, too, and there is no reason why it shouldn't do it again, but that is not what it is for.

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What do I think about the new Arizona immigration law? Oddly enough, I think about the early chapters of Barbara Tuchman's study of the beginning of World War I, The Guns of August, published in 1962. This was the state of things in Great Britain on August 1, 1914:

The average patriot had already used up his normal supply of excitement and indignation in the current Irish crisis. The "Curragh Mutiny" was England's Mme Caillaux [the principal in in a recent scandal]. As a result of the Home Rule Bill, Ulster was threatening armed rebellion against autonomy for Ireland and English troops stationed at Curragh had refused to take up arms against Ulster loyalists. General Gough, the Curragh commander, had resigned with all his officers, whereupon Sir John French, Chief of General Staff, resigned, whereupon Colonel John Seeley, Haldane's successor as Secretary of War, resigned. The army seethed, uproar and schism ruled the country, and a Palace Conference of party leaders with the king met in vain. Lloyd George talked ominously of the "gravest issue raised in this country since the days of the Stuarts," the words "civil war" and "rebellion" were mentioned, and a German arms firm hopefully ran a million cartridges into Ulster. In the meantime there was no Secretary of War, the office being left to Prime Minister Asquith, who had little time and less inclination for it.

I first came across the suggestion in a story by Poul Anderson, though it was probably not original with him, that the Irish caused the First World War. The great uncertainty that the German General Staff faced in deciding whether to push the button to start a great war was what England would do if the invasion of France went through Belgium. With the British Army in an audibly mutinous state of mind, it was a good bet that London would limit itself to a sharply worded note.

One can easily imagine the border situation in the Southwest deteriorating in such a way as to make America seem similarly preoccupied. The issue is an order of magnitude more perilous than the healthcare debate. Universal medical coverage is an issue that can cause rancor and consternation. Immigration is an issue that can cause gunfire. And not just on the border: the matter has been neglected for so long that now every town is a border town.

Taking a broader view, we see that the whole Western world is recoiling against the episode of high immigration. The issue is proving decisive in elections from Arizona to Hungary. Any administration that gets on the wrong side of something this big will be squashed flat.