The Tallinn Lectures--III.

Vitalism & Americanist Pluralism

Smiling as Christian Europe Dies

A. Vitalism, Voluntarism & the Emasculation of the Catholic Movement

Despite the vigor of the movement of Catholic revival, many if not most believers continued
to display their susceptibility to naturalist temptations. Some gave in to these temptations on
the intellectual level, thus openly and willingly joining the naturalist camp. But even when
Catholics did not necessarily accept naturalist theory, they often acted in daily life as though
they had done so, becoming practical naturalists.

In one way or another, therefore, Catholics could be found supporting all of the various forms
of naturalist thought and practice discussed in the previous lecture. These ranged from a
mechanism that valued uniformity over diversity to an atomism that worshiped individual
freedom, whatever the negative consequences this liberty might have for the survival of
objective law and morality.

All Catholic naturalists, conscious and unconscious, shared in the basic voluntarism
underlying one "natural" choice as opposed to another; a voluntarism which called itself
rational, while possessing all of the characteristics of a Faith; an unexamined Faith; a
Fideism. Like their secularist counterparts, they allowed no room for their
Faith-disguised-as-Reason to enter into the kind of rational dialogue regarding its validity
nurtured by the Catholic Tradition. Instead, they, too, appealed to "success" as a criterion for
judging the ultimate truth of their willful option.

I should like to begin this last of my talks by discussing a more complex phenomenon: the
transformation of a significant group of Catholics active in the Incarnation-centered revival
movement into vitalist-voluntarist proponents of the acceptance of nature "as it is". Once this
melancholy development has been outlined, I will add to it a treatment of the worldwide,
postwar impact of Americanist Pluralism. At that point, we will finally be able to grasp the
fullness of the problem we face today if we seek to defend a broad European identity
respectful of the integrity of each of its constituent national parts.

The great early leader of fervent Catholic activists making the changeover to the
vitalist-voluntarist camp was the Abbé Felicité de Lamennais (1782-1854). His significance in
this regard, from the 1820's onwards, cannot be exaggerated. Lamennais was the
priest-apologist who became the great conduit for transmitting the message of Rousseau to
the Catholic world in the early 1800's. Filled with love for The People as the vibrant,
energetic Voice of God, Lamennais at first thought that the legitimate monarchy was the
political vehicle for translating its sacred wishes into reality. When the monarchy failed him,
he turned to the Pope as the God-People's political and social agent. With papal rejection of
the notion of the People as the source of Truth, Lamennais then looked to a purely secular
democratic system as the infallible translator of God's will into practice. But since even the
supposedly vital People did not seem to possess much enthusiasm for the sacred task he
had identified for them, Lamennais realized that it fell to him, as Prophet, to take up this task.
He saw that he had been called by God to raise the People's slumbering spiritual
consciousness and reveal the new and higher stage of political democratic development to
which the history of Catholicism was inevitably leading it.
The Prophet's "official" influence in the Catholic world ended with his excommunication in the
1830's. Nevertheless, his initial followers, both orthodox and heterodox, were to be found
everywhere within it, some retaining merely his prophetic fervor, others his precise prophetic
vision in more subtle "liberal" Catholic form. His impact on the secular world continued
unabated. In union with many of the other religious syncretists, nationalists and utopian
reformers of the first half of the nineteenth century, he spent the rest of his life preaching the
final realization of the Catholic spirit through its rebirth in a secularist, democratic,
anti-Catholic form. (See John Rao, "Lamennais, Rousseau, and the New Catholic Order",
Seattle Catholic, February 1, 2005; Frank Paul Bowman, Le Christ des barricades, Cerf,
1987; J. Meinvieille, De Lamennais a Maritain, La Cité Catholique, 1949)

I am most interested at this time, however, in the work of a group of figures from the 1890's
through the 1930's who, at first glance, would not seem to have been at all influenced by
Lamennais' approach. These were the activists involved in the Outer and Inner
Missions---missionaries in Asia and Africa on the one hand, and Catholic political, labor and
youth movement leaders on the other---discussed in my previous lecture. All such activists
were honest militants who shared the sense of urgency central to the movement of Catholic
revival. All, in consequence, were men and women who were desperate for success.

Unfortunately, the Outer Missionaries were worn down by their many failures, amazed at the
resistance of native religions and cultures to the Catholic message, and disturbed by signs of
their revitalization even in places where they had long seemed nearly extinct. Inner
Missionaries were still more demoralized. They were shocked by their pre-1914 political
failures, their frontline service during the First World War, and the terrible social disruptions
accompanying that conflict's end and aftermath. All three experiences had demonstrated to
them the weakness of their distinctly Catholic impact upon the average voter and soldier.
Most of these apparently "typical" Europeans had proved to be totally indifferent to the Faith,
and yet capable of being roused to enthusiastic action by energetic lieutenants in the
trenches and political radicals at home. Such military and civilian leaders, as well as the
communities that they shaped, seemed to possess an extraordinary vitality. Where did it
come from? Why did Catholic Outer and Inner Missionaries lack the strength that a wide
variety of non-Catholic militants possessed?

A translation of the concerns of Catholic activists into theoretical arguments was undertaken
in the 1920's and 1930's by a kaleidoscope of thinkers calling themselves Personalists.
Personalists ultimately went down numerous, divergent directions. Nevertheless, the
mainline, in the interwar period, either consciously or unconsciously adopted positions going
back to Lamennais and, through Lamennais, to Rousseau, to Kant, and to the Pietist
Tradition.

Catholic activists, the Personalists lamented, despite their claims to be community-minded,

actually thought and spoke much more like the eighteenth century individualist rationalists
they were said to oppose. In practice, all of their arguments were designed to appeal to
isolated human atoms, and this on a one-dimensional, purely intellectual, boring scholastic
level. Hence the conviction on the part of the flesh and blood men and women to whom they
addressed themselves that in dealing with Catholics they were dealing with teachers who
were dead to the fullness of existence; cerebral academics; professional note-takers;
disembodied "losers".

The Holy Spirit, the Personalists continued, could never be an advocate of such lifeless
creatures and the Gospel as they preached it. He manifested Himself in history through
those vital, energetic, leaders and communities whose successes impressed the "dead"
Catholic activists themselves. This was due to the fact that God wanted human beings to
perfect their personalities, and they could only accomplish this perfection, becoming full
"persons" rather than desiccated "individuals", through participation in precisely such
energetically led circles.

Should Catholics really wish to have an impact in life, what they had to do was to "dive into"
the already vital, successful, "person-shaping" communities which they hoped to influence.
Their work would then be one of "witnessing"; i.e., using their Catholic presence to help
these vibrant, Spirit-favored societies to complete and perfect their unique "mystiques".

In order to "witness" properly, believers had to shed whatever stood in the way of their
enthusiastic cooperation with the mystiques in question: namely, their substantive Catholic
formation, with all of its presuppositions about how to express what was True, Good and
Beautiful. Yes, these vital communities might seem, at first glance, to be in many ways
hostile to one another in belief and behavior. Nevertheless, their success proved that they all
had the Holy Spirit behind them. Therefore, one could have absolute faith that their
contemporary, outwardly clashing mystiques would somehow providentially "converge" in the
future. Hence, these comments of Emmanuel Mounier, one of the most important of the
thinkers in question:

Surely [development] is slow and long when only average men are working at it. But then
heroes, geniuses, a saint come along: a Saint Paul, a Joan of Arc, a Catherine of Siena, a
Saint Bernard, or a Lenin, a Hitler and a Mussolini, or a Gandhi, and suddenly everything
picks up speed...[H]uman irrationality, the human will, or simply, for the Christian, the Holy
Spirit suddenly provides elements which men lacking imagination would never have
foreseen... May the democrat, may the communist, may the fascist push the positive
aspirations which inspire their enthusiasm to the limit and plenitude. (John Hellman,
Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left: 1930-1950, Toronto, 1981, p. 90).
Such personalist arguments found a serious hearing in Catholic educational, political, youth,
and labor movements in the 1920's, 1930's and afterwards. Their acceptance did not affect
merely these circles' vision of their ultimate purpose and modus operandi. It also worked to
justify a sea change in that Catholic liturgical movement which had formed part of the revival
of the previous century. Many of the leaders of the liturgical renaissance now began to claim
that their principle task was that of learning how to respond to the Spirit manifesting Himself
in the different mystiques of vital communities. For a true "witnessing" would require
developing a form of divine worship peculiar to the spiritual genius of each of these
providential entities.
From the standpoint of the older theorists of the nineteenth century Catholic revival, hunting
for a "success" that could only be gained by "witnessing" to a Holy Spirit who was willfully
said by His prophetic interpreters to endorse everything "vital" and energetic in
contemporary communities was a recipe for total disaster. Abandoning all that one knew
from the Catholic, incarnational vision in order to open the mind and heart to vital
"mystiques" meant nothing other than consciously diving into "slumbering" nature. It entailed
limiting God's message and activity in the world to the voice of nature "as it is", and not
admitting His supernatural role as corrector and transformer of nature's flaws. The believer
would be left with no means of judging whether the particular manifestations of nature
confronting him were true or false, good or bad, beautiful or ugly ones.

In the final analysis, such "witnessing" involved giving oneself over to and blessing a modern
"natural" world ruled by people with an agenda: the agenda of power-hungry ideologues,
libertines, and criminals whose rhetoricians used Isocrates' "appropriate words" to justify
erroneous and evil actions and cut off real, substantive criticism of them as though it were
some pointless waste of time. Such "witnessing" amounted to a baptism of the false and
ever more vulgar perceptions of the strongest and most arrogant "activists" of the place and
the moment. Should the liturgy be dragged into this enterprise, it would mandate a tailoring
of worship to however many self-deluded or cynical voices of Reason, Freedom, Progress
and the People might succeed in imposing their corrupt wishes on the communities which
they manipulated. It would require a constant retailoring of divine worship to respond to the
changing and progressively degenerating demands of the strongest wills. It would demand a
self-censorship and silence whenever the true Catholic spirit broke through and suggested
that God was being mocked and men in need of supernatural redemption were being
cheated.

A study of those involved in the Personalist campaign yields a Who's Who of the liturgical
and postwar European unification movements. It also serves as an introduction to many of
the liberal and radical periti at Vatican II and related, postconciliar "experts". Investigation of
the vital, successful communities to whose mystiques such people thought they must give
witness is also quite revealing. One discovers an early sympathy for Fascism and its cult of
vital action and successful application of strength. This was accompanied by liturgical
experimentation with much respect for the Leadership Principle and expressions of
paramilitary camaraderie. A major and very instructive example of such Fascist-like fervor
can be seen in the program and life style fostered at the elite training center established at
the castle of Uriage near Grenoble, with the aid of the Vichy government in France.

Studies of the development of Personalist influence also make it clear that this was matched
by an ever growing contempt for the entire theological, philosophical, liturgical, and general
cultural tradition of Catholicism. How could this not be so? We have by now repeatedly noted
that that tradition encouraged too strong of a critique of diving into a contemporary world
marred by naturalism not to be viewed as a most dangerous pest indeed. So angry with this
"cranky" tradition was Emmanuel Mounier that he even argued that the only man who had
come close to understanding how flawed it really was, and how Catholicism must be
regenerated, was the Nihilist prophet, Friedrich Nietzsche:

Nietzsche's critique of slavish Christianity now seemed to him to be unanswerable, and he

'came to think that Roman Catholicism was an integral part of almost all he hated. Then,
when he searched his soul, he discovered that the aspects of himself which he appreciated
least were his Catholic traits' (Ibid., p. 190). Doing what one willed was the unum
necessarium. Everything rational from the Greek tradition used to support Christianity and
dampen the will was execrated as well. If there was anything valuable in the Greco-Christian
heritage it had to come from personalists rebuilding it from scratch; those appealing to the
Catholic name and Catholic practice in his day required diagnosis and psychiatric help.
Mounier now flatly denounced old-fashioned Christianity and Christians. Christianity, he
wrote, was 'conservative, defensive, sulky, afraid of the future'. Whether it 'collapses in a
struggle or sinks slowly in a coma of self-complacency', it was doomed. 'Christians', he
castigated in even stronger terms in a rhapsodic style worthy of his new master (Nietzsche):
'These crooked beings who go forward in life only sidelong with downcast eyes, these
ungainly souls, these weighers-up of virtues, these dominical victims, these pious cowards,
these lymphatic heroes, these colourless virgins, these vessels of ennui, these bags of
syllogisms, these shadows of shadows... (Ibid., p. 191).
Metaphysical speculation, Mounier declared, was a characteristic of 'lifeless schizoid
personalities.'...Mounier even referred to intelligence and spirituality as 'bodily diseases' and
attributed the indecisiveness of many Christians to their ignorance of 'how to jump a ditch or
strike a blow.' ... 'Modern psychiatry,' Mounier wrote, had shed light on the morbid taste for
the 'spiritual,' for 'higher things,' for the ideal and for effusions of the soul.... Thus, many
forms of religious devotion were the result of psychosis, self-deception or vanity. Prayer was
often a sign of psychological illness and weakness (Ibid., pp. 192-193 all of the above from
John Rao, "The Bad Seed", Latin Mass Magazine).

But the dominant National Socialist strain of Fascism was unavoidably and unacceptably tied
to the Volksprinzip, and Personalists, despite their other temptations, never succumbed to
that of modern Racism. Even more significantly, Fascism had not proved to be vital enough
to win the Second World War, losing whatever credibility as an engine of success that it had
once possessed. The prize in that conflict had been carried off by the Soviet Union and the
United States. One might legitimately conclude that Marxist-Leninist and Americanist
Pluralist communities were those possessing the greatest vigor, successful energy, and
stamp of approval of the Holy Spirit. These communities had their own Word Merchants
working day and night to encourage such an attitude; to find the "appropriate words" to
equate everything non-Marxist-Leninist or non-Pluralist with Fascism, and therefore with evil
incarnate. Catholic doctrines and achievements of the European Catholic past were
generally non-Marxist and non-Pluralist. It was therefore only a matter of time before they
were both identified with the Fascist disease.
Both conviction and prudence told the Personalists that a swift change of allegiance was
definitely in order. The preference of most of them was for the vitalist Marxist-Leninist victor,
due to the more obvious communal and collectivist character of the Soviet system. A number
of men active in the Catholic Personalist movements mentioned above had learned to
respect the "energy" of Marxism-Leninism due to their experiences with Soviet citizens and
European Communists in labor camps in Germany. Those who had not "enjoyed" this
opportunity, schooled themselves in the same experience through participation in the worker
priest experiment of the late 1940's and 1950's. Liturgists from both groups then sought to
tailor worship to the needs expressed in such Spirit-guided communist milieu. Just how
accurate their perceptions were regarding their atmosphere is, of course, highly debatable,
given the willful voluntarism that constantly fuels their thought and action.

Liberation Theology is instructive in this regard. A number of extremely important

Personalists were at the center of its birth and development; hence, their call to dive into vital
Marxist-Leninist communities the world over in order to witness and perfect their mystiques.
Liberation Theologians, like their immediate Personalist precursors, insisted that responding
to the clear message of these Marxist communities required the dismantling of every
obstacle that a deadening, individualistic, Catholic rationalist tradition might place in their
way. But the Catholic peoples of Latin America who were supposed to be the generating
force behind the vital needs expressed through such vibrant communities seemed
stubbornly attached to beliefs and practices which they ought to have been in the forefront of
rejecting. Such stubbornness indicated the need for a little consciousness-raising of the kind
which Lamennais had been the first important Catholic to prescribe. Consciousness-raising
was to be accomplished by hearkening to the "appropriate words" of the Liberation
Theologian who explained to the People that which, in its heart of hearts, it really loved and
wanted. Such work could be done in "base communities". Here, an unacceptable Catholic
vitalism might be replaced by the acceptable, unquestionable vitalism willed by the prophets
of Marxism-Leninism but disguised as the Diktat of the Holy Spirit. (For all the above, see
John Hellman, Op. Cit., plus his The Knight Monks of Vichy: Uriage, 1940-1945, McGill,
1997; J. Meinvieille, Op. Cit.; Emile Poulat, Les pretres-ouvrieres: Naissance et fin, Cerf,
1999; also, John Rao, "All Borrowed Armor Chokes Us", Seattle Catholic, July 9, 2005; "The
Good War and the Rite War", Latin Mass Magazine, Spring, 2001; "The Bad Seed", Ibid.,
Fall 2001)

B. Americanist Pluralism

Even those entranced by Marxism-Leninism had to admit that the impact of America's vital
energy was evident everywhere in the postwar world. A number of Catholic personalists
therefore argued for the need to "dive into" and help perfect the American community and
those shaped by it. But what, exactly, were the underlying principles and standard operating
procedure of that community? And what would a Catholic "witness" to its peculiar "mystique"
really mean in practice?

Americans like to speak of their nation as a "young" one, and contrast it favorably with the
decadent countries of the Old World. But the American nation is as much a product as a
European land of all of the ancient battles and modern naturalist developments that we have
been discussing since the beginning of this week. America's Founding Fathers worked in an
environment deeply affected by the loss of Christian Faith and its transformation into a
secularist tool. The system that they created also very much reflects the concerns of the
final, Enlightenment stage of modern naturalism: including all of its doubts regarding both
speculative and empirical Reason, and, hence, all of its temptations to rebuild order on
foundations that one "makes believe" are objectively true.

The Founding Fathers and their successors built their "make believe" objective order first
and foremost upon America's British heritage. This was quite a schizophrenic legacy by the
late eighteenth century. It certainly included Christianity, chiefly in the form of Anglicanism
and Puritan Protestantism. But it also involved the Enlightenment, primarily in the manner
that former Anglicans and Puritans who had lost their Faith presented it. These converts to
the naturalist camp often used the Christian-inspired language with which they were familiar
to promote their new, anti-Christian goals. Whether they intended this or not, such speech
soothed those who remained believers and blinded them as to where, exactly, their
familiar-sounding doctrines might actually lead in the future.

Even the Founders were aware that there was a troublesome reality that their novus ordo
saeclorum was obliged immediately to confront. This was the presence in the United States
of a kaleidoscope of different ethnic groups and religious convictions. That presence grew
still more complex and troublesome with the mass migrations of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The fullness of the make believe order of the American Pluralist system
emerged out of attempts to harmonize the reality of a multicultural society with the basic
conservatism of the Anglican via media, the radicalism of Puritanism, and the naturalism of
an Enlightenment of both Anglican and Puritan flavor. Its theory and "mystique" were firmly
in place by the late 1890's. What they claimed was that America had discovered the formula
for providing a peaceful, ordered community out of a society guaranteeing freedom to all of
God (or Nature's) divided children. America thus offered mankind throughout the globe its
"last and best hope" for a liberty, tranquility, and happiness greater than any ever known in
human history.

Unfortunately, "diving into" the Americanist Pluralist mystique helps merely to bring to fruition
another version of vulgar, materialist, and uniform disorder, whipped into some semblance of
make believe unity through the will of the strongest. It aids in the perfection of that type of
bland, organized willfulness predicted by nineteenth century Catholic thinkers, but in a more
successful and seductive way than they could ever have imagined. Those who are
interested in a deeper, more detailed discussion of Americanist Pluralism and its
(temporarily) successful employment of Original Sin as the central building block of individual
and social life should consult my Americanism and the Collapse of the Church in the United
States, Why Catholics Cannot Defend Themselves, Founding Fathers and Church Fathers,
To Promote Dialogue, Fight American Pluralism, and many other articles, all to be found on
the For the Whole Christ website (jcrao.freeshell.org). All I propose to do in the present brief
talk is to outline the main lines of the perversion and the confusion that this system
perpetrates.

Let it suffice to say for now that the "freedom" and the "order" that one obtains through it are
a purely naturalist freedom and order based upon the peculiar and often contradictory
Christian and Enlightenment factors forming American culture. Its naturalism is bewildering
to the believer because, as noted above, so many Americans used---and still use---Christian
language to describe, praise and promote a set of anti-Christian purposes. It is baffling also
because it has to cater to both radical and conservative naturalist tastes at one and the
same time.

Hence, the American is told that he has the radical freedom that a secularized Puritans
might wish him to have, a freedom that "sounds Christian" because it can easily be related to
its fundamental Protestant roots. But in order to practice this freedom in a way that does not
disturb the order preferred by Enlightenment conservatives, he learns that liberty actually
has to be utilized in a way that avoids "divisiveness"; in a fashion that "integrates" its
practitioner into an order composed of endless varieties of "non-divisive, integrating
individualists".

Americans learn that the "freedom" of communities, such as the Catholic Church, is subject
to the influence of Puritan and secularized Puritan ideas regarding liberty. Freedom, under
these circumstances, means only the freedom given for individual members of a religious
society to rip their communal authority to shreds. All attempts to hold onto communal
authority could be nothing other than assaults on freedom detested by the anti-institutional
God of Protestantism and the anti-institutional Nature of the liberty-loving Enlightenment.
Freedom for religious communities---for all communities, as far as more radical thinkers are
concerned---amounts to nothing other than the freedom to be impotent and to self-destruct.
James Madison, the chief author of the American Constitution, quite openly rejoices in this
truth, arguing for the need to "multiply factions" within existing, strong communities so as to
paralyze their ability to mobilize their followers and actually shape the American political and
social order.

Individuals and communities are ultimately given a two-fold teaching regarding the
relationship of freedom and order. On the one hand, they are pressed to divide serious free
thought from serious free action. On the other, they are encouraged to build whatever unity
can exist upon a positive materialist use of their freedom. In the final analysis, the freedom
granted to men and communities under the Americanist Pluralist "mystique" is merely the
freedom to be materialists in a myriad of fashions. To take but one example, freedom for a
Chinese must never be understood as allowing him to harmonize the American system with
Confucianist principles. It does mean, however, that he can open as many restaurants as he
might see fit, thereby contributing to the rich diversity of American life.

But this cheap form of freedom offers no more substantial block to sinful misuse than
reliance on "common sense" prevents adherence to unnatural errors. It has within it an
innate tendency to degenerate, and, with that degeneration, to ensure construction of an
"order" based upon the dictates of the strongest practitioners of materialist freedom;
libertines and criminals. Such criminals maintain their alliance with the Americanist Pluralist
ideologue and the Word Merchant in order to justify and ennoble their oppression of the
weak. All, together, guarantee that the system gradually "spirals downward", ending in that
boring, corrupted sameness identified by Louis Veuillot as a chief characteristic of the
"Empire of the World".

None of these essential problems of the American Pluralist mystique can even begin to be
discussed. That mystique prohibits all criticism of its theory and its practice. If, for example, a
person wishes to employ all of the various tools western man has developed over the course
of the ages for discussing the validity of its definition of the meaning of individual and social
life, all of these tools, one by one, including theology, philosophy, history, psychology and
sociology, will be dismissed as both impractical and intrinsically dangerous. A desire to use
them will be said to illustrate nothing other than a lack of "obvious common sense" on the
part of the foolish, impractical, "loser" critic. Do such tools help one to make money or keep
the peace? On the contrary, all they do is bring up disruptive fantasies encouraging
divisiveness and disturbing profits.

If, on the other hand, one seeks to demonstrate the long-term practical dangers of the
Americanist Pluralist mystique, and especially its degeneration into a reign of "might makes
right" disguised as the victory of freedom, its totally unquestionable "godliness" will be called
up to smother the dialogue. The critic will be accused of lacking Faith in its divine nature and
mandate...as revealed, let us remember, through the all too arbitrary Will of the Founding
Fathers. Here he is condemned for his cynical rejection of the "last and best hope" for
individual freedom and social peace, and his consequent lack of charity for suffering
humanity.
Should the critic then return to theory, and identify the Americanist Pluralist Faith as a
voluntarist, irrational fideism masquerading a purely materialist conception of life, he will be
brutally brought back down to the practical level once again. Now, with complete disregard
for the change in tactic, he will be assaulted for his childish naiveté; his hopeless idealism in
the midst of a jungle universe guided by the War of All Against All. Surely only a "loser"
envious of the success of his betters would think that life was susceptible to guidance by his
utopian spiritual babble!

But what if our critic persists in his position and emphasizes the fact that he has been the
subject of an irrational attack, accused simultaneously of being both a faithless cynic and
impractically (but enviously) naïve? Why, then, he will become the kind of "public nuisance"
promoting unpleasant, logical consequences of first principles that David Hume deplored
and Ralph Waldo Emerson considered to be the infallible sign of a "petty mind". The Word
Merchants will be called onto center stage to find as many "appropriate words" as possible
to brutalize this Enemy of the People. Truth will not matter in their campaign against him. He
will be dismissed as an obvious lunatic. Moreover, since Americanist Pluralism fought the
good fight against the Fascists, he will also be denounced as a Nazi; an anti-Semite; a
defender of genocide. Terrorism being the system's current manifestation of evil, the critic
will also be painted as a probable Al Quaeda, "Islamo-Fascist" supporter. Why this
deranged, extremist Loser is the kind of man who most likely wishes that Estonia were still
within the Soviet Bloc as well!

Few have the stamina to reach this final stage of unsuccessful dialogue. The schizophrenia
brought on by Americanist Pluralist refusal to allow serious thought to be transmitted into
action will have deconstructed most potential critics' spirit from the very outset. Others will
have been daunted by the number of tools that have to be marshaled to uncover the
system's fraud and its bewildering modus operandi. Should a hardy few possess the will to
fight the good fight still longer, they, too, shall eventually be forced to abandon the struggle
due to the materialist environment created by the system in question. That environment
demands work and ever more work in order merely to survive. Even the strongest opponent,
over time, will be simply too exhausted to indulge the luxury of criticizing the system in the
few hours of repose left to him by it each day. Hence, mankind's "last, best hope" retains its
undeserved image, its victims never learn of its poisons, and it can continue to wreak its all
too predictable havoc again and again and again, in country after hapless country.

Equivocal use of Christian language on behalf of a happy vision of order and freedom,
accompanied by the appeal of potential success in the New World seduced many Roman
Catholic immigrants into the camp of Americanist Pluralism in the years between 1890 and
the present. Accepting its precepts seemed to be a "no lose" proposition. The appearance of
openness, prosperity, and tranquility similarly entranced the exhausted and demoralized
Europeans of the 1940's, with those resisting the Americanist Pluralist embrace easily
anathematized as unregenerate Fascist remnants.

But what happens both to Catholics and to non-Catholic Europeans still at least partly
historically shaped by Catholicism once they "dive into" this mystique, "witness" to it, and
then "bring it to perfection"? Neither has any hope of survival as a distinct force or culture.
They are both obliged to destroy whatever distinguishes themselves as Catholics and
Europeans in order to practice a "non-divisive, integrating, materialist freedom", and then to
repeat, as a dogma, the belief that they have never experienced such great liberty and so
exalted a sense of human dignity. They are both obliged to dismantle what is most essential
to their character, especially what has been corrected and transformed through the message
of the Incarnation, in order to "fit in" to a jungle society which they must praise repeatedly as
the most beautifully ordered in history. They are condemned to see their children treat this
dismantling and emasculation as the obvious fulfillment of the real Catholic and the real
European potential. They are condemned to hear their offspring repeat Black Legends which
denigrate truly Catholic and European heroes as villains, and adulate anti-Catholics and
opponents of past, substantive European culture as brave champions of the March of
Progress. And they obliged to accept the fact that the focus of this dismantling and
emasculation of true human achievement will change along with whoever is the strongest
ideologue, libertine and criminal of the moment and whatever it is that he wishes. Today, that
focus is on making certain that Catholics and Europeans be morally outraged only over
whatever does not build bigger and more globally-oriented business enterprises. It is also
focused on mocking "outmoded" concerns over just and unjust international conflicts, or
humane treatment of prisoners of war.

"Diving into" the mystique of Marxism was a terrible thing. Nevertheless, that mystique was
so patently fraudulent that it possessed a built-in destructive element. If one compares it to a
drink, it offered a beverage which contained a poison one could taste and therefore wish to
reject before it reached the point of destroying absolutely everyone who touched it. "Diving
into" the Americanist Pluralist mystique is not quite the same phenomenon. It is like taking a
poisoned cocktail that does still have something of a familiar, pleasant taste to it and seems,
for a while, to provide what it promises: tranquility and satisfaction of personal desire. One
does not realize, until the very moment that he reaches the bottom of the glass, that there is
nothing really there, and that the poison has done its job. The individual members of all of
the desiccated, "free", meaningless communities who drink the Americanist Pluralist
poison---the members of the Catholic Pluralist "Club", the European Pluralist "Club", and the
Estonian Pluralist "Club"---smile and toast their murderer as they die.

How, then, do we end this week's discussion? What can we say that we must do to go in
search of Europe's identity? This is a simple question with a simple answer. We must go in
search of that identity by going in search of Christ and the meaning of Christ's Incarnation.
With our eyes fixed on Christ we gain both Faith and Reason along with all of the complex
and eminently useful tools they provide for us for learning the True, the Good, and the
Beautiful. Through the application of these tools we gain a diversity that comes from unity in
the Creator God; a solid unity; not a make believe unity emerging from a twisted vision of
freedom and order.

The choice in front of us is exactly the same which the editors of La Civiltà Cattolica posited
in the middle of the nineteenth century: either Christ as King, with both order and the
diversity of true freedom, or Man and Nature as King with a make believe order, with the
tyranny of the strong, and with the destruction of that magnificent bouquet of different
cultures which Europe once seemed willing to offer to her God. My friends in England who
thought that they were "anti-European" turned out merely to be voting for the first of these
options.
Our hopes of making Christ the King seem very limited today. Still, success is not our
primary concern as active individuals. Our primary concern is to know, to love, and to serve
God. Let us therefore concentrate on these first things and leave His Providence to grant our
labors their just rewards. Certain factors are working to our benefit as we undertake this
mission. The self-deluded ideologues, criminals, and ordinary, confused members of the
Coalition on Behalf of the Unexamined Life remain divided. They do, at times, battle with one
another and thus bring harm to their common naturalist cause. Moreover, even if the majority
of men throughout the globe were to persist in mocking God, God cannot unceasingly be
mocked. The nature which He created, even though fallen and marred in its beauty, still tells
of His glory. It will always offer starting points for thoughtful men and women to develop
"Seeds of the Logos" leading individuals and societies back to reality. Nature will strike
against its false naturalist friends and a deceived mankind which tries to push it too far,
demanding from it what it cannot give. And it will do so with the aid of the Almighty Himself.

Try as modern man might, Cardinal Louis Pie (1815-1880), Bishop of Poitiers, argued at
Lourdes in 1876, he can never escape the fact that he lives in a world created and
redeemed at the behest of a supernatural will. "The supernatural is finished", he quotes
nineteenth century man as gloating. "Well, look here, then! The supernatural pours out,
overflows, sweats from the sand and from the rock, spurts out from the source, and rolls
along on the long folds of the living waves of a river of prayers, of chants and of light."
(Mayeur, Op. Cit., XI, p. 350).

September 28, 2007