Chesterton wrote Heretics (1905) and Orthodoxy (1908) long
before he was Received into the Church on July 30th 1922, 100 years’ ago. Truth,
orthodoxy, excludes error. There is no room for half-truths in Chesterton:
“There is something to be said very error, but whatever may
be said for it, the most important thing to be said about it is that it is
erroneous.” (Orthodoxy).
The great encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis was published
in 1907, On The Doctrines of The Modernists: “the synthesis of all heresies” as St Pius
X summed up Modernism. It was promulgated between Heresy and Orthodoxy. Loisy
was perfectly clear: a Modernist "is ruled by the single wish to be one with
Christians and Catholics who live in harmony with the spirit of age".
Chesterton wrote: “It is always easy to let the age have its
head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own.” How much longer are we going
to allow this age to have it's head? When a blasphemous parody of the prayer Our
Saviour gave us can be taken into the intimacy of our very schools to groom our
Catholic children to perversity and the sin that cries out for vengeance.
When “practising Catholic” political leaders can promise to
reverse the first victor over the evil of abortion which the US has seen in 50
years. When the Church in Germany, amidst the roar departing adherents,
desperately offers Modernists everything they want of the spirit of the age.
When the beauty of the traditional Mass is supressed despite those words: “What
earlier generations held as sacred, remains sac and great for us too, and it
cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.”
What scope for t pen of Chesterton, incisive, thrusting
between chromosome and cross-dressing! Not wielded with the intent of
cancelling person but of cancelling the cancer of error.
“It is easy to be a modernist; as easy to be a snob. To have
fallen in those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after
fashion and sect after sect set along the path of Christendom – it would indeed
be simple. It is always simple to fall: there are an infinity of angles at
which one falls, only one at which one stands.”
Chesterton looked deep into the history of this country to inspire us to fight the pagan onslaught. He went back to 878: the struggle of Albert the Great against the Danes. He locates it, with poetic licence, in the valley of the White Horse, focused on a fork in the road, a place of decision and fate. Things go badly, the mighty Guthrum routs the men of Wessex. With many stout warriors slain, Albert survives the rout to witness the enemy confident in victory:
“On a dark horse at the double way
He saw great Guthrum ride,
Heard roar of brass and ring of steel,
The laughter and the trumpet peal,
The pagan in his pride.”
We too know the pagan in his Pride. The message of the Battle of Ethandune is that victory can be won from the jaws of defeat. That is the way of the Cross.
“… Alfred in the fern hard by
Set horn to mouth and blew.”
The men of Wessex found new heart, and in the carnage which followed, Guthrum was humbled. And an even greater miracle occurs: his conversion:
“In Wessex in the forest,
In the breaking of the spears,
We set a sign on Guthrum
To blaze a thousand years.
Far out to the winding river
The blood ran down for days
When we put the cross on Guthrum
In the parting of the ways.”
Just when the new pagans think they have it all on their
side, and can relax in their Pride, then the Church will muster once more.
Respond to the call. In the contradiction of the Cross which is at the core of
all the paradoxes which Chesterton made his hallmark.
How will victory look? The conversion of the human heart.
One by one. That’s always the battle. The recognition of sin, the need for
repentance. It will be the blood of Christ which will bring cleansing from sin,
healing and new life.
May Chesterton be our inspiration. No half-truths here, in the parting of the ways: “there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.” We stand at the angle of the Cross.
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