Fin de Siecle

With the passing of Mother Angelica, it seems even more clear that we've hit the end of an era, at least in America.  First our supposedly "conservative" Chief Justice started re-writing law to allow the Obamacare mandate that affected the biggest expansion in government control in the history of the United States.  Then Pope Benedict XVI, who ask for prayers that he wouldn't flee from the wolves fled from the wolves and resigned.  Then Cardinal Burke got fired.  Then our "conservative" Chief Supreme Court Justice decided that the constitution not only allows gay marriage, it requires it.  Then our "conservative" political party started playing footsie with a vulgar, adulterous, orange-colored boor as nominee.  Then the greatest conservative justice on the Supreme Court died and now Mother Angelica has passed the earth.

Not for the first time, I'm reminded of Yeat's The Second Coming.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Who will take the place of Pope Benedict XVI, Antonin Scalia, and Mother Angelica?   The pessimist will say "no one".  The optimist will say "we may have lost leaders, but we still have a movement".  Wouldn't that be something?  A sea of cultural and spiritual conservatives breaking over the sea-wall of liberalism; the head is struck down, yet the flock charges on.

On Twitter, a question was posed: what would you say to new Catholics this Easter?  I replied "Don’t get discouraged by “bad” Catholics. We don’t follow pundits or priests. We follow Christ risen."  I meant it then, and I mean it today.  But it's one thing that there's a fever swamp of bad catholics out there that give the faith a bad name.  It's another thing that no one effectively repels it.  For every liberal outrage, there may be 100 or 1000 bloggers, Tweeters, Facebookers and so on to rebut the arguments or present an alternative interpretation.  But is there anyone that people are forced to take seriously?  Like it or not, the media controls the dialog. Is there anyone who the media recognizes as a voice for conservative Catholics?  Is there anyone who is in a position of authority who will do something besides issue limp wristed statements when liberal catholics get out of line?

In short, is there anyone in the Catholic Church who will (1) say something like this and (2) be listened to?

(Michael Voris and Father Zuhlsdorf are a "Yes" for the first question but a "No" for the second.)

Mother Angelica put steel in the spine of the US Catholic Bishops.  In the 1980s, they were willing collaborators with the liberal agenda of women priests, open marriage and contraception.  They reluctantly drew the line at abortion.  Mother Angelica's emotional and thoughtful rejection of that nonsense, along with the visible support of the Pope, eventually caused that nonsense to at least go underground.   And eventually we got a few Bishops in the mold of Burke, Chaput, Loverde, Morlino and Bruskewitz.

Now our Bishops are "pastoral" and the best conservatives can hope for is benign neglect from the Vatican.

Mother Angelica stepped down from EWTN over a decade ago.  Her passing is a symbolic tragedy and not a strategic setback.  And that it happened on Easter is inexplicable.

Rest in Peace.