The Remnant

John Derbyshire of National Review is not known for being the most optomistic man in the known universe. This is the man who famously declared that the U.S. was not going to go to war against Iraq, largely because he felt we lacked the cojones. There's more than a little of the doom-and-gloom-crochety-old-drunk-in-a-pub-for-whom-nothing-is-ever-right about him. We ought to take that into consideration.

Nonetheless, I think today he has a point. While everyone who isn't nailed down is crowding Rome to view the mortal remains of John Paul II (I'm waiting for the media backlash against the media overexposure to kick in), Derb is airing the dirty laundry, not of the Pope himself, but of the Church, and no, he doesn't mean anything having to do with priests, children, and K-Y Jelly. He means the gradual erosion of spirituality in the post-modern world, the "posthuman tsunami," as he puts it (I'm proposing a five-year moratorium on the use of the word "tsunami" as a metaphor. Any takers?).

For in spite of the fact that we all loved John Paul, we all hate going to Church nowadays. We all hate any doctrine (birth control, abortion, euthanasia, etc.) that gives us anything more thant momentary inconvenience. We have been trained by modern society to demand release from any pain unjustly caused us, and we have been trained by modern academia to find a way to blame the whole for any particular pain. Despite this saint's leadership, none of that has changed.

So we're doomed. Brave New World, here we come.

But I demur. John Paul II stood for freedom of religion, and freedom of religion is no small thing. As long as religion is not muzzled or censored by the state, religion can grow, and where religion can grow, religion will grow. Look at the Evangelicals in the United States, who are so successful in preaching their version of Christianity that they've made inroads in Latin America and even forced the coastal humanists in their own country to shudder at them. The mass of humanity may be willing to turn their brains into genome-mapped pleasure domes, but not everyone is. The religious impulse is harder to kill than anyone not acquainted with it will realize. Time Magazine proclaimed God dead in 1966, certain that religion would fade away. In 2005, the death of the Pope is the biggest news story of the year. Hardly seems like an end, does it?

But even if Derbyshire is right and worldwide church attendance dwindles to the 10% it likely is in infidel France, so what? Either that 10% is right about their being a transcendent God who promised that the gates of hell would never prevail, or they're wrong. If they're wrong, the Brave New World is no threat to anything, because the Brave New World will be right. If they're right...then they Brave New World is no threat to anything.

I am reminded of the path of the Jews in the Old Testament: raised from slaves to all-conquering zealouts to effete, polytheistic sacrificers to grist under the treads of the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires. When the Jews went away to Babylon, most of them, too, wallowed in the luxury of the Morning Star's Kingdom and forgot their God. But a handful, the Remnant, stayed true, and to them God promised return and restoration:

Cease your cries of mourning,
wipe the tears from your eyes
The sorrow you have sown shall have its reward,
says the Lord,
they shall return from the enemy's land.
There is hope for your future, says the Lord;
your sons shall return to their own borders.
Jeremiah 31:16-17

This would make John Paul II not John the Baptist, heralding the new age, but Josiah, the last good King of the Davidic dynasty, who labored mightily to restore the old-time religion, and largely failed, because the people had decided that the Mosaic Law was archaic and required re-interpretation in the light of their modern society. Of Josiah it was written: "Before Him there had been no king who turned to the Lord as he did, with his whole heart, his whole soul, and his whole strength, in accord with the law of Moses; nor could any after compare with him." Yet his kingdom was devoured by Babylon within a few generations, then reborn in such a way as would never allow it to bow to foreign gods again.

So if God will seek to punish the Catholic Church for the sins of its past (sins that John Paul II knew well), fear not. The remnant will see it's way through to the other side, and be there when the Brave New World is no longer new, and no longer brave, and surrenders as meekly as tyrants inevitably do.