No, Horvath, This is Not The Only Option

Citing :

"If we truly desire the B-option, then let us not withdraw from modernity, for strategic retreats easily turn into routs. Let us rather engage our neo-barbarian culture by both cultivating our Benedictine identity when projecting Boniface’s strength. It is the only option."

Your "only option" has the fault of everyone having to do the same thing.

Let "us" not do this, let "us" do that.

We may need both Benedicts and Bonifaces, both Placids and Patricks.

But St Patrick didn't learn to be the missionary in Ireland. He learned it in a monastery in Gaul.

St Ansgar (bowing) did not learn to be missionary in Sweden or Denmark or North Coast of Germany, he learned it in Bec and Corbey - sorry, Bec was St Anselm.

I have been a cultural warrior in a very unsheltered position, and am inefficacious due to exasperation and lack of charity.

Any time I have sought any kind of shelter against the tides of my harassers, I have been thrown back.

It may even continue for a while, but I am sure more sheltered people are better able to pray.

Now, the option you on the one hand describe as a good thing in itself and on the other as insufficient, is not a sheltered monastery.

It is a sheltered village, with married men and women bearing thirty-fold fruit.

It can be protected by missionaries (I am not likely to be one, except very indirectly through my writings, like Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, though not as indirectly as Tolkien, who forbade himself to be openly "everyman's theologian" and was perhaps forbidden also by his priest), it can be protected by crusaders. But in order to be protected it must exist.

It is a total mistake to imagine everyman can be drawn to the faith by sheer strength of grown men who renounce shelter. Even the first 280 years of the Church, the conversion came also because of people like St Barbara who genuinely liked being sheltered. The defense of Poland was by a Black Madonna in the hands of monks whose patron Saint was St Paul the First Hermit.

And Our Lady Herself was a sheltered woman. Our Lord and His disciples and at Her burial God Himself did not want it otherwise (Her grave was of course empty, I am not saying or suggesting She is dead).

She was not totally sheltered, she was often harrassed by the Jews, but not physically, and she was given shelter from them when needed.

The Day when the Church only has defenders and no one left to be sheltered is a dark day. It is not sure she will survive for long then without Our Lord returning.

Not doing villages of crunch conservatives is also a non-defense of economic good sense, a non-return to the order you claim to want to return to, a condemnation to either very jejune life or the hectic consummation you claim is at the back of the economic problem.

It poses the little question, is your loyalty with Christ, His Church and our models in it reaching back to the Middle Ages and beyond?

Or with businessmen who don't want to feel inferior for being hectic in production, or in demands of interest on monetary loans?

Is your moral theology Roman or Americanist?

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Thursday after
II Lord's Day of Lent
16.III.2017