Dear Spengler, I
just took over as prime minister of one of the
world's former superpowers, and the first thing
that came across my desk was a set of attempted
car bombings. It appears that Muslim physicians
with excellent credentials were responsible for
this outrage. People are thinking that if
affluent, highly educated people like these could
turn to terrorism, then no
one is
really safe. What should I do? Troubled on
the Thames
Dear Troubled, This is a
matter of the utmost gravity. Your National Health
Service is plagued by poor service and clinical
incompetence. Now you are asking your citizens to
put their lives into the hands of physicians who
are too clumsy to detonate a proper bomb. I
understand that you have no choice but to recruit
foreign medical personnel. To assuage public
concern, I suggest you require overseas medical
applicants to demonstrate their proficiency in
bomb construction and detonation before hiring
them. Spengler
Dear
Spengler, I am the chief executive officer of
the world's largest religious denomination. More
than 40 years ago we changed our Mass to
vernacular languages rather than Latin, but many
of our faithful miss the Latin Mass and want to
return to it. I am ready to grant them permission
to use the old Latin Mass, but I am being attacked
as a reactionary who doesn't care about reaching
out to the people in their own language. Am I
doing the right thing? Troubled on the
Tiber
Dear Troubled, You are doing
absolutely the right thing. Take a tip from the
Jews. They held themselves together for two
millennia by holding services in Hebrew, keeping
their sacred tongue alive enough to restore as a
national language in 1948.
The threat to
your denomination always has come from those who
want to worship their own ethnicity rather than
the god of creation. Your opponents are
soon-to-be-ex-Christians like American journalist
James Carroll, who enthuses over the "liturgical
movement" of the 1920s. The "liturgical movement"
introduced congregational participation into the
Mass, that is, making the "people of God" (whoever
might have wandered in) into the actor. As Carroll
explained, "No longer do we attend Mass as a
collection of isolatos, each on his or her knees,
face buried in hands from which dangle rosary
beads. We do not approach God alone but as members
of a praying community, members of a folk." But as
you have pointed out in the past, it is God,
rather than the "folk", who is the actor in the
Mass. As I observed elsewhere, [1] Carroll's
conceit is merely banal in America, because there
is no American "folk". America is composed of
immigrants who abandoned their folkways and
embraced the American idea. But in Europe, where
the heathen folk has persisted in uneasy
coexistence with Christianity, the people's
liturgy became a Volkisch, that is,
national-racist expression.
Your
denomination is growing fastest in the global
South, preaching to people still rooted in tribal
society. Anything you can do to emphasize
universalism is a step in the right
direction. Spengler
Dear
Spengler, As head of an organization that
defends Jews against defamation, I am furious
about Pope Benedict's decision to allow the Latin
Mass back into service. It contains a prayer said
each year on Good Friday about us, asking God to
"lift the veil from the eyes" of the Jews and to
remove "the blindness of that people so that they
may acknowledge the light of your truth, which is
Christ". We have had a good dialogue going with
the Catholic Church and I don't want to ruin it,
but this really sticks in my throat. What should I
do about it? Mad in
Manhattan
Dear Manhattan: Why don't
you retaliate in kind, and pray for the Catholics?
That ought to show them. Here's a suggested text:
Lord, open the eyes of the
Catholics to the insights of your servant Franz
Rosenzweig, who said: "It is only the Old
Testament that enables Christianity to defend
itself against its inherent danger of reverting
to paganism. And it is the Old Testament alone,
because it is more than just a book. The arts of
allegorical interpretation would have made short
work of a mere book. If, like Christ, the Jews
had disappeared from the world, they would
denote only the Idea of a People, and Zion the
Idea of the Midpoint of the World, just as
Christ denotes only the Idea of Man. But the
sturdy and undeniable vitality of the Jewish
people - to which anti-Semitism itself attests -
opposes itself to such 'idealization'. That
Christ is more than idea - no Christian can know
this. But that Israel is more than an idea, the
Christian knows, because he sees it. For we
live. We are eternal, not in the way that an
idea might be eternal, but we are eternal in
full reality, if eternal we be at all. And thus
we are the one thing that Christians cannot
doubt ... Our presence stands surety for their
truth."
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