Counter-Currents
Hans Memling, “Angel Musicians,” 1480s
2,085 words
Recently, the text of a debate between Greg Johnson and Jonas De Geer appeared in these pages. Here following is my commentary on the thoughts expressed by both of the parties in the debate.
I find myself agreeing with points made by both men, and also disagreeing with both on some other issues raised here in this excellent and very civil discussion.
Both parties agree that present-day Christianity is in a sorry state. There is not much to debate here, and I find myself in full agreement with this position.
Mr. De Geer points out that the decay of culture in the 20th Century was triggered by the collapse of the Roman Church instigated by the 2nd Vatican Council.
Dr. Johnson points out correctly that problems in the Church predate the Council, and while this is certainly true, the point Mr. De Geer makes is still spot-on. This is true despite the fact noted in the debate that the Scandinavian countries must have absorbed relatively little from the Roman Rite. This does not really matter all that much, since the Roman Church continued to be the flagship of Western moral behavior even after the Reformation. As I once asked of a Protestant friend (who happened to be a Methodist): Who is the head of the Methodist Church? My friend was caught flat-footed by this question; he had no idea. To be sure, he was only a nominal Methodist–but even nominal Methodists (even atheists) know who the Pope is.
The plain fact is that Protestantism, taken as a whole is essentially irrelevant–not because of the particulars of their various theologies, or because they are right or wrong, but because they are less competent theologians that their Roman professional peers. This by definition since the Roman Rite ruled the West for many centuries unchallenged and united, whereas the Reformation began to splinter soon after it started and now has hundreds of different denominations.
Reaching back in time, we can assign the troubles in Christendom to any one of a number of dates preceding the Rogue Council of 1962–1965:
The Schism of 1054
Here the Orthodox Rite has the high ground in my estimation. By avoiding the central authority of the Pope in the Western Rite, the Orthodox Church lent itself to nationalism, particularism, and ethnocentrism rather than the West’s universalism and general indifference to race and culture. The Russian Orthodox Church survived the Communist era, and remains intact and seemingly more energetic than the rapidly disintegrating Roman Church.
The Reformation
Many of the Protestant denominations were more political movements than actual religions.
Age of Exploration
In the settling of the Americas the Protestants took the high ground. When the Catholic countries (Spain and Portugal) settled the New World they commonly sent sailors only, leaving their wives and children back home in Europe. When these sailors arrived, they generally hauled off everything that wasn’t bolted down and sent it back to Europe.
They fornicated shamelessly with the ambient natives, creating a very large subclass of mixed race peoples, condemning most of the Republics south of the Rio Grande to poverty, perpetual revolution, violence, and chaos.
The Protestants (at least the English who did the lion’s share of settling North America) mixed very little with the Indians, killed off many of them, then put the rest on reservations. In contrast to the aforementioned Spanish and Portuguese, they often brought their families with them, indicating more honest intentions–to settle the land and make it their home rather than simply loot it.
The French Revolution
18th-century Bolshevism.
World War II
Pius XII, now falsely billed as a pro-Nazi Pope, was in fact a pro-Marxist. He took the side of the United Nations forces during the Second World War. This became very hard to justify after the USSR entered the war on the side of the Allies as shown here in this remarkable article by Vatican Observer Mary Ball Martinez:
Pope Pius XII in the Second World War
The Soviet Factor
Papal preference for the Allied side became more difficult to defend after June 1941, when this became the Soviet side. By that time Hitler’s “Fortress Europe” was overwhelmingly Catholic. Germany itself then included the predominantly Catholic regions of Austria, the Saarland, and the Sudetenland, as well as Alsace-Lorraine and Luxembourg. Moreover, the German-allied countries of Italy, Slovenia, Slovakia and Croatia were entirely Catholic, and Hungary was mainly so. France — including both the German-occupied northern zone and the Vichy-run south — cooperated with Germany. Similarly, Catholic Spain and Portugal were sympathetic.
A Catholic priest, Josef Tiso, had been elected president of the German-backed Republic of Slovakia. In France, which adopted the Axis ban on Freemasonry, crucifixes went up on all public buildings, and on French coins the old official motto of the French Revolution, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” was replaced with “Work, Family, Fatherland.”[1]
Paganism
Is Paganism a viable alternative to Christianity? In the sense normally used, I doubt it. As Mr. De Geer points out: “The attempts that have been made at creating new religions or recreat[ing] old ones in certain nationalist circles have been hopelessly futile, to put it mildly.”
My view on this, much to the horror of my fellow Roman Catholics, is that the Roman Church is itself a variant of paganism. Catholics reflexively deny this as though it was some sort of a slam, but the Protestants correctly point this out about the Catholic propensity for the veneration of Mary and all the innumerable Saints. In this the Protestants are exactly correct. Not until the Reformation did we get a widely accepted monotheism in the West.
National Socialist Era
Some ceremonies during the Third Reich strongly suggested pagan rituals, such as the midnight swearing in of SS members.
The late Reichskanzler discounted full-strength paganism of the sort delivered in Rosenberg’s The Myth of the 20th Century. Just the same, it seems that had the National Socialist experiment survived the war, both the Roman Rite and the Lutheran Church and some variant of each with a retro pagan admixture would likely have experienced a revival in Europe.
Indefectibility of the Church
I believe Dr. Johnson has the high ground here. Despite the persistent citation of this catch-phrase especially by Traditional Latin-Rite Catholics, the plain facts of the real world have forced even its advocates to hem and haw over this absolute statement, whittling it down from the whole Church as it was before 1962, now reducing its application to the Trad Cats in general, or one favored branch of the Traditional movement to the exclusion of others not favored.
This type of slicing and dicing is a bit too slick to pass inspection, especially when we consider that all the Popes (or anti-Popes if you prefer) from Pius XII forward have stood 180° opposed to the general thrust of their 259 predecessors.
With 266 Popes from St. Peter to the present Pope Francis, only the last seven (or eight if you want to throw in Pius XI) have been unorthodox in both belief and practice.
Doing the math: 7÷266 = .026, or about 2½ percent of the historical Pontiffs have consistently delivered heresy during their reigns.
This time argument frames this issue correctly. The fact that in space–the world we live in today–the Pope is in the majority amongst Catholics in terms of his political bias, is interesting, but basically irrelevant in terms of getting at what is the essence of any belief system that has the right to call itself Roman Catholic. Hence the modern traditional belief, popular in some circles, that the post- Conciliar Popes are frauds, and would (or should) be declared anti-Popes by a future reactionary occupant of the Holy See–assuming that any such appears.
Is it then possible to argue that the indefectibility of the Church is preserved by the existence of a few wildcat Trad orgs around the planet, or that the turncoat SSPX, which threw out its own Bishop in Buenos Aires to curry favor with the Jews, is now the Catholic Church?
No. A church, to have a legitimate existence in any society, must inform and be backed by the culture in which it subsists. Current Western society rejects both variants of the Roman Rite and all of the Protestant denominations as well. All varieties of Christians are pariahs in today’s Western culture. The politically correct mainstream versions of any of the Christian faiths are given polite notice in the press, but the contempt is palpable.
Can the Roman Rite in particular, or Christendom in general, expect that in time it will revive and take its former place in European civilization?
The chances seem slim. Though devout Christians like to think of Christianity as a permanent faith, history teaches us that very little if anything in this world is permanent given a long enough time frame. Religions have come and gone before, and nothing on earth remains in stasis indefinitely.
Change is in fact a law of life. Everything extant is subject to it, and even where change is subtle, given sufficient time even the most gradual rate of change can produce an end result that is so far removed from the original that it is barely recognizable.
Liberalism
Here I disagree with Dr. Johnson. Liberalism is not a religion of any sort. It is, if anything, perhaps a pseudo-religion, and at that not a very good one. Rather than a theology, liberalism is a sort of mental retardation akin to the poor cognitive development found in people that have suffered from childhood lead poisoning. I do not see a better way to explain the liberal failure to understand the obvious, even after numerous clear examples in life and history prove conclusively that many of their cherished dogmas are wrong. The notion that the races of man have equal potential, and that this potential is easily malleable and can therefore be modified and improved by training and education is just one example. Repeated studies and the evidence of experience and observation through long centuries tell us that the races differ in ability, behavior and intelligence, and that much of this is inbred and cannot be modified significantly by environmental factors.
As Groucho used to say, “Who you gonna believe–me or your eyes?”
I do agree however that there are parts of liberalism (or the left) that are salvageable, and even parts that are valuable, such as leftist opposition to Zionism. Also, though liberalism has a monopoly on the worst parts of culture and the arts, it also has a monopoly on the best of these, such as they are. When was the last time any of us have read a novel from the white nationalist right equivalent in caliber to American Tragedy or Sister Carrie?
The answer here, alas, is “not ever.”
A Civil Religion
I don’t know that this is going to work. The problem we face today is that our race and Western civ. along with it have come up against a global struggle between wildcat individualism (Whites and the West) vs. Tribalism (the jews). So far, the results seem to indicate that tribalism is a much more effective strategy with superior survival potential compared to poorly organized individualism.
Adding to our woes, there is little if any indication that tribal behavior can be taught. It seems to be an inborn trait. Either a race has it or it does not.
Much of today’s chatter on the white nationalist right exemplifies Spengler’s observation: “Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them.”
Any way you look at it, we are in this for the long haul. If and when a new Faith is organically developed over time (it cannot be invented in committee) or an old Faith revived or rediscovered, all of us now living will likely be long dead. Even our children or grandchildren may not see the day.
We’ve been down this road before. When the great cathedrals of Europe were built, those starting them knew they’d never see them completed.
The Cologne Cathedral, begun in 1248 continued under construction until 1473 when work was stopped. Building resumed in the 19th century and the cathedral was completed in 1880.
The first phase of construction lasted 225 years. Total time to completion: 632 years.
We have a long road ahead of us. Our job is to lay the groundwork. Victory will be the work of the generations to come.
Note
1. “Pope Pius XII in the Second Word War,” October 1993, http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v13/v13n5p26_Martinez.html
17 comments
Congratulations on a well thought out essay. A third possibility is that we live in the nightmare created by James Burnham and his therapeutic managerial concept. I hadn’t realized how bad things were until I took and old friend into the Emergency Department of a major west coast hospital for some pointers on how to handle her early stage dementia and now three months later I still can’t get her out. On the bright side when my life settles down again perhaps I’ll be able to come up with a short essay on how to avoid being kidnapped by the medical/pharmaceutical authorities. Christian/Pagan? It all depend how we treat each other.
Not entirely sure what message the author is trying to convey. It’s clear he is writing from a pro-Catholic perspective, but what is he trying to convince us of? That we should support Catholicism as some sort of European national religion? Just how does he propose to do that? Some more quibbles: like De Geer, the author simply states that Catholicism is central to the Western world, without even feeling the need to demonstrate this. I guess some people just prefer to pretend the Reformation never happened. “Many of the Protestant denominations were more political movements that actual religions.” This goes with his assessment of liberalism. Anything that he does not consider a true faith cannot be religion. Unfortunately (for all of us), it is, as can be seen by the emotive hysteria that both American Protestants and liberals revel in.
Lastly, the classic critique of paganism is once again, that it amounts to attempting to either create or re-create a religion. This view on the part of religious Christians assumes automatically that pagans are not sincere in their beliefs. After all, no one has to create what is already true. The fact is that what we now call ‘paganism’ (a Christian label) was simply the beliefs and worldviews of our ancestors in ritualized and mythologized form. Being an ethnic and tribal tradition, it did not require adherence to any defined creed. As the author points out, paganism was only outwardly erased after the coming Christianity, although I don’t think it’s accurate to give Catholicism exclusive credit for its survival. As long as there are European men who stay true to their heritage, there will be pagans.
He gets it wrong on Protestantism in my view, which I consider superior to Catholicism. Some of the most brilliant minds ever to have existed on this planet were possessed by Protestants. A cursory google search will bear that out. Also, he spoke of his Methodist friend not knowing who the leader of the Methodist Church was while everyone knows who the Pope is. But, this is a key difference between the two sects of Christianity and the reason there are so many different Protestant denominations. Protestants worship God in spirit and have a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ — the ONLY mediator between God and man. No Pope required. Ditto for worshiping Mary. Catholicism, in the minds of many Protestants, is little more than a cult.
Well Protestant denominations were generally quite egalitarian in origin, so it makes sense that the head of the ecclesial hierarchy is not as important as in the Latin Church, where if a putrid PC pushover from Latin America is elected by a council of old men in skirts, he must have been chosen by God as well. That said, all the egalitarianism of Protestantism accomplished was allowing Christianity to return to is Biblical, Hebraic, anti-traditional universalist roots, which was by no means a good thing. As the author points out, the impersonal hierarchy of the Catholic church allowed for the survival of European pagan traditions in Christianized form. Protestants on the other hand, tend to spend as much time attacking anything they see as ‘pagan’ (read authentically European) in Christian tradition as they do worrying over Islamization (and then, partly only because they fear it may hurt God’s chosen). If you had spent as much time with Pentecostalism as I had, you would understand why I have so little time for Christianity.
Quibbles:
1) The Supreme Being is just too abstract a concept to pray to. God never walked upon the earth (apart from the Incarnation), he never had his picture painted or photo taken, he never played a musical instrument, sang a song, led a crusade, made a home-cooked meal. But among the saints you’ll find all of these achievements, and more. They were real people, and that is why you can pray to them rather than to some vague “God” concept. When people say they talk to God, they’re usually just talking to themselves.
2) Catholics do not “worship” Mary or any of the other saints. See above. They pray to the saints because they find this to be efficacious. Try it before passing judgment.
How could Piux XII take the side of the United Nations during World War II when the UN did not exist until after its conclusion? This article isn’t up to snuff.
In fact the term United Nations was in general use during the War, possibly put into circulation after the Arcadia Conference (22 December 1941 to 14 January 1942)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/timeline/factfiles/nonflash/a1140346.shtml
I have a collection of Fortune magazines from the War years and on page 76 of the issue of July 1943 there is an advertisement from Universal Camera Corp. that uses the term United Nations in the product description.
Here is the context in which this appears:
“Wherever your boy is, binoculars are keeping watch—helping him and his comrades to destroy our enemies, and hasten Victory.
THESE FIGHT TOO! Universal now makes binoculars for our armed forces and the United Nations. It has pioneered in many new methods of production and assembly of lenses, prisms and precision optical instruments—significant contributions to America’s future leadership in this highly specialized field.
Remember Your Pledge To Buy War Bonds, And Live Up To It!”
“Please, Lord!—turn their binoculars this way!,” Universal Camera Corporation, Fortune vol. xxviii, no. 1 p.76
~Roy J. Street
No effort was made to address what I think is Greg Johnson’s most powerful argument: that Europeans have always been interested in the church, but the church has never been interested in Europeans, except incidentally. So from a racial standpoint, who cares whether the last however many popes have been ‘frauds’? Had Vatican II never taken place would the church today favor Europeans? That’s what traditionalists would have people believe, but it’s hard to see why it would be the case.
On an unrelated point, racial equality is far from an essential liberal ‘dogma.’ Liberals believed in racial inequality for far longer than they have believed in racial equality. Indeed, even today, one would have to believe that numerous liberals who publicly uphold civic racial equality harbor private beliefs in biological racial inequality – after all, some of them even admit it.
I think religion should be a personal choice and not a spiritual hegemony which reduces it to a political power and not a spiritual power. I was actually quite shocked to learn about the three way fight between the Christians, the Gnostics and the Neo-Platonists during the formation of the Catholic Church. Nasty piece of deception that. I am with the Platonists who believed the world is eternal. The Christians dropped that and stuck in the Jewish apocalypse. The Gnostics believed the world was evil. The Christians took that and made the body evil and therefore all matter. The dichotomy between spirit and matter is the space/place where all the esoteric/occult interesting stuff happens.
I told my kids that one can either be Socrates or Galileo. Socrates died for his principles and Galileo knew he did not have to die for the knowledge he knew was true and would be revealed eventually. (different contexts I know)
Christ sanctified matter and the human body by His incarnation. You are swinging wildly and missing. Jewish Apocalypse? Christ lived as a suffering servant but will return as a Conquering King to mete out Justice. Read Kalki by Gore Vidal if you don’t want to read the book itself.
Some of the Gnostics were ascetics. Others were wildly sexual, their rationale being that it didn’t matter since the body was unreal. Others, like Rasputin, had a third take on it: sin greatly that you might feel repentance and be saved. None of this is the viewpoint of the Church which says the World was made by God and is “good”. That’s Genesis. They fall apart on overpopulation I admit. There’s enough in the Bible to make a case for Environmentalism, but nothing that can counter “Be fruitful and multiply.”
I could give you a list of books to read by scholars and philosophers, but I see you stuck in a rut, so it is a waste of my time.
Have a look into Eastern Orthodoxy.
Dr. R.C. Sproul or John MacArthur might argue that protestants are far from irrelevnt considering they are the fasting growing sect of protest faith.
The Methodist was weak. His response should have been simple. Christ is the head of the church.
The truest parts of European Christianity be it Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, high or ‘low’ church Protestantism is its commitment to the survival of European man and women into the far distant future. Everything else is irrelevant. If the aims of these major confessions do not propagate the flourishing of our lineages and jeopardize our future as a race then they are worst then useless.
It is the unfortunate truth that nearly all Christian confessions or denominations trivialize our continued existence as a unique stock. In support of Dr. Johnsons’s point that Christianity was never exclusive to Europe. I’d like to point out obvious that the original disciples and their communities were (partially?) Hellenized Jews. A non-white, Caucasian group in the Near East. Furthermore not only dos the original religion extend into ancient Axum but was spread as far afield as India by Saint Thomas himself. Dr. Johnson said in the debate the faith has never been entirely of Europe and it is undoubtably the case.
I don’t see the benefit in hypothesizing the eventual devolution or complete refutation of Christinity. To that the degree that the myriad of churches remain particular to a certain ethno-racial is indicative of their greater value to our struggle. Unfortunately churches of all stripes appear not to be concerned with these issues. Conversion and sending your check it seem to be the bottom line for many of the more particular and traditional forms of Christianity. Protestantism, in some of its more particular variants, seems to provide a more organic existence for its communicants in the Anglo-sphere. This seems to be especially true as Europeans from the British Isles and continental or ‘ethnic’ whites continue to meld into the larger European family that exists in the USA, Canada and Australia.
Seems that the relative strength of traditional orthodox Christian traditions is explaines by the migrations and settlements of non-Europeans en mass into Protestant and Catholic white societies. These migrations and relative isolation of eastern and southeastern Europe creates an appearance that Eastern Orthodox white societies provide a refuge.
This is a bunch of defeatist nonsense.
Yeah sure it took hundreds of years to build a Cathedral, but making that analogous to our cause is a silly case to make when you have the example of National Socialism in Germany which took less than two decades to fully establish itself.
And what it proved is that when we White Men get our act together then we can do the whole tribalism game much better than anyone else. In fact if you want to think of it in tribal terms then you could say that our ‘tribe’ took on the USSR, was heavily outnumbered, stabbed in the back by our fratricidal Anglo brothers, and yet despite all this we almost won!
The Soviet Union was never the same again after Hitler bloodied their nose.
But when the Jew has devoted about 95% of his subversive activity to destroying and undermining White solidarity then it’s no wonder we’re so scattered and demoralized right now. But don’t take the easy way out and blame this on some evolutionary deficiency in us. This fight is long from over.
The author starts correctly at the Great Schism in 1054 and briefly notes Orthodox Christianity’s substantive differences vis-a-vis Roman Catholicism but them immediately moves on to the next theological crisis in European Christianity. The fact is, that millennial schism still marks the departure point of Rome from traditional church organization and it is fairly easy to see the differences today between the robust nationalism in Russia and other eastern European countries vs. the rest of the West.
That is no accident. While Orthodoxy is certainly not the sole reason that Serbians, for example, seem to take pride in their race of people, you cannot really define a Serbian without making note of the Faith, because Orthodoxy has remained relevant in their culture, even though the Jews did their best to stomp it out when they were in charge of the policies of many of those eastern countries.
Similarly, at the recent May Day parade in Russia, several highly placed figures (not just Putin) made the sign of the cross during the proceedings in highly visible fashion. This is widely recognized as a sign not only of devotion to Christianity, but membership in the Russian people’s native religion.
The reason Orthodoxy fits in so well with resurgent nationalism is that, while the church is hierarchical, there is no credence given to the idea of infallibility among any men in it, and, generally speaking, for practical purposes, the authority of the individual bishop or Metropolitan does not extend beyond the nation’s borders.
The author cites the veneration of Mary and the Saints as evidence that Catholicism is a variation of paganism as opposed to true monotheism. This is an uncritical acceptance of protestant propaganda.
Saints were not demigods or lesser deities, but exemplary individuals who were honoured as role models.
A lot of people attribute prayer exclusively to worship. However, there are several different definitions to the word “prayer”. The one most everyone is familiar with is worship prayer, that which goes to God and God alone. There’s request prayer, which is asking for something. There’s even the kind that you would use among friends, like, “Pray, do tell.”
Simply put, everyone who is in heaven is our family. They just happen to be in heaven and not on earth. Prayer to them is request prayer. We’re simply asking them to do something for us. It’s the same thing as asking a family member here to pray for us.
The type of prayer at issue is worship prayer. In paganism, the prayers given to them ARE for worship, the type of adoration given to a god. This is the difference between pagan prayer and prayers to saints: one is for worship, the other is simply requests.
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=2803
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