REMEMBERING THE BUSH BABY

Jerry Harkins


The lesser galago, also called the bush baby (Galago sene-galensis), is one of the smallest members of the order of primates, being about the size of a squirrel with a brain weighing a couple of grams. Despite its size, it is exceptionally vocal, producing loud, shrill cries surprisingly like those of a human baby. The plaintive cries and "cute" appearance may account for the name "bush baby.”

It could be a lot worse and, not so long ago, it was. This essay first appeared in 2005:

I am the bearer of very bad news. Your President is a moron. He didn’t know anything. Nobody told him anything. And he doesn’t remember anything. About anything. Fortunately, God whispers in his ear. Unfortunately, the voice he thinks is God’s actually belongs to Dick Cheney and Mr. Cheney isn’t telling him any different. The White House PR machine goes to great lengths these days to proclaim that the President is smarter than he looks and is a terrific manager who’s right on top of things and makes all the big decisions. He never looks backward. In other words, it’s become embarrassingly obvious he’s a moron. The posturing is necessitated by a series of books by knowledgeable insiders the burden of which is that the President drools a lot and is not completely toilet trained.

• He used to be a businessman who was so bad at business (three bankruptcies) he required serial bailing out by Stalwarts of the Bush family (SOB’s). In spite of his Harvard MBA.

• He used to be a bum who engaged in binge drinking and related intellectual pursuits. He was saved by the love of Jesus and a strong woman.

• He is a born again Christian. He believes the universe was created on October 4, 4004 BC at 9 o’clock in the morning, Texas time. In spite of his Yale BA.

Did I mention that he’s a moron? This is important because it explains why he keeps saying we’re winning a war we have already lost, why he paid no attention to the August 6, 2001 memo regarding terrorist hijacking, and why he can’t pronounce words of more than two syllables. It explains his goofy facial expressions and why he likes to play cowboy down on the range in Texas. It explains a lot. For instance, do you really think anyone with even half a brain would embrace tax cuts as a way to reduce the federal deficit? Why was he the last person to hear about the two most disastrous events of his administration, the attacks of 9/11 and the publication of those prison photos? And even if he was so disconnected, why in God’s name did he use “nobody told me” as a defense, thereby admitting his ignorance? Why else would he tell transparent lies like the one about cutting down all the trees, not to help his fellow plutocrats in the forest products industry, but to prevent forest fires? (Of course, technically he’s right about this: no trees does mean no forest fires among other things.)

Now a lot of you are thinking how can you say such terrible things about such a decent fellow who, as a matter of fact, was twice elected Governor of Texas? By God, you think, the American people almost elected him President of the United States. Wouldn’t that make all those voters morons too? Well, sure. If you insist on measuring the intellect of the voters by the people they routinely elect to govern themselves, then it follows that we’re all morons. You could, of course, point to the occasional exception. The more cynical among you could attribute it to the absence of “none of the above” on most ballots. Finally, if you’re really feeling nasty, you might say that American politicians and voters are no better and no worse than their counterparts elsewhere in the world. Actually, however, the only way to assure that we and our leaders are blessed with roughly the same intellectual skills would be to select the latter by random sampling. Otherwise, Harkins’s Laws of Competitive Politics inevitably see to it that, in any political contest, the worst possible candidate always wins. To wit:

• In politics, the sound bite is king. Short sentences endlessly repeated are the coin of the realm. This is a variation of the principle that empty barrels make the most noise.

• Government is the art of unkept promises. A candidate who knows this will always prevail over one who doesn’t. Voters, given a choice between a candidate whose promises are realistic and one who promises them the moon will always choose the latter. Everyone knows neither will keep his or her promises but a little fantasy can serve as a warm blanket.

• In every election, symbols trump substance. This is a corollary of Parkinson’s Law to the effect that the only factor influencing the outcome of a meeting is the seating arrangement.

• Lord Acton was right: power tends to corrupt. Politicians are obsessive about power to the exclusion of all rational thought. It begins with achieving the most important goal in a politician’s career which is getting the right parking space
.
• Finally, crime pays. This is axiomatic. While it is true that most career criminals are smarter than most politicians, there is considerable overlap between the two professions.

There are a few advantages to having a moron in charge of things. First, since he can’t learn anything, no one has to tell him anything. He has universal deniability, a huge asset for any politician. Second, it is futile and unsporting to second guess his decisions. Once he acts, it would be churlish to say that heads would have been a better call than tails. Third, the only rational way to hold him accountable is to have the lowest possible expectations which, of course, he is bound to exceed half the time unless his lucky coin is defective. It could be worse and would be if Karl Rove were the de jure President instead of just the de facto one.

There are also serious disadvantages to having a moron running the country—I mean in addition to the horrific notion of having the little black box with the big red button anywhere near him. It is a well established scientific principle that morons cannot resist big red buttons. Beyond that, though, you have no idea who is making the disastrous day-to-day decisions. When the President endorsed Ariel Sharon’s assassination squads and yanked the right of return rug out from under the Palestinians, he undid 50 years of American diplomacy in a single casual sentence which he ad libbed at a Rose Garden Photo Op. The Palestinians, who never had much faith in us anyway, rightly concluded that the President was washing his hands of the peace process. Now maybe you think Mr. Bush was right. Or, maybe you think he was just lucky. He called heads and, sure enough, it came up heads. It doesn’t make much difference what you or I think. What should bother all of us is that he made this huge, earth-shattering, policy-reversing decision pretty much between potty training and coffee break. I don’t want to “misunderestimate” him, but you know he was winging it. Or maybe Paul Wolfowitz put something in that coffee. Do you think he consulted Colin Powell? Do you think he has any idea that the Balfour Declaration is not some gay rights manifesto? When he says tax cuts are good for reducing deficits, is he recycling what even his daddy called “voodoo economics?” No, it’s not that complicated. Some Republican who has his ear told him tax cuts for the wealthy translate directly into campaign contributions. “As a bonus, Mr. President, you will reduce the deficit.” Who told him such a thing? My friend, you do not know. You know it wasn’t a conservative economist like Milton Friedman or a Keynesian like Bob Ruben or even an acolyte of Ayn Rand like Alan Greenspan. All you know is that whoever told him that was (a) filthy rich and (b) a Republican.

Who’s in charge here? There are times I get all teary eyed remembering the good old days when you knew Al Haig really was running things. We have had Presidents who were happy to be thought of as intellectually challenged. Eisenhower, for one, cultivated the image of an average Joe who graduated sixty-first in a West Point Class of 164. But can you imagine George W. Bush playing Ike’s role in World War II? Please! Not even Omar Bradley, who graduated forty-fourth in the same class of 1915, could have done that. And Bradley was a genius.

When Mr. Bush drools, he’s not putting it on. When he looks puzzled, it’s because he is. Jacob Weisberg says he wasn’t born stupid, he chose it. Which is pretty much the same line the White House is trying to sell when it says he’s smarter than he looks. They’re both wrong. A smart person like Eisenhower can choose the appearance of stupidity but cannot actually become stupid (any more than a truly stupid person can become smart). Someone like Jessica Simpson can make a career out of really dumb remarks but you have to be pretty smart to get away with such a gig. George II is no Jessica Simpson. When he wants to say that repealing the estate tax is good for everyone, it comes out, “The death tax is good for people from all walks of life.” This is not a regrettable lack of fluency; it is a tragic lack of intelligence. The words come out meaning the opposite of what he wants to say. He can’t even lie logically. When he proclaims his Iraq policy has been a “catastrophic success,” it is not a Malapropism, it is a short circuit in what passes for his brain. When he claims, “We're making the right decisions to bring the solution to an end” it’s not a slip of the tongue. It is a profound ignorance of cause and effect logic. When he claims, “Our economy is on a rising path,” he means it as an optimistic metaphor. He has never heard of Sisyphus (he cut that class at Yale) and he never stopped to think about the difficulties of a rising path. When he blames the trial lawyers for the fact that, "Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country," he’s not ad libbing an inanity. He probably has no idea what an OB-GYN does for a living but he knows loving women is widely practiced among Texas cowboys. Finally, when he says, “It’s the executive branch’s job to interpret the law,” it is not a simple mistake. It is a dangerous combination of Mr. Bush’s stupidity and Mr. Rove’s megalomania. God save us!

Subsequently

 God did not save us.  Instead he chose to punish me for thinking he could not do worse than George W. Bush.  It was by way of reminding me that God is omnipotent.  He can do anything, even invent a President like Donald Trump.  Didn't even break a sweat.

Much Later Than Subsequently

Back in the days when I wrote political satire, I didn't pay much attention to such offenses as name-calling.  George W. Bush is not and never was a moron.  He was frequently inarticulate and he made a lot of decisions I didn't approve of.  He surrounded himself with too many jackasses but a woman like Laura would not have stuck by a moron and a moron would not have been able to do such a good job raising children.  Finally, a moron could never have turned himself into a serious and talented artist in retirement, an artist whose portraits convey a forceful emotional intelligence.  I only regret that I never had a chance to have a beer with hm.

THE CHURCH VERSUS THE GOSPEL OF LOVE
Jerry Harkins

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to capture the historical Jesus. He was an itinerant teacher but we know what he taught only in rough outline. You sense his message was sophisticated and innovative but not radical. Much of what we think he said seems enigmatic (the first shall be last), perplexing (to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding), counterintuitive (turn the other cheek) or simply illogical (anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress). Part of the problem is that, by the time the books of the New Testament were written down, the sources were at best second and third hand memories. In many important passages what we have are historical memories in the process of becoming myths. The Bible was written by parties with different vested interests. The orthodox position is that the scriptures were “inspired” by God, but the evangelists remind one of the blind philosophers trying to describe an elephant to the king. For example, the four accounts of the central event of Christianity, the resurrection, are different in many respects. When whoever came to the tomb on the first Easter morning (there are at least six candidates in four configurations), did they find the door open or shut? Mark (16:4), Luke (24:2) and John (20:1) say open; Mathew (28:2) says closed. And whom did they meet when they got there. Matthew (28:2-5) says one angel, John (20:12) says two, Mark (16:5) says one young man, while Luke (24:4) says two men. Paul is another problem. He claimed to have received his teachings by direct revelation, but he never met or even saw Jesus in the flesh. In fact, Paul’s idea of the Christian message was fundamentally at odds with that of Jesus. He invented the fantastical notion of original sin which went on to become the lynchpin of all subsequent Christian theology.

One thing, however, is clear: the God whose personality evolves from Genesis through Job and the prophets to the gospels is, in the end, a god of love, a god who needs to love and be loved by his own creation. The story doesn’t start that way. The God of Abraham and Isaac, of Sodom and Gomorrah, of Job is something of a psychopath. As he says, “ I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.” The God of the Torah is a law giver. He gives the Jews ten commandments and 613 mitzvot in which love plays only a minor part. Love God (No. 4). Love both your fellow Jews (No. 13) and those who convert to Judaism (14). Jesus is only a bit more expansive—he adds your neighbor—when he tells the scribe about the great commandment, but love is the essence of his teaching and the consistent example of his life. “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” And later, “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.” God is love. These are the first words (and thus the title) of Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical.

At the Last Supper Jesus said, “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” Later he said, “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.” These lines are part of a lengthy and remarkable homily that might be taken as a constitution establishing the universal church as a manifestation and messenger of God’s love. It is, therefore, reasonable to ask, “What happened?”

Love as an abstraction has been a consistent teaching. In practice, however, there has been at least as much hatred in the history of the church. Indeed, the church rejects entirely any manifestation of sexual love outside its own extremely limited definition. Gay love is an abomination. Heterosexual love is tolerable only in the narrowest of circumstances. At various times, it has been perfectly acceptable to slaughter infidels and heretics, to mutilate eunuchs, to burn witches, to practice slavery, to promote tyranny and even to wage war. Christianity is not the only religion that has done all these things but it is the only one that has done them in the name of a loving God or, since God is love, in the name of love.

The problem is that love challenges power whether it is the infinite love of a God who has no need to browbeat his creatures, no need to torment them with the fear of hell, or the love of sexual partners who, being swept up in ecstasy, have no need for the preaching of dour priests.

The power of the church is based on the assertion that the Pope and the bishops are the “successors” of the apostles, and that the Pope is the Vicar of Christ on earth. The church believes, without biblical or historical support, that Peter was the first Bishop of Rome and all subsequent members of the hierarchy have descended from him in unbroken succession through the laying on of hands. Unlike so many other parts of the “sacred tradition,” apostolic succession is a truly ancient belief tracing back at least to 90 CE or, in other words, no later than two generations after the death of Christ. There were still living witnesses to his preaching and death.

The church’s reasoning begins with Christ’s charge to Peter as reported by Matthew 16:18-19: “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” This may be coupled with his final words before the Ascension: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” We are dealing, then, with three clauses: build, whatever and always.

It is notable that this grant of seemingly absolute power appears only in the gospel of Matthew even though Mark (8:27-30) reports the same occasion. Mark was the first gospel written. It is thought to be dated about 64 CE written by a companion of Peter and based on Peter’s sermons. It may seem strange that one of the most important statements in the life of the church escaped such a well-placed evangelist. Matthew, on the other hand, wrote around 90 CE about an event at which he had not been present. It seems clear that he had access to Mark’s account but he made many additions and changes. His also contradicts the others in fairly important respects. For example, Matthew says Jesus was born during Herod’s reign which means no later than 4 BCE. Luke, on the other hand, says Jesus was born when Quirinius was the governor of Syria which was between 6 and 9 CE.

Regarding the build clause, whatever you believe about Matthew, there is no indication that Peter was told to pass his authority to a successor. Nor is it anywhere said that Rome was to be the seat of the church or that the Bishop of Rome was to be supreme. Indeed, the Council of Nicaea in 325 said there were three primacies: Rome, Alexandria and Antioch. This was twelve years after Constantine had issued the Edict of Milan which legalized Christianity in the Empire and made the Emperor, who was still a pagan, the de facto head of the church. It was, in fact, Constantine who called and presided over the Council of Nicaea. And, while he did not proclaim doctrine, he did try to force doctrinal conformity throughout the realm, not through the Bishop of Rome, but through his Council. In the early church, the title of Pope was given to any bishop and it was not until the sixth century that it began being reserved to the Bishop of Rome.

The whatever clause is more interesting still. First, Peter did not or could not impose his views on the others. Even the non-apostle Paul engaged him on the most serious matters and won every time. The modern church is much more the church of Paul than of Peter. But the real problem is that the church invokes the whatever clause when it is convenient but denies it when it is not. Thus, in a letter to the world’s bishops, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, given on May 22, 1994, Pope John Paul II said, “…in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful.”

No authority! So much for whatever you bind. The historian Garry Wills titled his 2000 book Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit by which he referred to the persistent lying employed by the Popes as basic strategy. A perfect example of this is John Paul’s claim to Peter’s mission of “confirming the brethren.” He propounds a deliberate distortion of Luke 22:32. It is the famous scene near the end of the Last Supper. Jesus says, "Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers." But he replied, ‘Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.’ Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, Peter, before the rooster crows today, you will deny three times that you know me."

The Pope wants his readers to believe that because Jesus told Peter to reassure his terrified colleagues, he, John Paul, has the right to declare definitively that women cannot be priests. That is obviously not what Jesus meant. The Pope is proclaiming an absurdity on the basis of an absurd claim of authority unless, of course, one assumes that the doctrine of infallibility can transform an absurdity into an eternal verity. Sadly such miraculous mutations are often the sum and substance of papal logic. Virtually all proclamations are infused with beatific love for that which is being denounced. Thus, you will read that the church loves and respects homosexuals, women, heretics and sinners of every description. “Hate the sin, love the sinner” is pretty much the official mantra even though it has no correlation with actual actions of the church. Indeed, when it was abandoning such malefactors as Joan of Arc to the stake, it prayed the formula Rogando eam ut cum velit mite agere, that the executioners should treat her with gentleness. Burn her alive but do it gently.

There have also been formulas for less sedate occasions. On July 22, 1209, the crusaders of Pope Innocent III invested the town of Beziers in what is now southwestern France. The knights asked Papal Legate and Cistercian monk Arnold Amaury how to distinguish friend from foe. Arnie replied, "Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius!" Slaughter them all! God will know his own! And they did, all 20,000 men, women and children according to Arnold himself in his report to the Pope. The dead included a thousand women and children huddled in the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene. The bones of these martyrs were uncovered in 1840. As Stephen O’Shea wrote about the massacre, “In the days before gunpowder, to kill that many people in so short a time required a savage single-mindedness that beggars the imagination.”

Some may think that the fully documented stories of the Cathars and Joan of Arc represent not the rule but the exception in church history. Of their kind, they are certainly egregious but their kind is not at all uncommon. It is also true that from the beginning the church has been blessed with adherents who were kind and loving, wise, gentle and courageous. But it has rarely admired these virtues and has often persecuted their practitioners. Consider Saint Francis of Assisi and his followers. During his life (1181-1226), he was generally accepted and even venerated as a holy man and a man of peace. He founded his order on the basis of the rule of poverty in Christ’s mandate to the apostles, “Do not take along any gold or silver or copper in your belts; take no bag for the journey, or extra tunic, or sandals or a staff; for the worker is worth his keep.” He and his followers preached the holiness of poverty and opposed the ostentation of the papal court and the Italian hierarchy. Francis was canonized by Gregory IX two years after his death but during the following decades, the Franciscans and the papacy became estranged over the issue of poverty. A group of Franciscans led by Umbertino of Casale (1259-1330), William of Ockham (1288-1348) and Michael of Cesena (1270-1342) mounted a strong opposition to the papal court which, by this time, had fled to Avignon. Michael was excommunicated as a schismatic and sent to prison for the rest of his life. He was rehabilitated twenty-one years after his death. William was excommunicated for reasons that were never made clear. Umbertino ultimately escaped being tried for heresy by fleeing to Germany. The Pope, John XXII, lived a life of extreme luxury and was opposed to evangelical poverty because he felt he needed to impress his competitors, the electors of the Holy Roman Empire, whom he regarded as his spiritual and temporal vassals.

The lust for power, like other lusts, feeds on itself and seeks as many outlets as are available. Princes and prelates acquired vast art collections, for example, not because they were expressing their esthetic sensibilities but because the ostentatious display of wealth was a metaphor for their power that was obvious to friends and foes alike. The church nearly bankrupted itself in the building of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and, in the process, had to resort to extortionate tactics to raise money, tactics that ultimately cost it Germany. St. Peter’s is not beautiful. It is not an expression of the faith and hope that inspired the builders of Chartres. It is, in fact, ugly but it is big, boasting the largest interior of any church in Christendom. By far. It dominates Rome. It inspires awe as it was meant to.

The same forces translate easily to the parish level. Until very recently, they protected clergy engaged in the most odious, depraved sexual crimes against children. The church purports to see no relationship between the psychosexual pathology characteristic of the enterprise and the fierce historical misogyny and self-destructive insistence on a celibate all-male priesthood. What must be protected at all costs is the power. If anything frightens them, it is not the slippage in sacramental observance or mass attendance but the exposure of the church as Oz-like. The wizard of Vatican City is a small, frightened man with a megaphone hiding behind the elaborate façade of a Potemkin village. Popes like John XXIII and John Paul I are regarded as mistakes. This explains why Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae with all its embarrassing theology and fraudulent history. He was persuaded that to change the teaching on contraception would erode his own power and that of his successors.

Power, red in tooth and claw, is the sum and substance of papal ambition. The God preached by these men is a God of fear not love, of Genesis, not John. The “faithful” must be taught that it is virtually impossible to gain entrance into heaven and that only the hierarchs hold the keys to the kingdom. Only they can commune with the divinity and only their blessing can counteract man’s natural wickedness. They invented the idea of original sin: the sin of Adam passed on to his descendents so that every human being except the Virgin Mary is born in a state of degradation, of alienation from God. In the words of the official Catechism of the Catholic Church, there is an, “…overwhelming misery which oppresses men and their inclination towards evil and death cannot be understood apart from their connection with Adam's sin and the fact that he has transmitted to us a sin with which we are all born afflicted, a sin which is the ‘death of the soul.’” Baptism cleanses the soul but, “After that first sin, the world is virtually inundated by sin…Scripture and the Church's Tradition continually recall the presence and universality of sin in man's history.”

This is the logic of the Red Queen. It is not biblical. The Catechism itself claims that it is a “mystery” but even that is absurd. There is nothing mysterious about it. It is exegesis in the service of a political ideology. The church is interpreting a perfectly conventional creation myth, that of Genesis, to support the centralization of absolute power in its own hands. And the church’s interpretation is incompatible with the gospel of love.

Imagine a religion based on the notion that God is love. This would be a religion that understands its mission to be promoting love of all kinds by helping people find their way—their own way—to lives of love. Now think of the leadership of this religion. Is there a central figure who sits on a gilded throne wearing a huge crown and an elaborate costume? Does he affect red patent leather shoes made for him by Prada? Do its legions of celibate bureaucrats and canon lawyers spend their lives promulgating detailed instructions on the sexual behavior of members and non-members? Does it profess the inferiority of the female half of the species because of a warped understanding of the myth of Eden?

On December 7, 1965, Pope Paul VI promulgated Gaudium et Spes, the final major document of the second Vatican Council. Its first sentence declared, “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.” Yes. Gaudium et Spes is a revolutionary declaration. In language that is diplomatic but perfectly clear, it affirms that the church must always change to address the needs of a changing world. It has many themes, among them the notion that the church is the servant of the “people of God.” It embraces human freedom, the “dignity of conscience,” the high estate of marriage and, most importantly, the dignity of the human person. It is not without compromise as the council tried to accommodate its critics, notably Joseph Ratzinger who was otherwise regarded as a progressive (and is, of course, now Pope Benedict XVI). But aside from the gospel of love preached by Jesus himself, it is the only document in the history of the church that might serve as the creed of a church based on the notion that God is love.

Gaudium et Spes was sabotaged, deliberately and with malice aforethought, by the Holy Roman Curia which saw it, correctly, as a challenge to its power. The opposition was led by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, perhaps the most conservative prelate of the twentieth century. Taking advantage of Paul VI’s indecisiveness, the curia practiced the politics of delay and obfuscation, ultimately convincing the Pope to issue the birth control encyclical, Humanae Vitae, which halted the momentum of the council and then reversed it. That single document came close to destroying Roman Catholicism as priests abandoned the ministry by the thousands and lay people first ignored it and then stopped going to church. Ten years later, the curia engineered the election of Karol Józef Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II. There is little doubt that they knew that their preferred candidate Giuseppe Siri of Genoa could not prevail and that they were worried that the liberal Giovanni Benelli of Florence could. They then seized upon the suggestion of the progressive Franz König of Vienna, knowing as apparently König did not, that Wojtyła would be reliably ultraconservative on the issues that mattered most to them, most importantly, the power of the Vatican. Thirty-two years later, it is clear that the church is more conservative than it has been at any time since the death of Pius IX. The gospel of love survives only as a talking point to be trotted out occasionally to disguise the latest corruption of the good news. Love is dead and the church is dying.

JESUS-COME-LATELY CHRISTIANS
Jerry Harkins

The English were not history’s most obnoxious colonialists for which they can thank the Belgians. But they were, by far, the most successful. For nearly three hundred years it could be said that the sun never set on the British Empire and, although Winston Churchill did not become His Majesty’s first minister to preside over the collapse of said Empire, he did his best. Personally he was probably the nastiest colonialist since George III and he tried valiantly to stick his finger in the dike against the tide of history. It did not work and when the “blood-dimmed tide” was loosed, the world was swept up in a sea of unintended consequences that still plays out tragically in Ireland, the Middle East, Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Southeast Asia. But the Brits always tried to be soldiers of the cross, trading salvation for slaves and raw materials. They saw it as their Christian duty:

Take up the White Man's burden
Send forth the best ye breed

Go, bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need;

To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild

Your new-caught sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child. (1)

One of the more amusing consequences of Kiplingesque insouciance was the emergence of Anglicanism in the former colonies. The Church of England has its roots in the marital misadventures of Henry VIII. Unlike other Sixteenth Century exercises in religious reform, its Protestantism was confined mostly to liturgy except, of course, for His Majesty’s marital preferences. Theologically, its mainstream has always remained close to Mother Rome and it claims the true apostolic succession. It tends to be more flexible than Rome in the breezes of change but it is still essentially a very conservative organization. Indeed, in some parts of the world—Africa notably—it is more Catholic than the Pope. There are several reasons for this. First, the Africans are new at Christianity. While today they are a majority of the world’s Anglicans (2), they are only a generation or two removed from their pagan past and they must constantly struggle against regression. They are surrounded in many places and under siege by the most extreme sorts of Muslims. And, of course, they cannot be indifferent to the reality that they are a remnant of the white man’s burden. This puts a chip on the shoulders of many African hierarchs, especially those whose churches remained more or less loyal to the mother country during the wars of liberation.

These forces converge to produce an attitude toward women and homosexuals that is as extreme as any to be found anywhere in the world. The Africans are currently in the process of causing a schism within Anglicanism over these issues and, worse, they are carrying the day within the worldwide Anglican Communion. In terms of practical effect if not hateful rhetoric, they are a more serious threat to the Christian ideal of brotherhood than Pat Robertson and all the other fundamentalists combined. Consider, for example, the leader of the evangelical (i.e., conservative) Anglicans in Nigeria, His Graciousness the Primate Peter Akinola. In February 2006, he issued a communique on behalf of his Church of Nigeria Standing Committee lending support to a law outlawing same-sex relationships in Nigeria. The bill also proposed to criminalize gay clubs and other organizations and prohibit publicity, procession and public display of same-sex amorous relationships through the electronic or print media directly or indirectly. This was too much even for the Bush Administration which denounced it a violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. When you’ve been labeled a human rights violator by George W. Bush, you are well advised to get your spiritual affairs in order.

Not all African prelates are so burdened as Akinola. The Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu, retired Anglican Primate of South Africa and Archbishop of Capetown, recently wrote:

“Churches say that the expression of love in a heterosexual monogamous relationship includes the physical, the touching, embracing, kissing, the genital act - the totality of our love makes each of us grow to become increasingly godlike and compassionate. If this is so for the heterosexual, what earthly reason have we to say that it is not the case with the homosexual?” (3)

The difference is that Tutu has been on the front lines of the struggle for human rights all his life. For him, it is not a theological abstraction or a political ideology. It is personal and emotional. "I am deeply saddened,” he said, “at a time when we've got such huge problems ... that we should invest so much time and energy in this issue...I think God is weeping."

There are two intriguing questions about the coming schism: why is so much of the African hierarchy so vehemently opposed to homosexuality, and why is the Anglican Communion taking its lead from the Africans? As to the first, the simple answer is that the Africans are more literalist in their reading of the Bible than their more experienced fellow religionists. Unlike Europeans and Americans, they do not have the witness of two thousand years of the horrific effects of Biblical inerrancy. Nor have they been forced to cope with Christian hypocrisy. They have been told the Bible is the inspired word of God and they do not yet understand the winking of the theologians. When the well known Anglican theologian John Stott writes, “However strongly we may disapprove of homosexual practices, we have no liberty to dehumanize those who engage in them,” they do not parse the logic carefully. They jump at a chance to hate the sin and love the sinner without reflecting on the fatuous disapprove/dehumanize dichotomy. It does not occur to them that making hand holding a five-year felony for gay couples but not for straight ones is, in fact, dehumanizing the former.

Would that the explanation were so simple! Of course, if you believe it, you have to also believe the Africans are stupid or at least unsophisticated—the half devils, half children of Mr. Kipling’s poem. Sadly they are neither. His Righteousness Akinola is a very smart man as is evident from the ease with which he is dominating the discussion. By contrast, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Douglas Williams is a naïf. Both may think they can undo the American Revolution and intimidate the U.S. branch of the Communion but Williams is leading from wishy-washy hope and Akinola from steely determination. For both of them, this is not theology, it is politics—for Akinola, power politics of the most brutal kind. Williams, in the great tradition of Neville Chamberlain, is merely trying to appease his brother in the Lord. His position, of course, has evolved although always in the context of what he claims is his profound concern for the dignity of gay and lesbian people. In 1989, he said, “In a church that accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous biblical texts, or on a problematic and nonscriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures." Yes, this is gobbledygook but it is gobbledygook clearly on the side of the angels. By 2007, however, he was calling for the exclusion of the Americans and Canadians from forthcoming meetings of the Communion unless they repented and changed their ways. This is not gobbledygook. It is high church hypocrisy. But it is necessary to placate the noisiest members of his flock.

On the face of it, it is absurd to imagine that the Africans can excommunicate the Americans even though they outnumber them twenty or so to one and even though the Americans themselves are divided on the subject. The problem is that the Episcopalians contribute fully 70% of the Communion’s budget. His Grace Akinola knows this and appears to take the view that God will provide or, failing that, the Americans are so pusillanimous, they will continue to provide. His assumption is based on his experience of the English and his belief that the Americans are their genetic clones.

The problem His Excellency does not dwell on is that he and his congregants live in a maelstrom of chaos. Nigeria is an oil-rich nation with a Gross Domestic Product per capita of about $1,400 a year. The average age expectancy is about 46 years and about 6% of the adults are living with AIDS. Even Sudan is richer, healthier and in many ways more stable than Nigeria. Akinola’s self-sufficiency is empty braggadocio. He may be able to open his churches on Sunday but his Christians are routinely “disappeared” and without American political support he himself would be dead meat for the Muslims in the North. Thus when His Magnanimity denounces gays, he is acting out of fear. He tosses a red herring to his tormentors hoping thereby to distract them. He reasons that the Islamic fundamentalists hate gays more than they hate Christians. By waving his homophobia in their faces, he does not have to denounce their theocratic idealism too loudly and can hope to live another day. Those of us who have never lived in terror of night visitors must not be overly critical of this strategy.

The second question is even more intriguing. Why are the Africans winning the debate? Again there is a simple answer: they are enjoying the natural fruits of being the majority. The rubber ducky is theirs and the rest of us need to accede humbly to this democratic reality. The founder, of course, was a man who consorted with prostitutes and tax collectors. His reverence for democracy was never obvious and his followers have never felt it necessary to put doctrinal issues to the vote of the “faithful” who are regularly referred to as sheep or pigeons.

In theory, the Archbishop of Canterbury might think Akinola’s crusade was an opportunity for loving instruction in the gospel of love. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Whoever. The class of the saved is coextensive with the class of the believers. Whoever. Males and females, sinners and the just, whites and blacks, cowboys and Indians, even blonds and soccer players. But God forbid a white Englishman should be seen as instructing a black Nigerian.

Notes
1. “The White Man’s Burden” was written for Empress Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897 but Kipling decided to go with “Recessional” instead. The latter reflects on the inevitability of hubris in the colonial enterprise and portends its ultimate decay. It is said that he tweaked “Burden” to turn it into a commentary on American imperialism in the aftermath of the Spanish American War. But it should not in any way be read as an anti-colonialist screed.

2. At least 40.5 million of the world’s 77 million Anglicans (53%) belong to one of eight African Provinces, and that does not include the Provinces of Congo and Sudan for which there are no reliable statistics.

3. Preface to Sex, Love and Homophobia by Vanessa Baird, Amnesty International UK, 2004.

SINS OF THE FATHERS

Jerry Harkins

You will not read this in your Sunday bulletin but, until the Fifth Century, the Christian Church was little more than a diverse collection of local entities united only by the belief that Jesus of Nazareth had been the promised Messiah of the Jews. He was often referred to a the “son of god” but the exact meaning of that phrase remained elusive. The Christian congregations were in touch with one another but there was not even a widely accepted biblical canon until the Synod of Hippo in 393. There was little in the way of dogma although there was vigorous debate over such basic issues as the personhood of Jesus and the nature of the Trinity. What liturgy there was was celebrated mainly in private homes. The Bishop of Rome was just exactly that, the elected leader of a small number of Christians living in a large city who became the principal bishop of the Roman Empire only after that Empire began to decline. Other dioceses, including Alexandria and Antioch and, later, Constantinople, contended on an equal footing with Rome and the language of the church was Greek. The Roman church did not begin to assert global primacy until the middle of the seventh century. It encountered fierce resistance and was not notably successful until the aftermath of the Great Schism of 1054. Finally it did manage to establish supremacy in Europe because the Holy Roman Emperors and other kings feared divisiveness in the face of the threat from Islam. In 1073 Pope Gregory VII issued Dictatus Papae, a claim of absolute papal supremacy in both the spiritual and the temporal realms.

Although the Gregorian “reforms” had several important (mostly unintended) consequences, they came too late to re-establish Roman hegemony. One of the great tragedies of Roman Catholicism has been that it has never acquiesced to this reality. It is also ironic because, in the beginning, the Christian enterprise was nothing if not eclectic. In many places, including Rome, the church was an adjunct of local warlords who treated the papacy as a useful ally or a deadly enemy. The great strength of the church existed on another plane entirely, that of small congregations that gave succor to besieged believers in a new and comforting relationship with the divine. Obviously there were theological similarities but there was no orthodoxy and no heresy until the Roman civil authorities decided to impose a single ideology for their own management reasons. That ideology was under the control of the Emperor.

Constantine I convened the first ecumenical council at Nicea, about 70 miles as the crow flies southeast of Constantinople, in 325, just 12 years after his Edict of Milan had freed Christians from official persecution. The thirty-third Bishop of Rome, Sylvester I, did not attend. It had a lengthy and doctrinally important agenda but the principal issue was the question of whether Jesus was of the same substance as the Father or of only similar substance as the Arians contended. The Arians lost and the Nicene Creed, approved by a vote of the bishops and still recited at every mass, refers to Jesus as “consubstantial with the Father.” After intense debate, the bishops also agreed that Easter should be celebrated on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox.

The Nicene Creed was the first official statement of orthodox Christianity but, like all such documents, it raised as many questions as it purported to answer. For example, in referring to Jesus, it says, “Who, for us and for our salvation, descended from heaven and was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, [born] of the Virgin Mary and became (literally, factus est, was made) human. He was also crucified for us.” The Nicene fathers agreed and modern Christians believe that the horrific suffering and death of Jesus was necessary to “redeem” humanity from the sin of Adam. This belief is based on several ambiguous biblical passages. Moreover, in spite of Nicea, the precise nature of the redemption was not obvious to the Fathers and Doctors of the church who also continued to debate what kind of God would submit himself to such ignominy. It was important to them and is important to modern Christians because the redemption was already replacing love as the core part of the “good news” of the gospels. Control over redemption gave great power to the hierarchs whereas there is no such thing as control over love.

To Catholics raised in the years before Vatican II, sin and a strong inclination toward sin were brought into the world by the disobedience of Adam. His descendents somehow share in his guilt through the mechanism of original sin. Christ “redeemed” us which means that the guilt is absolved even while its consequences remain the central feature of human life.  Sin and the inclination to sin remain with us but now, at least, we are given a chance at eternal salvation. It is not clear how this redemption occurred although Paragraph 517 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “Christ's whole life is a mystery of redemption. Redemption comes to us above all through the blood of his cross, but this mystery is at work throughout Christ's entire life.” “Mystery” is the key word. Both the fall and the redemption are problematic—indeed eccentric—ideas but it was the best the dogmatic theologians could do and it has stuck.

The first problem is fatal: Adam’s disobedience was not sinful. Until he ate the forbidden fruit, Adam had no knowledge of good and evil, a knowledge necessary for an act to be sinful but available only to the gods, whoever they were (Genesis 3:4-7). He could only have thought that, if he disobeyed, he would “certainly die” (Genesis 2:18) which is all God had threatened. In fact, Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden not to punish them but to prevent them from returning to the tree and continuing to eat its fruit, thereby becoming as “one of us” and living forever (Genesis 3:22-24). If he had known the apple was poisonous, which is precisely what God implied (Genesis 2:17), he would not have eaten it. Of course, he had no concept of poison or death so God’s threat was meaningless to him.

The second problem is equally serious and is the first of several instances of injustice at the hands of the God of Genesis. Only after Adam ate the apple did God extend the punishment to all Adam’s descendents. Why? The answer is known to every Sunday school child: because we somehow “share” in Adam’s guilt. We are born in a state of “original sin” which, of course, is Adam’s sin. The church teaches there is no personal guilt in this, only personal punishment. At the moment of our conception, we are marked as children of Satan and heirs of hell (or limbo). We inherit all the earthly punishments of Adam and Eve—suffering, death, the inclination to sin, and sexual attraction. Eventually, God will explain to Moses (Exodus 20:5), “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.” There is no doubt that an all-powerful God has a right to make such a rule but there is also no doubt that it is unjust.

The third problem arises because of the undoubted presence of good in the post-Edenic world. Job, for example, is described as, “…blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil” (Job 1:8). Job denies he has sinned but explains to his friends that God has a perfect right to strike at him. But again, this is a conundrum. Most later Christian philosophers would say that God cannot commit an injustice because it is contrary to his nature. But God wreaks havoc in the life of Job merely to win a whimsical bet with Satan. He bets that Job will remain faithful to him in spite of a series of grave injustices. And, of course, he wins. Job confesses “I know that you can do all things; no plan of yours can be thwarted…My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:1-6).

The Christian notion that God sent a redeemer for people like Job who seems to have avoided both sin and the inclination to sin requires some awkward reasoning. A redeemer was not part of God’s covenant with either Noah or Abraham. After the fact, John (3:16) tells us, “…for God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, so that every one who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.” So God still loves fallen man and wants him to have eternal life but the price of this gift is the death of God. This absurdity is not something you will find in the Bible. Rather, it is something the early fathers and doctors reasoned to because they wanted to explain a seemingly absurd event, the literal death of the deathless God. They wanted to see the crucifixion not as ignominious but as the ultimate expression of God’s love for us. The crucifixion did not, however, restore the status quo ante by removing evil from the world. If it had, there would be no need for an institutional church holding the keys to heaven.

Theologians have struggled with the distinction between evil and sin without notable clarity. Sin has been defined as, “…an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods. It wounds the nature of man and injures human solidarity. It has been defined as ‘an utterance, a deed, or a desire contrary to the eternal law.’” This is gibberish of a high order. What makes a conscience “right?” Which goods? And why not other goods? Is the perversion sinful or is perversity only the cause of sin? Is it man’s nature to be good that is wounded? And exactly what is the eternal law? How can we know it apart from the fantasies of elderly priests? Adam’s disobedience was clearly an offense against the will of God. Disobedience may, under some circumstances, be evil but he did not know evil. “Evil” is a tricky notion. We cannot be sure that there was actual evil in the world prior to the sin of Adam. The idea of evil was, of course, well established and known to the gods. Many Christians think of Satan as a “fallen angel” and the personification of evil, but this is based on a single subjunctive in the New Testament (2 Peter 2:4), “For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them into gloomy dungeons to be held for judgment….” Similarly, the snake in the Garden of Genesis is often equated with the devil but there is no suggestion of that in the text. The snake is said only to be “craftier” than other animals. The story of Lucifer and the fallen angels mentioned in the first canon of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) suggests there may have been pre-Edenic evil although the existence of fallen angels or any other form of evil is not at all consistent with the story of the creation itself. Before the creation, there was nothing except God. At the end of creation, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).

All the relevant exegesis between the First and Fifth Centuries arose in the context of complex philosophical debates. It is madness to think that a minor act of disobedience should redound to the accounts of all succeeding generations, unless one also wants to think that God’s creative act turned out to be a mistake. There is a hint in the Noah story that God did indeed think he had made a mistake. “The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain” (Genesis 6:5-6). There must have been something wrong—a disposition to sin—in the original plan. Which is precisely the logic that one notices in Paul’s epistles. “Since by man (Adam) came death, by man (Jesus) came also the resurrection of the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:21). Is Paul saying that man created evil? Thomas Aquinas would ultimately give a brilliant answer by defining evil as the absence of good which implies we do not have to worry so much about its creation. But that would come 800 years too late. Meanwhile, Augustine of Hippo developed a truly fantastical answer of his own.

Augustine began by confronting the most basic question of moral theology: how did evil enter a world created by an all-good God? As a young man, he had been a "hearer" of Manichaeism for nine years and, while he later rejected it, he never fully abandoned its philosophy of evil. He seized upon the sin of Adam, claiming that it unleashed evil in the world very much the same way Pandora unleashed evil by opening the box Zeus gave her. The onrush of evil overwhelmed the Edenic good and the crucifixion merely made the good accessible again.

There are enormous problems with Augustine’s analysis. What kind of God would create a humanity inherently opposed to his will? The modern word sociopath does not seem blasphemous in this context. And, of course, if evil is the natural condition, how does good come into the world? Christians conclude that good comes from the merits of Jesus through baptism, citing John (3:5) to the effect that “no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.” But why is baptism good? Well, because it was created by God and it imparts God’s grace. But God created everything. In the vast array of creation, is only baptism good? The circularity of the logic is truly impressive but typical enough of an advocate reasoning to a foregone conclusion. In any event, the doctrine of original sin quickly became an integral part of the “deposit of faith.”

By the early Fifth Century both Rome and the Christian church were in turmoil and, in some ways, already in decline. The barbarians were at the gates of Rome and there was open rebellion in Britain. By 404, even the so-called Western Emperor, had to be removed to Ravenna and in 410, Alaric and his Visigoths sacked Rome itself. Both church and state retreated and paganism became resurgent in much of Europe.

Meanwhile, the subtleties of theological discourse had never reached the ends of the earth. The new faith spread to Ireland long before St. Patrick or his predecessor Palladius arrived in the Fifth Century. Presumably it migrated from Roman Britain. At the time, the Irish were still practicing a vigorous Druidic spirituality. The English evangelists, in all likelihood, would have been Romanized Britons with their own albeit less current Druidic heritage. In Ireland, the two religions merged in ways both superficial and profound. Celtic mythology was translated into Christian iconography, Celtic practices were adopted whole cloth. Brigida became Bridget but kept her whole repertoire of miracles. Christianity became simpler, more personal. In the place of great philosophical debates about the triune god of Nicea, the Celts simply taught that all gods are one god. There were no codes or creeds and not much in the way of liturgy. Small isolated communities simply inbreathed the simplest teachings of the Christians, interpreting them as seemed most useful. You can feel the difference by reading the stories. Roman hagiographies of the early middle ages told stern, didactic morality tales of heroic sacrifice and horrific martyrdoms. The Irish, on the other hand, were gentler, more entertaining. We learn of Brendan and his crew celebrating Easter on the back of a whale they thought to be an island. Bridget stops a battle by conjuring up a mist that makes the enemies invisible to each other. She prays for a long list of favors and offers heaven a lake of beer in return. Patrick negotiates special dispensations for the Irish with God through a chorus of angels who laugh at his requests and are properly shocked when God grants some of them.

Celtic Christianity was comforting, not threatening. Its greatest proselytizer was not Patrick but Pelagius who was born in about 354—the same year as Augustine and eighty-seven years before Patrick began his mission in Ireland. He was a Celt, whether British or Irish is not certain but probably the latter. Certainly, at the beginning and end of his career, he was an itinerant Irish monk. He came to Rome around 400 and was appalled by what he saw as the decadence of the Christian community. He began to preach what he must have thought of as revival. He probably considered Augustine and Jerome dissidents. His original dispute with them was over matters of discipline and did not become theological until they attacked him as a heretic.

To someone only two or three generations removed from Druidism, Augustinian Christianity must have seemed perverted and demented. The Mediterranean theologians had no sense of metaphor, mythic grandeur or esoteric intuition. They confused truth with meaning and zealotry with faith. They quibbled over trivia. What had been polite discussion before the Edict of Milan soon turned into bitter disputation because the spoils of victory meant power, and power trumped mere theology. Consider, for example, the comic opera “interdict” of England between 1208 and 1213. King John, widely regarded as the worst monarch in English history, rejected the church’s choice of the Subprior Reginald as successor to the deceased Archbishop of Canterbury. His choice was Bishop de Grey of Norwich but Pope Innocent III rejected both candidates, appointing his own man, Stephen Langton, to the see. When John threatened death to anyone who accepted Langton, the Pope, with the help of the English barons, placed England under an interdict which meant that all the churches were closed and no sacraments or other liturgies were available in England for periods ranging from one to five years. John gave in and prostrated himself to Innocent as his liege lord. The barons, feeling empowered by being on the winning side, forced John to sign the Magna Carta but the Pope, seeing the threat to his new vassal’s power and thus his own revenues, excommunicated them and pronounced anathema on the document. Unlike John, Innocent III is widely regarded as the greatest Pope of the Middle Ages but his achievements involved principally his own secular power. He instigated the Fourth and Fifth Crusades, both dismal failures, and the Albigensian Crusade which was successful in the extermination of tens of thousands of unarmed Cathar heretics.

The key to understanding almost all significant papal actions down to the present day is power. Power was the motive behind Pius IX’s absurdist proclamation of the Syllabus of Errors in 1864 and Paul VI’s disastrous encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968. It is thought Paul wanted to change the teaching on contraception and that his own commission had given him a decent if not perfect basis for doing so but the Curial Cardinals were able to persuade him such an action would weaken the power of the papacy forever. Innocent III was in fact promoting the best candidate in 1208 but his only motive was to assert his supremacy, both spiritual and temporal, over the king. Like Caligula, he would have appointed his horse to the job if he thought it would enhance his power. Like all Popes, Innocent, Pius and Paul were heirs of the ambitions and fears that bedeviled the church as the result of what might be called the disputes of the fathers. The earliest Christians had no thought of building a great timeless institution. They expected Christ to return imminently. Saint Paul told them, “We shall not all die but we shall all be changed” (1 Cor. 15:51). With this mindset, they had no use for the underpinnings or the structures of a formal enterprise. Thus, when it became apparent that Christ had been misunderstood about the end times, they had to transform Christianity. In the second, third and fourth centuries, the church was blessed and cursed by numerous leaders—the fathers and doctors—who were brilliant and scholarly disputators. To them, Christianity’s meaning was ambiguous. It consisted mainly of oral traditions and various writings of uncertain authority. They believed, incorrectly, that the evangelists had been eye witnesses to the events they reported but they knew that most of the sources, including the most important ones like Saint Paul, were derivative accounts based on fading memories. They also knew that the sources were inconsistent, often contradictory. Moreover the core documents were not philosophical tracts. The gospels, except for parts of John, were more of the nature of folk tales, simple, direct, homely and, most problematic, metaphoric. Their material was inherently unsuited to institution building and they felt they had to convert it into something grander, a vast, tightly woven tapestry of philosophy regarding issues both greater and more trivial than any addressed by Jesus. They also abhorred the uncertainty they encountered in the sources. It was a weakness in the competition with other religions some of which were backed by the brutal police power of the state.

Faced with these difficulties, the fathers and doctors did what intellectuals are wont to do: they theorized, interpreted and explicated, often brilliantly but rarely in disciplined consonance with the texts. Read the letters of Saint Jerome on virginity, the homilies of Saint Basil, the apologetics of Tertullian, the inventor of the doctrine of the Trinity who later became a Monatist heretic, the dialogues of Gregory the Great or the didactics of Irenaeus of Lyons. Some are interesting, some are boring, but they are all disputatious. Agreement eludes them; persuasion is less important than dominance. They stake out every conceivable position on an issue as though they are engaging in argumentation for its own sake. Over time, the issues became narrower and more specialized and the debates turned captious; more heat and less light were generated by increasingly arcane subjects. The church was still more than seven hundred years from executing people for heresy but the arguments were ferocious. Jerome and Augustine, who were actually quite close on most matters, seemed to despise each other. Parties were formed and, as the fortunes of power ebbed and flowed, they excommunicated each other with abandon. Pelagius, the ascetic critic of Roman excess, was excommunicated and later acquitted at least twice.

Ultimately, senior churchmen abandoned theological disputation in favor of power politics. For a thousand years, they grasped for more control over the minds and purses of princes and serfs. They amassed vast wealth and displayed it with shameful ostentation. Ecclesiastical appointments were called “benefices” because they came with income streams based on rents, taxes and the right to sell certain indulgences. Popes and bishops of major sees were expected to maintain both conscripted and mercenary armies, contract alliances, wage wars and conclude peace treaties. These things did not go unnoticed. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries an influential group of Franciscan friars attempted to call the church back to Christ-like poverty. The Popes, ruling at the time from Avignon in the south of France, at first temporized, then threatened and finally had a small number of Franciscans burned at the stake. Around the same time, Jan Hus in Prague and John Wycliffe in England preached heretical doctrines including the belief that the church should embrace poverty. Both were burned although Wycliffe had been dead of natural causes for thirteen years before his body was exhumed for burning on the order of Pope Martin V.

The Reformation did nothing to reform the church but was instead met with the Counter Reformation which culminated in the Council of Trent (1545-1563), a sad and regressive attempt to freeze history and doctrine–to restore the status quo ante. Except for a handful of small events and the fresh air allowed in during the short reign of John XXIII, the church has become progressively more sclerotic since Trent. Since John’s death in 1963, we have witnessed a second Counter Reformation aimed at interpreting away the decrees of the Second Vatican Council and returning to the anti-modernist teachings of Trent and Vatican I. It seems certain to succeed as conservative popes proclaim conservative doctrines and appoint conservative bishops all the while proclaiming themselves not conservative at all but only faithful to unchanging and unchangeable truth.

GOING HOME

Jerry Harkins

God does not create a longing or a hope without having a fulfilling reality ready for them. But our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.

- Isak Dinesen

As it turned out, Moville was nothing like the town I had carried around in my imagination all these years. My father talked about it endlessly when I was a child but, of course, he had never been closer to it than Montauk Point. I’d read everything ever written about the town and seen hundreds of early pictures. I’ve known its gross anatomy since I was old enough to sing “Danny Boy,” the harbor, the main street, the country churchyards, the farms. I knew it was a small town—once called Bonafobble—on the West Bank of Lough Foyle about half way up the east side of the remote but storied Inishowen Peninsula, home to the O’Neills, the O’Dougherties, Saints Finian and Finnian, and to the famous school founded in the fifth century by the former who educated a whole choir of Irish saints and scholars. Home also to us. We were from Moville.

We are the Harkin (O’hearcáin) family, minor kings in Ireland, descendents of Saints Erc and Finnian. Moville looms large in our history and mythology. My grandfather, Big Hugh Jerome, left there under mysterious circumstances sometime in the 1870’s. His blood makes up only a quarter of my own which includes, in equal proportion, contributions from the counties Mayo, Roscommon and Cork. But if I am from anywhere—anywhere save Brooklyn—I am from Moville. This reality was imprinted on my self-awareness at an early age by a father who obviously thought it important. There are twenty-six of us second generation descendents of Hugh Jerome but I believe I am the only one with this sense of the home place.

I finally arrived in Moville three weeks before my seventy-first birthday. What I found was a prosperous, attractive town that looked, in some ways, like a neat American suburb. The houses are mostly newish, smaller than their counterparts in Westport or Yorktown Heights but clean, modern, well maintained and attractively landscaped. They sit in small developmentally related clusters. There are a few small coops repurposed from old forts and factories. There is still a commercial fishing fleet but it has moved to the satellite town of Greencastle. The dock from which so many emigrants left after the famine is still there although now used mostly for laying up slightly derelict work boats.

The district surrounding the town proper contains two “parishes” and fifty-five “townlands” or neighborhoods and, until recently, was smaller than before the famine. Both town and district are much larger than I have always imagined. All those new houses are on land that used to be small farms, not nearly as small as the pathetic tenant holdings of Mayo or Galway, but no larger than necessary to provide food and wool for a large family and barter for the few things you did not make yourself. Now, ten years after the Good Friday Agreement, many people commute to work across the border in Derry. There is prosperity even in a recession year.

The Moville of my heart is very different. It is a place where for generations things kept happening whose effects rippled out and came to rest against me. I will never know what they were or whether they were even noticed by those to whom they happened. Who knows which turn in the road changed everything utterly? But one of them caused Big Hugh to migrate to Brooklyn where he met Ellen Howard lately of County Cork. As Francis Thompson taught us, “Thou canst not stir a flower / Without troubling of a star.”

In 1837, the townships were home to 10,687 souls It was a remote, windswept landscape with an economy based on fishing and shipping. Almost every family farmed. They were culturally isolated but cultured nonetheless. The tradition of educating their children pre-dated Christianity and, in the early part of the nineteenth century there were a half dozen schools. After the Great Hunger, there were no schools, very few priests and no form of representative government at any level. Still, almost everybody could read and write English. Except for praying and singing, they spoke no Irish. The music of Inishowen, however, was noticeably different from the rest of Ireland. It consisted of three or four unique and antique Celtic styles whose scales contain bent notes and microtones not unlike those of the Delta blues. These derive from the most ancient of instruments and, until the advent of the electric guitar, were most easily realized on modern fiddles. Not surprisingly, Inishowen has given us some of the greatest fiddlers and fiddle music. The men of old included immortals like Neilly Boyle, Francie Byrne, Con Cassidy, Frank Cassidy, and James Byrne. Still playing are such notables as Vincent Campbell, John Gallagher, Paddy Glackin, Danny O'Donnell, and Tommy Peoples. Dozens of internationally known singers have come from Donegal including, currently, Enya and the two bands Clannad and Altan. Oh, yes, the music. Even as a child, I understood William Irwin Thompson’s claim that, “For a Celt, the world is made of music.”

The people I imagined were individualistic, enduring, phlegmatic. They were simultaneously generous, charming and welcoming. Most of all, they had a strong sense of the absurd and could laugh at their tormentors and themselves. Penal times persisted in Inishowen for decades after Dan O’Connell achieved emancipation in 1838 but the English had little presence and the Church of Ireland folks, as isolated as their neighbors, tended to be less sectarian than their Protestant, mostly Presbyterian brethren in the rest of Ulster. The isolation protected everyone against the Catholic bishops and their Roman masters who contributed so generously to British imperialism. Priests assigned to Donegal from Maynooth or reassigned from other places were being punished for some sin or other. Most easily accommodated themselves to the prevailing Pelagian heresy and those that resisted it were, often as not, dealt with. Some were merely ignored. Others were actively shunned. It is said that in 1873 one of the O’Neill boys actually killed a priest who was seen consorting with a local Cruelty Man and then killed the Cruelty Man himself by hanging him upside down and shooting him in the testicles.

One cannot imagine such a thing happening in modern Moville. Indeed, one cannot look at the town today and see the way it must have been 130 or 140 years ago when Big Hugh left. The thought that first comes to mind is the Old Fella wouldn’t recognize the place. But on reflection I realize he certainly would feel right at home. I know this because I felt the same way. For one thing, I had never been in a place where there were so many Harkinses—three and a half columns in the phone book, dozens of them in the old cemeteries. Main Street stores and offices: Harkin’s Gifts, Harkin Beauty, Harkin Solicitor and so forth. In all my life, I’d met only one other Harkins who was not closely related to me. But the connection was more than that. It seemed that the soul of the place resonated with my own soul.

Places, you know, do have souls. I have experienced a similar sense of presence standing in front of the Cathedral of Our Lady in Chartres, at the shrine of the North American Martyrs in Auriesville, New York, and in the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy. In Moville, though, I had the immediate visceral sense that I belonged. It is not easy to explain.

Although I never thought about it, it was not surprising that the town would have changed dramatically between the 1870’s and the Good Friday Agreement. It did surprise me that it has changed even more since. Remote, beautiful, wind-swept Donegal is still a physical fact. Moville still rises from the shore of Lough Foyle. But remoteness no longer imposes isolation. The global village has arrived. The information revolution has linked the town to the emerging planetary uberculture. When the Troubles receded in 1999, citizens on both sides of the border understood that the political resolution might be temporary and even fragile but they decided to act as though it was now safe to ignore the politicians and other crazies. In 2002, I wrote, “If the Accord lasts 20 years, it may last 100 and that might be time enough to do some good.” Good in that sentence meant peaceful reunification which I believe will ultimately materialize even though I now realize that it is irrelevant to virtually everyone living there now. Back and forth they go every day and no one seems to remember where the checkpoints used to be. Not forgotten exactly, but like everything else in Ireland—the Flight of the Earls, the Wild Geese, the Penal Laws, the Transportation, the Ascendency, the Great Hunger, the War of Independence and the Civil War—the harsh history has done its work and acquired a soft edge. The Celtic Tiger brought prosperity and, with it, the business cycle. At the moment, Ireland is suffering from a terrible recession induced by the same forces that have wreaked havoc everywhere. Things are somewhat better in Derry due to a successful development plan undertaken in the late 1990’s and, as Derry goes, so go the communities of nearby Inishowen including Moville.

Things change but the soul of a place is cumulative. Nothing important is ever lost. A town retains its history and the repercussions—emotional and spiritual—of that history, its genius loci. In “The Gift Outright,” Robert Frost argues that people and their places belong naturally to each other. If we deny the connection, we diminish ourselves. “Something we were withholding made us weak / 
Until we found out that it was ourselves 
/ We were withholding…” Standing for the first time in Market Square, I was not the tourist, the stranger, the other. I was part of Moville’s history, part of the story, a small offstage part and more important to me than to Moville, but still both a giver and a receiver.

“THE HOWARDS, THE HOWARDS, THE ANCIENT, GLORIOUS HOWARDS!”

Jerry Harkins

I am a Howard on my paternal grandmother’s side and the title of this essay is a toast often raised in my family. My father was Howard Edward Harkins [1] and I have a brother, John Howard Harkins. My granduncle was Judge John Howard, and I inherited the Howard silverplate from his sisters, my maiden grandaunts, the teachers Jane and Annie Howard. I had a cousin Howard Harkins of fond if not sainted memory, and have a cousin, Paul Howard Landau, a gentleman, the son of a gentleman and a truly gentle lady.

Two generations ago, two Irish families of the Brooklyn diaspora joined fortunes through the marriages of two Harkins brothers to two Howard sisters. The former were scions of the O’hEarcáin clan of Moville, County Donegal,[2] descendents in the direct male line of Saint Finian of Moville.[3] The Howards were the Anglo-Norman-Irish branch of one of Perfidious Albion’s most distinguished families. The nameplate that graces the family townhouse hard by St. Stephen’s Green reads O’hOurahan which is a backward rendering of the name into Irish—perhaps a reverse snobbery.

My particular branch of this vast and complex family settled in County Cork shortly after Strongbow defeated the ragtag Corkmen of Dermot McCarty in 1174. Dermot had been the first Irishman to cast his lot with Henry II, thinking the monarch had come to settle scores with Strongbow and not taking into account the capacity of the English to renege on mere treaties. The early Howards left few traces. It wasn’t until the English branch of the family came into prominence that the record becomes richer. Not in Ireland, of course, at least not until Elizabeth I began to exile upper crust Howards there. There was a Jane Howard of Cork who got herself listed as a landowner in Pender’s Census of 1659. Since this was at the height of the Cromwellian genocide, Jane had to have been some sort of Protestant. There was also a John Howard of Cork whose will was probated in 1741. With an estate large enough to require probate, he too was probably a Protestant.

The first well-documented Howard was Robert of Norfolk (1336-1388), a Norman [4] landowner who married Margaret Scales (1339-1416). They had one child, a son, the first John Howard (1365-1436), who married Margaret Plaiz (b. 1368). Their son Robert (1385-1437) married Margaret Mowbray, the daughter of Thomas Mowbray who was the first Duke of Norfolk but who was banished by Richard II in the aftermath of the Bolingbroke affair, the bloody feud that forms the heart of Shakespeare’s play about that accursed monarch (take your pick; I meant Henry but Richard was an equally obnoxious pervert). While these famous events were transpiring, Robert and Margaret had a son, the second John Howard (1430-1489), who became the second [5] Duke of Norfolk and the Earl Marshall of England in 1483.

The third Duke was Thomas Howard (1473-1554) who was the uncle of Anne Boleyn. [6] Thomas himself was condemned to death for treason but, unlike his niece, he managed to survive when Henry VIII died the evening before the scheduled decapitation. One of Tom’s sons had been named Henry [7] for obvious sucking-up reasons. Henry became a third rate poet and the Earl of Surrey but led a star-crossed life. He was the foster brother and brother-in-law of another Henry, Henry Fitzroy, who, as the name implies, was one of the tribe of bastard sons of Henry VIII. He, the Earl, ended up beheaded for treason on the testimony of his sister, Mary Howard Fitzroy, wife of the bastard and no mean bastard in her own right. His brother George Howard, Viscount of Rochford (through his wife Jane) was beheaded along with his sister Anne Boleyn for alleged incest between them. It wasn’t true, of course, but His Majesty had to blame someone for the stillbirth of Anne’s son. His own manhood was unquestionable. When he arrived at the block, George said, "Masters all, I am come hither not to preach a sermon but to die, as the law hath found me, and to the law I submit me." His cousin, Catherine Howard, also married the King and, in keeping with family tradition, was the only other wife he beheaded. [8] For Anne whom he actually seems to have liked, he had provided an expert swordsman imported from France for the occasion. No such niceties attended Catherine’s date with the axman. It should be admitted that various of the Howards (as well as George’s wife Jane) had testified against George, Anne and, later, Catherine but almost all of them lost their heads also. Hopefully for perjury.

The fourth Duke was Henry’s son Thomas (1538-1572) who turned out to be a supporter of Mary, Queen of Scots. It was suggested that he marry the lady but he declined. Instead, he plotted with the Spanish court to overthrow Elizabeth I which was a fatal error in judgment. Thomas’ son and heir, Philip Howard, “enjoyed the favor of the queen” for a time but was later twice tried for treason, the first time for reconciling with Rome, the second for allegedly praying for the success of the Spanish Armada. While the court ruled that prayer could not be treason, Philip was condemned anyway. British justice is famous for making subtle distinctions that leave the rest of us breathless. In the event, Philip evaded the headsman by dying in prison. Nevertheless, he was canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970 as one of the 40 British “martyrs.” Don’t ask. [9] Philip’s brother, Lord William Howard, Lord High Admiral of Britain, was another one who married well, to the lovely Elizabeth Dacre whose inheritance included the vast estate upon which the family would establish Castle Howard. The castle was actually built several generations later by Charles Howard, the third Earl of Carlisle and Gentleman of the King’s Bedchamber. Again, don’t ask. Meanwhile, Lord William’s son, Charles, Earl of Nottingham and Baron of Effingham, followed his father’s footsteps, becoming Lord High Admiral of Her Majesty’s fleet just in time to become the victor over the Spanish Armada in the late summer of 1588. [10] Charles’ brother, William, Jr., is presently awaiting canonization in Rome. The seventh earl was a fellow named George who was something of a dandy and who was twice named Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Charles Howard was an 18th Century Earl of Suffolk who is best known for marrying the Lady Henrietta who served also as mistress to King George II. She was by all accounts an attractive and witty woman but, like so many of the Hanoverians, George was an ingrate. On one occasion he described her as an “…old, dull, deaf, peevish beast.”

Not all members of the family died ignominiously but that was the general drift of things for several centuries. Elizabeth I exiled several Howards to Ireland where, following local tradition, they bred prolifically and managed to survive in what passed for high style with castles and townhouses aplenty. For the most part, the family in England, Ireland and Australia, remained true to its Catholic traditions, often at considerable cost. Through the centuries, it kept turning out notable sons and daughters. Elizabeth Howard, for one, was the wife of John Dryden and a decent poet in her own right. The third John Howard was High Sheriff of Bedfordshire and a noted prison reformer. He was the first warden not to charge prisoners for their meals. Luke Howard (1772-1864) is generally regarded as the father of meteorology and the godfather of clouds. General Tilghman A. Howard was a U.S. Senator from Indiana and American Charge d’Affaires to the Republic of Texas. Sir Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) was a pioneer Nebraskan [11] who returned to London and started the city garden movement. The Comtesse de Beauregard was originally the English courtesan Lizzie Howard who in 1851 lent 800,000 francs to the Emperor Napoleon which he used to bribe key members of the military thereby assuring the success of his coup d’ etat. The grateful Emperor bestowed the title to recognize the lady’s contributions. [12] Sylvia Howard was the paternal grandmother of William Howard Taft, the 27th President of the United States and, later, the tenth Chief Justice. [13] Roy W. Howard (1883-1964) was the editorial head of the Scripps-Howard newspapers and, for many years, President of the United Press and its successor, UPI. John Winston Howard is the former Prime Minister of Australia. Even the late Lady Diana Frances Spencer [14], daughter of the eighth Earl Spencer, has a collateral and perhaps legitimate connection to the family through the first Visount Althorp, another ill-fated supporter of Mary, Queen of Scots.

It is a quirk of history that the only English word that rhymes with Howard may be the only pejorative that does not fairly describe one or another of the members of the family. Indeed, they were and remain a swashbuckling bunch. Two of England’s most famous regiments are the Green Howards and the Buff Howards, both named after Eighteenth Century Regimental Commanders, Charles of the Greens, Thomas and George of the Buffs. The Greens fought on the wrong side in the Battle of the Boyne, (1690) and the American Revolution but redeemed themselves on June 6, 1944 at Gold Beach in Normandy. [15] The Buffs were an important part of Marlborough’s forces at Blenheim (1704) and Wellington’s at Waterloo (1815) and played a notably heroic role at the bloody Battle of Anzio in 1944. [16]

John Eager Howard was a hero of the American Revolution who later served as Governor of Maryland and a United States Senator. It is his “warlike thrust” that is commemorated in the state song of Maryland. [17] His son George served as a General in the War of 1812 and his other son, Benjamin, was Governor of Maryland and a member of the House of Representatives. His great grandson, also John Eager, was the father of endocrinology. Oliver Otis Howard (1830-1909) was the commanding general of the Army of Tennessee and led Sherman’s right flank in the famous march through Georgia. He lost his right arm at the Battle of Fair Oaks. He received the Medal of Honor and went on to become the founding President of the great university that bears our name. He also wrote biographies of Zachary Taylor and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce Nation. Major John Howard led a vanguard of 150 volunteers from the British 6th Airborne Glider Infantry in the first battle of D-day. At 12:20 AM, they landed deep behind the Normandy beaches and seized two vital bridges over the Caen Canal and the Orne River. John’s cousin, Mark Howard, was killed in the invasion later that day and his brother Christopher died flying with the famous 617th Squadron, the Dambusters [18]. Major General Miles Howard, the 17th Duke of Norfolk [19], fought throughout North Africa and Europe. He was awarded the Military Cross for bravery under enemy fire. His 2002 obituary in The Times quoted him as saying "Anyone can be the Duke of Norfolk, but I'm rather proud of that medal." The American General James Howell Howard was the only World War II pilot in Europe to win the Medal of Honor. He was the only ace in both the European and Pacific theaters and in one engagement he single-handedly fought off 30 German fighters attacking an American bomber squadron. Earlier, he had flown 56 missions over the hump as a member of the Flying Tigers. [20] There was another James H. Howard, an American Admiral, who was awarded the Silver Star for saving the lives of sailors under fire in the Battle of the Solomon Islands.[21]

Finally, our own era has been graced by the life and death of George Howard, a Port Authority cop who raced into work on an off day when he heard that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. It was the second time he had done something like this. During the first bombing in 1993, he had rescued an elevator full of children by rappelling his way down the shaft and taking them out the top. Afterward he told an incredulous reporter, “That’s what they pay us for.” But his luck ran out the second time and he became one of the 400 rescue workers who died on September 11, 2001. In his eulogy, his brother Pat Howard, a New York City police sergeant, quoted a poem George had written about a colleague who had died in the line of duty. “He died a quiet hero, there really is no debate / He saved the lives of others, snatching victory from defeat” His mother, Arlene, a Navy veteran of World War II, gave his badge, Number 1012, to President Bush who said he would keep it with him always.
All these Howards are related to each other and to me. The family tree is many-branched and, at this late date, none of us carries more than a tiny genetic inheritance from Robert of Norfolk. Even as an Irish person with a considerable amount of Celtic blood, however, chances are I have as much Howard blood by percentage as the current Duke. I’m happy to say.

Notes

1. HEH was the twelfth of twelve children, born on May 26, 1908. On the eighth day they took him up to Our Lady of Perpetual Help to be baptized. It was in the middle of a blistering heat wave and powerful thirsts had been potently slaked. The priest allowed as to how there had never been a Saint Howard, so Daddy acquired Edward as a middle name. In the general alcoholic miasma, he was named after the English king who by rights should be remembered as Edward II but is called Saint Edward the Confessor (1003-1066). The Harkins side never caught on to the Anglo-Irish pretensions involved here. But the connections are rich.

King Eddie was, arguably, the least effective of all English monarchs, a class of Neanderthals genetically predisposed to ineffectuality. He enjoyed a companionate marriage to Edith, but he was not a priest. I wish I could enlighten you as to why he was called Confessor, but can only speculate that he had much to confess, including his share of the blame for losing England to the Normans. Granted he was six months dead at the time but he had done much to set the stage, following the course laid out by his father, Æthelred the Unready. As death neared, Edward named Edith’s brother as his successor. This, of course, was Harold II, the Hapless. But Edward had previously promised the throne to another cousin, William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, and it was this duplicity that led to the unpleasantness at Hastings on the only memorable date in English history, October 14, 1066. Anyway, you see the theme that emerges from all this. What’s in a name, indeed! Poor daddy!

2. The Brits always get this wrong. You will find Moville situated in County Down in English publications, even engraved in the stones of Westminster Abbey. On maps and on the ground, however, you will find it on the west bank of Lough Foyle, comfortably within the boundaries of Donegal and the Irish Free State. The Inishowen Peninsula was anciently part of Tyrconnell (the Land of Connell, the second son of Niall of the Nine Hostages) which was, in turn, part of Ulster. The eastern part of Down was also part of Tyrconnell which is probably the source of the confusion.

3. Actually, the second Finian of Moville, he of the Tenth Century. The first was Finnian, a Sixth Century teacher and scholar.

4. The name appears to be of Scandinavian origin, a combination of ha meaning high and ward meaning guardian or warden. In English, a warden is a guardian while a ward is a person guarded. Thomas himself was many generations removed from his barbarian forebears.

5. You often see him referred to as the first duke because he was the first Howard to hold the title which, of course, he got because his father had married well. This became a defining characteristic of the whole family.

6 . Anne’s mother was his sister, Elizabeth Howard who had married Thomas Boleyn.

7. This was the first in an intimidating number of Henry’s and Harry’s on the family tree. In 1857, Harry Howard was elected Fire Engineer for New York through the patronage of his good friend and former fire fighter, Boss Tweed. In our own time, Harry Howard married the heiress to the Butterick Pattern Company which he promptly sold to American Can of which he became Vice Chairman. He ran the whole thing into the ground and sold the corpse to Gerry Tsai who chopped it up into dog food and sold the empty shell to Sandy Weill who turned it into today’s CitiGroup.

8. Catherine was convicted on a bill of attainder that Henry sought and obtained from Parliament about 14 months into the marriage. The act declared that it was treason for an unchaste woman to marry the king. Catherine had been a lusty young lady, a fact that was well known to His Majesty who was one of the suitors who had enjoyed her favors. She was beheaded two days after the verdict. She was seventeen. Anne, on the other hand, was convicted on completely trumped up charges of adultery and incest with her brother George, Viscount Rochford.

9. It is not clear how one who dies of natural causes, even in prison, can be said to be a martyr but, then again, the Pope has special insights. Among the 40 chosen for sainthood in 1970 was Edmund Campion, S.J., who returned to England to minister to the Catholics in hiding. He wrote Campion’s Brag which I haven’t read but for which he was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn.

10. Howard’s Number 2 was Sir Francis Drake, the famous pirate who also occasionally enjoyed the favor of the queen. His Number 3 was Sir John Hawkins, another pirate and slave trader. Hawkins made the key contribution to the victory by designing the faster, lighter but more heavily armed warships that did the Spanish in.

11. Howard County is located about 150 miles due west of Omaha. There are also Howard Counties, named in honor of various other members of the family, in Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Texas and, of course, Maryland.

12. Who says Emperors don’t have nuanced senses of humor? Beauregard, of course, means beautiful and Napoleon III like his illustrious uncle was certainly a connoisseur of feminine beauty.

13. Taft’s father, Alfonso, had been Secretary of War under Grant and his mother was Louisa Torrey, an 1845 graduate of Mount Holyoke. His son was Mr. Republican, Senator Bob Taft of Ohio from 1939 to 1953.

14. The women in the family never married as well as their brothers and, of course, Lady Di was no exception. I mean, Charles Phillip Arthur George Windsor may be a Prince but he is also a first class ass. See my essay, “Things His Father Never Taught Him.” By the way, Lady Di’s brother, also Charles (the Queen is his Godmother), is the current Lord Althorp and a perfect ass in his own right.

15. The Battle of the Boyne was fought before the Howards became associated with the regiment. It should also be noted that since the early Twentieth Century, the Colonel-in-Chief has been a member of the royal family of Norway, currently King Harald V.

16. Buff, in this case, refers to the buffalo’s dark tan coat not to a regiment accustomed to fighting in the nude. Anzio was the brainchild of Winston Churchill and turned out to be almost as disastrous as a similar plan he promoted in World War I. That, of course, was the Battle of Gallipoli in which the casualties were primarily troops of Australia and New Zealand.

17. The “warlike thrust” refers to a brilliant maneuver he commanded that won the day at the Battle of Cows Pen, South Carolina on January 17, 1781. Or maybe it had something to do with needing a phrase to rhyme with “Carroll’s sacred trust.” (With deep subjects like geneaology, you have to learn to take the bad with the good. The state song of Maryland is based on a poem written in 1861 by one James Ryder Randall. It complains about the Unionist sympathies of some traitors and looks forward to the day when Noble Maryland, “spurns the Northern scum.” It is sung to the tune of “O Christmas Tree.”

18. Christopher did not join the squadron until after its most famous exploit, Operation Chastise, the bombing of strategic German dams on the night of May 16-17, 1943. During the mission, 8 of the squadron’s 19 planes were lost and 53 of its 133 members were killed. These were indeed brave lads who specialized in low level skip bombing. After two years of trying to destroy the formidable battleship DKM Tirpitz, sister ship of the Bismark, the allies sent in the Dambusters. Weathering an absolute blizzard of anti-aircraft fire, they sank the behemoth with two 12,000-pound bombs on November 12, 1944.

19. Properly styled, “His Grace, The Most Noble Miles Francis Stapleton Fitzalan Howard, Duke of Norfolk, Premier Duke and Earl of England, Baron Beaumont, Baron Howard of Glossop, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, Companion of the Most Honorable Order of the Bath, Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Earl Marshal, and Hereditary Marshal of England.” His Grace was born in 1915 and married Anne Mary Maxwell in 1949. He succeeded to the Beaumont and Glossop baronies in 1975 on the death of his formidable mother, Lady Ethel. He and Lady Anne had five children among whom the eldest son, Edward William Howard is the current Duke. The family remains staunchly Roman Catholic.

20. General Howard died on March 18, 1995 at the age of 81. He published his memoirs, Roar of the Tiger, in 1991.

21. Howard was an officer on the heavy cruiser USS New Orleans which participated in a record 15 battles in the Pacific. It survived Pearl Harbor and played a leading role in the Battle of the Coral Sea. When the aircraft carrier USS Lexington was mortally wounded, the New Orleans stood hard by her burning decks at great danger to itself and was able to rescue a good part of her crew. The New Orleans was hit often and hard and twice had to be drydocked for major repairs. She returned to action each time.