Christ the King

Today is the Feast of Christ the King, and also the hundredth anniversary of the institution of that feast by Pope Pius XI in 1925. In the encyclical with which he did so, Quas Primas, he recalled words of his predecessor Pope Leo XIII,- "What else is a nation but a number of men living in concord?" (back in the days when one could use the m word inclusively!) The Derry ones, for whom I have a particular soft spot since I visited Free Derry in August of 1969 - I love their liveliness and edge-, are celebrating this feast by processing the Blessed Sacrament through their city in wind and rain.

The Remedy for our Failures and Sins?

    Are they mad, parading the Blessed Sacrament on the streets and on the river that have seen such bitter division? Let us hear Pope Pius XI again. While recalling Christ's statement that 'my kingdom is not of this world', he went on to assert that 'On many occasions, when the Jews and even the Apostles wrongly supposed that the Messiah would restore the liberties and the kingdom of Israel, He repelled and denied such a suggestion.... It would be a grave error, on the other hand, to say that Christ has no authority whatever in civil affairs, since, by virtue of the absolute empire over all creatures committed to him by the Father, all things are in his power.' 'Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven', says the Lord's prayer.

    Whatever way one looks at it, we have a bit of a conumdrun here, which has indeed, literally, bedevilled the world for two millenia,- the Devil, father of lies, keeps cooking up false narratives and claiming the mantle of kingship for them, while men of power generally strive to usurp the frequently inconvenient authority that derives from God in truth. We have to start by getting rid of the lies, even as they strut about in their pomp, and then we may hope to live in peace with ourselves and the people around us. (Indeed a very good place to do so is in a boat, and the Derry ones took the Blessed Sacrament on a boat to bless the River Foyle with its three bridges, from which all too many people have drowned themselves!)

     If we wish to live, we must prioritise the quest for truth. On this feastday, what we are celebrating in Christ's Kingship is the primacy of Truth. One might have thought that this is not so very difficult to acknowledge, but from Pilate on, men of power tend to mock the very idea. The result, in Pius XI's words, 'is that human society is tottering to its fall, because it has no longer a secure and solid foundation.'

    Indeed human society had a very narrow escape from total self-destruction in the succeeding years; however a hundred years later we find it tottering on in a similar fashion. In fact the historical times when it appeared to have a secure and solid foundation may have been the exception rather than the rule, although there are also no doubt times when it is particularly precarious.,- but such times are not without their blessings, and the threat of wreck can even bring out the best in us.

    One Father Edward Cahill SJ, an associate of President de Valera's, published a great tome in the 1920s called 'The Framework of a Christian State'. I came across a review of it some years ago in The Irish Catholic by one Michael McDowell SC. He stated that 'Cahill urged De Valera to make a “definite break with the Liberal and non-Christian type of state” that had been “forced on us by a foreign, non-Catholic power”.... The threats to Catholic Christianity underlined the need for Ireland to adopt a new social system based largely on peasant proprietor agriculture.' Down to earth people, in touch with physical reality, are less inclined to cynicism about the very idea of truth, even if they like to play around with it!

    To promote his ideas, Father Cahill founded in 1926 An Ríoghacht, or the League of Christ the King. With a slight shock, I recalled lately that as a teenager at Downside I partook in the League of Christ the King, under the aegis of an elderly Irish monk, Dom Wulstan Phillipson, otherwise known affectionately as Wappy,- and I used to thoroughly enjoy his sessions in the Ford Library, which combined prayer with thoughtfulness. In the subsequent years his kind of thought was pretty much air-brushed out of my life, along with most other people's, only to come sneeking back with, for instance, Tolkein and 'The Lord of the Ring'.

    I can understand the confusion and indeed horror of our so-enlightened Irish establishment at finding attitudes eerily reminiscent of the likes of Fr Cahill being taken seriously again,- but they are most pertinent. In the hard times that are before us, the tradition of personal responsibility and ownership, combined with self-sufficiency and community, which to this day characterises life in the West of Ireland, offers something that we may build upon,- even as the present set-up becomes increasingly dysfunctional, and we have to combat the totalitarian tendencies of the cartel of big business and their cronies, by which we are unfortunately governed.

    However, quite apart from the obstruction of the parties in government, it was the same Michael McDowell mentioned above who was specially responsible for Maria Steen's failure to secure nomination in the recent presidential election, in spite of the two of them having been very prominent together in last year's referenda, when the Government's attempt to do away with the constitutional underpinning for family and a woman’s place in the home was soundly defeated. Judging by that defeat, and the huge amount of spoiled votes in the presidential election, she might have actually won. At least we would have had a proper electoral debate. Did McDowell lose his nerve, or what? He wouldn't be the first establishment figure to do so when revolutionary ideas which they espoused actually looked like happening!

    Acute polarization characterises our times, as one would expect at a time of special crisis. Many simply shy away from the resulting conflicts, but ‘no house divided against itself can stand’. How are we to 'live in accord'? When it comes down to politics, even in families, we will find conflicting views among good people. Unless these conflicts are handled in a constructive fashion, they will destroy any movement or even institution. How can we aspire to unite a whole society if we the people cannot even handle our own interior conflicts? 'The Cartel' will be quick to exploit these and use them to suppress opposition and debate.

    The Irish President has very limited powers, but is expected to provide a figure-head and symbol of unity for the nation. We are inclined to simplify the division in our country as one between ‘left’ and ‘right’, but the newly elected president was elected on the basis of the deliberate repression of any serious opposition to the official leftish narrative. We have seen a lot of such repression recently, for instance in regard to debate around covid and the government’s handling of it. It is probable that the debates around, for instance, AI, digital identification and currency etc will meet with similar repression, and the toolkit is available to make it more and more totalitarian.

     Politics, particularly the left/right business, and indeed confessional religion as in Ireland between Catholics and Protestants, seem increasingly irrelevent, but can we really be expected to sort out such issues on a purely individual basis? If a political movement fit for purpose is to emerge, I think it will have to do so from actual grass-roots efforts, though at the same time it will need to do so on a continent-wide basis. Ireland has form in such a matter, going back to the Celtic monks and missionaries. Let us adopt their tradition of community, based on the three-legged stool of prayer, study and physical work,- and let it all be pervaded by the spirit of fun that characterises the Irish at their best,- then nobody need be afraid of it!

    

Bloomin' 79th birthday!

    I'm off to Nazaré again next week, still determined to get the Anna M out again next year!

Confidence

 ‘Don’t let the old man in,’ is the advice of my dear wife, Fiona. She also informs me that at the age of 79, I should not count on being able to take folks sailing again next year. However, aside from any physical problems, the real poison of old age is the decline of confidence.

Confidence of course is the basis of any human activity, not least of money. ‘Neither a borrower or a lender be’ is lovely advice, but the entire world economy depends on the delicate balance between lenders and debtors. Mysteriously, nobody expects all that debt (235% of world GDP) to ever be paid back,- not that the lenders ever had it in the first place - central banks print it with the simple proviso that the borrowers will be able to pay the interest on it.

When this becomes questionable, interest rates have to go up to persuade lenders to take the risk. When governments have to borrow to pay the interest, they are embarking on a dangerous spiral that is liable to end in hyperinflation. We may find even a great and productive country such as France as a rudderless ship drifting on the rocks. This cannot be allowed to happen, so the rest of the Eurozone, one way or another, will have to try to take her in tow.

In Ireland we experienced this in the financial crash of 2008. Now, however, our Government is swimming in cash, with a record surplus of about 23.2 billion euro in 2024, largely due to a bonanza in the corporate tax take and other revenues from a few huge American corporations in the tech and pharmaceutical sectors.

According to David Murphy, writing in RTE news today, ‘Pfizer has 4,000 employees in Ireland and is one of the largest corporate taxpayers.’ He further states,- ‘The pharmaceutical and medical device sector accounts for 65% of total goods exported from Ireland and 90% of products sold to the US’. Naturally, those who run Ireland Inc, and anyone else who considers such matters,  must get the jitters from President Trump’s antics, and it is small wonder that they would not want to upset the likes of Pfizer.

            Commission President Von der Leyen appears to be getting away with her failure to release her correspondence with Pfizer's chief executive regarding the purchase of billions' worth of vaccines, in spite of the ruling of the European Court of Justice to do so. No doubt her defence is that said vaccines were most urgently needed and saved millions of lives. I have been doing a spot of research on my own account, laboriously counting Co.Clare deaths in RIP.ie for the last 10 years. That represents a fairly stable demographic, since it is mostly the indigenous population that use it. This was the result:- 

Year    - 2015 - 2016 - 2017 - 2018 - 2019 - 2020 - 2021 - 2022 - 2023 - 2024

Deaths -885      896     909     1054    996     1003    1213    1259     1258    1268

It would take an enormous amount of careful research to pin down exactly what has happened here, but to me there are some fairly stark stand-outs: - there was not actually much of a pandemic here in Co Clare (see 2020), but there has been a surge of death in the wake of the vaccine roll-out, which has been sustained ever since. The fact that there is a widespread tendency to refuse to even consider such facts fails dismally to inspire confidence in the institutions that do so.

The whole covid affair has sparked a great deal of anxiety, along with the wars in Ukraine and Israel, the climate alarmism, the unpredictability of the American administration, and the unsatisfactory politics going on in Ireland and Europe etc etc. In short, if there was such a thing as a barometer of confidence, it would be very low at present!

Not alone money, as we have seen, but life itself depends on confidence. When this confidence loses its moorings,and we find ourselves tossed about on a stormy sea with no direction, all we can do is find other means of orientation. Such in fact is the human condition. Money in particular may be a good servant, but it is a very disappointing and unsatisfactory master, to put it mildly. The same may be said for any structure which bases itself on money, notably governments. When they are set up as ends in themselves, they become systems of idolatry, false gods. They say with Pontius Pilate, Truth, what is that? The question is raised ever more urgently, especially with the advent of AI.

     We are challenged to immerse ourselves in the quest for truth and thus the establishment of confidence more and more as we age, and if we do so, even as death draws nearer, this becomes the blessing of age. Relentlessly, we are pushed on toward finding faith in the one true God. The direct experience of the sea, including the genuine encounters with one's inner self and with other sea-farers which it involves, is a fine aid for this process. The sea has often been referred to as a mirror to our souls, notably by Charles Baudelaire. 'Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer! La mer est ton miroir...,'- but beware! It is dangerous, even while the authenticity of one's experience depends on exposure to this danger. It is tempting, though not a good idea, to defy this danger with a false confidence and with pride.

There is a reason why the first thing someone does, who wishes to establish that they have arrived as a billionaire, is to acquire a super-yacht. For that matter, if you happened to be a psychopathic monarch, acquiring a splendid flagship fits pretty well with acquiring a church! We need to eschew this tendency. For my part, I have found recent years fairly harrowing, but I have survived. I’m hoping to go to sea again in my eighties, with renewed purity of heart, and thus to pass on this plank of the heritage that came down to me!

The Mary Rose,- sunk under the King's nose in the Battle of the Solent, 1545.