The theme of bad government appears (coincidentally) in several of the books that we review this month. This bad government may be manifested in simple cowardice, as in the fear of European politicians to face up to undeniable fact that many of the young Muslim males immigrating into Europe do not share the European vision of the sexes as equal – with dramatic consequences (see Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Prey: Immigration, Islam and the Erosion of Women’s Rights). Ali exposes the failure of European politicians to stand up to the growing abuse of women by these men. Ali herself must be quite a courageous woman as her own colleague Theo van Gogh was assassinated by an Islamist terrorist in the Netherlands. However similar courage is not in large supply among those politicians who refuse to engage with the shocking statistics showing a huge increase in the rape and sexual coercion of women across European cities.
Bad government also appears also in the USA where certain States, most notably California and New York, have turned against Charter schools (see Thomas Sowell’s Charter Schools and their Enemies). Charter Schools are quasi-private schools, most often in underprivileged areas, whose academic success gives the lie to the woke view that inequalities are “rooted in social, political and economic structures”. Sowell points out that these schools usually out-perform public schools, even though there is no cherry-picking of pupils – they are chosen strictly by lottery. However, since the success of these schools, officialdom in places such as New York and California is out to bring them down, or at least to make life very hard for these schools.
The same theme appears in three other reviews this month but with reference to the tendency of government to arrogate all power to itself; something it does by devouring all lesser forms of community. The dynamics of how this takes place is brilliantly analysed in Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community. James Bradshaw summarises Nisbet’s fundamental observation: “As the State had grown in size and scope, it had gradually absorbed the functions of other bodies: those of the Church, the guild, the community and the family. As a result, people had grown more detached and isolated.”
Nisbet’s analysis is not limited to what we traditionally denominate as totalitarian systems, but also States in the “free” West. For here too, despite the safeguard of democracy (the worth of which is, as we are witnessing, inversely proportional to people’s capacity to be duped) States have a tendency to banish, or at least neutralise, all competitor authorities (in the words of Alasdair MacIntyre: “All power tends to coopt, and absolute power coopts absolutely”). Nisbet’s description of the over-weaning State absorbing the authority of the competitor powers (Church, guild, community and family) must strike us as pertinent to our current situation.
Certainly the way religion for one has been treated by the Irish government during our Covid lockdowns does not bode well. Without wishing to be melodramatic, we are witnessing how strong the State has become, for better or for worse. We certainly do not have the strong hierarchy of the first decades of the State’s history, and to some degree that may be a good thing. But it is worrying to see the hierarchy going, cap in hand, to beg our politicians for the recognition of basic and common sensical religious liberties – only to be stonewalled.
This of course is one of the bitter fruits of secularisation which we also examine in this issue (see Stephen Bullivant’s Mass Exodus). Secularisation is in some perverse way our plea for the State to lord it over us, a kind of re-statement of Good Friday’s “We have no king except Caesar” (John 19:15). Of course secular power finds such a request just too tempting to resist. Here in Ireland, as many people have observed, we may have swapped the rule of the Church for that of our State, and that may turn out to have been a bad move on our part.
The good news is that man is made for God and cannot live without God. This is echoed in the inextinguishable desire for beauty testified to by those pianos being brought to Siberia by cultured Russians being sent into exile (see Sophy Roberts’ The Lost Pianos of Siberia). Roberts describes how “On the gravestone of the pianist Vera Lotar-Shevchenko in Akademgorodok, the Soviet “science city”, is the legend: “Life in which there is Bach is blessed”.
The inextinguishable human desire for God is testified too by those great saints of the twentieth century who courageously stood against those systems, Nazism and to Marxism, which sought to deify the State. In this issue we look at one such saint (Robin Harris’ Stepinac His Life and Times). Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac (1898-1960) led the Catholic Church in Croatia during the period of Nazi occupation and later during the Communist era. He was the leading light in the Catholic resistance to Communist rule, suffering years of State persecution, imprisonment and hard labour for his temerity. As the reviewer, Fr Conor Donnelly points out: “It is not often that we hear of the contribution of Catholics in opposing totalitarianism, so these stories are important for us to know. The brutality in Yugoslavia has often been described as worse than elsewhere in this not-too-central theatre of war.”
Men like Stepinac are witnesses to the fact that Pilate’s dreadful power over Christ, re-enacted again and again throughout history, is only ever ephemeral. In fact it is an authority only given him by God so that in the end the Resurrection would testify to the fact that Christ in fact is the true rule of mankind: “Christus vincit”. Happy Easter!
About the Author: Rev Gavan Jennings
Rev Gavan Jennings is a priest of the Opus Dei Prelature working in Dublin. He is editor of Position Papers.