Does this tell us something?

In France, they have Aéroport Paris-Charles de Gaulle, and in Poland, airports named after Fryderyk Chopin and Ignacy Jan Paderewski, interpreter of Chopin, and second Prime Minister of the Polish Republic.

In England there is John Lennon Airport, which I will never use. Need I say why?

This post is most certainly linked to the previous one.

Hitching the Barque of Peter to the Liberal Handcart - His Holiness & the Death Penalty

Before the XX century, and even now in Muslim countries, religion was to a great extent what informed the public conscience. Together, Christianity and the public conscience informed British legislation of a social kind, such as Catholic Emancipation, the abolition of slavery, and the Factory Acts.

The process is now largely reversed. Laws passed have changed the public conscience about matters like the death penalty, abortion, and sexual deviation. After a decent period of reflection (or weathercock-gazing) religious leaders, Catholic Bishops amngst them, also change their consciences.

Last Wednesday, Pope Benedict, catching up with secular fashions in morality, asked that countries work towards abolition of the death penalty where it still persists.

His rather more robust predecessors in the Papal States maintained the death penalty until Pius IX, one of my favourite Popes, unfortunately abolished it in 1869, and retired the last executioner Battista Bugatti on a pension. Among the methods in use up to the 1860s were hanging, beheading, and the mazatello , a long-handled pole-axe with which the condemned was first stunned before having his throat cut. Charles Dickens witnessed and disapprovingly described an execution by Bugatti.

There is an appealing moral symmetry about the death penalty when applied to murderers. Kill and be killed. Its use prevents further murderous activity by the party executed, and to an extent repairs or restores the injured honour of both those closest to the person murdered and society at large. It also enrages post-freudian twerps who cannot distinguish between cruelty and sadism.

Opposition to capital punishment in principle is founded upon either religious, but not Catholic, morality, or upon mere squeamishness. A society which accepts abortion but cringes from execution is not prepared to kill the guilty who are visible, but quite sanguine over killing the invisible innocent child in the womb. Sentimental hypocrisy.

Opposition on practical grounds - the risk of wrongful conviction - is another matter, but not one that Benedict seems to have mentioned. He seems less concerned about more than a thousand years of practical Catholic wisdom, than conforming the Church to the fickle spirit of the age: hitching the Barque of Peter to the liberal handcart.

And when clergy, be they never so high, adopt secular morality, dissent may well be a duty, and one which I heartily embrace.

Or have I missed something?




 

A Matter of Heroism and Honour: Some Rambling Thoughts

Last week, I stood awe-struck before the magnificent and beautiful monument to the heroes who fell at the battle of Thermopylae, and saved Greece, and ultimately Europe, from the horrors of Persian despotist and barbarity. Their epitaph, written by Simonides and recorded on the monument and in the Greek Anthology:

Ὦ ξεῖν', ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε
κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι.

My translation, humbly submitted as accurate and prodosically correct, but without pretension to being poetry:

Go tell the Lacedaimonians, passer-by
Obedient to their orders, here we lie.

Like the Spartans themselves, it is pithy, lapidary, terse, and has a certain dry humour.

And what did they die for? Not for the Greek gods, who were, morally, grossly inferior to their worshippers. The answer is simple: they fought and died for their honour, a pagan concept, perhaps, but none the worse for that. The duty of a Spartan was to win or die, and in the performance of this duty lay his honour. I cannot, will not, believe that to those who knew not God, or His Son, His mercy does not extend, for I cannot believe that God is less merciful and generous than His creatures. Those who fought for Country, Home, Family, and Hearth were following a prompting of nature as natural as hunger and thirst, and I hope to be worthy to meet them in Heaven.

If Honour is a mere figment of paganism, then so are Love, Friendship, Patriotism, Good Manners, Art, Music, Literature, and all that strives to make life more beautiful and harmonious in this vale of tears.

Charity and Some Difficulties with Not Hating One's Enemies

Redneck Reflections has an excellent but tough post today on the necessity for positive good and for charity, a virtue I find difficult to cultivate.

Loving my enemies if they are weaker than me is easy - mere routine. As to those I perceive as stronger, there is nothing I would not (at least theoretically) inflict on them. As Virgil wrote, of the destiny and duty of Rome:

Parcere subiectos et debellare suberbos

("Spare the humble [or defeated] and war down the proud", and boy! would I not war the arrogant swine down!).

And this leads me to another matter - Honour, which a correspondent attacked as a merely pagan idea, but one to which I am greatly attached. A future post, perhaps. 

71 YEARS AGO TODAY

Today the new semester starts in Polish schools, and in the little town where I live and teach, we started with Mass at the church, the local state schools too, followed by a ceremony at the communist era social-realism war memorial.

The mayor, who is everyone's friend, spoke movingly of the cruelty and barbarity of the occupation by Germany, during which 6 million Poles, half of them Jews, were murdered. He thanked God that Poland survived and is now free.

Among the people present were two of the parish priests, old soldiers in their spledid uniforms, the police, the fire brigade, teachers, school pupils, and ordinary citizens.

At 11 o'clock, the air-raid sirens sounded. A memory of my childhood in wartime London, when I had to listen for the siren, as my grandmother was stone-deaf.

Then each of the groups present laid flowers at the memorial and bowed. A little dog following one group to the memorial stretched out its front paws and, believe it or not, bowed too, not comic but moving.

We sang the Polish National Anthem and went our ways.

Thank God here piety and honour are still very much alive.