Mere Comments: Here Lies England
April 17, 2007

There weren't any newspapers back in 476, when the German warlord Odoacer took control of Roman government in the west. No headlines blared about the fall. No pundits noted the irony that the poor young emperor whom Odoacer "encouraged" to resign in favor of a monastery was named, with fitting diminution, for the founder of Rome and her greatest ruler: Romulus Augustulus. Not that it would have mattered, because a tree will long put out a few leaves and shoots after the trunk is dead to the core, and nobody will really notice the difference. So it is in history. Rome retained a "Senate," not that it accomplished anything, and "consuls," honorary and pointless. The young sons of Boethius were elected consuls simultaneously, and it was one of the proudest moments of that man's life, he being the last of the great classical Romans. But it was like being chosen for the local chapter of the Lions or the Elks; not much more than that.

Why should we believe that such a fall cannot happen to us, or has not already happened? The National Catholic Register reports that a new law has been enacted in Little Britain, on whom it seems the sun does nothing but set, prohibiting Catholic teachers in Catholic schools from teaching Catholic doctrine to Catholic students. It's easy to guess the specifics. The British Duma is not exercised over that most revolutionary of Catholic and Christian affirmations, that the God through whom all things were made took flesh of the Virgin and became man -- a doctrine that John Adams, alas, once called pernicious. Catholics may talk all they want about that, because that is thought to be irrelevant. But they may not talk about the sin of sodomy, lest they offend the feelings of those people -- some lonely and unfortunate, some simply confused, some wilfully perverse -- who are committed to the sin, and who demand that they be free from criticism for it. The law, apparently, has been pushed by a woman member of the Blair cabinet, a Catholic and, what's more, a supernumerary of Opus Dei. She's delighted by the innovation, as is her fellow Catholic Mrs. Blair. the rest

NCR article