Against Catholic Reaction

I.

            I bear bad news. I speak not with hate but with a heavy heart.

            The Catholic Church has failed the test of modernity. Arguably, so too has every major church to varying degrees. Others may have failed earlier – but by 1965 with the close of the Second Vatican Council, there wasn’t much question left as to the path the ‘universal church’ was taking.

Founding stock folk of Western Europe, including the colonial offspring, have nowhere to look for shelter. One can look perhaps to kooky splinter churches with small congregations, but anything with a national or international presence has at this point a questionable theology and is clearly pandering to globohomo. Frankly the two are intertwined; pandering to globohomo power leads to a compromise of principles and theology.

All of these places have been broken by a set of common conditions: demands of power, rapid displacement with technology and urbanization, ideological shifts, and the subtle creep of spiritual decay. The demands of power are clearly a problem, and it’s quite likely that a lot of these churches bent because to fail to yield is to lose all of their privileges and status – or at least that is the threat. These churches were useful once upon a time to the organization of society, but as industrial technology and electronics became more sophisticated, consequently the tools of social control were refined such that the church became more of a liability than an asset for power. This runs parallel with one of my themes: the left as embodied powerlust for the sake of a cosmopolitan coalition. All of these churches are breaking themselves for people not interested in the longterm stewardship and health of things.

Displacement due to tech and urbanization is something I treated elsewhere, and suffice it to say that these factors have an impact on all aspects of traditional life – including religion. You can have rapid technological change, movement of people, and information, or you can have traditional society, but it increasingly looks like you cannot have traditional society bundled with all of these other things. Ideological shifts are something which other reactionaries treat, and it’s succinctly stated in the Moldbug phrase ‘Cthulhu swims left’; the past 150 years has been, on the whole, a clear line of victory for the left. Part of this has to do with the power process of the left and the fact that so many of them are utterly obsessed with the mere act of acquiring and holding power. It all ties into the spiritual decline as well, which has been a process since the modern age really took hold, around 1750 or so and accelerating around 1900.

No one knows exactly why the spiritual decline happened. I believe it’s due at least in part to the elevation of science and reason, also in part to fads among certain elite circles. Power and culture exist in a weird feedback loop, but I’m becoming increasingly convinced that for the past three hundred years power and elite affect has had a very disproportionate impact on culture. The deep subversion between 1700 and 1950 of broader society by Masonic orders was likely an element as well. Part of the explicit aims of the Masonic orders is the elevation of science and reason as well as a perverse universalism. They are essentially husks by the current year, relegated largely to social clubs for old men with little effective power, but they do this on the backs of having achieved their goals. They know not what they do.

There is something important at the outset that religio as such is a relatively new idea. For most of human history and before written history as well, you did not conceive of a religio which could be neatly packaged and chosen a la carte; you were born in a tribe, and you believed what the tribe did, more or less. It was a way of life, and the mode of thought went along with it. To put it another way, birthplace and worldview were nearly one and the same. As far as I can tell, the modern concept of religio comes from about the so-called Enlightenment period, sometime in the 1700s, and it was probably a result of deep introspection after contact with queer ways of life and odd peoples during the age of exploration.

Less and less do I like the religio term, but it will have to do as it is the word of the day. Religion is at bottom a collection of ways of life, customs, rites and rituals, myth and philosophy. Much of the philosophy is shrouded in mythological language and metaphor, and the customs, rites, and rituals are often conveyed by induction into ceremonies or the telling of myths and stories. All of this is very important. The mythology builds the words and imagery by which we express ourselves.

You can’t sit an average person down and convey to them in two weeks metaphysics, epistemology, a deep conception of creation or divinity, aesthetics, ethics – and furthermore all of the things you do on a social and personal basis for good reason, which make life more bearable in the long run. You can hand them a Bible and give them a basic Bible studies course in that time, and they can pick up on the other things elsewhere. Given a coherent religion with a more or less Aryan foundation – including Aryanized Christian sects (most of the dominant denominations, excepting Judaizing and Eastern forms), Buddhism, and Sanatana Dharma (Hindu) – one can make sense of the world and at least steer their life right without knowing the philosophical nuts and bolts. Things outside the Aryan/Indo-European purview lack something that makes them either incompatible with modernity (i.e. primitive animism) or with being around other worldviews (i.e. Judaism and Islam).

That conveys firstly the impossibility of every man his own priest, and secondly, every man a rational agent dissecting the world. Even as a Protestant descendant, and someone still in the Protestant frame of thought, I find the first laughable, and the second absurd on its face. I don’t think that this was the Protestant mission, even if some wanted to push it in that direction. One doesn’t need an ordained intermediary with God or need to work for grace – one should be suspect of those demanding either of these things on the face of it as we are not yet in the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

To circle around, how exactly did the Catholic Church fail? I outlined the general causes of every church softening and ultimately crumbling, but what about the specific case? Moreover, were these failures endemic to the church – that is, were they failures from within, or were they attacks from without? First, I should say I find that Catholic reactionaries are startlingly incapable of recognizing their own hand in their follies and failures. Everything was an Anglo, Jewish or Masonic plot; and to the extent that these plots succeeded, and the Anglo-Jewish-Mason crew has installed the homo mafia to bugger good Catholic boys, there is zero Catholic culpability.

The Catholic jeers at the modern Evangelical, but Catholic evangelism brought us large portions of the third world. The Catholic is incapable of grappling with the problems that their precise belief system has wrought, and the fact that more important than winning mere numbers of souls is the quality of the men and whether they shall care to live alongside you. It turns out a large portion of those whom they evangelized in the past centuries, and continue to support through Catholic charities to this day, can easily be turned into weapons both by Catholic NGOs and the ‘Church itself, as well as by globohomo to destroy [white] Catholic neighborhoods and [white] Catholic countries, not to mention Protestant lands. In the Current Year, the ‘Church doesn’t spare a thought for any of the havoc it or the policies and side effects wreaks. They continue Catholic evangelism in Sub-Saharan Africa and support globohomo NGOs and charities there. Part of the African demographic crisis lays at the feet of the papists.

This is a theme that I’ll hit more in a later essay, but suffice it to say certain Aryan people understood this better than others: you can only make an imperium with sufficiently like people. Period. You cannot make an empire with xenos who wish to kill or exploit you and your people. The Others of the West fit exactly that description of xenos who wish to kill or exploit you and your people.

E. M. Jones has good things to say. I don’t like him as a person for reasons, but I’ll set that aside. One of his key deficiencies, like others in what we might broadly paint as the ‘Catholic Reaction’ movement (not all of them self-identify as this, but it’s a useful label so it’ll do), is the inability to identify points of Catholic failure. As stated above, virtually everything is an outside infiltration or subversion in his worldview and there is a degree of truth to this. What he is missing, of course, is the fact that the Syndicate is essentially an alliance of Jewish and Catholic criminals, and this has been the way things have been run since at least the 1920s during the excesses of prohibition and probably a bit earlier than that. The Syndicate, known in popular media as the Italian or Irish mafia which are but two public aspects of it, happily partners with elite interests. There is also the extent to which the cosmopolitan elite has been a broad power sharing partnership over the past 80 to 100 years, but which of course ultimately favored the Jews. This partnership happily aligns with E. M. Jones’s three ethnic thesis: Catholic, Protestant, and Jew, where the Jew ultimately wound up on top, and the traditional Protestant elite have atrophied worst over time. Still, there are far more Catholic-descended people in the cosmopolitan elite today than there were in 1900 (let alone 1850) whether one looks at nominal or real power.

It is certainly true that the character of this country has changed substantially with mass Catholic immigration since the mid-to-late 19^th century. Catholics from Ireland and Southern Italy in particular brought with them a degree of civic corruption, filth, and aggressive nepotism that Protestant NW Europeans are unfamiliar with, and those patterns frankly continue to this day. One still sees the legacy of Catholic immigrant machine politics in the conduct of the modern Democrat party, power politics, and white flight. White flight was presaged by the Protestant descendants who founded most of the coastal cities, generally North Sea founding stock (English, Dutch, Huguenot, North German) fleeing those cities for the hinterlands or for the frontier, as they were swamped by Catholic and Jewish migrants and the attendant crime and blight those people brought. It’s also true that we can NAXALT; however, we are speaking of generalities, and the Catholics we got in this country were generally not from places like Northern Italy or France, who would have blended with the present English fold much better. All this being true, it is manifestly clear as well that the rot could not take hold and especially deep hold without it being welcomed to some degree. Everyone who is corrupted by modernity is to some degree complicit whether they realize it or not.

II.

The first big issue for the Catholic Church was, of course, the Reformation. I shudder to go into a huge detailed history on the Reformation, but the preamble to that was many years of abuse, scandal, and corruption in the Renaissance ‘Church. Difficult for a lot of Catholics to conceive is that many institutions, especially ones as old as the ‘Church, live on a cyclical basis. During the high points, there is widespread enthusiasm, [relatively] low corruption, and often correspondingly great works by or for the ‘Church. During the low points, enthusiasm peters out, corruption rises, and one is likely to see fewer monuments or other great works. As I mentioned this is just a fact of institutions, not something that is true only of the ‘Church or of churches, but it is a fact that all long-lasting institutions have this cyclical mode. It was because of this cyclical tendency that even a figure such as Evola noted that one should be a revolutionary conservative – that is to be willing to purge extant institutions that have lingered past their time, but rebuild new ones based on the principles of the old. To conserve that which is sickly and dying may be conservative but it is also foolish. Ultimately one should care more about that which is timeless than whatever particular forms institutions take.

To the papist mind, the Protestant is entirely to blame for the Reformation. The Protestant left the graces of God somewhere between 1520 and 1550 and hasn’t looked back since. In addition to the complaints of corruption, Northern Europeans also chafed under effective institutional rule by Southern Europeans, and combined with a wave of centralization in the ‘Church in the Renaissance period which threatened tradition – for instance priests living with wives but whom they didn’t marry inside the ‘Church, local appointments beyond the purview of central control, and other practices within local parishes which were upset in that period. One may fret that these priests were not living up to their celibacy vows per ‘Church doctrine, but that doctrine is based on practice carried from early ascetic orders and not from the Bible or theological argument.

Martin Luther was not the first firebrand to rebel. Jan Hus was famously burned to death several generations before Luther, and some link the inspiration to the Reformation somewhat tenuously to the late Middle Ages heresies like the Lollards and Waldensians. The early humanists like Erasmus, and the Gutenberg Press also form part of the backdrop of the Reformation; Erasmus was one of the men who made better Latin translations of the older Greek and Aramaic manuscripts available, and the movable type printing press allowed for mass production of pamphlets and other material which one simply could not do in previous years such that propaganda could be distributed in every town to literate people who could then shout from the town square or stir discussions of it at alehouses and other public venues.  

The first radical act of Luther and consequently of the Reformation was to question the practice of indulgences as instituted in 1519. Not only did he question the practice of bishops going and fetching tidy sums from people in their death beds, or widowers and other grieving people, but worse yet he did so publicly. Virtually all of the 95 Theses are questioning the practice of indulgences as then instituted. The second radical act was to produce common tongue translations of the Bible from the Latin and Greek texts produced by Erasmus. This was essentially heretical, and one could be viciously prosecuted and murdered by the Church for this act. One should note that the Eastern Orthodox Church never took such a stance on the Bible, nor delivered the mass in a tongue which the congregation could not understand. This reflects two differing worldviews, where the Catholic is supposed to create the image of heavenly mystery, and the Eastern Orthodox a reflection on the awe of God and the martyrdom of Christ.

These acts paved the way for the further questions of faith. Reformers, including Luther, began to ask all sorts of fundamental questions which shook the foundation of the ‘Church – because it stripped away the excesses and vestiges built by the ‘Church. The big ones – and the first ones – are that which were justified by reading the Bible and coming to a new understanding, of course being the ‘Solas’. The formula of each of those statements is very similar: Sola Fide or ‘By Faith Alone,’ Sola Gratia or ‘By Grace Alone,’ and ‘Sola Scriptura’ or ‘By Scripture Alone.’ The first, ‘By Faith Alone,’ means that works are not necessary to attain salvation. Only faith makes one candidate for grace. The second means that God's grace is His Will and not subject to human intervention. A priest or holy man has no power to intercede on questions of grace and salvation. The last that I put here is fairly obvious, and means that the Bible is the highest authority on God's word, and all tradition and worldview should be harmonized with the Bible.

The Reformation was, in essence, a move toward early forms of Christianity and a way to pick and choose tradition that made sense; most of the high Protestant churches would settle on something in between papist decadence and early church austerity, but later low Protestants would generally tend toward the austere look and feel. Luther or his immediate followers did mention something along the lines of a ‘universal priesthood of man.’ I don’t believe Luther wanted everyone to steer themselves absolutely; the vision was for intelligent men to have the opportunity to read the Bible, which was something they could not do under the Roman Catholic Church, and to cut out the degenerate institutional trappings literally carried in decayed form from the Roman Empire in the form of the Catholic Church. The Pontifex Maximus was the Roman emperor or other heads of state, and even as Constantine consolidated the Church he retained the title; lower priests [helped by local elites and magistrates] ran local rites and cult temples before Christianity. Reformers decided largely to get away from the so-called pagan or unreasonable practices left in the ‘Church such as veneration of Saints, the Eucharist and transubstantiation, clerical celibacy, and so forth.

The reality is that most of these are not “pagan” at all in that they do not precede Christianity, though it is arguably likely that the practice of keeping patron saints is a holdover from patron deities. That alone wasn’t so troubling. The fact is that there was no way for someone to tell in 1550 (or 2020) which of these saints were truly great people and which were frauds or myth. The Eucharist was early dismissed, and transubstantiation as a concept thrown in the dustbin. Reformers could not be convinced in any mythical or allegorical fashion that the unleavened communion wafers and simple wine were the flesh and blood of the Christ. To carry forth a scene from the Last Supper and claim that communion at every church had the same essence seemed somehow profane. Adult baptism became a bone of contention even among the Reformers, with most of them siding with tradition despite that Jesus was baptized in adulthood and most Christian sects recognize that faith must be affirmed at an age where understanding is possible. I mentioned above that clerical celibacy stems from the so-called ‘desert fathers’ and other early ascetic orders who strove to live with raw discipline to emulate Christ and the early martyrs, stripped from comfort and temptation.

There were other questions of doctrine and theology of course. Most Protestant denominations are still Trinitarian. The number of Protestant denominations exploded in the course of the mid-to-late-1800s through the mid-1900s. Most of these were small denominations, splinter groups, tent revivals, and among all of these there is a great overlap in hucksterism. If one can launch any stinging critique at Protestant denominations, whatever grand scams the Catholic Church has pulled over time have been far subtler in general than the latter Protestant denominations which exist almost as a precursor to self-help and get-rich-quick schemes. Protestants also failed to control the rise of Judaizing cults. Indeed, it is from these latter Protestant fundamentalist evangelical denominations that we get so-called prosperity theology and Christian Zionism.

Ultimately, Luther succeeded because he had the proper means in the printing press and textus receptus, and then he found princes in the Holy Roman Empire willing to shield him from the Pope and the Emperor, who at that time was essentially a weak figurehead. Other would-be reformers before were not so fortunate, having been less forceful or less charismatic or perhaps simply less lucky, and so they ended up dead almost without exception. The Reformation swept through the entire North Sea area, including England, Scotland, and Scandinavia. Switzerland as well broke with the ‘Church, and nascent Protestant movements in Bohemia and Northern Italy were forcefully crushed and the Protestants either removed to other principalities or killed (this happened between the time of 1550 and the Treaty of Westfalen, 1648). The French Protestant population would fall to the fate of persecution, forced conversions, and exile, but this happened largely after the Thirty Years’ War with the revocation of the Treaty of Nantes.

The ‘Church doubled down on persecuting Protestants wherever they could pressure rulers and on counter-reform practice. Faithful Catholics were not supposed to read the Bible until 1965. This wasn’t followed roundly of course, and by the 1700s, one could find plenty of literate Catholics disobeying their church rules (reading Bible translations produced by Protestants). In time, the Protestants won on common tongue Bibles and on other issues by making the Catholic position untenable.

III.

Then there were the wars of faith in the 1600s, not quite a hundred years after the Reformation started. The Thirty Years’ War epitomizes it and so I’ll stick to that. It was a conflict that wrapped up the geopolitical and religious issues of Europe at the time, such that France and Austria were on opposite sides despite both being Catholic powers. The French were less interested in who won on religious grounds in the HRE and more concerned about the geopolitics of dashing Austrian power before they got too big.

As the Reformation was coming to a head – or drawing to a close depending on your point of view – by the 1580s and ‘90s, at that point most of Northern Europe was interested in some form of protest against the Church. The HRE was splitting apart by principality according to the loyalty of the princes and people thereof. This came at a time when the Habsburgs were trying to consolidate their power in Austria and the HRE.

The two sides were drawn around Pfalz, the leader of the Protestant Evangelical Union, and Bayern, leaders of the Catholic League. A whole slew of greater and lesser states gathered on each side, but hostility wasn’t assured until the Defenestration of Prague. Emperor Rudolf II had guaranteed Protestants could worship freely in Bohemia, but his successor Mathias preferred the counter-reformation style. He revoked this guarantee and issued writs to condemn Protestants. At the issuance of one of these writs, noblemen and townsmen gathered in Prague and threw some of the Emperor’s men from a third story window in 1618.

At the outset, Papist victory seemed assured early on. They won key victories at the Battle of White Mountain against the Bohemians, stamped out Protestant uprisings in Upper Austria, and Mannheim and Heidelberg. It’s worth noting here the loyalties of many of the Papist fighters and generals – if Catholics criticize the seizure of ‘Church funds and estates by Protestants, the whole of the Catholic war effort in the Thirty Years’ War turned into a partly organized state and Church-sanctioned looting effort. I’ll try to tally the costs somewhat later, but suffice it to say for now they were steep. Pfalz was crushed after 1621, and the Evangelical Union dispersed in formal fashion. Bohemia would be stomped down in due course over the next four years.

The Protestants had assistance from the Ottomans after a fashion, as well as from Transylvanian Protestants and various other small allies including Brandenburg and volunteers from Britain. The Catholics had the full might of the Austrian and Spanish armies, as well as some of the lesser Catholic principalities in the Empire at the time. The Austrians and Spanish were both Habsburg realms. Danish intervention was a mixed blessing for Protestants, and despite initial promise only served to prolong the war for more fruitful commanders to come forth. Danes lost at Dessau Bridge and at Lütter, and with a third major defeat at Wolgast they came to terms. Their terms were to keep their then-holdings in exchange for a cease of hostilities, including cutting all support to Protestants in the HRE.

France at that time was dealing with their own Protestant uprising. They would not deal with the uprising as harshly as later, but the revolt occupied them for several years during the middle period of the Thirty Years’ War. France would throw money behind Protestant mercenaries and whoever the main Protestant army tended to be at the time. Dutch Protestants would follow a similar suit, fighting the Spanish on seldom occasion during the actual period of the Thirty Years’ War and preferring to lend financial and material support to others willing to do the fighting elsewhere.

Swedish entrance under the banner of King Gustav Adolf proved pivotal. He led Protestant armies to a string of victories upon landing at Stralsund and sweeping across Northeastern Germany. First at Frankfurt an der Oder, then Werben, Breitenfeld, and Lützen – as well as later fields, the Swedish forces would tend to prevail over the Imperial armies. Gustav’s armies were the most disciplined and he refined pike-and-shot formations as well as introduced light field artillery. However, his just as every army in that time relied heavily on mercenaries. With their entry, Swedish coffers were spread thin and quickly reliant on overstretched revenue streams from domestic sources as well as French payments and captured cities.

Gustav Adolf died at Lützen. By then, one of the two main Papist commanders had been felled in battle. Two years later, von Wallenstein, the greatest of the Catholic commanders, would die as well. The Evangelical Union fell into disarray a while after Gustav’s death. Thus they came under the French banner, and a French and Swedish alliance was holding ground in 1639. The Spanish would suffer defeats at sea in that year and the following year. By 1645, the Imperial forces were losing ground in the Low Countries and along the Rhine, and rebellion was breaking out in Spain that forced the Spanish to divert armies to their home territories. Three years later when both sides were ready to negotiate peace, both were undisputedly bloodied and spent from many years of fighting and bloodshed, but the worse for wear at that point were the Habsburgs. After nearly thirty years and a great deal of uncertainty, the war yielded a clear strategic victory for Protestants.

One way to convey this is as a series of movements. The first movement was of course the Reformation which happened for all the reasons in the section above. In response, the ‘Church following about 1550 and most Catholic rulers around a similar time decided to follow the Counter-Reform movement, which meant deepening orthodoxy and stamping out reform and protest figures wherever they be found, the earlier and smaller the presence, the better – but no quarter was to be spared either way. The Counter-Reform viewed this in existential terms, and to a large degree they were probably correct. Had they taken a conciliatory or moderated tone, we don’t know what would have happened, but there is a fair chance that the Protestants would have swept further than they did by the 1680s in fact, and there would have been no means to stop them once they had sufficiently widespread power.

The problem was, the Counter-Reformation people either naively presumed Protestants under coercion would simply quietly comply or that a few leaders could be picked off and the rest would follow. This was not the case. Everywhere the Counter-Reform model was enacted and large Protestant populations existed simultaneously, rebellion was almost inevitable because these people knew that death, dispossession, or conversion lie in the future and it wasn’t always clear which would be the case. The simple Catholic historical narrative, again, falls apart upon deeper scrutiny – one sees that actions provoke responses and in this case, the response ended up igniting a series of campaigns that culminated in the Thirty Years’ War. The French for their part should have been counted as fair-weather Catholics whose loyalties were suspect at best, having been known in their history for installing anti-popes at their own convenience. Only highly influential zealots inspire waves of Catholic revival, else the French often do what is geopolitically expedient regardless of religious-ideological principle.

This war would desolate the economy of most of the interior of the HRE for two generations, from Bohemia and Saxony to Pfalz on the lower Rhine. Farmland was burned or pillaged, and homes and other buildings repeatedly razed on campaigns. Over a third of the German population was killed and more were horribly maimed or famished; in some areas especially in the Northeast over half died in the fighting and ensuing chaos during those years. Much of the damage was laid at the feet of mercenary armies and poor conduct including systematic looting, both of which were endemic to warfare during that time.

Aside from the physical impact on Germany, the other major result was the peace agreement, the Peace of Westphalia. Brandenburg, France, and Sweden gained substantial land holdings as part of the settlement. Pfalz was also halved. The Peace of Augsburg terms were clarified and altered somewhat; princes now had absolute rule to determine whether their state was Catholic, Protestant, or Reform. Sovereign authority was also recognized, and citizens from a Protestant city travelling to a Catholic city could not be harmed without reprisal (or vice versa). Further, citizens belonging to any of these denominations could not be compelled to convert so long as they practiced in private and did not intend subversion or treason, even if their private practice contradicted the public faith of the state where they lived.

IV.

A third test for the ‘Church came with the French Revolution. I will try to keep this substantially shorter than the last two sections. Suffice it to say, other reactionary writers have correctly identified this period as a pivotal moment in Western history for obvious reasons. One can find what might be called fledgling currents to modernity in previous eras. Yet the very structure of modernity was established principally in France between 1790 and 1819, and deepened in France a hundred years later.

The Revolution came about as a confluence of factors ranging from discontented aristocrats to an upstart bourgeois class who saw the chance to possibly gain yet more power, as well as a lower and under class element which came to feel increasing resentment at those above. These elements ranged from spurned aristocrats whose traditional influence was decaying in the administrative apparatuses of the absolutist Ançien Régime to certain of the bourgeois folks who were increasingly forming a new ‘middle class’ where many of them could be quite wealthy and influential but lacked high birth and distinction in that way.  The resentments of these elements were not sufficiently managed at a point.

Louis XIV the Sun King had concentrated power in the hands of the court substantially during his reign. This involved schemes ranging from dividing old aristocratic power bases to increasing royal revenue sources and forming a standing army. It’s worth noting here for a second that for much of history standing armies were fairly rare and generally small, where the tendency was for countries to have something similar to a retainer-levy system even if they used different names; that is, to have a small force of permanent soldiers who guarded the king and other high nobility, and could respond to small skirmishes or revolts. These are your retainers. In the middle ages, retainers tended to be well-armed and often horse-mounted soldiers. Levies were the broader group of armed citizenry who could be pressed into service during campaign season or times of war. The arms and equipment of these levies were sometimes questionable, but the point was primarily to add numbers and not to fret about quality.

By the 1600s, standing armies began to come back in a small way, and by the 1700s they came back in a somewhat more pronounced fashion. By about 1720, most major European states had a force of ‘regulars’ which formed the core of their professional army, which could be padded with conscript reserves in emergencies. This sort of system hadn’t been seen widely since antiquity. Why mention this in a long article primarily on religious matters? Simply, the most expensive things funded by states, historically, has been militaries – armies and navies. Part of this is because up until about 1930 or 1940, it was commonplace for armies to serve to build certain infrastructure and domestic improvement projects (canals, levees) as well as their national defense and wartime roles. Part of it is because when you need 70-90% of your people working as farm labor some portion of the year just to keep food plenty in the pre-petrochemical age, margins are inherently thinner. Hypermodern states can afford to spend on things that ones in the early modern era could not.

Few doubt that Louis XIV was a great king. Despite the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and despite the great centralization efforts he undertook and the great deal of warfare, he remained fairly popular during his life and after he died. His first wars were a series of civil wars or tax rebellions depending on one’s point of view. His chief problem was probably that he went too far in creating a grand absolute state, and proved an example his successors could not live up to. His grandson, Louis XV, turned out to be a fairly competent king but was marked by substantial setbacks in the Seven Years’ War and court scandals.

It was Louis XVI, son of Louis XV, whom incensed and opportunistic revolutionaries would behead along with his family in 1793. The ‘Church in France had slid in influence by the 1780s with the removal of the Jesuits, and an increase in Freemasonry and scientific humanism. A debt and fiscal crisis on the heels of the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution left the French state broken and royal prestige diminished. The king and the court spent most of their time in Versailles. Any of the other nobles who had occasion to visit Versailles but did not spend most of the year there would have quickly realized how decadent and out of touch the king and his circle had become. All of this culminated along with the marginalized aristocrats and empowered ‘middle class’ to create a tinderbox which became increasingly difficult to navigate as the 1780s wound on.

All the ‘Church could do is stare in horror as these upstart elements with their varying backgrounds beat back the monarchies of Europe in the French Revolutionary Wars of 1792 to 1802, and as the most of the ruling elite and upper clergy of France was liquidated under the guillotine. Most of the ‘Church lands were seized as well – and these people were not Protestants. Their issue with the ‘Church was not a specifically Protestant issue, but instead came in the form of a liberal, scientific humanist critique. The ideal revolutionary religion was not Protestant Christianity, but cults to Nature, Reason, and Wisdom. Of course the things reactionaries harp on most happened as well, things I’ve covered in the past – the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a final abolition of serfdom and feudalism, universal suffrage republic and a citizen army with attendant mass conscription, and most privileged estates outside l’État proper lost their old privileges.

Some other reactionaries claim that liberalism is specifically Protestant. There are definitely Protestant flavors to it, but it’s not the case that we can prove the counterfactual – that liberalism or something like it would not have occurred without the Reformation. There’s also the fact that Protestants are only one part of the overall liberal milieu. I won’t get bogged down in defending the statement here, but suffice it to say that one likely cannot walk back all of liberalism. Some things liberalism puts forth are too popular and too enticing, and a thing once granted even if in bastardized form is worse revoked wholesale.

France’s Revolutionary Army won most of the battles they fought, whether by numbers or élan. The Jacobins fell in the Thermidorian Reaction. Napoleon came to dominate this period in a relatively short time. The ‘Church would be restored partly once Napoleon was firmly in power and as he worked to undo the full excesses of the Revolution, but it would never regain its former place in French life. The countryside would remain fairly devoutly Catholic, but the big cities – really the whole Ile de France, Marseille, Lyon and Toulouse – these places would all slide into secularism, somewhere between apathy and atheism.

If we come to the role of the ‘Church here, by this point the Papal States were withered and the ‘Church covered mostly weaker states in the south of the continent. Spain was an empire in decline for the better part of a hundred years, Italy was still in the tenuous first steps of unification, the HRE was weak, and the Catholic domains of Eastern Europe were mostly under foreign control. France was the nominal exception, and highlighted by the fact that the revolutionary forces carried out acts listed above but also overran the Papal States, the ‘Church was clearly limited in their response. Even so, it must be stressed that the Catholic Church has been in decline but for its third world evangelism for a very long time.

V.

The modern Catholic Church will cuck to power, bad press, or strong headwinds or anything in between. Anyone who doesn’t believe this should examine the two Vatican councils, the Franklin scandal (wherein the Church was complicit in turning out Catholic orphans to wealthy and connected people), the Covington High School debacle, and a hundred other illustrations which show that the ‘Church has abandoned its flock. Catholics complain about fag priests and the rampant child abuse scandals that surfaced lately, but the more seriously the celibacy vows are enforced, the fewer good men you’ll find willing to take up the job knowing that they cannot have a wife and children.

The modern ‘Church wants to reach out to the Other. They want to claim that atheists and Muslims –of course especially Jews – are all up for God’s grace. The Bible is pretty clear: only those who accept Christ are permitted into the Heavenly Kingdom. If you take the Bible seriously, clearly Protestants are correct and Second Vatican Council ‘outreach’ is hogwash.

Part of the appeal of the Catholic Church is to have something that is as universal and eternal as you can have on Earth. They managed to hang onto the trappings of Rome, both a fusion of the old civic worship model and the late Empire Church. It is supposed to be something to ideally match the glory of God and the example of Christ. One wants to worship somewhere there is beauty, truth, and glory. Unity is fine and all, but at what cost? Unity at all costs is akin to servitude.

Islam is an ideology that is explicitly striving after unity, and this unity is at the cost of worshiping the black flag of Arab chauvinism and their alien desert hodgepodge faith. Whatever elements of the perennial Arabs discovered or ‘borrowed’ from their neighbors, and Islam is a heavily borrowed religion, you cannot separate it from its baggage. One will find in the Hadiths elements from Eastern Christianity, Sanatana Dharma (Hindu), Judaism, and Zoroastrianism. One will also find explicit commands in Islam to subjugate the infidels and to obey blindly. This includes waving the sword at insufficiently pious Muslims and heretic Muslims, but animists and kuffar make the top of the list.

All this being the case, what can one do as a Catholic? E. Michael Jones rightly points out – and I’ve said as much elsewhere – that the empty chair people (Sedevacantists) are schismatics. Part of belonging to an orthodoxy, and the Catholic Church is ultimately an orthodoxy in fact if not in name, is affirming whatever they say within a few degrees of latitude. You can be a few degrees more liberal or conservative, but if one is an ultra-conservative ‘deus vult’ type, or one wants to go back to a 12^th century church, or even if one wants the ‘Church to liberalize substantially faster than its current pace – in any of these cases one is a schismatic. Welcome to schism and welcome to the Reformation. It took many papists 500 years to realize how rotten their church is, but finally they see the crumbling, worm-eaten edifice for what it is. What’s worse is the absolute depravity that the ‘Church had to condone and absorb in order for these people to wise up.

A Catholic who doesn’t want to be a schismatic is stuck in that narrow window of orthodoxy. I understand the longing for tradition in a world largely without tradition, or where anything which seems rooted and old is increasingly hard to find. Their best bet, then, is trying to find the best Catholic parish they can, and to work within the ‘Church to cut out the worst rot of modernity. This is an uphill battle, and for the work of a lone man or a small community working part-time on church matters it’s likely somewhere between impossible and ineffectual. I would advise they remove the whole “Catholic Reaction” pretense and put-on that so many of them have, and walk amongst friendly reactionaries and conservatives outside the papist fold with more humility and understanding. As Catholics (and Catholic reactionaries), you are largely in countries which are historically Protestant even if they are momentarily secular. Secularism is an unstable equilibrium, like libertinism or left-libertarianism, globohomo neo-liberalism, and various other hypermodern phenomena. As the saying goes, ‘nature abhors a vacuum.’

The churches of the present will almost certainly not survive 100 years. At least this is the case for the West. The Orthodox Church may well live on for Greece, Serbia, Russia, and all the other folks and lands it serves faithfully; but since as a white Englishman or Frenchman seeking to shelter in the Orthodox Church, you will be left out in the cold because you are not a co-ethnic, it is a clear non-starter. In the core of the West the traditional churches will be replaced. Traditional Christianity will likely be replaced. Its replacement will likely conserve some of the forms and content of Christianity, just as Christianity held content from Judaism and forms from Germanic and Hellenic Europe.

What do I advocate as a replacement for the degenerate forms of Christianity? I like the idea of what I call a syncretic church. Christians would scoff at the notion of returning to syncretism, which is something those from thousands of years ago before Judaic mind viruses would have recognized immediately as true. Syncretism roughly falls in line with perennialism, and acknowledges that there are deep similarities between religious practices between different peoples – usually in this case in the form of looking for overlapping mythological figures and gods. The syncretic church would synthesize the stories of the disparate Aryan traditions from the Vedas to the Sagas, with allowance for Christian influence as well primarily in the form of the New Testament.

I view the OT as problematic because the stories of the OT are written from the point of view of Jews and encourage readers to empathize and sympathize with Jews to excess, to want to become Jews. Thus the teaching in many churches of Christendom as the new Israel and the failure to realize that from the OT point of view, we [gentiles] are all Amalek and Esau. It’s very clear who Jacob is, and they are those who historically descend from Hebrews. Trying to read Christendom or a particular Christian nation or tradition into the role of the New Israel is not only counter to history, but it’s entirely against the deep tradition of Jews which is at root a folk religion even if Judaism itself took local Canaanite gods and synthesized that with strains of thought coming from Zoroaster. By folk tradition I mean that it comes from this Jewish taproot and explicitly seeks to further its power, where the whole point of worship is a reciprocal relationship of piety in exchange for power and worldly goodies. The Avesta predates the consolidation of the Jewish local cults into one god, for before they had a single YHWH they had Elohim (a plural form which still appears in the OT) in addition to Yahweh and various other local divinities.

Based on everything I’ve written before, and based on my opinions of Judaizing cults, the need to remove excessive Judaic influence is obvious. Perhaps there are specific books of the OT which could be salvaged, but I don’t see how Exodus or Leviticus could be salvaged for canon of a new Church. They can be interesting historical documents, sure, but they do not make sense as canon for a movement which is looking to further Aryanize our worldview rather than to submit to the Other.

As a parting word to Catholics, I advise you to take that which is timeless, beautiful, and true from the ‘Church and extract the marrow and put it in another body that is not hopelessly decayed.