Best wishes to foreign readers who have a soft spot for this realm, on this feast day of one of our greatest Saints, S Edward, King and Confessor. He is one of a tiny handful of our Saints whose relics still rest where they were before the Reformation. The Breviary Office makes a particular point of talking about his virginity. Oret pro nobis.
And we certainly need his prayers. The fragility of our social fabric can rarely have made us so manifestly vulnerable. Our government is in the hands of a man who sought power because he had an agenda: he wished to be the Churchillian figure whom History would remember as the man who, by 'getting Brexit done', restored the independance of England ... or do I mean Britain?
But Clio put paid to this unhumble ambition by whacking us with the plague. Johnson immediately adopted the policy of "following the Science". Fraudulent, of course, because there is no more a univocal 'Science' than there is a single Philology or just one Theology. But it served until this week, when the government had a final dust-up with its scientific advisers, resulting in the Chief Medical Officer ... a dry individual whose Mother I knew ... putting the boot in, and how publicly.
And there are the young people. They are currently turning up at their universities. We all know how idealistic youth are; numbers of them have recently been saving the planet by striking ... not going to school ... on Fridays ('Extinction Rebellion'). But the idealism and principled altruism of the young is rarely much better than skin-deep; beneath it is the fallen human nature common to us all, fuelled in their case by over-impetuous and very dirigiste hormones. Something called 'Freshers' Week' (which did not exist in our time) means that they begin their university career with a week of alcohol, drugs, and sexual promiscuity. Here in Oxford, it was reported that when the 'junior deans' and a College Servant in a particular college tried to break up a disorder, they were ignored, and one undergraduate deliberately coughed over ...
Yes ... where was the Dean? Where was the Head of House? In a sense, we are reaping the harvest of the late 1960s, when the colleges abandoned any attempt to discipline the young, and made their profession a 10.00-5.00 job with much of the teaching farmed out to penniless doctoral students.
So now the Covid numbers are soaring in places where there are universities.
And the Government, cut loose from any pretence of objective policy-making, is floundering helplessly. The Welsh are threatening to put Offa's Dyke back into commission to keep out the infectious English!
Yes ... we really do need S Edward's prayers. And yours.
6 comments:
Point well made, and taken. But Philology is one step removed from reality. Science is directly describing physical reality, if, as with all purely human attempts, not infallible, especially in new areas of research.
How is a virus which leaves 99% of its carriers alive and which kills virtually no one who is not old and/or already sick, an "epidemic?"
As for England, your real problem is the disappearance of the English nation. London has a Mohammedan mayor and is less than half English, the rest being all sorts of fake, on-paper Third Worlder foreigners who are supposedly "British."
The birth rates of the native people are dropping, while the others happily breed and keep arriving. Only 80% of the people living in the UK are English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish. You even have the ludicrous category now of "White British."
THAT is why you need St Edmund's prayers. Especially if your Ordinariate, so profoundly rooted in place and race, is to survive.
Here in Texas in the US early voting started today - the Confessor's collect, "Lord, you raised Saint Edward, king and confessor, to excel in good government and faithful service.
May these ideals survive and flourish among us through his prayers" - seems apropos in election time.
Seminary-like discipline needs to be restored to university halls of reduence and colleges.
AvB
... And the empirical sciences rely on philosopy, Queen of all natural branches of knowledge.
AvB
Indeed, the physical sciences only describe quantifiable reality. That portion of reality which involves qualities is unknown to such science, but is the most important part of reality.
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