14 July 2020

14 July, A Chesterton Calendar (With a Musing by the Old Curmudgeon)

How a Catholic can glorify the Fall of the Bastille and the Satanic Revolution is beyond me. It was condemned from the beginning by the Popes, and remained condemned throughout his life. It was not until the revolutionaries and their modernist allies captured the human machinery of the Church at Vatican II that it was falsely claimed that the Revolution was compatible with the Faith.

GKC was blind to the effects of the Revolution: anarchism, communism, fascism, and national socialism. Of course, he did not live to see its other rotten fruit, the sexual revolution, abortion, euthanasia, identity politics and the dictatorship of political correctness.

JULY 14th
THE FALL OF THE BASTILLE

The destruction of the Bastille was not a reform: it was something more important than a reform. It was an iconoclasm; it was the breaking of a stone image. The people saw the building like a giant looking at them with a score of eyes, and they struck at it as at a carved face. For of all the shapes in which that immense illusion called Materialism can terrify the soul, perhaps the most oppressive is that of the big building. Man feels like a fly, an accident in the thing he has himself made. It requires a violent effort of the spirit to remember that man made this confounding thing and man could unmake it. Therefore the mere act of the ragged people in the street taking and destroying a huge public building has a spiritual, and a ritual, meaning far beyond its immediate political results. It is a religious service. If, for instance, the Socialists were numerous or courageous enough to capture and smash up the Bank of England you might argue for ever about the inutility of the act, and how it really did not touch the root of the economic problem in the correct manner. But mankind would never forget it. It would change the world.

'Tremendous Trifles.'

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