The Little Way of Christendom, Part 2

Mr Howard continues his series on the civilisational collapse caused by modernity, especially its destruction of the "little platoons". Part 1 is here.

From One Peter Five

By Theo Howard

To build amidst civilizational collapse is the grand adventure we have been called to.

– Josué Luis Hernández

The lay genius is for building institutions.

– Marc Barnes

Intermediary institutions

Besides Our Lord’s exaltation of the elect at the Eschaton, “The meek will inherit the earth” also means that those who have faith in God’s providence and have children, even in times of great hardship, will inherit the temporal future. Today, one major sign of the very earliest buds of spring is the multiplying number of traditional Catholic families. Despite the worsening travails of the modern economy, more and more families are striving to faithfully follow the Church’s teaching, rejecting expectations of bourgeois comfort, embracing a frugal standard of living, homeschooling their children, and trying to keep the mother at home while being entirely open to life. The family is the first institution of Christian Civilisation, so here we already have the first stones of a new social architecture being laid amid the wider liberal decay all around us.

An increasing problem that this revival of integral Catholic family life entails is that many well-renumerated jobs in the secular world are in some way participating in constructing Antichristendom. We are building our own prison. The oligarchs have designed the economy such that the well-paid jobs in such sectors as business, finance, government bureaucracies and ‘professional services’ often involve building and maintaining Babylonian structures of sin. The corollary is that it is becoming nearly impossible for a publicly anti-liberal man to attain to senior positions in any organisation (including in many organisations which call themselves ‘Catholic’). I personally know many capable traditionalist Catholic men who have to scrape by in precarious junior positions in fields such as business, education and law because their organisations would never risk promoting them.

The Second Vatican Council was the concordat with the liberal world where the hierarchy effectively surrendered to this Antichrist system and thus cut the legs out from any Catholic layman who might try to stand against liberalism ever since.

The successive defeats in the fight against liberalism by the Popes led to a “baptism” of defeat, that is, to a retraction of everything that had been said and to the affirmation of the compatibility between liberalism and Catholicism.

– Miguel Quesada

Liberalism attempts to dissolve all intermediary institutions so that the atomised and deracinated individual is utterly bare before the almighty state. The Catholic intermediary institutions that once formed a kind of protective framework around Catholic families in non-Catholic states (in some countries there was an entire Catholic ‘pillar’ of society) were dissolved on the express orders of the bishops following the Council. In Switzerland, the Catholic Conservative Party abandoned its name to become the “Democratic Popular Party” and in the canton of Ticino followed the direction of the local bishop in promoting the secularisation of the Catholic constitutional status of the canton to becoming a mixed religion polity.[1] This appalling clerical betrayal of the laity was repeated across the world with Catholic trade unions, political parties, credit unions, orders of chivalry, sodalities and schools all being forcibly stripped of their explicitly Catholic identity in the name of ‘ecumenism’ and aggiornamento. Perhaps the most famous American example was the National Legion of Decency, which had been largely successful in keeping a leash on Hollywood immorality for thirty years to the great benefit of not only American public morals but those of the entire world, but was neutered and disbanded by the American bishops during the conciliar period.

I am therefore interested in exploring ways in which Catholic men can avoid being coerced into working for avaricious institutions that despise us, in jobs that contribute to the construction of the panopticon Beast system. Rather, let us look to build parallel institutions in which we invest our time, talent and treasure which would give us greater structures of solidarity and resilience against Regime hostility and the shockwaves from its eventual collapse. We might not be able to defeat the liberal oligarchy, but we might outlast it if we make very different commitments. What we need to do is reconstitute a Catholic social order, re-founded Catholic lay institutions.

Following the ongoing formation of Catholic families, we next need Catholic intermediary institutions: communities, businesses, guilds, commons, craft workshops, sports clubs, almshouses, orders of knighthood and credit unions. The natural and Christian political order, with its institutions and intermediate societies, is the most propitious context for all men to direct their lives towards virtue. New technologies like remote working can be leveraged to gradually transition Catholic families from wage-earning households in Babylonian structures to productive domestic economies and local businesses.

Learning our lesson from the last sixty years of the Church crisis, such projects would also need to be lay-governed, explicitly traditional, anti-liberal – professing the Social Kingship of Christ – and formally independent from the ecclesiastical structure, thus ensuring they would be protected from being denatured by liberalism and modernism.

Reconstituting a Catholic Social Order

No serious restitution of society or the Church can occur without a return to the first principles, yes, but before principles we must return to the ordinary reality which feeds the first principles.

– John Senior

Various commentators have remarked how it is incredibly difficult to build anything wholesome and lasting today. Financial and legal concerns are a major first hurdle. Parallel institutions cost money and need some kind of legal defence so as not to be at immediate risk of falling to the first hostile lawfare attempt. This is one area where wealthy Catholics might consider investing. Then they might consider existing Catholic businesses like Tridentine Breweries, which can grow and employ more men, rather than donate to Republican Party or ‘nationalist-populist’ candidates. Of course, this requires a radical change of mentality. Imagine if a wealthy Catholic man bought a few hundred acres, subsidised local housing and invited young Catholic families to come and help till this land as a commons. I venture to suggest that this might have a more fruitful long-term effect than simply continuing to donate to political or pro-life public relations campaigns. The response to aggressive globalism should be radical localism.

I concede that there would still be a need for some Catholics to engage in the wider liberal structure, particularly in order to fight important defensive battles (e.g. protecting homeschooling rights), the question is where we should devote the preponderance of our efforts. Rod Dreher’s ‘Benedict Option’ suffered from many liberal and false ecumenical presuppositions but it was not without serious insights. However, as Sebastian Morello has pointed out – a Benedict Option needs to be led by actual Benedictine monks. Andrew Willard Jones confirms this in the conclusion to his excellent The Two Cities:

When the medieval reform came in the eleventh century, it did not come first from above… High Medieval Christendom was built because the laity founded, purified, and populated thousands of monasteries… The cloisters changed the world… Perhaps, then, it is not to the heights of political or ecclesial power that Catholics should be looking for reform, but rather, like the laity of the eleventh century, maybe they should be building monasteries for their sons and daughters to populate. Perhaps the Church won’t break free from the world’s domination until the faithful stop thinking of the Church as merely a little corner of the world and allow themselves to be led not by the powerful, but by the religious, by the meek.[2]

Christendom or Martyrdom

But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another: for verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come.

Matthew 10:23

In this two-part essay, I have argued we need to convert our apostate nations and polities “from the ground up,” as the Church did last time. Such a ‘little way of Christendom,’ or a ‘return to Nazareth,’ might seem like foolishness to the wise, but perhaps God will look with favour on those lowly servants who put not their trust in princes rather trusting that He will lift up the lowly from their tribulation.

I do not offer a concrete programme for how different Catholic communities can move forward in their own particular circumstances. Following the principle of subsidiarity, a universal programme would be antithetical in any case, but I am interested in sharing ideas with anybody who is thinking about the Catholic future rather than lamenting the collapse of godless liberalism.

There are already promising new organisations like New Polity, the associated College of St Joseph the Worker, and the Organic Integralism of the Pascua Florida project that have been thinking and working along these lines. There are also long-established traditionalist institutions like Carlist circles in the Hispanic world. Each of us has a sphere of influence, no matter how limited, through which we can contribute to the future Catholic social order. The men at New Polity have made compelling arguments in favour of divesting from 401ks and workplace pensions and investing this money into cultivating local friendships and businesses instead. As Miguel Ayuso has taught us – if the political sphere is closed to us then we focus on the pre-political sphere, which is the cultural sphere. Such efforts should be as local and ‘incarnational’ as possible.

A first step that more and more families are taking is simply to start growing and rearing some of their own food. Much has been written and said about the multitude of benefits from getting one’s hands in the soil. I am also much encouraged by families turning to such traditional crafts as making clothes, learning to play traditional instruments, brewing their own beer and singing folk songs with their friends when they drink it.

Where liberals are accidentally right is that we have to be defined more by what we love and affirm, rather than what we condemn. If we focus our efforts on new parallel institutions then secular people will be increasingly attracted to, and curious about, our ‘islands of order and peace’ amidst the worsening storm.

Ultimately, there is no choice for lay Catholics but to strive to subject the temporal order to Christ the King. With its escalating persecution and depravity, the liberal regime is extending the warfare and dissension that characterise tyranny into our homes. As Sebastian Morello has put it: we will either have Christendom or Martyrdom. There is no enduring option of bourgeois liberal comfort.

I encounter many people who say that the current temporal panorama is depressing. I say on the contrary it is cause to rejoice:

By whom also we have access through faith into this grace, wherein we stand, and glory in the hope of the glory of the sons of God. And not only so; but we glory also in tribulations, knowing that tribulation worketh patience.

Romans 5:3

References

Amerio, R. (2015). Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the XXth Century. (F. J. Parsons, Trans.) Kansas City: Sarto House.

Jones, A. W. (2021). The Two Cities. Steubenville: Emmaus Road.

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[1] (Amerio, 2015) p.49

[2] (Jones, 2021) pp.346-7