November 17, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
The IMAGINATIVE
CONSERVATIVE’s
Fascinating Review
of THE LAND WE LOVE
Friends,
As often as not when I come downstairs to my computer in the
morning I already have an idea of something I want to write in the MY CORNER
series, something I wish to share with you. I archive daily dozens of files and
news articles for future reference—I have them strewn all across my crowded
Desktop for (mostly) easy reference when I might need them.
But then, after a cup of strong coffee and reading the usual
100 new messages that have come in overnight, something unsuspected may hit me
across the face, something that causes me to rethink what I’ve intended to do.
That happened today. Once again my planned installment on “hate
crimes” and who is really responsible for them will be postponed.
Distinguished author Jerry Salyer teaches in
Kentucky and writes frequently for Chronicles
magazine, where occasionally my byline will show up as well. He has been a
staunch defender in print of those Covington Catholic
boys who were so pilloried and attacked by the Mainstream media and,
stunningly, by such Neoconservative publications as National Review—see its outrageous coverage, January 20, 2019: “The Covington Students Might as Well Have
Just Spit on the Cross,” another confirmation of the precipitous and ugly slide
of once “conservative” journals and journalists into a foul and fetid Leftist
bog.
I just discovered that Salyer has written a probing review of
my book, The Land We Love, at the Web
site of the respected online journal, “The Imaginative Conservative.” Salyer’s
approach is different in large part from that taken by other reviewers in that
he examines the religious emphases and concentrates on some of the deeper
theological connections and links which appear in the volume. Using that
perspective he is able to draw both certain historical and philosophical insights
which others might miss or overlook.
As I attempted to do in The
Land We Love, Salyer recognizes that the “Confederate cause” became for European
traditionalists a cause they could fully comprehend and, also, embrace. They
understood, at least intuitively, that the cause of the Confederacy was in many
ways the cause of traditional Western Christian civilization. And fighting for
the Confederacy was to fight for that “outpost of Christendom,” to defend that
two-Millennia inheritance, its richness and fullness, against the agents of a radical
progressivism that aimed to undo and overthrow it. Liberalism, modern
democracy, egalitarianism, statist centralization, the attack on traditional
religion—these were common enemies,
even for figures as diverse denominationally as staunch Presbyterian Robert
Lewis Dabney or Catholics Father Abram Ryan and Admiral Raphael Semmes.
And thus the specter of the ultra-traditionalist Catholic
Prince Camille de Polignac, Major General of the Confederate Armies, leading thousands
of hardy Texas Protestants at Mansfield in 1864—They loved and respected him,
and according to accounts, could not pronounce his name, so called him
affectionately, “Gen’ral Polecat.” He earned and kept their affection.
I pass on Salyer’s review:
Under advanced liberalism there is an expectation that
anybody who so much as dares to speak civilly to or about any figure associated
with the Confederacy is to be deemed persona non grata. For Catholics
as Catholics, such sweeping and absolutist expectations are simply
unacceptable.
Forth from its scabbard,
high in the air
Beneath Virginia’s sky;
And they who saw it gleaming there,
And knew who bore it, knelt to swear
That where that sword led they would dare
To follow—and to die.
Beneath Virginia’s sky;
And they who saw it gleaming there,
And knew who bore it, knelt to swear
That where that sword led they would dare
To follow—and to die.
—“The Sword of Robert Lee”
by Father Abram Joseph Ryan
Chaplain, Army of Northern Virginia, CSA
by Father Abram Joseph Ryan
Chaplain, Army of Northern Virginia, CSA
That the revolutionary left
seeks to purge the Southern legacy from America is obvious. Less obvious is why
this ongoing purge should be a topic of interest to my fellow Catholics. No
doubt some might ask me whether we do not have plenty of uphill battles
already. Is it not enough to support the countercultural Latin mass, and
declare the perennial albeit unpopular truths of Church teaching, without
getting embroiled in rancorous debates about the real causes of the War Between
the States or the personal virtues of General Lee? While I appreciate such
reservations, the truth is that we all have a dog in the fight over the
Southern legacy, whether we admit it or not. It is no coincidence, after all,
that the bishop who cheers the loudest for the tearing down of Confederate
memorials is the same one who recently issued an LGBT prayer card in honor of
Gay Pride Month. For those leftists who most fervently hate the South also hate
the Church—and largely for the same reasons. And let us be clear: They hate the
South not so much for its failings, real or imagined, but because they
(correctly) see its various cultures as embodying a deep-rooted resistance to
the egalitarian-utopian project. Moreover, I would also point out to my fellow
communicants that Southern heritage and Catholic identity are not only
analogous, but connected—at some junctures, even inseparably intertwined.
That, at least, is the conclusion one might draw from select
passages of The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage,
a recent collection of essays by Boyd Cathey. To be sure, this wide-ranging
book deals with many compelling subjects, from the thought of Presbyterian
theologian Robert Louis Dabney, to the rise of neoconservatism, to the formerly
positive relationship between the South and Hollywood. It is safe to say,
though, that the book’s most unusual feature is its emphasis upon Dixie’s
relationship with Christendom. Dr. Cathey holds a doctorate from the University
of Navarra in Spain, so his book contains a lot more references to Spanish
traditionalists than we might normally expect from a work of this sort.
Indeed, the section
entitled “Secession and Catalonia” deals in no small part with the troubled yet
inspiring history of Catholic Spain, a history which the author sees as
pertinent to his own North Carolina. Historically the Spanish king was “not
actually the absolute king of a unitary, centralized royal state, but rather
the monarch over a collection of fiercely regionalist states, each with its own
traditions, history and parliaments,” explains Dr. Cathey. This loose patchwork
of a kingdom was rocked by wars of succession during the early modern period,
which pitted mechanistic liberal ideology against the old regime of fueros, or regional rights:
During those several civil wars in the 19th century,
Catalonia stood, by and large, with the traditionalist defenders of the ancient
regime, the Carlists. It was the Carlists who defended the fueros and
who advocated the return of a strong king who actually had power, but whose
powers were also circumscribed by the historic regions and traditions of the
country. It was the Carlists… who understood [that] 19th-century liberalism,
despite its slogan of “liberty and equality,” would actually do away with and
suppress those old regionalist statutes and protections, those intermediate
institutions in society that secured more liberties for the citizens.
So far, so good, and
nothing surprising to the historically-conscious Christian, Catholic or
otherwise, who is well aware that the Spanish Carlists were among the most
tenacious opponents of that modernism so stridently condemned by Pope Saint
Pius IX (of whom more will be said shortly). But what does all this have to do
with the American South?
Catholic intellectuals such
as Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo and Juan Vazquez de Mella have much in common
with the agrarian-minded, piety-oriented Southern patriot, argues Dr. Cathey,
noting that one of the Spaniards he befriended as a doctoral student went so
far as to characterize the Confederate soldiers of yesteryear as “paladins of
Christian civilization.” (As a personal aside, I can attest to the curious
affinity certain Spanish traditionalists have for Dixie, having had on some
occasions the honor of sharing drinks and cigars with a gallant Cuban who
served the Tridentine mass and was wont to profess his high regard for
Stonewall Jackson.)
Given the common
misconception of the South as monolithically low church evangelical, many will
be inclined to scoff at romantic phrases about medieval paladins, but here the
romance is backed up with at least a few cold hard facts, as Dr. Cathey
relates:
In Spain I discovered as many as 1,000 Spanish Traditionalists,
or Carlists, who rose up against Liberalism in their own country under the
motto, “God, Country, our Regional Rights, and our King,” and then came to
Texas to volunteer for the Confederacy. They came by way of Mexico and fought
in Confederate ranks at Sabine Pass and at other battles. According to Spanish
military historian, David Odalric de Caixal, some enlisted in the Louisiana
Tigers. Others found their way as far afield as the 34th and
41st Tennessee regiments. A few
even ended up in the Army of Northern Virginia, where General A.P. Hill called
them his “rough tattered lions sent by Providence.”
Nor were Spanish Carlists
the only Catholic Euro-Confederates. Following the destruction of the
Neapolitan monarchy at the hands of masonic revolutionaries, several hundred former
Bourbon guardsmen likewise crossed the Atlantic to fight on behalf of the Davis
government, and to this very day Confederate banners fly in Naples to
commemorate the South’s “Italian Brigade.”
As Dr. Cathey rightly
points out, neither the Louisiana Tigers nor the Bourbonists in grey fit tidily
into the common conception of the war as a noble Northern crusade against
wicked slavedrivers—and whatever we may think of this Richard M. Weaver
Fellow’s account, let him not be mistaken for some isolated crank. There have
been many Catholic writers and thinkers who would more or less agree with the
historiography of yet another Catholic, the poet-scholar Allen Tate, who wrote
that “in the South the most conservative of the European orders had, with great
power, come back to life,” even as the antebellum North, “opposing Southern
feudalism, had grown to be a powerful industrial state which epitomized in
spirit all those middle-class, urban impulses directed against the agrarian
aristocracies of Europe after the Reformation.” Whether we ourselves concur,
there is no denying that the 19th century
was indeed the era of liberal nationalism in Europe, as proponents of the
consolidated, urbanized nation- state usually succeeded in imposing their
vision upon champions of traditional agrarian order. There is also no denying
that around the same time, the Know-Nothing movement enjoyed vastly more
support in the urbanized and Puritan-rooted North than in the South. From
there, it is not hard to see why many European Catholics identified with Dixie
during the fratricidal American war.
Another concrete historical
episode to which Dr. Cathey alludes deals with the arch-Confederate himself,
Jefferson Davis, who was educated at a Dominican priory in Kentucky, maintained
throughout his life close and warm relations with a number of individual
Catholics and Catholic religious communities, and eventually embraced a number
of Catholic practices, such as the scapular. In contrast to Lincoln, whose
interest in God remained mostly confined to speeches, Davis took with him after
the war into his prison cell a Bible, a prayer-book, and a copy of Thomas a
Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ.
Were Davis’s personal spirituality the whole story, perhaps it would not be
worth mentioning, but what must also be fished out of the memory-hole of
inconvenient truths is his correspondence with the pope.
Writing to Blessed Pius IX,
Davis lamented “the ruin and devastation caused by the war which is now being
waged by the United States against the States and people which have selected me
as their President,” and thanked the pontiff for his efforts to broker a truce,
or at least mitigate the ferocity of the conflict. “I pray your Holiness to
accept on the part of myself and the people of the Confederate States, our
sincere thanks for your efforts in favor of peace.”
“We attach you to us by a
perfect friendship,” Blessed Pius IX replied warmly:
It is particularly agreeable to us to see that you, illustrious and
honorable President, and your people, are animated with the same desires of
peace and tranquility which we have in our letters inculcated upon our
venerable brothers. May it please God at the same time to make the other
peoples of America, and their rulers, reflecting seriously how terrible is
civil war, and what calamities it engenders, listen to the inspiration of a
calmer spirit, and adopt resolutely the part of peace.
Let us admit that the
pope’s express wish for peace does not quite constitute the full-throated
endorsement for which Davis might have hoped. At the same time, what is also
quite clear is that neither Pius IX’s clearly expressed desire for a negotiated
settlement, nor his acknowledgement of a plurality of disparate American
peoples, nor honorifics such as “illustrious and honorable President” can be
reconciled with the 21st-century
politically-correct sensibilities. So should we be embarrassed on behalf of
Blessed Pius IX for his not having denounced the vile rebellion, for his not
having seized the chance to align himself with “the right side of history”?
Shall we perform the hallowed ritual dance of white liberal guilt because in
1863 pro-Southern articles authored by Bishop Martin J. Spalding appeared in
the papal newspaper Osservatore Romano?
Although I myself find Dr.
Cathey’s position persuasive in many respects, for Catholics how we assess his
argument is almost irrelevant. It makes little difference how much weight we
give to the factors various thoughtful, rival historians have presented as the
true cause or causes for the American “Civil War”—slavery, states’ rights,
tariffs, the industrial-agrarian cultural divide, and so on. So far as I am
concerned Yankees—Catholic or otherwise—are quite welcome to keep busts of
President Lincoln on their desks and roll their eyes whenever they hear someone
whistling “Dixie.”
There is one point I must
insist upon, however. As I mentioned at the beginning, no honest person can
deny that The New York Times,
National Public Radio, and other organs of globalist liberal orthodoxy despise
the South and characterize it as the land of racist hillbilly rednecks. The
journalists and bureaucrats who run such organs take for granted that all
decent people distance themselves as far as possible from anyone who ever
fought for the CSA. For that matter, under advanced liberalism there is an
expectation that anybody who so much as dares to speak civilly to or about any
figure associated with the Confederacy is to be deemed persona non grata. For Catholics as Catholics,
such sweeping and absolutist expectations are simply unacceptable.
They are unacceptable not
because the antebellum South was necessarily a quasi-Catholic ideal, but
because no serious member of a serious body allows outsiders to dictate to him
where the pale is, or who is to be within or without it. When the Catholic
totally condemns Confederates, he is not merely guilty of uncharitably
condemning men who sought to do their duty to their respective home states.
Rather, he is in many cases condemning men who were his co-religionists to
boot; Euro-Confederates aside, during the war the overwhelming majority of
Catholic sons of the South remained loyal to their native region, such that a
notably high percentage of Confederate leadership came from Catholic ranks.
These Catholic Confederates
may not have been saints, true, and just for the sake of argument we will grant
for the moment the Unionist assumption that they were politically misguided.
Even then, the fact would remain that such Catholic Confederates seem to have
been at least as devoted and earnest parishioners as are many of us today. Were
we to disavow such bygone brethren of ours simply because the shrill voice of
political-correctness tells us to, for their having worn the gray, I am not sure
how different we would be from those quislings who obediently scurried to
disavow the Covington Catholic students for having worn MAGA caps.
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