Marin County Meets the Tiber
Abdul Hamid isn’t a name that enrages you, but the name John Walker is. Abdul is Mr. Walker’s name in religion, the Islamic religion. It is a religion he embraced not because it was his father’s but precisely because it was not his father’s. John Walker’s father firmly adhered to the dogmas of the late Sixties’ liberalism, to which he was so devoted (and according to most recent reports, still is) that he named his young son after on of its patron saints, John Lennon. All this may seem somewhat odd, going from sandals-and-beads, “give peace a chance” Marin County to jihad-obsessed, “Allah be praised” Kandahar. But it isn’t. It all has to do with nature hating a vacuum, especially human nature.
John Walker’s parents were nursed at the breasts of the antinomian Sixties, a time of shocking intellectual and spiritual malignancies. No one diagnoses this tragic time with greater surgical precision that Roger Kimball in his 2000 jewel, The Long March:
“…our culture seems to have suffered some ghastly accident that has left it afloat but rudderless: physically intact, its moral center in shambles. The cause of this disaster… was a protracted and spiritually convulsive detonation – one that trembled with gathering force through North America and Western Europe from the mid 1950’s through the early 1970’s and tore apart, perhaps irrevocably, the moral and intellectual fabric of our society… The Age of Aquarius did not end when the last electric guitar was unplugged at Woodstock. It lives on in an our values and habits, in our tastes, pleasures, and aspirations. It lives on especially in our educational and cultural institutions, and in the degraded pop culture that permeates our lives like a corrosive fog.”
Mr. and Mrs. Walker, in the proper fashion of radical chic, encouraged their son John to “choose his own spiritual path”. One of John’s neighbors noted that he grew up “intellectually privileged” and was enrolled in an alternate school for “motivated, self-directed learners” who design their own course of study. Mrs. Walker said of her son’s Islamic conversion that “it is good for a child to find a passion”. Picture-perfect liberalism. As Shelby Steele wrote brilliantly in the Wall Street Journal (10 December 2001):
“This is a world where learning is self-referential, where adults are only broadly tolerant. There are no external yes’s and no’s, or rights or wrongs here, just the fashionable relativism that makes places like Marin so cool. But there is another message as well: that traditional American history, culture, and religion are without any special authority. Worse, historic racism and sexism may leave these American offerings with less moral authority that foreign options.”
But beneath that thoroughly swallowed radicalism was a deep darkness poised for revenge. Man craves the Absolute, and satisfies that craving in absolutes. It cannot be suppressed, even if its expressions are depraved. It wasn’t in John Walker, and they were.
One would be mistaken to believe that any institution escaped this antinomian scourge – even the Catholic Church. Coincidental with Vatican Council II came this grinding Sixties nihilism which found its way into the intellectual bloodstream of not a few churchmen. Aggiornamento, originally a strategy for sanctification, was retooled as a modernist Taliban. So that now a theological radical chic prevails, and becomes the obligatory mark of authenticity. Without it one becomes an ecclesial “untouchable”, banished from office, advancement, reward, notice, and sometimes, even survival. It is not an exaggeration to say that a kind of Year One was announced in 1962 by the bien pensant. All that went before would thereafter be considered an embarrassment – almost taboo. Wounds from this treacherous period are all too fresh to require repeating. Suffice it to say that the likes of John Walker’s parents filled the ranks of the Church’s intelligentsia and ruling elites. And still do.
Need evidence? Try suggesting to an American Church official the use of the Baltimore Catechism in the classroom. Or the exclusive use of priests for administering Holy Communion (or kneeling to receive Holy Communion, for that matter). Or, dare we say it, permission for the Tridentine Mass. Scandalized surprise greets you. A recent Gallup poll reported that acceptance of the gay lifestyle was higher amongst students attending Catholic high schools that students in public ones. Need more? At the 2001 October Synod of Bishops in Rome, the loathing of the Roman millennial culture was center stage. Archbishop Sebastian D’Souza, Archbishop of Calcutta, India, moaned “The traditions of a dead language, Latin, which are part of a dead foreign culture, Roman, even if seen as a vehicle for orthodoxy, do not respond in a satisfactory way to the character and lifestyle of Indian life and tribal languages.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but Bishop Paul Yoshinao Otuka of Kyoto, Japan, when speaking of a document of the Japanese Conference on Reverence for Life, remarked to the Synod Fathers, “the various themes in the book are not written in a manner that insists that the only correct answer and resolutions for problems comes from a Catholic point of view.” Marin County, meet the Tiber.
Let us count our mixed blessings. A John Walker-turned-Islamic-traitor roused outrage in most Americans, thank God. But what of all the John Walkers being turned out by the progressive Catholic Establishment today? Where’s the Catholic outrage at them?
Excelsis | January 2002
