Happy 7th Day of Christmas!

And a few words from the brethren in Britain, with comments from Carl Olson at the end:

...Gratitude is seldom the reward of those who see an unwelcome truth more clearly than others; quite the reverse. But Benedict’s ‘crime,’ apart from being German, goes much further than his failure (or worse his refusal) to screen out the unpleasant consequences of consumerist materialism from his vision, which it is the duty of all right-thinking people. He lays down a ethical challenge to our utilitarian ways of thinking; in other words, he is a heretic to be excommunicated from the Church of Righteous Liberalism.

Read the entire piece, "The Pope Strikes Back" (The Salisbury Review), which directly takes Richard Dawkins to task for holding the Pope to a standard he won't dream of holding the "secular social ‘liberals’" running the "brittle Weltanschauung" (Dalrymple's terms) to. Which segues into a Christmas Eve (er, "Winter Solstice Celebration Evening Prior"?) editorial in The Guardian, which readily admits the loss of religion (Christianity, to be specific) in Great Britain, and reacts with all the passion and incisive reflection of a mid-level, career bureaucrat on the late Friday afternoon:

This Christmas, for perhaps the first time ever, Britain is a majority non-religious nation. Most of us have probably seen this moment coming, but it is a substantial event nonetheless. It is undoubtedly a development that would have astonished our ancestors who built a Britain on the basis that we were and would remain a predominantly Protestant people. The victory of secularism would have flabbergasted them almost as much as the pope appearing on the BBC with his Thought for the Day.

The change ought certainly to inspire some national reflection, though there is no need for national breast-beating. After all, in most eyes, the BSA survey finding simply underscores things that have already become obvious. Today, our three political parties are led by two open atheists, and a prime minister who admits his faith comes and goes, a development impossible to imagine in other parts of a world, in which the loss of religion is not a uniform trend. The Britain of 50 years ago, in which religion was a far larger part of the social fabric and the national way of life, is a country we have lost.

What is more striking about the survey is how quickly the change has come – just a generation. It is not that long since everything shut on Sundays, since a majority went regularly to church of some sort, since all schoolchildren knew and sang hymns and studied the Bible even if they did not believe in it, and since the idea that public figures could be anything other than observantly Christian would have seemed unthinkable. It would be hard to say, by most yardsticks, that those were better times. They were certainly different ones. The direction of change is likely to continue. We must all get used to it.

Yes, indeed: suck it up; bite your lip; grab a nap. Whatever it takes to get you through your meaningless, empty day. The friend who sent me the link simply wrote: "Perhaps Newman was right. Catholicism or atheism. No via media." He was referring Newman's statement, in the Apologia: "And thus again I was led on to examine more attentively what I doubt not was in my thoughts long before, viz. the concatenation of argument by which the mind ascends from its first to its final religious idea; and I came to the conclusion that there was no medium, in true philosophy, between Atheism and Catholicity, and that a perfectly consistent mind, under those circumstances in which it finds itself here below, must embrace either the one or the other." (I suspect Newman's remark is the inspiration for George Neumayr's October 2010 editorial in Catholic World Report titled, "The Battle of Britain: Will Catholicism or atheism prevail?").

Anyhow, I think The Guardian has hit upon the perfect, dreary slogan for the post-Christian, post-meaning, post-have-a-reason-for-living society the West has either embraced or is trying to stuff down our collective throats: "The direction of change is likely to continue. We must all get used to it." No thanks.