Natives From Nowhere

The Vatican has recently approved of some considerable alterations of the Novus Ordo celebrated in the Mexican diocese of Chiapas. These alterations are put forward as springing from immemorial Mayan traditions. The controversy leads me to think again about what it means to have any kind of culture at all, especially as against the phenomena of the masses, which bid fair to make the world into one great Nowhere.  

How can you tell Nowhere from Somewhere? One sign is the stale whiff of the faculty lounge—an air of white wine and copier’s ink, left over from last week’s conference on traditional culture. You are then sure to find that what is left of tradition has been overtaken by scholars peddling the same nostrums in Scotland as in San Cristobal de las Casas. These nostrums they get not from close and reverent study of the past but from notions in the current air, such as a chirpy reporter reading from a cue card might pronounce on television. 

That is why we would be shocked to find them recommending, precisely as a return to tradition, anything more warlike than our bland acceptance of safety first and last, more patriarchal than our sexual indifferentism, more ascetic than our assumption that happiness is a warm puppy, or more dynamically hierarchical than groups of complacent people sitting at a round table to discuss the feelings they imagine they have. 

I do not like Nowhere. For the last twenty years, my family and I have spent much of our time in an outpost of Francophone Canada, on the Isle Madame, in Nova Scotia. The Acadians here have tried their hardest to preserve their language and their culture. I often hear people speaking French in the local grocery store or the hardware store. There is a French Mass every Sunday in one of the two churches remaining open, and an English Mass in the other, Notre-Dame de L’Assomption, at one time the cathedral church in the diocese. The windows and the Stations of the Cross in each of these churches are inscribed in French. 

The province and the municipality fund a school wherein all classes are conducted in French; but a majority of children on the island attend the English school instead. Ethnically, the islanders are French, Irish, Scotch, Jerseyman, and Basque, in that order. That is not to mention the Micmac, the natives whom the French found when they arrived in the late sixteenth century. If you are French here, it’s as like as not that you have Micmac blood, because the French Catholics and the Micmac got along quite well after the centenarian sachem, Membertou, converted to the Catholic faith in 1610. The French and the Micmac had a common enemy, too, the British, and so did the Irish, of course, and the Scots, most of them from Catholic clans like the Campbells and the MacDonalds.

When we first came here, we expected French cuisine. But the Acadians have been here for a very long time and have developed their own cookery from what they could fish from the sea, shoot in the woods, and raise up on small farms. The first Acadian dinner I ever had on the island was moose pie, with a glass of yeasty moonshine made by our next-door neighbor. 

We also expected that the hymns sung at Mass would be not just in French, but genuinely French, from the past. No such thing. Nor were they Acadian, alas; no moose or moonshine in them. They were indistinguishable from the treacly stuff sung in English in almost every church in the United States. If anything, for a variety of reasons, the Church’s severance from centuries of Christian hymnody is more complete on the island than in America, so that, with the exception of Christmas carols and Eastertide hymns, it is unlikely that most of our French-speaking friends have, in many years, sung anything written before 1900, perhaps even before 1960.

I had thought, too, that the schools would introduce students to the riches of British or French literature, depending on the dominant language; but that also is not so. The Scots used to have a thriving culture mainly in the highlands and on the western side of Cape Breton; I have seen a substantial monthly magazine, printed in 1960, at least half of which was written in Gaelic, still the native language for some thousands of people. It is now no one’s native language. If you visit their old churches, you will see some inscriptions in Gaelic, but the only people who can read them will be those who have tried to learn the language, or a little of it, on their own.

Still, our place is not Nowhere. But if it is to remain a Somewhere, only the Church has the knowledge and the potency to see to it.

I have long said that the Church must undertake a task unprecedented in her history. It is not to simply make herself manifest in human cultures. That would be to subordinate the Church to local ways. The old task was far more challenging than that. It was to baptize the cultures, to do her best in both idea and theory to cleanse them of error, folly, and wickedness, and to elevate their virtues to a height that the noblest pagans themselves never dreamed of. This is, in fact, what she did.

Think of the stable hand, Caedmon, illiterate, initiating a tradition of Christian poetry composed in the ancient heroic meter of the German peoples. Think of the tilma of Our Lady of Guadalupe, whereon she is portrayed as an Aztec princess. But Caedmon had a genuine culture behind him, as did Juan Diego when he received the miraculous cloth. This is no longer so.

We do not need flights of culture-like fancy that are all drearily predictable, like television commercials, like mass-promoted music on the radio, like recent entries in an online encyclopedia. Every time, for example, you see a neologism like “marginalized,” the slovenly work of Anglo-American word-factories, creeping into the argot of professors, preachers, and journalists around the world, you are in the presence of a culture-eroding virus. But the Catholic Church, at peril of her mission, must not be mindless to win the mindless, rootless to win the rootless. Every time you see a neologism like “marginalized,” the slovenly work of Anglo-American word-factories, creeping into the argot of professors, preachers, and journalists around the world, you are in the presence of a culture-eroding virus.Tweet This

I do not write here as someone who attends the Tridentine Rite. I do write as someone acutely aware, from early-twentieth-century Catholic chant books, missals, novels, histories, biographies, hymnals, books of philosophy and theology, seminary textbooks, and The Catholic Encyclopedia, that the Church used to present to the common believer a culture that fed from two thousand years of the Faith. To enter the Church was to enter a vast and intricate and manifold world of meaning.  

St. Anselm belongs, or should belong, as much to Chiapas as to Canterbury where he died, or to the Valle d’Aosta where he was born. Augustine should burn the heart of the young sinner in every Carthage in the world, and those are legion. Kateri Tekakwitha was named for the great saint of Siena; so, the hand of God brings together an Indian girl and the ardent adviser of popes.

All belongs to all. Let the Church no longer be a dragon snoring away, lying on a heap of riches she does not put to use.Yet this cultural work requires great deliberation and patience. It is not a flag on a wall, or a tweak to a prayer. I do not want the people of Chiapas to be more like the people of Mexico City or Chicago. I do not want them to be natives from nowhere. But I do very much want that the Church should build up human culture where it is fading or where it has ceased to exist, and that means that she must be herself above all. Anything au courant is to be shunned. That all comes from the mass phenomena, inimical to culture. It is time to return to our soil. We need not go begging among imaginary pagans.