While some Catholics may be celebrating the news about Archbishop Viganòis being dragged to the Vatican by his tinfoil mitre, others are not so sure.
<a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/vatican-accuses-former-us-nuncio-archbishop-vigano-of-schism/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Schism stuff</mark></a> aside, some see in his observations from the bottom of the rabbit hole an element of truth about the way in which we are being manipulated. To a certain extent, ‘twas ever thus, but it is the current manipulation of the past to fit certain present-day ideologies that is especially concerning.
In 2021, Channel 5 produced a miniseries depicting Anne Boleyn as a black woman. In 2022, Shakespeare’s Globe put on a show called “I, Joan”, which depicted St Joan of Arc as “non-binary”. And now the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth (the Yorkshire home where the three Brontë sisters spent most of their lives and wrote their famous novels), has “queered” Charlotte, Emily and Anne because they used male pseudonyms when writing (who knows what J.K. Rowling will turn out to be in 200 years).
All such moves are part of a deliberate attempt to feed the dictatorship of relativism.
As Pope Benedict XVI asked in the context of Jesus’s proclamation of the Kingdom, “Is it not true that the great dictatorships were fed by the power of the ideological lie and that only truth was capable of bringing freedom?”
In George Orwell’s <em>1984</em>, the protagonist Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth where the Party understands that by rewriting the events of the past and controlling the narrative of history they can maintain their position of authority. When Smith is tasked with fabricating a story, we are told that “it was true that there was no such person as comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence”.
In his encyclical letter written on the hundredth anniversary of <em>Rerum Novarum</em> – the encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII that addressed the condition of the working classes, entitled with the Latin for "of revolutionary change"– Pope St. John Paul II, who lived under a communist regime for much of his earlier life, wrote:
“In the totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, the principle that force predominates over reason was carried to the extreme. Man was compelled to submit to a conception of reality imposed on him by coercion, and not reached by virtue of his own reason and the exercise of his own freedom.”<br><br><strong>RELATED: <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/you-cant-police-belief-but-state-still-tries-to-control-our-thoughts-and-values/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">You can’t police belief but the State still tries to control our thoughts and values</mark></a></strong>
A soft version of this totalitarianism creeps into our lives today dressed as a lamb, asking us to embrace it. Can we really dismiss all those who point to the bloody fangs hiding behind the cuddly ball of fluff Those who say that thought and prayer can never be a criminal offence. That abortion is not Healthcare. That the thing growing in a woman’s uterus is a human being. That cleansing through euthanasia is not love. That men are not the same as women. That white people are not the enemy.
Anne Boleyn was not black. St Joan of Arc was not confused about being a woman. The Brontë sisters were not the Brontë Brothers or the non-binary Brontës. But our latter-day Ministry of Truth tells us to submit to a conception of reality not reached by virtue of reason and uses every trick in the book against those who refuse.
As Christians we have a duty to show the children running the nursery what it means to be a grown up.
As St Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians: “We must no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, by every wind of teaching, by peoples trickery, by their craftiness and deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we must grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.”<br><br><strong>RELATED: <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/as-in-us-cultural-dissatisfaction-in-france-driving-voters-with-catholics-turning-to-marine-le-pen/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Why France’s Catholics are turning to Marine Le Pen</mark></a></strong>
We are now so far down Artificial Lane that the next big “conspiracy” must surely take us back to Reality Alley. Here there will be whispers of something called “truth”, of real men and women, of family, of fields, streams and mountains bathed in clear light.
“You’re crazy,” some will say, though, when someone ventures that babies used to grow in the wombs of women, that people over 65 used to be allowed to live out the natural span of their lives, that parents were allowed custody over their own children – and that the Brontë sisters weren’t queer.
<em>Photo: English writers Anne, Emily and Charlotte Bronte. Original Artwork, circa 1834, by their brother, Patrick Branwell Bronte. (Photo by Rischgitz/Getty Images.)</em>
