![]() ![]() If you’re not telling me the truth here, where else are you lying to me? What else are you dissembling? What are you leaving out? ![]() When hagiography unravels, a cloud of suspicion starts to cover everything. If St Thomas Aquinas knew the world was a sphere in the 12 th century ( Summa Theologica I, Q.1, Art.1), everybody knew it. No, Columbus did not think the world was flat. ![]() No, George Washington did not throw a silver dollar across the Potomac. The well-meaning but untruthful stories of Parson Weems and Washington Irving did untold harm to American children. When we see their statues in a public park-minus the halo, minus the hagiography-we now have a chance at a reasonably fair assessment of them. But now that we see them without their halos, we have a chance to evaluate them all truthfully. We can no longer give a “get out of jail free card” to hallowed figures like Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Robert E. If our parents and teachers don’t tell us the truth about the past, our children will never learn what kind of people we are and where we can from. History is not a statue, a plaque, or a monument. Let us not be guilty of special pleading just because Velimirović is a saint. It knows the value of nothing until Jews impose their own measure of values all modern ideas including democracy, and strikes, and socialism, and atheism, and religious tolerance, and pacifism, and global revolution, and capitalism, and communism are the inventions of Jews, or rather their father, the Devil.” It believes nothing other than what Jews order it to believe. “ Europe knows nothing other than what Jews serve up as knowledge. We surely must remember his Words to the Serbian People Through the Prison Window: But if we’re going to remember him honestly on May 3, his feast day, we surely must remember Adolf Hitler decorated him with a medal. We don’t deny his piety or his staunch Orthodoxy. I request that you respect this custom.” Chutzpah indeed. Who could but admire the sheer chutzpah of Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens when the Nazi occupants threatened to execute him by firing squad for protecting Jews? Damaskinos showed up in the commandant’s office, rope in hand, and replied: “Greek religious leaders are not shot, they are hanged. Orthodox heroes don’t get a free pass either. Lewis for that matter-as a creature of his culture and time and proceed to enjoy his Father Brown stories and his theological books. Chesterton harbored a nasty streak of anti-Semitism, where does that leave us fans and devotees? It leaves us exactly where we were before. Chesterton I know and love, the famous defender of the Christian faith? (Was Chesterton being ironic and I’m being obtuse? You read The New Jerusalem and you tell me.)īut now that we suspect G.K. When I first read The New Jerusalem, I was horrified. Any Jew living in England should be dressed as an Arab so we could identify him as a Jew. He once wrote that no one born a Jew could truly be a good Englishman. The more serious charge is that Chesterton made many unguarded anti-Semitic statements. If the fat friar Thomas Aquinas can be a saint, the heft and girth of Chesterton is no obvious impairment to sainthood. First, he was intemperate, yea verily, corpulent. Chesterton was that he was not canonized as a saint. The best thing that ever happened to G.K. Just tell us the unblemished truth and let us sort it out. The #cancelled generation doesn’t want pious un-truths that impart moral lessons, even if they are earnestly taught. Cromwell, good honest Calvinist that he was, protesteth vigorously. The artist, Samuel Cooper, wanted to airbrush some of his many blemishes. The famously ugly Oliver Cromwell once sat for a portrait. If we’re going to canonize heroes as genuine heroes, we must see them as they really are. Some of the search results will be wrong. Fr Tom Hopko used to remark with his customary aplomb, “The toothpaste is out of the tube.” Anybody with a laptop and a Google Chrome browser can discover nearly anything about anyone at any time. In the good old days, we could hide the disciplina arcani-the Orthodox truths handed over to new converts when they were first baptized-from outsiders. Our #cancelled and #metoo and #woke friends won’t let us get away with it. Austin Farrer, the great Anglican theologian, drew a line in the sand for Christians living in our post/modern era. ![]()
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