Another one of those posts...

I am still here. Between work, bella domestici (''home wars'' for those of you who don't know Latin) and other commitments, I have been unable to continue my two other posts. One is about Tolkien's concept of the ''long defeat'' of human history, which I guess is pertinent given current governmental legislation - although I really don't see what everyone is moaning about and why they expected anything different. This is a secular, and therefore evil and Godless, nation, and I expect that in my lifetime I shall see laws passed that make even the mention of Christ's name except in scorn a criminal offence, so why bother complaining or trying to change anything? Politicians, who are corrupt money-grabbing thieves, simply aren't interested in what the Church teaches. As for the notorious absence of the Bishops in this unfortunate conflict, did we really expect any better? The Bishops are incompetent compared with earlier Church standards (didn't St Gregory the Great refuse to consecrate a candidate because he couldn't recite the Psalter by rote?) anyway. The Church should instead focus on personal internal reform (by which I mean doing away with the New Rite) than wasting precious time and energy on the irreligious - these are the Last Days afterall, or have certain Catholics forgotten this? Shake the dust from your feet, expel the wicked from amongst you, etc...If I were able, I would retreat into a small ''family of God'' (a small band of ardent Traditionalists, have High Mass everyday and sung Office with Tolkien in between) and speak Latin all day.

The other post is about General Councils of the Church, how they are notoriously ambiguous, how the office of the Pope requires someone who actually knows how to be Pope rather than an arrogant autocrat (I wonder if Ecumenical Councils teach Popes this?) who thinks he can do as he pleases with the Liturgy, etc. I am also going to (although I haven't so yet) work in some of the Syllabus of Errors and compare it to what Vatican II taught. ''Conservative'' Catholics are often embarrassed by the Syllabus of Errors (apostate ''catholics,'' you know who I mean, are simply not interested in it - that is if they've even heard of it), just like the Genesis Creation story; where it plainly teaches something later contradicted by Vatican II, they shy away from it like out-of-date furniture.

Sigh...nothing has ever been entirely to my taste; Western Liturgy should be longer, Low Mass shouldn't exist etc;...except Tolkien, but then I wish that more of his stuff were complete. He was only human and had many other commitments. When The Lord of the Rings was finally published, roughly 17 years after ''the New Hobbit'' was conceived of, the English Faculty at Oxford said: ''so this is what you've been doing all these years! Now we think it behoves you, Mr Tolkien (he was not a D.Phil, but then most Dons weren't in those days), to do some real work!'' As a philologist, and a very good one (he was a pure philologist - fascinated by language and the form of words purely for the sake of words - Literature was secondary), Tolkien knew more than anyone else in the world. I wonder if he'd have been better off writing treatises on complex aspects of philology and English literature instead of writing The Lord of the Rings? Fame puzzled Tolkien, and he was certainly disturbed by fandom in the '60s, too many hippies, and I'm quite sure he'd repudiate the Peter Jackson trilogy. I sometimes wish that he'd never published The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit - but that I myself had discovered the manuscript in the Bodleian Library, as a Classical Moderations student...but perhaps this is just selfish of me?