LinearDecline and Fall (Main Forum)
I was just having a coffee with a friend, two old men sitting in the warmth discussing the ways of the world. He was once a priest I was once a brother.
I have just read Chris Geraghty’s Dancing with the Devil and was telling him about it. Geraghty sometimes writes purple prose and he says several times in the book that these are his opinions and his views on how things happened and some people he respects do not agree with him when he talks of particular people or events. That said there are enough stories of power plays, bastardry, incompetence and meanness here to scandalise the innocent and even to disturb those of us who worked around or in the Church long enough to know what it is really like.
Even if Geraghty gets it only half right it is a scary tale.
As I sat there sipping my cappuccino I imagined some of my ancestors seventeen hundred years ago, in Dorset say (I had ancestors there) sitting in whatever they had instead of coffee shops there on the outer edge of the collapsing Roman Empire. Gaius and Publius let us call them, two retired functionaries of a Roman empire on its last legs.
Publius: “Once, the books tell us Gaius, that in the days of Augustus this was a thriving enterprise, the Roman Empire. We had a mythos that made sense. It explained where we all fitted in. We had ceremonies and liturgy that made sense of the complexities and misfortunes and delights of life. To be Roman, even here in Britannia on the outskirts you knew where you stood. You knew whom to respect. You knew whom you could trust. But now it is all gone. Finished. Washed up”.
Gaius: “You’re right Publius. The people in Rome are incompetent. They fight among themselves. They send out commands that make no sense. They think that only they know what is right and good. Anyone who disagrees with them is silenced. Some are fed to the lions. People there and here are dabbling in all sorts of silly beliefs desperately hoping that they will fill the void. They fail of course. Some are quietly drinking themselves into oblivion. It is hard to believe but that’s the way it is. In our lifetimes we have witnessed the collapse of an empire. I wonder will anything replace it.”
They sit quietly contemplating their togas and time passes over them a long long time ago.
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by Bill Dowsley 
, 'Wombeyan, NSW', Friday, June 08, 2012, 14:07 (346 days ago) @ Enda
Enda, do you ever have some idea of the value to so many of us here you are? Thank you so much.
There are others, too, and I thank you all.
This morning, I have been thinking of the 'homily' of that little, fat, stupid bishop in the US, which has a thread below, and ran over some empires the world has seen.
We are seeing the end of two hegemonies. Let us prepare our young for change.
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by Marian , Friday, June 08, 2012, 17:20 (345 days ago) @ Enda
In our lifetimes we have witnessed the collapse of an empire. I wonder will anything replace it.”
Another Roman Empire?
Good story Enda - what happened to your two Romans by the way? Did they turn up in the 17th century as Reformers or Papists??? You could re-write history! 
Marian
who is hoping for a new way to be church
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What happened to your two Romans by the way? Did they turn up in the 17th century as Reformers or Papists?
Marian that is a very good question. I don't know the answer. I watched the Queen's jubilee celebration from St Paul's the other night. Such wonderful music, what a great sermon from Rowan Williams (I can't think of any Catholic bishop who would come near him) and I think "maybe I am an Anglicn at heart". Then I think of Sydney Anglicanism and know I am not, though I care for the ones I know. I just have a different model of Church.
My Dorset ancestors eventually became Quakers so maybe my two men sired Protestants eventually. Then my Quaker great grandmother married an Irish Catholic and became part of the Roman Empire. I didn't know her so I don't know whether her temperament was Quaker or Papist.
Under the influence of my Leaving Certificate English teacher I read Rober Hugh Benson's Come Rack Come Rope when I was fifteen.For a while I was fired up by the English Catholic martyrs at the Reformation. Benson, a convert from Anglicanism whose father was the Archbishop of Canterbury, didn't mention the Protestant martyrs under Queen Mary.
Benson's brother who stayed Anglican compiled the Eight Lessons and Carols the Anglicans use still at Christmas. You'll have seen it done from King's College Cambridge and it is beautiful.
Just as a bit of gossip Benson's mother, after the death or her archbishop husband set up in a relationship with another woman and changed her name to George. Ah these Anglicans!
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The assumptions of old men always seem to be that the "Empires" of the past were a good thing. And that applies to the Roman, the Holy Roman, and the British, as much as to the declining American.
I was in the car listening to Radio National on an exhibition of paintings from the Napoleonic era. Both the interviewer and the guest were waxing lyrical about what a superb human being Napoleon was. He was a voracious reader, was familiar with all the classic texts of Greece and Rome, and the discussion about his military tactics had them lathering in gush.
But how many people did he kill? They never even mentioned it. As with Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, we human beings have this sick, distorted admiration for butchers.
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Hi James. This old man (me that is) does not think empires are a good thing. He, I that is, am just amazed at how quickly the Roman Empire I grew up in has collapsed so completely.
And it was all done by 'great men'.
I have used it here before, the other day for instance but Lord Acton's observation "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. All great men are bad men" was made about the Roman Church around Vatican I.
Acton, a Catholic saw it at the height of its 19th century ruthlessness and ignorance. He coined this aphorism after a long discussion with Newman. Geraghty's book is an account of some of the bad men in Australia. They didn't care whom they hurt as long as they kept power (all for the good of the Church of course!)
Napoleon and all the others killed people. It is maybe a lesser sin but killing reputations, hopes and wholesome enthusiasm rates pretty highly on my list of deadly sins. We have seen a lot of that in my lifetime.
Shelley wasn't a Catholic but he got it just right. He's describing an ancient but now wrecked statue in the desert:
'My name is Ozimandias king of kings;
Look on my works ye mighty and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
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I wasn't actually thinking of you when I made that comment about "old men", Enda. I was thinking more of people who seemed old when I was young and learning history. And that other penchant of "old men", that the world is in continuous decline from some mythical golde era of their youth, can sometimes apply to not so old men too.
Apart from the "purple prose", and the stories of the corruption of the "Roman Empire", what did you think of Geraghty's book?
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