Ex Cathedra as Henry VIII

Old CG Jung ramped up Heraclitus' idea of enantiodromia from a philosophical fragment into a psychological law. Enantiodromia is about the tendency of things to turn into their opposite. For Jung, when a conscious attitude was extremely one-sided, the unconscious tended to create a countervailing attitude that would eventually break through.

My favorite examples are the socially conscious Boomers, who started out with the Berkeley Free Speech movement and wound up, with their university speech codes and politically-correct language orthodoxy, to be the most linguistically totalitarian generation in memory.

My positive attitude toward traditional religion is based on its capacity to resist the expansion of the State. I always favored Becket over Henry II. When I want to insult Obama, I compare him to Henry VIII.

And when I want to think of how paltry and pusillanimous my life has been, I just recall the gruesome fates of those Catholics, the monks especially, who refused to kiss the royal glutes and tell him that, yes, his new marriage was cool and yes, he was the Pope of England, Ireland and Wales.

During my reveries of the weekend about my alternative post-American republic, I thought it wise to chart a conscious course between theocracy and secularism. And I was clear that Islam would be a religio illicita precisely because it is inherently theocratic.

But when I thought of Catholicism, I realized that I had a problem. The liberalized Catholicism flowing from Vatican II, with its self-serving and ten-minutes-old obsessions about "the dignity of the human person" and  "universal human rights", has thrown its lot with the Third World. Even if that means, witness Magdi Allam's defection from Mother Rome, fostering an influx of racially, culturally and religiously alien peoples into the European heartland of old Catholicism. The Catholics certainly also agitated against the Afrikaaner regime, whose fall has provided us with the spectacle of Black-run South Africa, crime, poverty and corruption-ridden world capital of rape.*

So the Catholic Church in the Alternative Republic would be a non-theocratic but constantly contestatious religion, hostile to an ethnostate. How would Ex Cathedra VIII handle these meddlesome priests?

I have a differentiated fantasy life. I can take pleasure in my image of the Forest of Gallows without actually wanting this to happen in real time and place. At least this week. So in my subsidiary fantasies about my fantasy Republic, there are a varied set of fantasy options for dealing with fantasy opposition. None of them involve hanging, drawing and quartering or leaving monks to die of thirst and starvation while chained to a wall, lying in their own filth. I'm big on exile and ex-migration. And other non-bloody means.

But for a religion like contemporary Roman Catholicism, I think, if it turned out to be as boringly noxious about racial egalitarianism as I assume it would be, along with exiling individual clerics or nuns, there could be a tax-related issue. Any non-theocratic religion that found itself at serious odds with the Republic would be invited to sign a concordat accepting the Constitution, or else find itself heavily taxed. That might get some response.

But here I'd be, a fantasy version of Henry VIII Lite, enforcing the supremacy of the State over the Church. (Although I wouldn't force them to pay for contraception.) Hello, enantiodromia.

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*I may have overstepped. It might be outdone by another African paradise, The Congo.