A Letter to a Layman

Thank you for your letter. I was glad that you were prudent enough to have it delivered to me privately by your second son. One can’t really trust the mails nowadays. Sometimes quite innocent inquiries are misinterpreted by the authorities. It was a pleasure anyway to see the lad. He was a fine upstanding specimen of New Zealand manhood in his fern-leaf-embroidered uniform. I only hope he manages to hold on to the Faith.

Your whole letter really boils down to one central inquiry – What has gone wrong? And this puts me in a quandary. If I answer you honestly, I will be in real danger – if the letter is intercepted – of a period of gruelling interrogation and possibly a life sentence in the Mount Cook Labour Camp for misinterpreting the alliance of Church and State and the progressive aims of our honoured Leader, General Clagg.

I am an old man now; but they will not spare me on account of my age. Our former Superior, Father Nathan, received a life sentence though he was over eighty. I have heard that he died of a heart attack in a labour camp. Heart attacks are very common these days among those who in any way oppose the policy of the New Administration. On the other hand, I must confess that my age makes me in some ways more eager to leave this monstrous world and be joined to the Lord

If I were to reply to you with a few soothing platitudes, no doubt I would be safe for a while at least. But I would have my conscience to reckon with. And a bad conscience can be a difficult bedfellow. So I will simply tell you what I think.

Some are of the opinion that our present difficulties are the inevitable aftermath of the Bomb. With China all but wiped out and Russia turned into a gigantic plague-pit and America in ruins, each country saw the need for a strong internal administration to avoid anarchy. Even here, where two-thirds of the people mercifully survived the effects of germ warfare – only two missiles struck us, if the reports were correct – we still had the Armageddon page 635 cults roaming the country and looting wherever they went. So we needed an augmented police force and a strong military Government.

General Clagg supplied both of these. He had every Communist or known Communist sympathiser killed. And then, taking a leaf from the Communist book, he introduced collective farming. The resistance of the Waikato farmers was put down with very little bloodshed. And so the clean, green country which we see around us today came into being. No unemployed; no malcontents; no public immorality; and if you don’t object to the police raids on those who show the faintest signs of opposing our Leader’s policy, then you might say the New Administration had wiped out crime at one blow.

The Church could not approve wholly of the methods of the New Administration. On the other hand, General Clagg promised us freedom of worship as long as we were willing to introduce New Administration teachers in our schools. Many Catholics had been agitating for years to have our separate school system abolished. To them the change seemed progress. They felt that the last wall between secular and religious thought had been broken down, and that there was at last no difference between being a Catholic and being a patriotic New Zealander. Most of the New Administration teachers were appointed from their ranks. The Religious were confused. They had no clear directive from the Bishops on the subject. Some of them stayed, having become seculars; some of them retired to monasteries and convents.

I don’t think we can honestly blame all this on the Bomb and the brief interlude of germ warfare after the Bomb had fallen. There have been wars before in the history of mankind, though none as bloody and none as genocidal. I would ask you to think – What precisely are our present evils? You may have a different list from mine; but this is an honest list.

The lack of free speech is very onerous. So is the introduction of torture in our gaols. The second evil had its beginning, I think, in the old days when the police became steadily more brutal and arrogant without anybody turning a hair – except of course those who were subject to their mercies. There was therefore an organisation already corrupted by irresponsibility and minor sadisms ready to the hand of a maniac like General Clagg. (Now I have cooked my goose. If the letter is intercepted, there will be no hope for me at all on earth.) We had in a sense prepared the ground for this evil plant to take root.

The callous disregard of the unity of family life is another evil. Boys are taken from their families and sent to the other end of the country to work in factories or on collective farms; and their parents never hear from them again. Moreover, under the New Administration, boys like your second son – I don’t blame him, Joseph; and I hope he survives his terrible environment – are encouraged to spy and inform on their parents.

Then there are the endless rallies and indoctrination sessions. Because the New Administration have taken full control of the mass media, one can’t turn on a radio or watch a TV screen without striking some kind of propaganda.

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I think General Clagg showed great cunning in the way he got the manufacturers on his side. First he made concessions to them, reduced their taxes, but insisted that they should refer at least indirectly to the New Administration in all their advertising. Then he accused them publicly of misrepresenting the New Administration in those very advertisements he had asked them to produce. And he put all those among them who had any strength or individuality in gaol and replaced them with New Administration managers. There wasn’t even a kick from the remainder.

It may seem a strange thing for me to say, but I think the General’s massacre of all Communists and fellow travellers did more harm than any other single measure. Sometimes these days I am haunted by my old friend, Marty Bernstein, who was killed in the great purge – a humanist with a conscience like a diamond and an inner fire of charity that burned continually – and he seems to say to me: ‘Frank, old friend, you were wrong and I was right. It’s the rebels who prevent the maniacs from taking over. If you get rid of the Left in any country, you’ve got rid of those who see through stone walls and can recognise a tyrant when they meet one. . . .’

And then he smiles and goes away from me. He was an atheist and possibly a saint.

What went wrong? Well, I can only answer that in my own terms. There was one authority in the world greater than Caesar; and that was the Catholic Church. When we had all that fuss forty years ago about the birth control issue, I didn’t see what it was leading to. I was a young man then, and I was eager to democratise the Church. Modern life requires that every Catholic should exercise his or her conscience in an adult way – that’s almost a direct quote from an article I wrote at the time.

Then, when the American and North European clergy rose in a bloodless revolt – unless spiritual wounds shed blood – and forced the appointment of younger and more ‘progressive’ Bishops, and when those Bishops in turn forced the recognition of the College of Bishops as the sole central authority in the Catholic Church, and turned the Pope into a figure-head – then I was a little alarmed, but more pleased than alarmed, for I felt that conscience had become the ruling force in Catholic life.

And then, when the Third World War came, with its genocidal horror, and the countries that were left each contracted into rigid shells of dictatorship and military rule, there were many powerful Caesars and no one more powerful than Caesar left on earth. How could the College of Bishops give clear and authoritative rulings, when most of the European Bishops were puppets of Jacques Perinaut and most of the American Bishops were henchmen of President Groody? As we know, there are no Asian or African Bishops because the Asian Catholic community was totally destroyed by the War, and the African Catholics were massacred after the War because the pilots who dropped the Bomb on Africa were Portuguese Catholics.

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There is no power left in the world greater than Caesar. That is the problem. Jacques Perinaut may not be the worst man in the world; but I think he was moved by diabolic inspiration when he eliminated the diocese of Rome and divided it between two other Italian dioceses. He did not want even the ghost of the Papacy to survive.

Without the Papacy, the Church is acephalous, headless; no infallible utterance can be made; the magisterium has fallen apart. We have our democratised Church at last; and it means that we are delivered body and soul into the power of Caesar.

I have seen the Bishops in this country make their uneasy compromise with the New Administration. Bishop Maloney held out. He was an old man and couldn’t change. We could do nothing when he was charged with the misuse of State money and traitorous friendship with the enemies of the Administration, and duly convicted and executed by ganching.

The other Bishops were not cowards; but in an acephalous Church they could reach no agreement as to what was the best course to follow. They decided, each in his different way, to lie low and weather the storm. It is not betrayal to reach a compromise with Caesar when there is no unified alternative power to that of Caesar. I can’t really blame them.

If the Papacy had been preserved, where would be now? The Pope would have been made prisoner, of course; perhaps executed; but then secretly another Pope would have been elected. The Church would have returned to the catacombs. In this country some would have resisted General Clagg; some would have gone over to him and formed a schismatic group. But the true Church would still have remained, in the gaols, in the labour camps, attending at prohibited Masses by proscribed priests.

Our honoured Leader has no need whatever to prohibit the hearing of Masses as things now stand; for the Mass is no longer a symbol of the authority of God manifest on earth. We are in the same position as the Protestants. We have the liberty of our consciences. But those consciences – among the young ones at least – are not formed by authoritative Catholic teaching. The new catechisms teach that General Clagg is the Earthly Saviour as Jesus Christ is the Heavenly One. And when General Clagg dies in his bed, or is assassinated by a Chief of Police whom he has offended, the next dictator will be the new Earthly Saviour.

Well, Joseph, I think that is what went wrong with us. We succeeded in democratising the Church. The gates of Hell, at our pig-headed and determined insistence, did prevail against her. General Clagg is one small hinge of the gates of Hell. What I pray for, day and night, is the return of the Papacy. I do not see how it can be resurrected. But all things are possible with God.

The Chair of Peter has been vacant – indeed, invisible as well as vacant – for fifteen years. If the Bishops were to gather disobeying their respective Caesars, and elect another Pope and swear loyalty to him, then the Church page 638 would be saved, and through the Church perhaps the world. But nowadays a Bishop is Caesar’s dog, whipped if he disobeys, shot if he rebels.

I advise you to attend Mass whenever you can. The Sacraments are not destroyed by the downfall of authority and doctrine; not yet, at least, as long as our schismatic priests intend to offer a sacrifice. I call them ‘schismatic’, but who are they in schism from? Schism is impossible now that the Papacy has been destroyed. General Clagg has told us he is the man appointed by God to protect the Church in this country. I cannot forbid you to follow and believe him. Bring up your sons and daughters to obey the moral law and pray for the return of the Papacy.

For myself, I am old and grow careless. Once I would not have written what I have written here. The new Superior was appointed by General Clagg (by a rigged election) and I know he keeps a close watch on me. They have not yet forbidden us to pray; though we must attend the classes in indoctrination for four hours every night. I come away with my head reeling.

May God watch over you.
Your father in Christ,

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