‘Vera Crux’: A Poem by Joseph S. Salemi

I think, Joseph, you old warrior, that you have identified the crux of the matter. Practicing the tenets of your religion is not possible if you are dead. It’s like what has been said in other contexts: Kill them all and let God sort them out. Don’t do unto others as you would have them do unto you, give them what they deserve.

Very powerful poem, Joseph – the imagery, the diction, and the technical accomplishment: I love the deliberate rhyming of sermon with vermin – that is so powerful in its paradoxical juxtapositioning. And in any case, one senses the fury of the poetic rage in this. We are told to turn the other cheek, which has largely now become a methodology for virtue-signalling; and we are told to resist evil, which is now largely otiose since the majority now can barely understand what evil actually is. What enervation of spirit! Thanks – great work.

“Innocent as doves,” dear Doctor, but it is worth noting that Jesus also added the caveat, “wise as serpents. ”

It is said that in the first Christian centuries, some Roman soldiers who converted to the new faith resigned their positions because their soldier’s oath required absolute, sovereign and divine allegiance to the emperor. It is also possible, but not provable that some resigned out of an embrace of pacifism, through taking Christ’s description of the Kingdom of God literally and performative.

It is also clear that other Christians remained in the military without feeling any disconnect between the necessities of this world and the demands of the one that is both “here and now” and “yet to come.” Indeed, the earliest extant Roman edifice in England (the Dover pharos) shows evidence of having been used as a place of Christian worship during the Roman era, a time when the structure was still enjoined as part of a Roman military installation that centuries later became Dover Castle.

In the days before (the Roman) St. Augustine, it is not clear whether the Church Fathers smiled, frowned, blessed or cursed in one direction or the other those communicants who served in the Roman armies. Constantine (who embraced the faith but deferred baptism until his deathbed) had no qualms about placing the sign of the cross on his soldier’s shields as commanded (so he claimed) by voice of heaven itself, spoken to him in a vision accompanied with the words, “By this sign, conquer.”

Crusaders, bore the sign of the cross on shield and tunic as both an identifier and talisman, while often representing military orders that paralleled those of religious orders.

It was the descendants of these Roman and Crusader Christians who beat back the Saracen/Moors from their deep incursion into France, who followed Columbus to the New World as conquistadors (while–it is worth noting–raping, slaughtering, and enslaving the Aztecs, Incas, and other non-pacifist indigenous peoples in their search for gold), and who defended the gates of Vienna (with the help of the decisive, last-minute arrival of the so-called Winged Hussars from Poland) from invading Islamic hordes from the east.

It might also be mentioned in passing that the Reformation movements were taking place at the very moment that Vienna was making its last stand. Calvin makes reference to it in his writings as does Luther, neither of whom preached pacifism and Zwingli, a noted Reformation pastor and theologian in Zurich actually died from wounds suffered in battle while serving as an armed chaplain with Swiss troops while fighting against the French. Indeed, his statue in front of his (formerly Roman Catholic) church in Zurich depicts him holding an impressively large battle sword, which serves as both a symbol for the Word of God which he preached and the manner in which he died.

Christian pacifism, traces of which can be found throughout Christian history, did not arise as a religious movement until the so-called anabaptists led by the Swiss, Reformation-era, Menno Simons, whose much persecuted and abused followers fled or were forced from their region of Alsace-Lorraine and Switzerland over subsequent centuries where they found freedom to practice their faith in William Penn’s wilderness of eastern Pennsylvania and, in time, further west into Indiana and Ohio where they were known as Mennonites and evolved into other communal sects such as the Shakers and the Amish.

My mother’s side of the family represents this branch of Christian pacifism. Her family’s historical records give every indication that they were brave, tough, hardy and honest folk who faced dangers, trials and even death for their faith, even laying down their lives rather that defend themselves against attacks by Indians with whom they had previously established friendships. While they refused mandatory conscription in Europe and suffered from it, I do not think it either fair nr accurate to hang the label “wimps” around their neck like a scarlet letter.

When the Kingdom of God is finally established and Jesus’ vision and commands are at last lived out to the full, I expect that the way of life that will be lived, enjoyed and celebrated will be more akin to those of my Mennonite forebears than that of the Conquistadors.

On the other hand, my father’s side of the family, descended from the Scottish Presbyterian branch of the Reformation, did not see an inherent conflict between their Christian faith and enlisting and serving in the defense of the United States and liberty during the Second World War. Indeed, my Uncle Jack piloted a B-17 over Germany for three tours of duty (he was only required to serve one) and was hand-picked by Eisenhower to fly the general into Normandy immediately following the D-Day invasion.

I enjoyed your poem and the historical perspective it represents. But the injection of Christian pacifism into the mix is not only an historical anachronism but any contemporary priest who advocated such a thing would, along with the later Mennonites, have been labeled as a heretic. Yes, of course, it is true that Roman Catholic Priests accused Columbus of barbarous cruelty towards native people that exceeded the boundaries of Christian conscience established by Augustine and the Church, leading to his conviction and imprisonment for a time back in Spain. But those priests who spoke against such cruelty were neither pacifists nor wimps, but adherents to both Scripture–as they understood it–and to the letter of Canon Law.

Today, while–out of Christian conscience–a particular Christian or member of a pacifist sect of Christians, may defer conscription to serve as an active combatant, the historical weight of Christian theology and practice has been to support and/or tolerate Christian participation in war in defense of innocents who would otherwise be harmed by an aggressor.

Along with yourself, I consider the current incursion of Islam into Western Europe and North America to be the greatest threat to Western culture and the long-evolved national freedoms we enjoy since the days of the Moorish conquest of Iberia and subsequent invasion of France, and Islam’s siege against the gates of Vienna.

Those who do not recognize the gravity of this threat are either naive, uninformed, confused, brainwashed or ignorantly or intentionally sowing the seeds of their own destruction and that of Western civilization. I have been writing and publicly posting on this matter for over thirty years. Where are the Rolands and Charlemagnes of this modern day? And from whence shall come Winged Hussars to deliver us from this evil increase? Shall we once again look to Poland for our salvation? If not Poland, then where?

Brian, pope Prevost is going to be a huge disappointment for those R&R Catholics who call themselves traditionalists. In reality, they are frantic to find some clerical figure to whom they can bow down in abject obedience. Their freaky intellectual gymnastics, done in trying to reconcile the mindless liberalism and blatant heresies of the Conciliar Church of Bergoglio with real Catholicism, are laughable. And Prevost is just Bergoglio with twenty more IQ points, and a better tailor. I love reading R&R websites, just to see how they’ll try to explain away or excuse whatever outrage comes out of Rome next.

A friend reminded me that when I spoke of “the treason of the clerisy,” I was probably remembering the 1927 book of Julien Benda titled “La Trahison des Clercs,” wherein he argues that members of the West’s intelligentsia (not just clergy, but all those in the verbalist professions) have been changed into apologists for whatever ideological tendencies are in power. The right-wing meme that best mocks this new mutation is the soulless face of an android saying “I support the current thing.”

A succedaneous religion is a substitute or ersatz religion that uses the rhetoric and some of the language of a previous religion, but with utterly new meanings attached, and with different goals and purposes. Comte’s Church of Altruism was a succedaneous religion to the Catholicism that he rejected. Much of left-liberalism is a sentimentalized Christian morality directed to secular humanitarian ends, with no divinity involved.

When you describe the female Reform rabbi at “The Temple of Woke,” you are talking about a Jewish version. A Korean woman married to a Jewish man, living in Manhattan, and a rabbi at an ultraliberal Reform Synagogue, and supporting an explicitly pro-Hamas antisemite like Mamdani? Well, that’s the kind of petrie dish in which a lot of insanity multiplies. How Jewish could the woman possibly be with that sort of resume? But succedaneous religions are like that. Like a hermit crab living in the shell of a dead sea creature, she really has no connection at all with the cultural traditions of Judaism. She has its trappings and its prestige, but she uses them merely as a platform to spread her real religion, which is Wokeness.

Many persons will tell you that they are atheists or agnostics or freethinkers, or simply uninterested in religious matters. But if you talk to them for a while, in many cases you’ll discover that they are passionate adherents to certain succedaneous religions, like Wokeness or Marxism or feminism or anti-racism or environmentalism or trannie rights or DEI or some health regimen. And they will turn into savage fanatics if you dare to criticize their beliefs. By the way, some writers today are not using the term “succedaneous” any longer. They now speak of “parareligions.”