In one of the great ironies of linguistic history, the English word “bedlam,” suggesting frenzy, madness, chaos, and noise, comes from what was then the common British pronunciation of the sacred name Bethlehem, in the Hospital of Saint Mary in Bethlehem, a monastery dedicated in 1402 to the housing and treatment of lunatics.
Hence we have “Tom o’ Bedlam,” the name that Edgar assumes in King Lear in his disguise as a madman; first to escape the ministers of law that pursue him, unjustly, as a traitor to England and to his father, the Duke of Gloucester, but second, to remain close to the action, so he can do whatever he can for justice, for his father, and for his country.
For the truly mad are those souls devoured with ambition, while the faithful and loyal are called fools.
How do you preach the word of God to madmen? How do you preach it in Bedlam? For everyone in Bedlam is going to be afflicted with the twitch. If everyone around you is shouting, you will be led to shout too, if only to be heard at all, but eventually it may come to be a matter of course.
If everyone around you howls at the moon, gathering in packs to lift up their hearts and eyes and hollow throats to that satellite, you will likely steal a glance that way too, and maybe join in, at first because you want to meet the madmen where they are, but eventually because you too fall in love with the howling.
I ask the question, because Bedlam is where we are, a political, social, educational, and religious Bedlam of distraction in the most literal sense – as of someone condemned to death by horses pulling him apart limb from limb.
Let me illustrate. Bishop Robert Barron notes that the Somali welfare scam in Minnesota is a crime against the needy. At a moderate assessment, $1,000 has been filched from every man, woman, and child in the state. He does not launch into a diatribe about it, since he has more important things to do. But for this, I have seen him accused of being as wicked as a Vichy collaborator with the Nazis.
Now that, frankly, is not sane. Whatever one may think about what American immigration laws should be (I have yet to hear anybody suggest any specific emendations to the laws in question), it is bizarre to draw any equivalence between American immigration officers and the Gestapo.
And as far as an American Kristallnacht is concerned, those bricks smashing the windows of businesses during “mostly peaceful demonstrations” do not have the fingerprints of policemen on them.
Nor is it “Nazism” to say that schoolchildren should be taught, first and foremost, to be proud of their country and their culture – whatever of it still remains after the inundations of mass media. It is a part of the virtue of piety, required by the commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother.”
I expect that Italian schoolchildren will be taught the glories of their artistic and literary heritage, and I would be deeply disappointed to learn that it is no longer so.
It was not Matteo Ricci who demanded of the Chinese that they should despise their ancestors. That was the Communist, Mao Tse-Tung. This, too, did Bishop Barron call to mind when he criticized, gently enough, a rather loud but dopey congresswoman who seemed to insist that material goods were all that really mattered to people. For at base, the Marxist, along with too many secularists who consider themselves conservative, really does believe that man doth live by bread alone.
But we need to pull back from the madness. Bedlam, even for sinful and addle-pated mankind, is not a normal state of affairs.
I appeal to this rule. If political division causes you to break charity with a fellow Christian, if you are pleased to learn that such a person has done or said something bad, if you are eager to magnify its badness rather than to interpret it in a less damning light, if you are the Eternal Oculist, so eager to remove specks from other people’s eyes that you delight in gouging them out altogether, then you are committing a sin against the first commandment, and politics has become your strange god.
Turn back, O man.
I do not mean we should be indifferent to moral evil. The Church permits no range of beliefs on abortion, or on the depravity of grave sexual sins such as adultery and sodomy.
If a priest preaches otherwise, he has eo ipso broken communion; he ought to know better. Laymen are in another category. We should make allowances for confusion, ignorance, good intentions wrongly applied, personal moral compromise and weakness, and so on.
The application of moral principles, by contrast, often does admit of a range of possibilities. If someone says, all other things being equal, that a married man with children deserves in distributive justice, and by Catholic social teaching, first consideration in employment, I doubt he would now find many allies. Yet Pope Leo XIII takes that as a given; so does that conservative man of the left, G.K. Chesterton.
If Catholics of one sort may demur in this matter, and appeal to prudence and to balancing a range of goods, then surely Catholics of another sort may do so when it comes to the far cloudier matter of immigration.
But in general, we should keep in mind where we are: Bedlam.
And how do you preach to Bedlamites? Understand the language, but don’t speak it. Spend some time on a mountain. Show up for simple daily works of charity. Invite the madman to leave his pen once in a while. Read old books. Teach them to others. Whistle a merry tune.
Pray, and consider that if you are going to be a fool sometimes, and you are, you had better be one that laughs at yourself first.
