Folly in the Seat of Wisdom

Reports out of New York say that the state’s Department of Health has issued warnings to the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, whose order has, for over a century, run a hospice for patients dying of incurable cancer.  Indeed, the village where their hospice is located was renamed Hawthorne in their honor.  The state, however, without giving it much thought, passed a law requiring all nursing homes to accommodate women who insist that they are men, and men who insist they are women, and other permutations of sexual expression that that factory of illusions, the human fancy, can invent.  

That, of course, is not how they put it.  It is as a sensible person may put it.  So might a sensible person affirm other biological facts evident to anyone with eyes or a clear mind, such as that dogs can only be either boy-dogs or girl-dogs, regardless of whether they have been neutered, or that the developing child in the womb is human, individual, alive, a complete organism, and exactly where it is natural for him to be.  

The sisters have gotten no complaints from their residents, so that the state’s warnings appear to be motivated by sheer gratuitous enmity.  For the sisters are Catholic.  They have responded as did Peter in Acts: “We must obey God, not men.”  

The ironies abound.  Their hospice is located in a village called Hawthorne, renamed for their order in the days when New Yorkers were grateful to them for undertaking work, at no expense to the state, that no one else was eager to do.  Their foundress, Sister Alphonsa Mary, was none other than Rose Lathrop Hawthorne, the daughter of that titan of American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne, certainly no Catholic, though he bore no Puritan animus against the Church.  

Nor did Rose, a convert, dishonor the memory of her mother and father.  Far from it.  Literary scholars owe to her a great debt of gratitude, for preserving, editing, and publishing their correspondence.  I have read some of the letters they wrote when they lived for a few years in Italy and became close friends of Robert and Elizabeth Browning.  

Rose remarked that all the great English and American writers and artists of that time, regardless of their faith, made their way to Italy to drink from the springs of Catholic culture.

Hawthorne himself, half-Puritan in sensibility, was acutely aware of his ancestry, even ashamed of it, as he was the great-great-grandson of John Hathorne, the most aggressive of the judges in the Salem witch trials.  Those trials brought together the worst of both sexes.  

In men like Cotton Mather, who died still believing there was witchcraft in Salem, the matter was set afire by the ferocity of intellectual warfare; he was fighting against a recrudescent materialism.  If devils are real, materialism is false.

The victims of Salem were chewed up in the wheels of his acute and relentless mind.  I hope God forgave him before he died, but if not, a present-day Dante might find a way to place him beside Lenin, two murderers by abstraction. 

The girls come off no better.  It is, indeed, impossible to imagine a group of boys getting together to faint, jabber, shriek, writhe, and set a whole colony by its ears with visions of the occult, catching the habit by social contagion, and more than half believing it themselves.  

Enthusiasm is what the shrewd Ronald Knox called it, and its history is chock full of female devotees: 

From the Montanist movement onwards, the history of enthusiasm is largely a history of female emancipation, and it is not a reassuring one.  Martha Simmonds escorting Nayler into Bristol with cries of Hosanna, Madame Guyon training up her director in the way he should go, the convulsionary priestesses going through the motions of saying Mass at St. Medard – the sturdiest champion of women’s rights will hardly deny that the unfettered exercise of prophetic ministry by the more devout sex can threaten the ordinary decencies of ecclesiastical order.  

To which the feminists in our time would no doubt respond that those ordinary decencies are precisely what they aim to disrupt, if not to obliterate.

The clear-eyed, bald-faced liar is usually male; his lie is strategic and cold.  The breathless believer in the lie is usually female; her lie is the work of vanity, or misdirected piety, and it is warm, often with heartfelt devotion.  

Saint Paul must have encountered it.  It may well be why he does not permit women to teach in celebrations of the Eucharist, because “the woman was deceived, but the man was not deceived.”  The word he uses suggests guile, trickery.  It is not the same as a mere statement contrary to fact, as when someone testifies that he saw John robbing the store, when he saw nothing, or when he saw Joe doing it instead.  It involves either credulity or a willingness to be beguiled.

So I say there is no chance, none, that what is happening to the Sisters in Hawthorne could have happened thirty years ago, and not just because, at that time, had you said that there were more than two sexes, everyone would have known that you were not sane.  

Folly has set herself up in the seat of wisdom, and we can expect, in a variety of forms, what happened at Salem happening among ourselves and with all the dizzying force of mass media – the delivery mechanism of social contagion – enabling it to increase and multiply.  All this will happen while the cold liars, the haters of mankind, will continue with their project to supplant the human soul with the algorithms of the computer, amassing hitherto unimaginable power, what by comparison makes Stalin look like a mere schoolyard bully.  

In the meantime, the good Sisters engage in acts of daily, gentle, human, and holy charity, acts appreciated neither by the technocrats nor by the horoscope readers in state government.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, thou shouldst be living at this day.