Saint Bibiana, who is commemorated today, a virgin martyred during the reign of Julian the Apostate, is the patroness of single laywomen, amongst her other heavenly duties (she is also invoked, for reasons I cannot discern, for hangovers, whether as a cure or as a prevention, but probably both). Single ladies could use a lot of intercession in today’s fractious world, which may be likened to a spiritual post-World War One era. Just as after 1918, the young women of Europe could not find a young-ish man, ten million of whom had been blown to bits in a senseless war, so too, here in 2019, so many young men have been spiritually shredded by the evils of our culture: pornography, radical feminism, pointlessness, lassitude, unemployment, a hyper-reaction to ‘toxic masculinity’ – now including even normal masculine proclivities – and on it goes. So men, man up, and if you feel called to marriage, for forth et carpe diem et carpe feminam. The culture of life can only be built up one person, one couple, one family at a time. And, as Saint Paul says, that time is now.
And, while on masculinity, it seems Andrew Scheer is striving to show some, albeit a little too little, too late, and to the wrong audience. It seems the knives are out, and there he was, berating his fellow conservatives who are trying to oust him, saying this is no time for naysayers and infighting, a veritable ‘how dare you’. But where was this spirit in his conversations with feminists, pro-abortionists, pro-transgenderists? Would that he had been more clear and vociferous in his principles, one which I’m sure, or at least hope, he holds, deep down. Yet now he is fighting for his political posterity and posterior, the latter of which is soon likely to be handed him on a silver platter, as the ‘Conservative’ party seeks a leader more attuned to the culture, who will march, bedecked in rainbow-ism, arm-in-arm with Trudeau in the endless ‘gay pride’ parades.
Mr. Scheer seems not to want to be an historical footnote, the man who would be, might have been, prime minister. I’m at the point now where we should probably seek a leader in someone who seeks not that role, in fact, who would disdain it, a anti-politician, one who lives by Saint Philip’s maxim amare nesciri, loving to be unknown, a Platonic hermit philosopher king, and take up the mantle only as a service to mankind (and one who would use that latter word) – a true ‘public servant’. Quixotic, perhaps, but one can, even must, dream.
The real battle, after all, is not in politics, but in culture, which we must rebuild, one brick, one life, one soul – indeed, with each and every moral decision – at a time. Take up that task, dear reader, like the courageous, principled young Bibiana, beaten and pummelled by leaden chains until death, one who disdained the anti-Christian politics of her time – and the world may change for the better than one might have thought.