Again and again, in every corner of the
world, like a flame bursting from blackened ashes, there would appear the old
tale of the Brown Scandal, or Priest Ruins Potter Home. Tireless apologists of
the priest's party watched for it, and patiently tagged after it with
contradictions and exposures and letters of protest. Sometimes the letters were
published in the papers; and sometimes they were not. But still nobody knew how
many people had heard the story without hearing the contradiction.
It was possible to find whole blocks of
blameless and innocent people who thought the Mexican Scandal was an ordinary
recorded historical incident like the Gunpowder Plot. Then somebody would
enlighten these simple people, only to discover that the old story had started
afresh among a few quite educated people, who would seem the last people on
earth to be duped by it.
And so the two Father Browns chase each
other round the world for ever; the first a shameless criminal fleeing from
justice; the second a martyr broken by slander, in a halo of rehabilitation.
But neither of them is very like the real Father Brown, who is not broken at
all; but goes stumping with his stout umbrella through life, liking most of the
people in it; accepting the world as his companion, but never as his judge.
GK Chesterton, The Scandal of Father Brown
Reflection – One of the downsides or upsides (I can’t decide which, really) of
being on social media is that whether you like it or not, you end up knowing
about the latest scandals of the day, the stories that are rocking the
zeitgeist house, or at least that little portion of the zeitgeist that you
personally occupy.
You end up at least knowing about them (after the 50th
time some story or other pops up in your newsfeed), whether you have the slightest
interest in them or not. I think part of the wise use of social media is being
vigilant about being swept along in the current of scandal, simply thinking,
reading, and caring about some story or other for no other reason than that
everyone else is thinking, reading, and caring about it.
We need to actively fight against that tendency in our on-line,
wired-in world. Just because (for example) some woman got cat-called walking
down a street in New York and made a video about it, we don’t by that very fact
have to Have A National Conversation about harassment. Really. We don’t.
Or, I understand that there is some Cardinal or other in Rome who’s
gotten moved from one job to another (the details escape me), and this presages
the coming of the antichrist or something. As has been foretold: “Lo, and I saw
the seventh seal being broken open, and a voice from heaven cried, let the
curial officials be transferred without a full explanation being given to those
who Feed on the Buzz. And there was a great outcry and lamentation in the
heavens, and a third of the bureaucrats fell from the heavens.” (The Apocalypse
of Rorate Caeli 6: 66).
Yeah, anyhow, whatever. Not my circus, not my monkeys, as the saying
goes.
All of this (which I have absolutely no intention of taking further
interest in, writing about, or debating), puts me powerfully in mind of that
wonderful Chesterton story “The Scandal of Father Brown.” As with many GKC
stories, the plot is irrelevant. Essentially Fr. Brown is caught up in an
affair where he appears to be helping a woman run away from her husband with
her lover, and an American journalist on the scene dashes off an expose of this
perfidious deed. It then turns out that the journalist got the characters
wrong, and that the lover was the husband and vice versa, and Fr. Brown was
restoring the marriage to right order.
But it’s this last bit of the story that I find especially relevant,
where the scandal rages in the media, denunciations and defenses, pro-Burke and
anti-Burke (oops, I meant to write Brown) camps forming, and high drama ensuing
as the man is pilloried and then vindicated, pilloried and vindicated.
Zzzzzzz… oh, sorry, nodded off there. My goodness, how boring and
pointless I find all this scandal mongering.
And meanwhile, the real Cardinal Brown (oops, I mean to write… well,
you know), is neither pilloried nor vindicated, not broken at all, but I hope is stumping along
with his umbrella, so to speak, accepting (and here’s the money phrase) ‘the
world as his companion, and never his judge.’
That’s it, there. The trouble with all this stupid tiresome SCANDAL,
SCANDAL all the time, in the Church, out of the Church, wherever, is that it
gives the ‘world’, be it Buzzfeed, Gawker, the NY Times or CNN, wayyyyy too
much power. These people are not our judges. They’re no one’s judges. They
really, truly, utterly Do Not Matter.
For that matter, the Pope is not our judge, either. If Pope Francis
phones me up today and transfers me to Ulan Bator or something, who cares? Off
I will go to Mongolia, and see what awaits me there.
There is one Judge, and one Judge only, and all of us are to spend
our lives stumping along and attending to our duties, being obedient, and
loving as best we can, where we are, under the merciful eyes of the One Judge
of men. Everything else is a distraction, pure and simple.
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