Spirits Of Hatred Across The Land

That photograph above is of a plaque, in Latin, I saw affixed to the doorway of a building. It reads, loosely translated, “Don’t lose hope,” or, more poetically, “Despair of nothing.” I use it to start this entry because it’s important. I believe it, and you should too. But it’s harder than usual these days to hold on to that adjuration.

I passed that doorway on my way to the Vatican to have lunch with Cardinal George Pell, who heard I was going to be in Rome, and who invited me to dine with him in his apartment. I have long admired Cardinal Pell, and never more so than by the way he bore with grace his unjust humiliation and imprisonment on trumped-up child sex abuse charges in his native Australia. The elderly cardinal spent over a year in solitary confinement in an Australian prison following his shocking conviction on child sex abuse charges based on alleged incidents in the 1990s. The convictions were shocking because the allegations were so risible, the case of the accusers so thin. Yet Pell was convicted, and incarcerated until the Australian High Court (its Supreme Court) threw out his conviction in 2020, and set him free. Pell wrote about his prison experience here.

I admire Cardinal Pell for his forbearance under this horrible trial, in which he was not only denied liberty (even the liberty to say mass in his cell!), but also suffered the gross indignity of having his name smeared as a pedophile, the worst sort of man. I looked forward to sitting down with him. We had a lovely lunch, and had one of his assistants take this photo as I departed.

I posted that to Twitter, and thought nothing else of it. I thought everyone knew that Cardinal Pell had been exonerated. I thought everyone knew that Do they not that Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who is now on trial in the Vatican for financial fraud (Pope Francis fired him over allegations of embezzlement), confirmed that the Vatican Secretariat of State sent $2.3 million (Australian) to Australia during the cardinal’s trial and imprisonment? The Vatican first said that the money was meant to support Pell in his distress, but the Australian bishops conference said it never received the money. When questioned about it by Pell, Becciu said that he indeed sent the money, but that he refuses to tell Pell what it was for. Italian media reported that it was a bribe, but did not provide evidence.

You should know that Pell was appointed by Pope Francis in 2015 to lead an investigation to clean up the scandal-ridden Vatican Bank. Pell did not mess around. NPR reported at the time:

In overseeing many of these changes, Pell’s gruff and no-nonsense manner irritated many of the Old Guard, who feared the outsider was amassing too much power.

“When it comes to money and to properties, [the] Vatican becomes always a place of snakes,” says longtime Vatican analyst Marco Politi. He also says Pell “rocked the boat.”

“And in this job, Pell has been in the last months very energetic, sometimes maybe too swift … not observing the soft diplomacy,” he says.

Pope Francis knew there would be resistance to Pell, says Gerard O’Connell, Vatican correspondent for America magazine, a Jesuit publication. “Because you are touching interests; you are touching a whole network … of money moving here and there that has been put in place over decades”.

At the pope’s instructions, Pell insisted that all funds that different Vatican departments pocketed from outside sources must now be listed in the balance sheet. O’Connell says that means no more shell games.

“They can’t keep money in the closet and use it for other purposes,” he says. “Because people were giving money, but also trying to influence the policy directions and even nominations.”

I remember thinking back then that these hidden Vatican interests were going to find some way to set Pell up, to take him down. Sure enough, in the Australian state of Victoria, the most historically anticlerical of all Australian states, child sex abuse charges were lodged against the cardinal in 2017. A year or so after that, I met at a social occasion someone who had been a key member of Pell’s team working to clean up the Vatican Bank. This person confirmed my suspicion that it was a set-up. This person told me that they had known that sexual corruption was a big thing in the Roman Curia (networks of sexually active gay men), and they also knew that there was a lot of financial corruption there, but until they started working on this issue on Pell’s team, they had not understood how intimately connected the two kinds of corruption are in the secretive world of the Vatican.

I can easily understand how most people did not follow the Pell case to that level of granularity — that is, to the point of understanding how likely it is that Cardinal Pell was framed by rich and powerful people in the Vatican who did not want him to shed light on what they were doing in the dark. Still, I assumed it was common knowledge that Pell had been exonerated, cleared of the abuse charges.

I was wrong. A number of commenters — always anonymous, of course — used my Twitter thread to denounce Pell in grotesque terms as a pedophile. Some of them accused me of being a pedophile too. Some posted links to media reports announcing Pell’s conviction — but not to his subsequent exoneration. The raw hatred for this poor man, George Pell, shocked me — and yes, it is still possible to shock me. I quickly realized how devastating child sex abuse charges are to a man, even if the charges are eventually proven to have been false, or at least not established in fact. There will always be people who refuse to believe in the innocence of the accused. A cloud of doubt will forever hang over Cardinal Pell’s head. This is why it is so, so important not to rush to judgment on these cases. There is almost no more effective way to destroy a priest’s name than to accuse him of sexually abusing children. It’s a nuclear weapon in the hands of a malicious enemy.

I’ve seen a lot of this in the past few days directed against me by an unusual source: the far right. I don’t want to link to the occasion of the attacks, but it had to do with a far-right commentator of rising influence, an intelligent and insightful man, laying into me viciously for having written a blog post saying that the principle of “no enemies to the Right” was corrupt and dangerous. The man had initially criticized me for having written negatively about Thomas Achord, the former headmaster of my kids’ school, who had a secret online life as a white nationalist, racist, Jew-hater, and misogynist. Achord had said, on an anonymous Twitter account that he finally admitted under fire was his own, that he saw himself as a Trojan horse in the classical Christian education world, hoping to use its institutions and networks to subtly bring people into white nationalism. I strongly attacked this, and said that we conservative Christians must be vigilant against this kind of evil.

Responding to my criticism, the far-right commentator said I was wrong to attack other people on the Right, no matter what they had said and done. I wrote a response to this, which in turn prompted an online outpouring of extraordinary vitriol from this man, including personal invective. This, in turn, prompted an orc army of Very Online far rightists to swarm me with filthy comments, many of them extremely personal, having to do with the divorce my wife filed earlier this year (i can’t defend myself against these groundless charges because I have a moral duty to protect my children, and even my estranged wife). People sometimes ask me how I can stand the hateful commentary directed against me. I tell them the truth: that if you are a professional opinion journalist, which I have been for over three decades, you develop dinosaur skin. This stuff doesn’t get to me, mostly because I take it as a sign of how sick and deformed are the souls of those making the insults. Often I laugh at them, because the poor soul who has ginned up the remark really does seem to believe that he has struck a blow against me. Uh, no. No one likes to be trashed, but a swarm of anonymous Internet mayflies are hardly the US Air Force. The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.

Still, I was telling a friend yesterday that there is so much darkness and spite abroad in the land. I have always had a soft spot for David French, not because I agree with his positions (mostly I don’t), but because I know how demonic the personal assaults on him and his family during the Trump presidency were. I mean that word literally: they assaults were demonic — and they came from the far right. I am accustomed to this kind of thing coming from the Left, but my side (broadly speaking) is capable of it too. There is something about our culture today in which people give themselves permission to hate without restraint. (This is why I reject the “no enemies to the Right” principle.) They relish dehumanizing those they despise, but in so doing, dehumanize themselves. By defiling the imago Dei in their enemies, they defile the imago Dei in themselves.

We can all fall into this — God knows I am not immune from the temptation — but it’s something we have to guard against. Every day when I say my prayers, I pray against the demon of spite. I can be very passionate against people whom I believe to be committing great evil, so I constantly have to remind myself that whatever wickedness they have done, they are human beings too. I sometimes take my own savage commentary about this or that villain to confession, because even though that person may truly be an evil man or woman, I judge that I went too far in condemning them. This is going to be something I struggle with for the rest of my life, though I hope I’m getting better at resisting that temptation. Again: in the end, to give oneself over the the purity of hatred, one risks destroying one’s own soul. I believe that is happening.

I post all this today because overnight, I heard from someone I had interviewed for my upcoming book on Christian re-enchantment. This man is now a Christian, having spent a number of years as a student and practitioner of the occult at a profound ritualistic level. I don’t say more because we still have to work out what he’s comfortable allowing me to reveal. I can say, though, that this man was no dabbler. He was very high up into it. Anyway, he told me overnight that most Christians in the world today were no threat at all to what he and his fellow demon-worshipers were up to. But, he added, Christians on the extreme right were really helpful to their plans to spread the occult under cover. Why? Because the hatred that these Christians nurtured in their hearts and in their online circles opened them to demonic manipulation. He said specifically that right-wingers (Christians and otherwise) who make political alliances with pagan white nationalist types and techno-occultists, all to fight the Left, and in obedience to the No Enemies To The Right principle, play right into the hands of the demonic.

I believe it. You can’t read the kind of stuff these people write online, on social media and elsewhere, without seeing superhuman malice made manifest. Beware. You might think you need to do this to win a political battle, but the cost is going to be your soul. This is not simply something I’m telling you, but a man who literally served demons for years, ritually and otherwise, is saying it.

In Rome, I interviewed a Vatican exorcist. He told me that it is vital that Christians not let the demonic dominate their thoughts, because the Christian faith is about life, and light, and Christ’s victory over darkness and the devil. Nevertheless, he said, Christians absolutely must keep squarely in front of them the fact that all of us, at every moment, are fighting a spiritual battle. We might wish that reality were constructed in a different way, but this is simply the way the world is. I mentioned to the exorcist what my New York Catholic friend said when I asked him how the experience of his wife’s demonic possession (she is now free, Deo gratias) changed the way he moved through the world. The New York man said that now, when he walks down the street in Manhattan, he is inescapably aware that all around him, unseen spiritual battles are literally happening. When I related that to the Vatican exorcist, he vigorously agreed. This is the spiritual reality in which all of us move — even online. Especially online.

Nihil desperandum — don’t surrender to despair. But understand the grave spiritual risks we all take when we return hatred for hatred, and when we contribute to building a culture powered by the bonfire of the passions, fed by the incineration of our own humanity.

UPDATE: Received a message just now from the ex-occultist, who gives me permission to post it here:

By warning of the presence of demonic influence within the far-right, my goal is not to claim that the far-right is uniquely guilty in this regard, or even guilty in a manner symmetrical to the left. My point is rather that demonic ideological influence is so subtle and widespread that it has unsurprisingly also crept into the realm of the dissident right, in addition to being obviously at work among mainstream conservatives who have become tragically vulnerable to (and even complicit in) in the workings of the enemy. It is inevitable that opposing demonic leftism will entail taking positions that would be considered by most to be right-wing extremism – indeed, my own experience of the demonic has left me with more hardline conservative positions on social issues than just about anyone I know.

I’m also not afraid of making alliances with right-wingers who do not share my precise religious commitments. But it is never worth joining with those actively promoting demonic ideas. As Christian traditionalists, we will find plenty of enemies on the right. Not because we should seek the approval of leftists who will hate us no matter what ideological concessions we make, but rather just because types like the Nietzschean right-wingers are wrong and diabolically influenced. Paganism and the occult have the same demonic root whether they manifest on the left or the right. Strategic thinking and unflinching determination in the name of victory against the alarming designs of the left are often virtuous, but they become vices the second they distract us from total devotion to the truth of Christ and from awareness of our true enemies in the spiritual realm.

Put differently, our preconceived notions of the political spectrum should be secondary to our zealous devotion to Christ and opposition to all works of the devil. Contemporary leftism is a program of spiritual death that should be aggressively opposed. Centrists (whether self-identified as liberals or conservatives) are often under a greater demonic spell than the extremists they love to feel superior to, as they are often the staunchest defenders of the power structure of the modern world, the most blind to its Satanic elements. And the far-right has also been spiritually compromised in a number of ways. Only by relentlessly clinging to our foundational theological commitments can we allow God to lead us toward clear spiritual perception of the complexities of our contemporary political struggles. We should never be afraid of taking truly extreme right-wing positions when they align with our faith but we should also never hesitate to name our enemies, even to the right.

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