Kathryn, I have no particular comment on the pope’s designation as Time’s Person of the Year, although I do note that it took John Paul II sixteen years to be awarded the same ‘honor’. What could account for the difference? I was, however, interested to read in your interview with (my old friend) Michael Coren that Michael had spotted the pope’s citation (in the course of his first homily) of the late 19th/early 20th century Catholic polemicist Leon Bloy.

This mention of Bloy was something that attracted the attention of the Daily Telegraph’s Tim Stanley (a Roman Catholic, incidentally) earlier this year, and, eventually, me. Homilies are not my normal reading, as you know (!), but the intersection between religion and politics, is, however, something of interest (to me, anyway), particularly the point at which the definitions of what is a religious, and what a political, creed blur, a topic on which the British historian Michael Burleigh has written extensively (and brilliantly) in recent years (following on from the likes of Eric Voegelin).

But back to Bloy. I blogged about him over on (ahem) Secular Right in August. Here’s one key passage I cited there from Tim Stanley’s piece:

Bloy was a radical Catholic. He was obsessed with capturing and embodying the essence of Christian doctrine, to the degree that it made him the sworn enemy of compromise. Born in 1846, he was raised in Paris in the French republican tradition – rationalist, secularist. In his twenties he underwent a dramatic conversion to Catholicism that left him craving constant encounter with the divine. Like anyone who thinks they have discovered The Truth, he was impatient with the fake consensus that others tried to force him to live by. Christ on the Cross was the only fact worth knowing, martyrdom was the only death worth experiencing. Bloy embraced poverty and gained the nickname “the ungrateful beggar” for his habit of refusing to get a job, begging for money, and then using the fresh ink he acquired to attack the lifestyles of the rich who kept him. We might today call him a hippie bum, but no bum ever wrote with this kind of passion:

And here’s some of my response:

Stanley attempts to draw a distinction between Bloy’s rhetoric and the language of Marxism by focusing on the fact that Marxism is a materialist creed. Superficially, perhaps, but Marxism is better seen as a manifestation of the old millennialist tradition of which Bloy-style Catholic radicalism is yet another expression. To read Bloy’s turn-of-the century ravings is to glimpse a shadow of the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution and the “Democratic Kampuchea” to come.
To get a very quick flavor of Bloy, read the rest of Stanley’s fascinating article and then go over to the French wikiquote. See Bloy sounding off against Protestantism, democracy and modernity, (vaccination was “un ordure”, apparently, a favorite word of this somewhat excrementally-obsessed writer, and cars and trains were not much better). Check out the repeated demonization of the rich and the bourgeois as “pigs”, dehumanization of a sort that was the prelude to so much twentieth century massacre.
Bloy’s morbid and violent prose appears to be the product of a genuinely totalitarian spirit (”Je suis pour l’intolérance parfaite”), and of a mind that recognized only one truth. God, so to speak, help anyone who disagreed.

To be sure, it’s extremely important to note (as Stanley and I did), that this was just one citation by Francis, albeit one of a rather, to abuse the term, Manichean vein (no comfort there for those who think that Francis’s faith is of the cuddly variety). It should also not be necessary for me to say this, but, I will go ahead and do so anyway: no, I don’t believe that the Francis is a ‘Marxist’, let alone someone with dreams of building a gulag. That said, Bloy was an interesting man for Francis to have chosen to quote on such a high-profile occasion.

Come to think of it, Bloy was an interesting man, period. As mad as a hatter, I reckon, but interesting. It says something that Ernst Junger, not exactly an uninteresting individual himself (Pour le Mérite, Storm of Steel, Occupied Paris, a Catholic convert at the age of 101, etc. etc.) , appears to have been a bit of a fan.

History!