Some interesting e-mails in re my negative remarks about Sgr. Buttiglione.

No, I am not anti-Catholic. If I were, I should not have lasted long at

National Review! And I cannot forbear pointing out that every time I attend

Holy Communion I assert, with the Minister and all the rest of the

congregation, that: “We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic

Church…” It is true that I have put myself in bad odor with certain

sections of the Irish-American community by saying very rude things about

Irish terrorists, which some people take to mean I am anti-Catholic. (At

least, that is what these people took it to mean up to about, oh, September

11, 2001, since when they have been strangely quiet.)

I do, though, in spite of having changed nationalities, still have the

Englishman’s congenital suspicion of Papal ambitions. I suppose this is

absurd in our day and age, when what were once the great menacing powers of

Catholic Europe now have imploding ex-Christian populations sunk in

hedonism, and fast-swelling Muslim ones afire with religious passion. I am

sure, though, that those congenital suspicions underlie much of British

opposition to the growing power of the EU; and contrariwise, that dreams of

a new Holy Roman Empire — with lots of jobs for scholarly

priest-bueaucrats, in which they can boss other people around and tell them

what is and isn’t moral — dance, like visions of sugarplums, in the heads

of many Europhiles, as I believe they do in the head of Sgr. Buttiglione.

In our meeting with him on Monday, Sgr. Buttiglione raised the old “Athens

and Jerusalem” formula of the origins of Western culture. Every time I hear

this, I find myself thinking: It wasn’t *just* Athens and Jerusalem. The

Anglo-Saxon (you can say “Anglo-Saxon-Celtic,” if you like, as historian

John Lukacs does) peoples brought something to the mix, too; something not

so easy to list off in books that students must read, since those peoples

were illiterate when they first brought it, but something critical and

extraordinary none the less.

The old tribal customs of the north-German forests, which developed into the

Moots and Things and Parlements of the Middle Ages — the idea that large

public matters ought not be decided until different opinions have been aired

and different orders of the community consulted — was as important to the

development of the modern West, particularly of the United States, as

anything we got from Athens or Jerusalem. My guess is that Sgr. Buttiglione

would not agree with that, or perhaps would not understand it.