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COMMENTARY
September 27, 2006
Milingoring
Ha! cried I, though to no one in particular, upon calling up the news yesterday, to read that the former Archbishop of Zambia had finally been excommunicated. My readers will know me for a Catholic. But it strikes me what happened illustrates something of significance beyond the Church, for the world at large.We don’t have hangings any more, I am sorry to say -- for as I've come to realize, the ability to string a man up for a capital crime, proved in a legitimate court of law, before an impartial judge and jury, under clear and reasonable rules of evidence, was among the marks of our civilization, before decadence set in. Not just the hanging, but everything that led to it. It was a mark of confidence in our ability to distinguish right from wrong, and to act on what we could distinguish. It was an opportunity to show we took individuals seriously: victim and perpetrator alike. Alas, sometimes even legitimately-constituted courts of law make mistakes so serious, that only God can sort them out. (Nothing in this world is perfect.) Our job is to learn from our mistakes. That was the meaning of the common law, only recently effectively abrogated in this country (see Rory Leishman’s excellent new book, Against Judicial Activism) by the revolutionary charlatans of political correctitude. Centuries of legal development, through trial and error, had made the English-speaking countries the most open and prosperous in the history of the world. The system was never planned: it rather emerged through many generations, when men understood that reason and justice and freedom are larger than any man, larger than any generation. As Dr Johnson said, the prospect of a hanging concentrates the mind: not only in the prospective swinger. Grave crimes require grave punishments, and therefore grave considerations. It was the wisdom of our ancestors throughout the West to allow our hypotheses to be tested, even and especially when the stakes were high. Excommunication is like hanging, only worse. Neither operation necessarily involves physical pain -- not if they are done properly. Both involve some pain in the soul. And while either may be redemptive, hanging has the advantage of concentrating the mind before the fact. The condemned man has the opportunity to make a sincere repentance. Sincere, because it will not save him from passage through the trap door into eternity. Whereas, the thought of excommunication comes mostly after the fact, and thus tends to engage a man’s whole power of self-righteousness (see, the history of the Reformation). Moreover, a hanging can only determine the fate of a transient body. The fate of a soul is more consequential. Still, no excommunication is final. The subject is not placed permanently outside the intercession of the Church, only until he recants convincingly. Emmanuel Milingo became Archbishop of Zambia in 1969, just shy of his 40th birthday. He became widely popular by his efforts at exorcism and faith healing, which went too frequently beyond his Catholic instructions. He dabbled in primitive magic, which might be efficacious, but cannot be doctrinally sound. Recalled to Rome in 1983, and assigned to a local church without loss of rank, he continued to perform indigenous African rites, to a swelling new-age congregation. In the year 2000, he married a South Korean woman in a “Moonie” mass wedding at New York. His problems with the Vatican thereby grew. On the weekend, he attempted to ordain four married men as bishops in Washington. And that was it. He has finally achieved the excommunication that a less patient Church might have administered 30 years ago. The case -- open and shut under the Code of Canon Law -- isn’t interesting. Milingo, now 76, is a rogue, and rogues are almost invariably less interesting than their reputations. When Catholicism first arrived there, northwest Europe was as barbaric as sub-Saharan Africa was, much later. What we call “European” today is the result of centuries of civilizing action, by a Church that exalted reason as well as faith, and which instituted and enforced rules to prevent its own clergy from “going bush”. African Catholics today -- I know several -- are among the least likely to suggest concessions to African tribal customs. The continent itself is slowly rising above the murky relativism of its past, just as we in Europe and America are sinking back into the relativist welter. Some day Africans may have to re-civilize us, by faith and reason. In the meantime, we of the West have another opportunity to recall that we are not “Western” by some accident of geography, but by the authority and responsibility, the laws and rules, that supply the very conditions of our freedom. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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