ELEISON COMMENTS DCL (28 December, 2019) : SPEAK UP !
If there have been great minds from the past, it is because they will have been thinking on great matters, which means, explicitly or implicitly, matters of God, and if they were truly great minds, their thinking will have been not just destructive. One such mind was certainly Englands Shakespeare. As a Catholic he grappled with his countrys apostasy being fulfilled just as he was reaching his prime, around 1600. But that turning of England to Protestantism meant that if he did not want to be hanged, drawn and quartered, he had to disguise his Catholic message, as Clare Asquith proved in her book of 2005, Shadowplay, where she took English literature way above English patriots and the dwarves of literary criticism.
To take just one example, in the books Appendix on Shakespeares Sonnet 152, she shows how from start to finish, beneath the obvious application to a woman Shakespeare has known, there is a complete second meaning of far wider application to himself as a writer who has failed to warn his countrymen as he should have done. Here are the 14 lines of the sonnet together with their obvious meaning :
In loving thee thou knowst I am forsworn You know I break a promise by loving you, but by
But thou art twice forsworn to me love swearing, swearing you love me, you break two promises: you
In act thy bed-vow broke and new faith torn, forsook your husbands bed, then returned to him
In vowing new hate after new love bearing. (new faith, new love) only to forsake him again.
But why of two oaths’ breach do I accuse thee, But why do I accuse you of breaking two oaths when When I break twenty? I am perjured most, I break twenty oaths ? It is I the greater perjurer, for
For all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee, To your own harm I have sworn oath upon oath about
And all my honest faith in thee is lost; your goodness when I well knew you were not good.
For I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness, Thus I have been swearing that you are very kind,
Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy, very loving, very truthful, very constant, and to
And, to enlighten thee, gave eyes to blindness, put you in a good light, I have made me see what I
Or made them swear against the thing they see. Did not see, or, have sworn I saw not what eye saw.
For I have sworn thee fair: more perjured eye, For I have sworn you were good. What terrible
To swear against the truth so foul a lie. Perjury on my part, when that is so untrue !
Interestingly, the sonnets text makes more sense in its hidden meaning, referring to faithless England, than in its apparent meaning, referring to Shakespeares unfaithful mistress. Thus Merrie Englande had been a faithful wife of the Catholic Church for 900 years. By Henry VIIIs Act of Supremacy (1534), (In Act) England broke its marriage (bed-vow) with the Catholic Church and took Protestantism as its lover. Then it remarried the Catholic Church under Mary Tudor (1553, new faith, new love), only to fall back into adultery with Protestantism under Elizabeth I (1558, new faith torn, new hate of the Catholic Church). But Shakespeare (1564-1616) blames himself for much worse infidelity, because down these years he has repeatedly glorified (to enlighten thee) England with its unfaithful Tudor rulers, for instance in his History Plays, glorified to Englands harm (to misuse thee), because as a Catholic he knew full well that Protestantism would be the ruin of Merrie Englande. Sure enough !
And today ? The pattern repeats itself : for over 1900 years Catholics were faithfully married to the true Church, but with Vatican II (1962-1965) the mass of them followed bad leaders into more or less of adultery with the modern world (bed-vow broke). Then Archbishop Lefebvre (1905-1991) led many back to the truly Catholic Church (new faith, new love, or renewal of the old faith and the old love), only to see his successors at the head of the Society of St Pius X which he founded in 1970 fall back into an adulterous longing for a reunion with Conciliar Rome, by a new hate for the pre-Conciliar truth.
Conclusion ? Any Shakespeares amongst us, or any Catholics, must speak up, that Pachamama Rome is, as such, nothing other than an abomination, to be shunned.
Kyrie eleison.
The Archbishop said, Rome is no more in Rome.
Elsewhere today is Catholics spiritual home.