'Queering' the past

When ideology rewrites history, truth becomes the enemy.

As some Catholics celebrate the news that Archbishop Vigano is being dragged to the Vatican, others are not so sure. Schism stuff aside, they see in some of his observations from the bottom of the rabbit hole, a truth about the way in which we are being manipulated. To a certain extent ‘twas ever thus, but it is the manipulation of the past to fit some present ideology that is especially concerning.

In 2021 Channel 5 produced a miniseries depicting Anne Boleyn as a black woman, in 2022, Shakespeare’s Globe put on a show called “I, Joan” which depicted St Joan of Arc as ‘non-binary’, and just this week the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth (the one time Yorkshire home of the authors), has ‘queered’ the Brontes because they used male pseudonyms when writing, (who knows what J.K.Rowling will turn out to be in 200 years).

All such moves are part of a deliberate attempt to feed the dictatorship of relativism. As Pope Benedict XVI asked in the context of Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom, “Is it not true that the great dictatorships were fed by the power of the ideological lie and that only truth was capable of bringing freedom?”

In Orwell’s 1984, protagonist Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth where ‘The Party’ understands that by rewriting the events of the past and controlling the narrative of history they can maintain their position of authority. As he is tasked with fabricating a story, we hear: “it was true that there was no such person as comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.”

In his encyclical letter written on the hundredth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Pope St. John Paul II, who lived under communist regime for much of his life, wrote:

“In the totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, the principle that force predominates over reason was carried to the extreme. Man was compelled to submit to a conception of reality imposed on him by coercion, and not reached by virtue of his own reason and the exercise of his own freedom.”

A soft version of this totalitarianism creeps into our lives today dressed as a lamb, asking us to embrace it. Can we really dismiss all those who point to the bloody fangs hiding behind the cuddly ball of fluff? Those who say that thought and prayer can never be a criminal offence. That abortion is not healthcare. That the thing growing in a woman’s uterus is a human being. That cleansing through euthanasia is not love. That men are not the same as women. That white people are not the enemy.

Anne Boleyn was not black. St Joan of Arc was a woman. The Bronte sisters were not the Bronte Brothers or the non-binary Brontës. The regime tells us to submit to a conception of reality not reached by virtue of reason and uses every trick in the book against those who refuse.

As Christians we have a duty to show the children running the nursery what it means to be a grown up.

As St Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians:

“We must no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, by every wind of teaching, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness and deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we must grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.”

We are now so far down artificial lane that the next big conspiracy must surely take us to reality alley. Here there will be whispers of something called ‘truth’, of real men and women, of family, of fields of mountains and streams.

“You’re crazy,” they’ll say, when someone ventures that babies used to grow in the wombs of women, that people over 65 used to be allowed to live, that parents were allowed custody over their own children, and that the Bronte sisters weren’t queer.