Every now and then a secret is entrusted to someone by chance: a prince is born “in on” the royal scandal; a plumber knows the rituals of the freemasons because he was employed to fix their bathroom sink; a girl happens to be niece to whoever killed Kennedy. If these lucky ones have a penchant for telling, then their career is as good as made—in journalism or blackmail, as it suits their fancy.
I find myself in such a situation. By the undeserved gift of being Catholic, by the providential arrangement by which I am Catholic in Such a Such a diocese where So and So is chancellor to the Bishop, and by the sheer happenstance of poking about in a defunct parochial school after dark—in short, by chance I am steward to a Great Secret. Thank God, I have no passion for blackmail: there’s something distasteful about threatening clerics for cash after they have taken a vow of poverty. But journalism—journalism has my heart.
If she didn’t, would I give away the secrets of this esoteric brotherhood in print? Would I divulge its solemn rituals? I hope I don’t sound paranoid or bloated in the estimation of my own importance when I confess a fear that the following tell-all might well put me in line for assassination by the same ecclesial cliques that murdered Merton and poisoned Paul XI when, in their estimation, these clerics were poised to do damage to the True Faith. But the truth must be told, and if it can be told within an article that earns the author a literary reputation, it must be told quickly. As the Poet once wrote: “Always act in accordance with the dictates of your conscience, my boy, and chance the consequences!” With such sentiments to steel me:
Christmas is a spell cast by Catholics sometime around December 12th, the power of which radiates out from a hidden room in almost every American diocesan office and, for approximately six to thirty days, makes Catholicism true.
A priest in the chancery—and member of a hushed meeting held at the aforementioned parochial property—agreed to give me the skinny in clear and conveyable terms. We met at night in a room that smelled like cinnamon and the elderly. A prick of our fingers by the leaf of a holly bush; the low mumble of Nat King Cole’s 1960 rendition of “A Cradle in Bethlehem” while our blood was mingled; a brief sharing in the sacrificial ham; these things established our bond and the confidence of my contact.
“Really, it began in the fifties,” he said, offering me a candied nut. “Marge brought them in,” he said. “Marge who does the dusting,” he said. “You know, Marge, she gave us all write-ups of those visions she had.”
“Ah, Marge. Who says, um-”
“The coming darkness of global communism-”
“Will overshadow even the sun, yes, now I've placed her. She made these?”
“Her specialty.”
“I'll take three.”
“A godly number,” he crunched. “It began in the forties, during the crisis that precipitated the Second Vatican Council.”
“Could you explain?”
“The Council?”
“No, the crisis.”
“Why?”
“Well,” I blushed, “not everyone knows of the crisis. Some say the Council was the crisis. My readers, they’re–”
“Trads?”
“There’s no need to be mean.”
“Have another nut. Have four more. That makes seven. Days of creation and all.”
“My readers-”
“Don’t bother explaining. I know the story. The American Church, chugging along with all the pep and unbroken vigor of a team of reindeer; the clergy, biretta-doffed and lacy, keeping chastity and sound doctrine with the icey cool of an army of snowmen; the liturgies, traditional; the husbands, stalwart and sure as the annual appearance of Uncle Mikolaj and his boozy eggnog, the wives-”
“Yes, well, something of the sort.”
“I’m afraid it's not true. In fact, it’s precisely why the League For a Coercive Holiday Season was first founded: Catholicism was treading water. Men were going to church with the same passion and purpose as they went to the Elks. The laity were in open dissent. You had churchgoers attending and even giving talks on ‘the virtue of self-interest.’ Priests would laud the separation of Church and State like they had invented it themselves. Christianity remained as an exterior institution, but only on the condition of its vivisection into an ‘outlet’ for ‘spiritual necessities.’ If you had asked anyone, circa 1953, ‘ought we replace the sinful structures of our mercantile society with the customs of Christianity?’ they would have looked at you as Rudolph’s father first looked at his newborn son in the claymation spectacular of 1964, Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer—as a freak!”
“So,” I said in a summarizing tone, reaching for another nut.
“Take two. That’ll make it nine. That’s three times three, the Trinity made manifest in the trinitarian structure of all nature.”
“So,” I said, “the League For a Coercive Holiday,” I said.
“There were different opinions as to a solution. Even in those early days, you could catch some whisper of the need for a Council to revivify the faithful, yes. But in the American Church another proposal was discussed and actually circulated in a draft that grew popular enough to have been referred to in Harper’s Magazine as “that strange and overly-zealous proposal of our doddering, celibate class.”
He passed me a piece of well-worn paper.
Because of my contact’s concern for secrecy, I was only allowed to view the document once, and could make no copies. I have his permission to publish only what I remember of it, and with the caveat, here given, that I may be mistaken as to its definite contents. Still, I am blessed with a photographic memory of most things literary, and so I ask for the unbounded confidence of my readers when I say that it read as follows:
A Proposal for the Annual Use of the Holy Relics of Saint Nicholas in Order to Blast Our Increasingly Pagan Empire With a Spirit of Christianity It will Be Compelled to Enjoy
Whereas, in former times, Christianity governed every day of the calendar, “in these latter days,” strange teachings have emerged through channels sundry—but in the main liberal, masonic, communistic, Methodistic, Rockerfelleristic, atheistic, hedonistic, modernistic, positivistic, individualistic, capitalistic and mercantile—which have suggested, to the dismay of Mother Church, that the Cosmos does not belong to her spiritual care, but that she rules only, and this only in part, a segment of nature diversely referred to as “the religious,” “the spiritual,” “the private,” or, to quote a recent pamphlet circulated by the apostate Grand-Mason and Tertiary Wizard’s Apprentice of the Reformed Order of Oddfellows, “all the stuff that doesn't matter.”
Because of this rapacious, audacious, and ungracious error, the vast majority of American Catholics imagine, to the dismay of Mother Church, that she has no jurisdiction over matters political, economical, public, juridical, festive, social, or customary. And so the Church, that pearl of great price, languishes, as one of our esteemed members so memorably put it, “like a chocolate egg forgotten in the toe of a discarded Christmas stocking.”
Whereas several of our brethren have suggested an Ecumenical Council, our society proposes the following annual blessing to coerce the wayward into full Christianity:
+
Ever-blessed and magnanimous Saint Nicholas, who among other things rescued three children from being pickled and eaten during a famine, vouchsafe to hear us, your unworthy children who are likewise in a pickle. Whisper our prayer into the ear of the infant Jesus Who so loved to be thrown upwards towards the ceiling by you, his favorite Saint. What we ask may require certain interventions into the usual operations of nature, pretanature, supernature, etc., etc., but they don't call you Wonder Worker for nothing, so: By your sainted liberality, and by the merits that have so enlarged your presence in Heaven, we ask for a licit share in the strange and furtive power of the aforementioned positivists, masons, et al., that, as they have rendered Christianity functionally irrelevant for three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, you would render their creepy secular dystopia functionally irrelevant for three to sixty days as it suits your good pleasure and the will of God; that you would inexplicably and with great power render null and void the burgeoning and wicked norms of our increasingly pagan world order and restore the salutary customs of Christendom to this great nation. Give us this gift, holy father Nicholas, that we the priests of God may point to your arbitrary and blessed suspension of the superstitions of liberalism as if to say, “See, isn't it better?” and thereby get a leg-up on converting the world to Christ. Hear us and by your merits grant us a season of Christianity incredibly Still Around despite its apparent formal dissolution. In Jesus's name. In gloria patri etc. 3 years indulgence.
+
“How about that?” my interlocutor said, dispersing the theological reflections that proceeded from my perusal of the document.
“Pretty intense,” I responded.
“Hardly. Three more nuts and you've got an apostolic twelve, that’s all.”
“Ah. Gimme.”
“The League couldn’t–oh look, it's snowing!”
It was.
“The League couldn’t come to an agreement as to whether such a request was respectful of the Church’s tradition regarding coercion, and so the draft was never signed. “But,” and here his voice fell low and soft, “all evidence points to a certain inner circle composed of two bishops, thirty-three priests, and one visiting Carthusian who called themselves the Persistent League Within the League For a Coercive Holiday Season, who invoked the blessing nonetheless.”
“No!”
“Yes, and we have it on the evidence of letters between His Excellency J- and the Most Venerable U- that several of this inner circle repudiated the deed when, after the solemn petition, no immediate effect on the social order was felt, leaving only the Yet Persistent League Within The Persistent League Within the League For a Coercive Holiday Season.”
“No!”
“Yes, and it is difficult to deny that this fierce devotion and apparent impertinence was rewarded at long last, for when winter came, and every winter after that, the strangest series of events occurred that enshrined and still enshrine the peace and joy and logic of Christendom within the very nation most responsible for rendering it irrelevant. We bear witness to it now; every year, for some 6-30 days roughly and irresponsibly referred to as ‘Christmas Time.’”
I left the diocesan office, into the rapidly falling snow. My confidante had given me more claims and less evidence than my attractive but demanding mistress, journalism, usually prefers. Still, I could hardly deny the chief power of his narrative, which was to make sense of Christmas in America, a time in which the citizens of an enlightened, liberal, secular, and capitalistic state spend six to thirty days in profound repudiation of the very principles they usually go to war in order to defend.
In any other season, whether Easter or Pentecost, a man would be regarded as line-crossing, proselytizing, Bible-thumping freak were he to proclaim, in public, the doctrine of an Original Fall and a Subsequent Salvation through the incarnation, life, and death of Jesus Christ. But let a man do so when it is cold; let him do it wearing a red hat with white trimmings; let him use the words, “Long lay the world in sin and error pining till he appeared and the soul felt its worth,” and suddenly such preaching isn’t merely tolerated, but men feel compelled to seek it out, over radio, on street corners, in concert halls, whether accompanied by band or blasted over loudspeaker. There is no prayer in public schools, but at Christmas time school-children beg, by rote, that Christ “save us all from Satan's pow’r.”
The very name of it, sanctioned by government and popular custom alike, would be hard to understand if we were to believe that the above spiritual intervention failed, and that the United States of America has not, in fact, been offered a kind of Disneyland version of Christianity to which everyone gets a free, annual, and somewhat compulsory pass. It is “The Holiday Season.” A Holiday is a holy day, and while you’ll strain in vain to find even a Catholic who refers to Easter as a “holiday season,” even atheists feel compelled to wish each other “happy holidays” during Christmas Time, as if making up for their deletion of the several hundred holy days of Christianity through one, condensed celebration.
Almsgiving was an everyday duty of Christendom, attaining the forgiveness of sins for the giver. The virtue was done away with by the religion of liberal capitalism, which posits such giving as something irrational and seeks to instead alleviate human misery by Continuing Success in Business. And yet, in this Suddenly Catholic Again Time, openly confessed as “the most wonderful time of the year,” the secret pleasure of almsgiving bubbles up in the Christian Unfaithful, and by strange law, “Please, it’s Christmas,” attains to the same moral power as “not in front of the kids”— drawing on some inexplicable core of goodness at the name of which sins cease and wallets open. Everybody gives. Everybody feasts. Even the advertisers have no recourse to our greed, for everywhere you hear the stern voice of Capital saying, “this season, give the one you love something she will never forget.”
At Christmas Time it is customary to break all otherwise iron laws of economics, according to which everyone seeks their own interest, and every action is a transaction. The gift economy reigns supreme from December 12th to the 25th-ish, through wrapped presents and acts of service, and is then banished and declared to be an impossible dream by economists, upon their return from the holidays.
Teetotalers indulge and workaholics rest. Even that basic form of liberal individualism, which conceives of the family as a dissoluble contract, established for the sake of the production of worker-consumers who, at the age of eighteen, graduate into a life of debt and wage-slavery in some gargantuan metropolis—even this is given its holy day. Up and out of their prodigal apartments and to grandmother's house they go to begrudgingly forgive the past sins and offenses of the previous year for the sake of dinnertime peace; to assert the primacy of the family over every larger social form (saying things like “this is what it’s all about” through mouthfuls of beef wellington, etc.).
And as for the apparently fundamental separation of Church and State, it is not so much denied as magically dispensed with: the intermingling of these two forbidden lovers is given license and the blind eye during Christmas Time. Liberal denizens walk complacently past Virgin Mary’s and Saint Joseph’s with the same indulgence a man might have walked past a lovers tryst during Carnival. The official religion of Church-State frigidity goes on its Rumspringa; apostate pop musicians churn out odes to the infant Savior; people miss going to church; some even go; Gospel truth is enshrined in stalwart institutions like “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “It’s a Wonderful Life”; and even the newer, sentimental productions of Christmas Time tend to tell the old Christians truth that it is Good to Give and Bad to Hoard. Everywhere the basic social order of Christianity becomes the norm and governing principle, and liberalism, where it does rear its head and assert its right, appears obviously, and to everyone, as a Grinch.
Could all of this be explained as something less than a miracle? Has a society ever indulged in such a ritual repudiation of its own values, and survived?
I, for one, believe.