The Radical Courage of Charles A. Coulombe

This entry is again mainly just a pointer, a pointer to a very long piece that has now been placed in the Reviews.

But first a very personal notation …

2009 was a year wherein I was hit, HIT very deeply indeed by the writings of one Charles A. Coulombe.

One Charles A. Coulombe, Catholic American author and Papal Knight, who among other things astonished me by making contact through the comments boxes here …

Charles A. Coulombe who has been stirring, moving, provoking, enriching me in countless ways throughout the last twelve months.

Who is Charles A. Coulombe?

His own introduction to himself can be found here …

As to my own feeble answers to such a profound question, allow me simply to moot this.

No doubt many surfing to his website might find content they consider of an outrageous audacity.

But one thing one certainly cannot fault Mr Coulombe for is a lack of GUTS.

The American Mr Coulombe risks one of the worst stigmas of all in America … that of being labelled “Un-American”.

For he has the courage to point out, among many other things, that his own country is the victim of an ideology-cum-religion, which he is hardly the first to call “Americanism”.

For as he ably points out in his book, in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century countless Catholics, including Popes, warned of the dangers of this “Americanism”. This is not a reference to the country itself, but to the quasi-religion that inhabits her.

And Mr Coulombe has the courage among many other things, to stick unflinchingly to the consequences of his Catholicism and not water it down for public appeal.

The Catholicism of Charles A. Coulombe seems to me hardly more radical than that of the Popes up until Pius XI (†1939), at very least.

Mr Coulombe knows he is simply consistent with Catholic tradition at least until that time.

It is also no less radical than Catholic orthodoxy of centuries.

Which means that by the standards of the modern America he inhabits of 2010, it is very, very radical indeed. At least, if one has the courage to draw out the consequences. And stick to them.

Stick to them, Mr Coulombe certainly does. I am not in agreement with him on all points, including a Feeneyite reading of Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus.

BUT I would like to at least try to be humble and say, there is a very great deal of importance I have to learn from Mr. Coulombe. Indeed I already have learned a very great deal indeed …

A very great deal of importance …

One of my fears concerning the good knight´s crusade is that he will end up mainly “preaching to the choir”. That is, to those of us more traditional Catholics who do not automatically take it as read that in the contemporary dogmas of modern secularism, we have now reached the undisputed highpoint of civilisational wisdom over millennia - which are not to be contested without provoking wrath.

And that where the Church agrees it can be indulgently tolerated, but God forbid where it disagrees …

I would like very much to see if Mr Coulombe may be heard beyond the choir. Although in fact, I do recognise that one of his explicit goals is to strengthen the choir. And as far as I am concerned, his work in this regard is not in vain. For it has certainly helped to focus and strengthen me in clafying crucial issues.

With these and many other things in mind, I have written a very long review of his epic Puritan´s Empire. I think that even less traditional Catholics, indeed non-Catholics could learn a very great of value about the Americanist assumptions which have been controlling our world to ever greater degrees for decades now …

But alas, his dissonant and courageous voice may remain buried beneath layer after layer of cultural conditioning and prejudice.

I would also like to remark that there are very significant convergences between the counter-revolutionary Catholic political thinking of Valentin Tomberg and that of Mr. Coulombe. And that this is a theme to which I intend to return.

My long review of Puritan´s Empire can be found here.