The anti-statue movement has taken a turn into absurdity

The United States’ frenzy of statuary iconoclasm has taken a turn into the theater of the absurd. Knocking down or defacing statues of national founders or heroes not only displays ignorance of history but also assaults the principles of Western civilization that allow for racial progress to continue.

Destroying statues is often a part of revolutionary movements. Patriots tore down a statue of King George III as the American Revolution gained steam, and those seeking freedom from communism’s vile yoke pulled down the monuments to their oppressors, Lenin and Stalin. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the protests over the killing of George Floyd have targeted edifices honoring the heroes of the Confederacy. As the Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Stephens, said in his “cornerstone speech,” the Confederacy rested on “the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.” Monuments to this revolting sentiment have no place in a United States that is dedicated to the opposite principle — that all men are created equal.

That principle was first politically enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, and it has been America’s cornerstone ever since. All reasonable people acknowledge that it has been inconsistently applied throughout our nation’s history, but that principle has been the fuel of every movement that brought further emancipation. The early suffragists explicitly appealed to it at the first women’s rights meeting, the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. Abraham Lincoln opposed slavery under its banner, and Franklin D. Roosevelt created the New Deal by citing its promise. The greatest speech of the 1960s civil rights revolution, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, is a masterful disquisition on that immortal principle. It is America’s gift to the world.

Protesters who tear down statues to brave warriors who fought to more fully implement that principle mock and dishonor the idea that enables us to become a more perfect union. George Washington owned slaves, but he also founded a nation dedicated to the idea whose incompatibility with slavery made its eradication inevitable. Defacing or toppling his monuments dishonors the country. More than any man save Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant destroyed the Confederacy with his magisterial generalship. As president, he tried to extend the Civil War’s purpose by presiding over the Reconstruction of the South, an effort that was abandoned only after he left office. Toppling his statue — as protesters did in San Francisco, citing a slave whom Grant was gifted and later freed before the war — is ahistorically ludicrous.

There are those who say that Western civilization itself ought to be undone — that monuments to people such as these ought to be destroyed because of their participation in an endeavor that included global colonialism and racism. This fever has extended elsewhere, as statues to the English sailor Capt. James Cook, the man who brought knowledge of Australia and New Zealand to Europe, have been defaced in both countries by people who believe he paved the way for colonialism and the oppression of indigenous people. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s courage saved the world from Nazi barbarism, but his statue in London has also been vandalized for racist statements he once said.

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On Park Avenue, a Picture of the Catholic Church Divided

Here’s the broad outline: Our Saviour was a sleepy parish in the Murray Hill neighborhood of midtown Manhattan when Father George W. Rutler, noted author and preacher, was appointed its pastor in 2001. He breathed new life into it. He hired and collaborated with Ken Woo, an artist who filled the sanctuary with stunning iconography. It won awards. Rutler added the traditional Latin Mass to the weekly schedule. During his twelve-year term, twelve parishioners entered the seminary. That’s a lot. When Rutler arrived, he inherited a deficit. When he left, Our Saviour was running surpluses and had money in the bank. 

In 2013, Rutler was reassigned to a parish on the other side of town, in Hell’s Kitchen. The incoming pastor at Our Saviour told Rutler that he would keep the Latin Mass. A few weeks into his term, he discontinued it, without notice. Last summer he started removing the icons — again, without notice.

...Shortly after his arrival in 2013, the new pastor invited a man who was a server at the Latin Mass at Our Saviour to leave the parish. He left. By now, most parishioners of a more conservative or traditional sensibility have probably moved to parishes they find more congenial. If Our Saviour has been distilled to a core who are mostly okay with the new tone, what’s wrong with that? 

One possible answer is “Nothing.” We might shrug and say, “Let people sort themselves out. The Ancients are no longer welcome at Our Saviour, but the Moderns are. Good for the Moderns. Bad for the Ancients. They can go to Holy Innocents.” At that point, we’ve accepted that the Church is riven. It is, but we shouldn’t accept it. 

To the chancery at the Archdiocese of New York, a parish touched by traditional Catholicism, rooted in the Latin Mass and the preconciliar Church, may seem analogous to the immigrant ethnic parish of a century ago: Old World, un-American, unassimilated, non-English-speaking, embarrassing. They see “phase me out” written all over it. To those who assumed that Latin and all the foul dust that floated in its wake were disappeared two generations ago, it must seem like nasty, stubborn mold. “Eww, I thought we painted over that.”

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