Van Morrison's Very Catholic Album

In the last 40 years America has moved left. And one of the most effective tricks the left uses is to deny that this leftward movement has taken place, and decry any centrists left as hopelessly right-wing.

This is an argument I have made before, but it so affects our culture that it bears repeating. Think about it: someone today who is for civil unions but against gay marriage, for a balanced budget, and not envious of the rich is virtually called a neo-Nazi.

John Podhoretz recently wrote that liberals stopped understanding conservative ideas a long time ago, even while conservatives are able to articulate the liberal ideas in order to dispute them.

When it comes to things like Catholicism, the situation is even worse. This can be traced back to at least the early 1970s. "Has the Church lost its soul?" This was the question posed by Newsweek on October 4, 1971. In a lengthy story written by Kenneth Woodward, the writer himself offered the answer: "The 'soul' of the U.S. Church -- an integral Catholic subculture with its own distinctive blend of rituals and rules, mystery and manners -- has vanished from the American scene."

A poll taken by Newsweek bore that out. Sixty-three percent of Catholics had not gone to confession within the previous eight weeks. Sixty percent did not think someone who divorced and remarried was committing a sin. Ninety-two percent could not name a decision made by the Conference of Catholic Bishops that had been important in their life. Seventy-three percent favored teaching sex education in schools -- both Catholic and public. A third were against the Vietnam War, and more than half thought priests should be able to get married. Fifty percent also thought it was fine to reject the Church teaching on contraception.

Of all respondents, 75% were 18 to 35. And according to Woodward, there was no holding back the liberal tide: "Both theologically and politically, conservatism has been reduced to a sectarian movement in American Catholicism, led largely by disgruntled converts devoted to the hopeless task of preserving the Church in a mold made by earlier generations. There are no compelling conservative minds in the Catholic press."

Perhaps Woodward had never heard of Paul Quay, Rudolph Allers, Dietrich von Hildebrand, or even Jacques Maritain, a liberal who had expressed his doubt in the direction of the post-Vatican II Church in his book The Peasant of the Garonne.

Once upon a time, the left understood conservative ideas and engaged with them. I have noted before the deep spirituality, and even common-sense conservatism, of some of the writings of Lester Bangs, who is considered one of the world's greatest rock critics.

In Bangs's reflection on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, he writes that when the album came out in 1968 he was deeply depressed: "nerves shredded and ghosts and spiders looming across the mind." Then he writes this: "in the condition I was in, [Astral Weeks] assumed at the time the quality of a beacon, a light on the far shores of the murk; what's more, it was proof that there was something left to express artistically besides nihilism and destruction."

Yet in Astral Weeks "there was a redemptive element in the blackness, ultimate compassion for the suffering of others, and a swath of pure beauty and mystical awe that cut right through the heart of the work." This was a tonic, wrote Bangs, because "the self-destructive undertow that always accompanied the great sixties party had an awful lot of ankles firmly in its maw and was pulling straight down." In another piece, Bangs made this observation: "There's a new culture shaping up [in 1970], and while it's certainly an improvement on the repressive society now nervously aging, there is a strong element of sickness in our new, amorphous institutions. The cure bears viruses of its own."

Bang's Astral Weeks review has a striking passage about the song "Madame George." It's a song about a transvestite, but there is nothing vulgar about it -- it is rather a celebration of the humanity of even the strangest of us. "The beauty, sensitivity, holiness of the song," Bangs writes, "is that there's nothing at all sensationalist, exploitative, or tawdry about it; in a way Van is right when he insists it's not about a drag queen...it's about a person, like all the best songs, all the greatest literature."

Bangs then goes on a magnificent digression about the problem of seeing the miracle of each human life, and how doing so can almost be too much to bear:

As I write this, I can read in the Village Voice the blurbs of people opening heterosexual S&M clubs in Manhattan, saying things like, 'S&M is just another equally valid form of love. Why people can't accept that we'll never know.' Makes you want to jump out of a fifth floor window rather than read about it, but it's hardly the end of the world; it's not nearly as bad as the hurts that go on everywhere everyday that are taken so casually by all of us as facts of life. Maybe it boils down to how much you actually want to subject yourself to. If you accept for even a moment the idea that each human life is as precious and delicate as a snowflake and then you look at a wino in a doorway, you've got to hurt until you feel like a sponge for all those other [expletive's] problems....so you stop feeling. But you know that then you begin to die.

In 1968, when Bang's piece was in his depression, Karol Woytyla, who had become the bishop of Krakow, Poland, wrote the following in a letter:

I devote my very rare free moments to a work that is close to my heart and devoted to the metaphysical sense and mystery of the person. It seems to me that the debate today is being played out on that level. The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person. This evil is even more of the metaphysical order than of the moral order. To this disintegration planned at times by atheistic ideologies we must propose, rather than sterile polemics, a kind of "recapitulation" of the inviolable mystery of the person.

Here we have two very similar ideas (down to the italicizing of the word person) coming from the pens of two great writers. Imagine if Bangs, or any other liberal writer submitted such a piece to the mainstream media today. It would never see the light of day.