It isn’t everyday that a homilist has you sitting up (metaphorically) taking notes.
Sadly, many priests these days see opportunities for “innovation” not in the preparation of their homilies but rather in butchering the rest of the Mass. The Catholics of Lismore have been blessed with powerful, traditional organ-driven liturgical music, reverent priests, black letter theology and truly beautiful Cathedral architecture. In these post-Vatican II times, it is almost old school high Anglican. Not coincidentally, it may all have more than a little to do with the recent, sixteen-year tenure as Bishop of Geoffrey Jarrett, a cradle Anglican.
Bible scholars, cradle Christians and casual readers with a scriptural bent will be familiar with the story of Jesus angrily removing the money lenders and market produce sellers from “His Father’s House”. Today I heard things I didn’t know and had not heard before. And the resonance for our times was striking.
The traditional narrative has Jesus righteously angry with those turning the Temple into a market place. He kicked them out, with force, and told them and everyone else why. When questioned on what authority He did this, He explained that He could destroy the Temple and rebuild it in three days. The Easter events occurring shortly thereafter proved Him to be speaking the truth.
But there is a back story. As I discover. It wasn’t just about the commercialisation of a sacred space. It turns out that the High Priest-endorsed sellers were a protected, corrupt cartel, ripping off those who travelled from far away to the Holy City for the Passover and were in need of purchasing animals to slaughter. They were extracting a premium. Woolworths-like, they were price gouging.
They were scammers! Monopolists. Corrupt. Who knew? The Son of God was pushing back against scamming. Deo gratias.
There were three reasons that Jesus was SO angry in the Temple. The offence to His Father (of course). The destruction of reverence for those who were there at the Temple to worship and pray (God help Catholics in many parishes today). And the corruption and hypocrisy of it all. The homilist suggested that Jesus was most (repeatedly) angry in the Gospels about hypocrisy. Which might be reassurance to those of us who sin massively in other areas.
The lesson for us? Righteous anger is okay. Especially anger at corruption. Anger directed at evil and used for positive good is not just acceptable. It is needed. Essential. And, perhaps most important of all, we have a duty to identify, root out and destroy system corruption.
Which brings us, neatly, to the corruption all around us in our own times. Jesus may well be on the side of the whistleblower. And those who push back against the corrupt state.
I hope so.
Edward Snowden. Julian Assange. Daniel Ellsberg (he of the Pentagon papers in the 1960s). The Covid medic-warriors. The NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption. Gerard Rennick and the others of the Covid Five. Tucker Carlson. Peter McCullough. Andrew Bridgen. The freedom micro parties. Mark Steyn and the climate scam hunters. The critics of pork barrelling. ICAC had a little to say about that.
Defined as “the allocation of public funds and resources to targeted electors for partisan political purposes”, the ICAC concluded that pork barrelling can, under certain circumstances, involve serious breaches of public trust and conduct that amount to corrupt conduct.
The public corruption of our age and the indifference to it from voters and the media are scandals, true enough. The list of corrupt actions in out time is long and ghastly.
· Some of it falls under Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”. Following orders, like Adolph Eichmann.
· Bureaucrats who look the other way, to protect their jobs.
· NSW police officers who protected the Teacher’s Pet murderer and sex abuser, Chris Dawson.
· The bishops who “moved on” known, proven sex offenders.
· Chief Health Officers who knew, or should have known, that Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates were killing people, as well as destroying their freedom.
· Academics who saw funding opportunities provided by Big Pharma research grants as the main game.
· Politicians who defended – yes, actually defended – pork barrelling as normal governance practice.
The policy scams of the age are legendary. Ponzi schemes. Money laundering exercises. Mass immigration. The Ukraine war. Net zero. These lies are big lies. They cost trillions of dollars. ScoMo’s Covid play comes to mind. He bet the whole Australian economy on anti-science, unproven, corrupt, bought-by-Big-Pharma bureaucratic advice. That he was clueless in the face of the system doesn’t excuse it.
There are many definitions of corruption. Here is one:
Corruption can be defined and categorized in different ways. The most common types or categories of corruption are supply versus demand corruption, grand versus petty corruption, conventional versus unconventional corruption and public versus private corruption.
https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/rgnzd-crm-brf-48/rgnzd-crm-brf-48-en.pdf
Victoria’s Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission defines corruption as follows:
Corruption is the misuse of public power, position or funds. It can happen through:
· improper or unlawful actions
· failure to act by public sector staff or agencies
· people trying to improperly influence the functions or decisions of the public sector.
https://www.ibac.vic.gov.au/what-is-corruption
The most cursory examination of Victoria’s recent governance would have one raising eyebrows, on this definition. God help us all.
There is petty corruption. Where politicians and others with one hand on the levers of power seek to enrich their bank accounts. Think Russ Hinze of the Joh days in 1980s Queensland. Then there is system corruption. Think climate policy, or mass immigration, for example. Where a whole cadre of ruling class operatives tell big lies that will impoverish the people in pursuit of a self-serving ideology.
Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, provides a good case study in the contrast of (small) private and (massive) public corruption.
Whatever the fate of his ongoing private corruption accusations, he did something much worse. He and his buddy Albert Boula, the CEO of Pfizer, together made the people of Israel a giant experimental lab for an untested, unnecessary, ineffective, dangerous Covid vaccine. People died. Bibi, as a vaccine evangelist, helped to set the scene for a massive, lethal, global lie. Now, THAT is corruption. By world, historical standards. It doesn’t get much worse.
Petty corrupt politicians are a minor and predictable problem. They all do it! We all saw the “rural independents”, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, who sold their souls back in the early 2010s for hospital upgrades (in Tamworth) and dual carriageway roads (into Port Macquarie).
System corruption perpetrators, not so much. The old leftist notion of “hegemony” is, surprisingly, useful here.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/hegemony
The elites’ utterly successful project to embed a corrupt system in the public’s acquiescence, witnessed in so many ways, like Covid and post-Covid surveillance subservience, has seen a profound transformation in our political culture. The voting public is weakened, rendered irrelevant, feeling powerless in the face of the system and the endless offenders. Worst of all, the voters seem to have a reached the conclusion, what can you do? Most do nothing.
Is corruption embedded in the democratic system?
The public choice theorists, like (Nobel Prize winners) James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, think so. Public policy practitioners have private interests, they say. They act on them. We all live with the consequences.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html
One of these is the easy acceptance of corporatism, the outsourcing of core government functions to the unelected, off-shoring, privatisation, and all the other core elements of de-democratisation. The militarisation of the polity.
Corrupting the very process of democracy is corruption, big time. It doesn’t get any bigger.
There is an ongoing debate over the role of, and need, for, anti-corruption bodies like the NSW ICAC. Those who value the rule of law, like Chris Merritt, use rule of law arguments to castigate ICAC for its allegedly brutal methods. He calls it a “kangaroo court”.
https://www.ruleoflaw.org.au/is-icac-a-kangaroo-court/
My response to these well-meant arguments is always the same. Get rid of the political corruption, then we won’t need an ICAC. Simple. When elections are corrupted by false promises and the ignoring by politicians of their “mandates”, perhaps the naked, exposed, defenceless voter might well be thinking, ICAC is all we’ve got. Our votes don’t change anything. Ever.
Look at Victoria (if you must). Its judicial system is corrupt, from top to bottom. There is, seemingly, no electoral path to redemption. When both branches of the “unity party” agree on so much that is corrupt in the system. When all the major parties profit from its continuance. Look at Queensland in the 1980s. We needed a Tony Fitzgerald, then. Everyone agreed on that, at the time. Unfortunately, we still do.
So, then, as now, there is corruption in the Temple. And righteous anger is the appropriate response. We have a very good source on this. St John’s Gospel.
Paul Collits
3 March 2024
Indeed. But it only through prayer with The light of God shining in dark places that corruption is uncovered. The brave ones you mention are shining the light.
As for the two major conflicts there are solutions and resolution for them but in one case the west is using it as proxy war against the invader and the other, the ones that caused the war are using it as a proxy war for the advancement of Shia Islam.
So the Ukraine war is a "legendary policy scam" ? Try telling that to the Ukrainians who are fighting, suffering and dying for their independence. Independence from a revanchist imperial power led by a murderous psychopath with delusions of grandeur.
Currently we have a remarkably similar situation to that in the 1930s when 3 fascist powers (with the collaboration of communist Russia) were set on a course for territorial expansion. There were the usual pathetic apologists and collaborators in the West then as well.
The result was World War 2 with many millions of dead and immense destruction due to earlier appeasement.
Maybe you need a history lesson or two, Mr Collits. But you certainly need figurative surgery to remove the scales from your eyes.