This was startling to see at the top of one of my favorite blogs this morning:
Nothing like a little marketing hyperbole to blast from the cover of your book…
Here’s the post. Little Victims was a roman a clef which includes an exposé of sorts of his time at a Catholic boarding school, rife with homosexual activity, not only between students, but between masters and students. Published in 1933, and then as the blog goes on:
Rumbold published Little Victims while still at Oxford, and quickly faced the price of his youthful choices. When attending a service in the private chapel of the Old Palace in Oxford soon after its publication, Father Ronald Knox refused to offer him the Sacrament.
“When he reached me,” Rumbold later recalled, “He snatched the silver plate our of my hands and passed it one to the next person.” When Rumbold later wrote Knox demanding an explanation, Knox replied, “A few weeks ago I heard from the Archbishop of Birmingham that somebody had called attention to your novel, and asked if some public notice ought not to be taken of it.” The Archbishop told Knox that Rumbold ought not to be admitted to Communion. “The whole book is foul and offensive, and unless he withdraws it from circulation, and says he is sorry for having published it, I do not see how we can allow him to receive Holy Communion.”
“I have written a very moral book,” Rumbold told reporters when news of the Archbishop’s decision became public. “I have attacked every kind of sexual license, but my Archbishop, like most of the Catholic hierarchy, has no powers of discrimination. I wish I knew what he objects to in my novel.”
“I was at a Catholic school. People seem to believe that Catholic schools are immune from vice and different from Protestant schools. That is untrue. They are worse. How can I make Catholic schools pure unless I point out first of all how bad they are?” To some extent, he had a point. Its settings aside, Little Victims is as much a moralistic tract as Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, including its melodramatic ending (Christopher finds himself incapable of heterosexual love, goes mad, and shoots himself).
Rumbold told reporters that he would appeal to the Pope. “I feel sure his Holiness will reinstatement, being a man of great sense and intelligence,” he assured them. He swore that he would travel to Rome for a private audience with the Pope, but there’s no evidence that ever took place.
I read this blog and Larry Chapp’s blog and they connect for me in the question of how does one find the Good News in the midst of such Hell. Apparently Mr. Rumbold fell literally into the Abyss after a long life of frequent misery. What does today’s American Catholic Church offer to help such a person? If one starts from the Epicurean frame of very many American Catholics, Mr. Rumbold was living a live of “pleasure” and many would say he should have “Pride” in his behavior. From the frame of C.S. Lewis in the Great Divorce, Mr. Rumbold was living a life of Hell, from which only the love of Jesus can rescue him if he walks away from Hell, a change of direction which requires some pain and suffering. If his autobiographical details are accurate, he certainly got both barrels from his parents, so his behavior is understandable.
My question is how does the American Catholic Church, now, help people to walk away from Hell, however they practice it? That is what I have always wanted and I am grateful to have found people who helped me. However, they were usually outside of the standard, established Church community. Sure, the “Church” offers sacraments and sacramentals. The question is, how does the Church offer the services of the bus driver, transporting people closer to Heaven and Theosis?