Over the transom from a longtime reader, this is a quote from Evelyn Waugh in his novelization of the life of St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, who went to Jerusalem, found the True Cross of Christ, and brought it and other relics of The Passion back to Rome. It is “Helena”, and NOT “Brideshead Revisited” that is Waugh’s masterpiece.
This beautiful passage applies perfectly to those people, both simple and grand, lettered and unlettered, who in these days of the Bergoglian Antipapacy and ascendancy of the Antichurch, are making “that tedious journey to the Truth.”
Let us pray that all of those people of good will who still labor and suffer under the misapprehension that Jorge Bergoglio is or ever was the Vicar of Christ have… an epiphany.
A blessed Epiphanytide to one and all.
Helena perhaps… apprehended that her fame, like theirs, would live in one historic act of devotion; that she too had emerged from a kind of ‘ουτοπία’ [Utopia] or nameless realm and would vanish like them in the sinking nursery fire-light among the picture-books and the day’s toys.
“Like me,” she said to the Magi, “you were late in coming. The shepherds were here long before; even the cattle. They had joined the chorus of angels before you were on your way. For you the primordial discipline of the heavens was relaxed and a new defiant light blazed among the disconcerted stars.
“How laboriously you came, taking sights and calculations, where the shepherds had run barefoot! How odd you looked on the road, attended by what outlandish liveries, laden with such strange gifts!
“You came at length to the final stage of your pilgrimage and the great star stood still above you. What did you do? You stopped to call on King Herod. Deadly exchange of compliments in which there began that unended war of mobs and magistrates against the innocent!
“Yet you came, and were not turned away. You too found room at the manger. Your gifts were not needed, but they were accepted and put carefully by, for they were brought with love. In that new order of charity that had just come to life there was room for you too.
“You are my especial patrons,” said Helena, “and patrons of all late-comers, of all who have had a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation, of all who through politeness make themselves partners in guilt, of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents.
“Dear cousins, pray for me,” said Helena, and “for His sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.”
