Leonardo di Chirico has fun with semantics.

n a cat­e­go­ry of dis­cov­ery that might be called “found blogs,” I ran across this gem on a site called Defama­tion 21, cour­tesy of the ever-help­ful assis­tance of the polem­i­cal rogue Mr. John Bugay. The title of the arti­cle, by Leonar­do De Chiri­co, is “Vat­i­can Files No. 19”; and based on both its con­tents and the allu­sion (as I pre­sume) to that bizarre TV show from the 1990s, I am rather afraid that to peer into Vat­i­can Files 1–18 might take me deep­er into the realm of sci­ence fic­tion than I want to go.

Mr. Bugay rec­om­mends the arti­cle in this blog post as a “blunt and hon­est” mas­ter­piece of expo­sure. What Mr. De Chiri­co expos­es, accord­ing to Mr. Bugay, is the “Roman Catholic shell game” with the mean­ing of words. The word that both these fine upstand­ing gen­tle­men are think­ing of is “evan­ge­liza­tion.” Accord­ing to Mr. Bugay, the pur­pose of said “shell game” is to—what else?—“expand the bound­aries of the Roman church.” In Mr. Bugay’s jad­ed way of see­ing real­i­ty, Catholi­cism is not about win­ning souls for Christ; no, instead it’s about get­ting fat. Mr. Bugay blames John Paul II for all this mad­ness and trots out the typ­i­cal anti-Catholic bogey­men:

[S]ome bold Roman Catholics (like the CTC gang) … are ‘e—’ in their efforts, [but] most Roman Catholics just won’t ‘get it.’ Rome sim­ply does­n’t preach ‘the Gospel,’ it preach­es ‘sacra­ments, Mar­i­ol­o­gy, hier­ar­chy, tra­di­tions, papa­cy, devo­tions.’

Amaz­ing­ly, he leaves out Rosaries, vain rep­e­ti­tions, indul­gences, Mass cards, saints, litur­gies, vest­ments, trin­kets, baubles, and beads. But let that go long enough to take up Mr. De Chiri­co’s brave expo­sure of the Catholic abduc­tion of the E‑word. (I dare not write the whole thing, lest fire rain down on me.) For the basic gist of Install­ment No. 19 in the Vat­i­can Files is to won­der how those Catholics, wicked as they are, dare to use such a fine, upstand­ing, Protes­tant word! Mr. De Chiri­co explains his curi­ous sense of exclu­siv­i­ty and enti­tle­ment:

There was a time [Note the stan­dard fairy tale begin­ning here.] in which the [E word] meant some­thing like this: Bib­li­cal­ly, it was defined around the evan­gel (i.e., the Gospel) as it is tru­ly wit­nessed in Scrip­ture.

 

[And Mr. De Chiri­co is, of course, the very man to tell us what the “true wit­ness” of Scrip­ture is.]

 

His­tor­i­cal­ly it referred to the six­teenth cen­tu­ry Protes­tant Ref­or­ma­tion—” [Hmmm. No known usage of the word before Luther and Calvin?]—“and the E— Revivals of sub­se­quent cen­turies. Doc­tri­nal­ly, it has point­ed to Chris­t­ian ortho­doxy.

Well, we can stop here. You see the point. “Ortho­doxy,” in Mr. De Chiri­co’s anachro­nis­tic, fairy tale view of Chris­t­ian his­to­ry, rough­ly means “stuff no one dreamed up until Mar­tin Luther.”

But now—and while Mr. Bugay lays the blame for this at the feet of John Paul II, Mr. De Chiri­co lays it at the feet of George Weigel—the Catholics have come along in an attempt to steal the E word from Protes­tants. How dare they. Don’t they know that we have our cor­ner of the dic­tio­nary and they have theirs? The papists need to stay in their own ghet­to, damn it.

“The recent book by George Weigel,” Mr. De Chiri­co con­tin­ues,

is a clever attempt to re-engi­neer the word by over­look­ing its Bib­li­cal roots, by sev­er­ing its his­tor­i­cal roots and replac­ing them with oth­er roots, by chang­ing its doc­tri­nal out­look … and by rene­go­ti­at­ing its reli­gious use. … [E— Catholi­cism embraces not the Gospel but] sacra­ments, Mar­i­ol­o­gy, hier­ar­chy, tra­di­tions, papa­cy, devo­tions, etc.

Heav­ens, when will these hor­rors end? Those cul­tic papist Roman­ists have not only added books to the Bible, but now they’re adding new def­i­n­i­tions to the dic­tio­nary. You see how they play it? First they add to the word of God, and next they add to words.

Mr. De Chiri­co attempts to explain what it all amounts to in the end. (And I beg you, gen­tle read­er, if you can under­stand this, to please clar­i­fy it for me, because I am sure I don’t know, although I have tried hard to find out.)

“We start­ed,” he says,

with Socrates and we end with Vir­gil. … The sto­ry of the Tro­jan horse tells us how what seemed to be a vic­to­ry turned out to be a dev­as­tat­ing defeat. [E— Catholi­cism] may appear as an E—ly friend­ly project and we may want to wel­come it. In actu­al fact, it is an intel­lec­tu­al­ly coura­geous attempt to re-define what E— means, main­tain­ing the same spelling but giv­ing it a Roman Catholic mean­ing. It is a dif­fer­ent word alto­geth­er.

I sus­pect he’s try­ing to draw an anal­o­gy between Mr. Weigel’s book and the Tro­jan Horse, but the point of it is lost to me in the midst of the strange insis­tence that Protes­tants have squat­ters rights to the E word.

This is what pass­es for thought on the oth­er side of the Tiber Riv­er.