Of Dante and Our Current Crisis

Friends: Be sure to read Bob Royal’s second Synod Report from Rome. You’ll find the link at the site in a note above Tony Esolen’s column.    Of Dante and Our Current Crisis Anthony Esolen on the sin of bad bishops: simony. They replace the bride of Christ with a male in drag and set him about to pander and procure. In these bad days I have called to mind Dante’s Inferno.  I think of the structure of the City of Dis, the Hell within Hell.  Outside of its miserable walls are punished those sinners who gave in to immoderate desires for things that are naturally good, such as the intercourse of the sexes, male and female, food and drink, and wealth; and who misused faculties that are natural to the human person, such as anger and the longing for rest.             But your ticket for entry into Dis is an active malice, the tang of loving things that are simply evil.

            The first of these sinners are the heretics, whose prime representatives are men of powerful intellect who denied the immortality of the soul, and therefore cut themselves off intellectually from the roots of life itself.  It is an offense against the image of God in man.  They dwell in tombs just within the walls of Dis, and are as it were the front end of a pair of brackets, enclosing all of Dis’s depraved citizens. 

           At the other end, in Hell’s dead center and bottom, we will find the traitors, the worst of whom, Judas Iscariot, is chewed and mangled forever by the worst of the fallen angels, Satan.

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           In one of those pouches we find the Simoniacs, those who traded in ecclesiastical offices; they are planted upside down in holes in the ground that parody the baptismal font, with their feet slicked with oil and set aflame. https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2018/10/04/of-dante-and-our-current-crisis/