Feuilleton

✥ Early in our marriage, my wife and I lived in an uninsulated, two-bedroom house in Arlington, Virginia, which we rented from a woman who had been in the area since the Truman administration. We were always getting into scrapes with her—not because of mutual dislike, I think, but because the interests of landladies and renters are often opposed.

My most vivid memory from those days is the time our dryer broke down. I called our landlady. She didn’t believe me. After all, she had only bought the thing two years ago. It couldn’t already be breaking. Well, no, I assured her two weeks later. The dryer only starts when I give it a kick. I have to tape the door shut to keep it running. “That’s normal,” she replied. I was too timid to call her again until the day it stopped running altogether.

“Don’t you think I’m going to buy a new one,” she told me, and gave me the number of a repairman. I called him up, and his wife told me he’d come over soon. Now my repairman—let’s call him Sam—was perhaps the last of his kind. He and his wife, longtime Arlington residents, owned an appliance repair company that they ran out of their kitchen. Sam’s wife handled the business end (mostly taking calls on their home phone), while Sam did the handiwork. He drove a white pickup truck and worked with a basic toolkit, the sort you can find at Home Depot.

I took Sam to my basement and explained the problem. My dryer ran slowly, and then it didn’t run at all. Not much more to the story. “Okay,” he said. “I know how to fix this.” He opened up his toolkit and began taking the thing apart. When he had finished dismantling the dryer, he put it back together. Ah, I thought—the oldest trick in the book. “There,” he said. “Should be fine now.”

And he was right. For a few hours, the dryer ran like a dream. I completed one load. But the next day, I found myself on the phone with Sam’s wife again. Same problem, I told her. I think the door sensor is broken. “That’s too bad,” she replied. “Sam is booked. Would next week work?”

I thought about it for a moment. My wife and I really needed to do our laundry. We couldn’t wait a week. And my landlady had made it clear that Sam was the best deal in Northern Virginia; she wasn’t going to shell out for anyone else. But there were other considerations, too, the sort of hare-brained thoughts that only enter the head of a desperate renter. I had never done a load of laundry in Ohio, for instance. Now seemed as good a time as any to try it.

No, I replied after a pause. Next week won’t work. Maybe not next month either. I will let you know.

Then came a long period of wandering. My wife and I loaded our station wagon with suitcases full of dirty clothes and for the next few months we drove around the country doing laundry at friends’ houses. We dried clothes in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Nebraska—a relentless push west until the circumstances of daily life called us home.

By then, I had grown used to our way of life. There didn’t seem to be a point in fixing the dryer, especially when every few weeks I could take our sopping wet clothes over to my parents’ house and run a cycle while I caught up with my brothers. So I delayed in calling Sam, and I pushed off updating my landlady.

But around Christmas, a long email shook me to my senses. My landlady informed me that since Sam had not actually fixed my dryer, she had no intention of paying him. And, she added, Sam’s wife had just told her that she and her husband were shutting down the business in a few months. If Sam didn’t fix the dryer before he retired, my landlady said, he would never see a dime.

I liked Sam and hadn’t realized that he had not been paid. So I called his wife, and she said that he was available the next day. When he showed up, we repeated the same ritual. He took the dryer apart while I got him a cup of coffee.

“These damn things weren’t built to last,” he said as he installed a new door sensor. “They all become trash in a few years. Everything does.” When Sam finished, he left in a huff. He retired several weeks later. I am told my old landlady hasn’t bothered to fix the dryer since.

—Nic Rowan

✥ We are pleased to present the following extracts from a forthcoming book, 1054 and All That: A New History of the Catholic Church:

At some point between 66 and 90 A.D., the Gospels of Saint Mark, Saint Matthew, and Saint Luke were written. Saint John’s Gospel came later because his was more abstract and poetic, whereas the other three—which historians called the “Synopsis Gospels”—just tell the story. Scholars have devised the QAnon hypothesis to explain how it is that all the things Our Lord said to Saint Matthew and Saint Luke were forgotten by Saint Mark. Traditionalists, who believe that the books of the Bible were written by their own authors, maintain that QAnon is modernism, a heresy condemned by Saint Pius X, founder of the controversial priestly society.

It was not until later that other gospels were discovered and translated by the well-known scholar Elliot Pagels. These are sometimes referred to as the “Agnostic Gospels” because no one knows whether they were written or not. In 2002 they became controversial after they inspired Dan Brown to write a bestselling novel whose plot revolves around Jesus finding the Holy Grail and entrusting it after his death to his father, Joseph, who later shared it with Rudolf Steiner. Experts are quick to point out that Brown’s story—which features a secret society called the Elders of Zion—has no basis in fact.

In Her early years, the Church was subjected to frequent persecution. This changed when Constantine the Great became emperor in 306, which some historians believe was a bad thing because it meant that Christians could no longer render unto Caesar. Constantine disagreed with them, however, and sent his mother, Saint Helena, on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Saint Helena, whose birthplace was not in Montana as earlier hagiographers naïvely assumed, was a beautiful and pious woman who had convinced her son not to follow in the footsteps of his father, Constantius, who had divorced her years earlier in New York. Her travels were later commemorated with the feast of the Invention of the True Cross. In 1960, Pope Good Saint John XXIII removed this feast from the General Roman Calendar because he did not believe Saint Helena had actually invented it, but in parts of Latin America, where they do, the feast continues to be celebrated on May 3.

***

In 1865, Cardinal Newman wrote his famous apology. This was addressed to Cardinal Manning, who refused to accept it because he said that Newman had a “low view” of the temporary power of the papacy. While Manning believed that the popes’ temporary power was actually endless, Newman argued that it was in fact only temporary. Newman was the greatest English churchman of his age. He had many non-Catholic friends and admirers, including Joanna Trollope, the novelist. His apology, which was published as a book, was widely admired upon publication, which led to him having breakfast with Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Years later, during the first Vatican Council, Newman argued privately that while popes could be infallible if they chose, most of them rightly considered it impolite.

***

Pius X was a mostly unimportant pope who is remembered for only two things, both of which were already discussed in an earlier chapter. Apart from condemning the works of Eldon Tyrell and other modernists, he is best known for deforming the breviary and for breaking an oath.

***

In the years leading up to the Second Vatican Council, there arose a movement calling for reform of the Church. Among its leaders was John Courtney Murray, a priest famous for his authorship of numerous books, including The Second Sex, and for his promotion of issues related to religious liberty, such as the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This was also when the Church finally became aware of human dignity, which had previously been thought lost. It was a period of significant upheaval. Jean-Luc Goddard directed The Ottaviani Intervention, and there were clown Masses, so called because they were celebrated in circus tents and other places where the old Latin Mass was only occasionally prohibited.

The chaos only came to an end after the elevation of Józef Wojtyła (pronounced “Wodge-tilla”) to the papacy. Pope Saint John Paul II was called the “Great,” like Gregory the Great, except that John Paul II was even greater. As pope he made numerous reforms, appointed bishops such as Roger Mahony and Theodore McCarrick, and invited leaders from other faith traditions, including al-Qaeda and Archbishop Lefebvre, to engage in dialogue. It used to be assumed that after Pope Saint John Paul II the Great, ecclesiastical history had ended, but Pope Benedict XVI was accused of starting it all over again after issuing his well-known motu proprio authorizing the use of the 1998 I.C.E.L. translation of the missal. His successor was Pope Francis I.