“Let priests take care not to accept from the liberal any ideas which, under the mask of good, pretend to reconcile justice with iniquity. Liberal Catholics are wolves in sheep’s clothing. The priest must unveil to the people their perfidious plot, their iniquitous design. You will be called papist, clerical, RETROGRADE, intolerant. But pay no heed to the derision and mockery of the wicked. Have courage. You must never yield, nor is there any need to yield. You must go into the attack whole-heartedly, not in secret but in public, not behind barred doors, but in the open, in view of all.”
—Bishop Sarto (later Pope Pius X).1
A retrograde is one of “God’s spies,” to borrow Shakespeare’s term. A retrograde is a “deplorable 2.0”—the thinking man’s version. A retrograde calculates, night and day, how to return to the Old World Order of moral and sexual decency, familial patriarchy, local rule and subsidiarity, classical masculinity and femininity, Christian liberty, republican sovereignty, national borders, faith and hope and charity, goodness and beauty and truth, and most subtly and most importantly, the social kingship of Christ.
Recall Boromir of Gondor’s words about reclaiming Osgiliath: “This city was once a jewel of our kingdom! A place of light and beauty and music. And so it shall be once more! Let the armies of Mordor know this: never again will the land of my people fall into enemy hands. The city of Osgiliath has been reclaimed for Gondor.”2
Notwithstanding his eloquence, the retrograde is a devastatingly effective counterpuncher—with good reason.
In reference to the planned 2016 infiltration of the American Catholic Church by operatives connected to the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, Republican Representative Paul Ryan reacted thus: “To despise the Catholic Church, accusing her of being ‘seriously retrograde’ [as Clinton’s campaign did] is an insult to millions of people in this entire country.”3
Representative Ryan was wrong: to be counted a “retrograde” by the radicals should be an honor worn on the lapels like a badge. In an era of profound spiritual and moral crisis like ours, the retrograde must joyfully cultivate the virtue of righteous fustiness. He must understand that in the trenches, laughter is war.
The retrograde has the unique capacity for understanding the discomfiture between the degenerate, radical-infiltrated world of decay on one side and the well-meaning but clueless Christian world on the other. The retrograde recognizes that the overwhelming majority of Christians today clearly have no interest in evangelizing the undecided world, which lies somewhere between Christianity and radicalism (usually naively favoring radicalism).
Under a shadow of such desolate and universal reach, becoming one of God’s spies amounts to a last resort and a pure necessity. It involves not “deep cover,” acting like the enemy, but rather “half cover,” acting as a conservative “contra” in the secular arena. The retrograde is a crypto-Christian counterinsurgent willing to fight like a Navy Seal and to think like a counterintelligence officer.
Although these rules for retrogrades will never involve the commission of any intrinsic evil—violating any one of the Ten Commandments—the task is grim and gritty and not for the faint of heart. In fact, this brief introduction will be one of the least subtle references to the book’s religious reason for being.
God’s spies should adopt the mien of mixed martial arts hall of famer Bas Rutten and the mission of Father Gabrielle Amorth.
The following forty rules govern the retrograde program of attack, recovering then resuscitating the Christian West. Scattershot at first, the retrograde tends to a rescue mission, since, over the course of the last century, the West’s “conservatives” were so entirely asleep at the wheel. Such “conservatives” over the last three generations have forfeited to radicals almost every inch of the landscape without a fight. It is nothing more than feckless cowardice masquerading as Christian charity. Initially, we must recover whatever ground we can. These forty rules should provide a brusque and, at times, abrupt start.
As our momentum in reclaiming the West grows, so too will our organizational principles sharpen. But for starters, the rules for retrogrades will deliberately involve action which—although calculated—will be blunt, non-surgical, and even artless in some places. The hour is late and the road before us is both winding and long. The fight ahead, that of re-Christianizing the neo-pagan West, will be ugly. It will be a war of attrition. We will fight with everything we have: our intellects, our hearts, and, if necessary, our bodies.
Retrogrades … to the streets: our aim is to reverse the deuced machinations of radicals like Saul Alinsky, who provided the inspiration for these rules by dedicating to Lucifer his Rules for Radicals.
Lest we forget to give a reverent acknowledgment to the very first retrograde: from Sacred Scripture and Tradition, the prince of the heavenly host who fought valiantly to preserve the Holy Name of God in the face of diabolical sacrilege, and who did it so effectively that he cast like lightning the Deceiver of the Whole World, Lucifer, and his cabal of demons from the heights of heaven into the pits of hell—St. Michael the Archangel.
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1 Fr. Hieronymo Dal Gal, St. Pius X: Life of the Beatus, 1954.
2 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, extended ed. directed by Peter Jackson (New Line Cinema, 2002).
3 Alexandre Meyer, “Rivelazioni di WikiLeaks: lo staff della Clinton ha fomentato ‘infiltrazioni’ nella Chiesa Cattolica,” Aleteia.org, October 17, 2016.