Rome Fiddles while Nero Burns
I watched a video interview today conducted by Bishop Barron. It was all shop talk about abstruse theology, with a few French phrases thrown in for good measure, a kind of airy intellectualism that made me wonder how such intelligent and narrowly well-educated people can be so horribly wrong about basic human decency. Not a peep about real people or real problems. Not a whisper about the collapse of our politics or the blatant hypocrisy of the Church or the fascist enthusiasm of our neighbors.
It was all supremely unreal, in the face of the moral collapse and suffering that surrounds us.
It reminded me of this anecdote about Eric Voegelin, told by one of his students ...
Did anyone ever tell you the story about how Adorno and Horkheimer tried to lure [Voegelin] to Frankfurt? It is an anecdote he told freÂquently. After the war, when they were rebuilding the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, he was invited to come. And he said that he went through Frankfurt, which was in ruins, and he was totally shaken by the sight.
He came to visit Horkheimer and Adorno for a dinner, during which they tried to persuade him to join the institute. He said that it was a dinner of the most unbelievable bourgeois, high-class quality; the discussion was about the quality of the wine and the horrors of capitalism! And to see this son of a banker, Horkheimer, and Adorno discussing the horrors of capitalism and to see the unbelievable refinement of that dinner in the middle of misery–that was what persuaded him to stay away.