The Weekly Sanfedisti

      My formative years were dominated by the 1980s, the smiling gentle image of Ronald Reagan, the warm waves he recieved from cheering throngs of supporters, a Middle America of hard working plumbers and doctors and steel mill workers. The omnipresence of the red, white and blue against the existential foreign threat of Communism. In my childhood, that is the America I thought existed, that still existed, of course I was born near the turn of the millenium with no experience of the 80s, I had devoured the Fox News Propaganda, as well as that from the endless swarm of GOP Presidential candidates who would quote Reagan for every policy question. I remember in College I had attended a meet and greet for a Republican running for Governor and someone had asked him "what relevance is Reagan to someone who wasn't even alive during his Presidency?" the question seemed to have stumped him as he largely ignored it and went on some long-winded diatribe about "freeing industr...

   Whenever I watch the inauguration of a new president I am drawn to the prayer given by the greying Bishop presiding over the ceremony, I think when will be the last time a Prince of the Church will be invited to such an occassion, a hundred years from now? two? Our Church is fast fading into irrelevancy and the aging hierarchy has barely noticed, reforms and reformers have shaped the Church to their whim to the dismay of elderly grandmothers everywhere who still cover their head in deference to God, to the embarassment of reformist prelates. From ritual to language to the very superiority of the Church as the true religion, everything has been shaken by the reformers except perhaps something fundamental, going all the way back to Constantine and Theodosius and continued to through the prayer of the greying Bishop - the Church-State collaboration.      The Church-State relationship should ideally be harmonious and complementary, with some examples being the ki...