As Rabbie Burns reminded us, in his barbaric Scotch brogue, “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men/Gang aft agley,/An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,/For promis’d joy!” 

If he had been a wiser man — and been born two hundred years later — he might have recognized how his poetic insight paralleled a lesson of Friedrich Hayek’s: managerial planning and bureaucratic planners aren’t always our best guides to freedom and happiness. (READ MORE from H.W. Crocker III: Robert E. Lee, the Man for These Hard Times)

Conservatives may be wise to the depredations of bureaucrats, but they still value loyalty to individuals and institutions — even as, these days, we are rarely rewarded by either, as family, friends, successful businessmen, cultural figures, politicians, and institutions of all kinds, from alma maters to sports leagues to the FBI, surrender to the gods of wokeness. 

The most conservative institution in the world is the Catholic Church because its very mission is to conserve, proclaim, and defend an unchanging truth. The Church could very easily take as its motto the famous line of Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland, who died fighting for the royalist cause in England: “Where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” 

Yet in this divinely inspired institution the list of badly laid plans carried out by inept or corrupt authorities is a long one. That fact is captured in a new book, Persecuted from Within: How the Saints Endured Crises in the Church, by former White House speechwriters Joshua Charles and Alec Torres.  They show how even saints suffered persecution from Church officials, only to be finally vindicated. The authors cover celebrated cases (St. Athanasius, St. Thomas More, St. Padre Pio), lesser-known ones (St. Bruno, St. Mary MacKillop), an American bishop (the Venerable Fulton Sheen), and others. The authors draw religious lessons, but there are political ones as well. 

Let’s start with religion. The authors note the importance of Christian obedience. Jesus was obedient unto death, and as the authors rightly say, “none of us will get to Heaven unless we obey a will that is higher than our own.” But they also point out the distinctions made by the ever-helpful St. Thomas Aquinas between perfect obedience, sufficient obedience, disobedience, and false obedience. The last is when, in the authors’ words, “those in authority demand what is contrary to God’s will…. No one can command, for example, that you steal your neighbor’s property, commit murder, worship a false god, or reject the Catholic Faith.” An official’s authority is limited by at least three more considerations: hierarchy (with the ultimate authority being God), jurisdiction, and trust (whether the official has God’s will in mind).

The default position of the faithful Catholic is obedience, as beautifully stated by St. Francis de Sales (who is quoted in the book): 

Therefore do you obey their [ecclesial, civil, and domestic superiors’] commands as of right, but if you would be perfect, follow their counsels, and even their wishes as far as charity and prudence will allow: obey as to things acceptable…. Obey in things indifferent…. Obey in things hard, disagreeable, and inconvenient, and herein lies a very perfect obedience. Moreover, obey quietly, without answering again, promptly, without delay, cheerfully, without reluctance; and, above all, render a loving obedience for his sake who became obedience even to the death of the Cross for our sake. 

  But obedience ends when the Faith is put at risk. Every Catholic has a duty, an obligation, a responsibility to oppose false teaching; to correct error; to confront even the pope as Paul confronted Peter when he was wayward; to stand alone, even as St. John Fisher stood alone among the bishops of England against King Henry VIII. The instances where this is necessary may be relatively rare — but this is when courage, and fidelity, counts. 

There is a political lesson for conservatives here. In the left’s long march through our institutions, radicals have found little resistance from conservatives, who have been loath to stand up and defend their principles, rebuke evil authorities, and be martyred. Too often, conservatives have become grumpy but compliant yes-men, or prided themselves on their tolerance for accommodating professed ill-meaning opponents, or fled institutions instead of stubbornly working to recall them to what they should be. 

Would we not be in a better position now if every conservative professor tucked away in a think tank in Washington, D.C., instead held a chair at a university, and was fighting daily to restore sanity there; or if all the great  conservative denizens of unread op-ed web pages actually ran for office, from the city council to the school board to the statehouse; or if the brass hats at the Pentagon slammed their desks and refused to kowtow to the rainbow agenda that is making a shambles of military discipline and good order; or if businessmen stood up and cleared from their corporate halls the febrile mobs of diversity hustlers, pronoun cudgelers, and human resources commissars. (READ MORE: America’s Next Civil War Will Be Worse Than Our Last)

Restoring America, and its institutions, means the exercise of our personal resolution to defend the country we knew, the values it represents, the history it lived, the principles by which it is meant to abide, just as upholding the Faith requires our personal adherence to the Church’s unchanging truth, even in the face of severe opposition, both external and internal. The blood of the martyrs is not only the seed of the church; it is the necessary beginning for America’s next great awakening — and all of us, as faithful patriots, should heed that call.  

H.W. Crocker III is a popular historian and novelist. His classic history of the Catholic Church Triumph, updated and expanded, has just been reissued in hardcover.