McCarrick is dead. He was a part of a much bigger evil

Mr. (formerly Cardinal) Theodore "Uncle Ted" McCarrick has died. 

His predatory sexual advances to seminarians were well known even in the early 1980s, apparently, but he became one of the most powerful men in the Catholic Church. 

Pope Francis was his protégé and cancelled the restrictions that Pope Benedict XVI had placed on Uncle Ted. 

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote: Chaucer and Margaret Thatcher

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote...

My favourite poet began his most famous work in the springtime of England, when we were devout Catholics. What would Chaucer think of us could he see us now, as I hope he can?

He'd certainly be pro-European as his England was half French, still essentially ruled by Norman French and indulgent of sexual sins except for men on men. 

I read in the early 1990s A.W. Ward's Life of Chaucer (1909) in the Macmillan Men of Letters series. Ward said that even though Chaucer's England was very different from ours the English were already very enterprising and good at business. 

I suddenly saw with much pain that I had been wrong about Mrs Thatcher. She was a conservative (In her time I had never thought she was) and trying to restore England.

I am one person away from Mark Twain and Thomas Hardy

 

From 'The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick-Maker: The Story of Britain Through Its Census, Since 1801' By Roger Hutchinson (2017)

I wrote before in this blog that Frederic Harrison said his first memory was of his father paying a very rare visit to the nursery in 1837 and saying,

'Frederic, I am going to tell you something now that you will remember for the rest of your life. The King is dead.'