From The Daily Telegraph recently:

Zelensky hailed the King as a ‘true inspiration’ Credit: Getty

Sovereign

There was a time when [His Majesty King] Charles [III] was spoken of as a “caretaker” King – a phrase his allies have always bristled at. He would fill the gap, it was thought, between the beloved and long-serving Queen Elizabeth II and a younger, vigorous King William V and his glamorous wife.

It is now clear he is doing a great deal more than that.

As Tina Brown, the former Vanity Fair editor and biographer of Diana, Princess of Wales, wrote recently: “As the British public waits for Prince William to walk through destiny’s door, the most that was expected from the transitional reign of his septuagenarian father was, in Churchill’s phrase, to just ‘keep buggering on’. And yet, Charles’s first few years as monarch have been something of a quiet triumph.”

The successes are easy to list.

The King has charmed post-Brexit Europe by addressing parliaments there in their native language, rehearsing diligently to get his French, German and Italian accents up to speed.

In May he jetted to Canada for less than 24 hours (he is, lest we forget, the King of Canada) to attend the State Opening of Parliament. It sent a message to America, in not so many words, that Canada was a sovereign nation they should stop threatening to invade.

Trump has been “very quiet” about it since, notes one British diplomat.

Charles has burnished his own diplomatic credentials with support for Ukraine, hosting President Zelenskyy for tea at Sandringham in March, shortly after Zelenskyy’s bruising encounter at the White House. 

The war was a “priority” for the King to discuss with President Trump during their private meetings during the state visit, a palace insider confirms. A week later, Trump made what appeared to be a public U-turn to say that Kyiv can “win all of Ukraine back in its original form” and is said to be growing impatient with Putin’s Russia. 

“It is interesting timing, isn’t it,” notes the source. Some Ukrainians, meanwhile, have credited the King outright.

His quest for building bridges between the faiths is ticking along without the need for speeches: he will visit the Vatican this month, and recently made a striking show of attending the first royal Catholic funeral in modern history – of Katharine, the Duchess of Kent, with the Royal standard flying above Westminster Cathedral.

The King’s speech at Auschwitz for the 80th anniversary of liberation was warmly received, making him the first monarch to visit the site of the concentration camp. His work with the Windrush generation, commissioning their portraits for the Royal Collection, helped celebrate their contribution to British life in the middle of the culture wars.

Having been so outspoken in the past can work to the King’s advantage, aides believe: the public knows what he thinks, so now he can say less and “convene” – that favourite royal word – more.

This turned out to be much less cringe than I'd feared it would be - and much more edifying than I'd expected.

The subject of "anti-Semitism" in the Church is of course a difficult one, if only because it can never be clear prima facie what one even means by the term. One man's "racism" is another's fair comment, as always! And there's a certain sort of (especially Marxist) Jew who will tell you that "the Catholic Church" - by which, perversely, he will normally mean the clergy - has been the very matrix of anti-Semitism down the centuries.

But the sort of anti-Semitism that leads to unjust and uncharitable laws, not to mention forced conversions and pogroms, has of course never been part of the Christian inheritance. On the contrary, it has been a curse of the lower orders in every society since before the time of Alexander of Macedon.

Holland and Sandbrook here open up a mediaeval can of worms with a surprising amount of tact, discretion, and thoughtfulness.

Well this is awfully sad - and another example of the march through British institutions of people who loathe Britain, its institutions, its history, and its culture. 😞 pic.twitter.com/0xjVD8vvQE

— Marcus Walker (@WalkerMarcus) August 11, 2023

Interesting that, for a "conservative" Anglican, "Britain" and its "institutions" and "history" are more important than the public worship due to Almighty God!

Welby is a very good example of what happens when the correctly ordered relationship between Church and State is reversed. https://t.co/ksmWP9jRod

— The Two Swords (@The_Two_Swords) July 7, 2023

The chancellor has given us a budget to help women 'to get back to work'; but we want a budget that will help mothers to be with their children.

— Fr Thomas Crean OP (@crean_fr) March 16, 2023

[The Times]

Is the King of England a traditionalist?

Well, Yes and No!

Certainly he thinks of himself as a traditionalist - or at any rate trad-adjacent. And he certainly self-identifies as firmly anti-"modernist".

The problem though is that if you dig a little deeper he does indeed have some very odd ideas about what modernism actually is. Yes, it's something artificial - perhaps even "rationalist" (and, at that, not necessarily particularly rational). But what is the fundamental principle of the idea? What is the source of its power?

For what it's worth, I don't think he really understands Modernism, and that's because he doesn't realise quite how deep, dark and dangerous its roots really are. And thus his "traditionalism" isn't so much anti-Modernist as simple mystical perennialism.

And that, though it may be esoteric in and of itself, is hardly a secret. As Prince of Wales, the King was a patron of The Temenos Academy, and for a time he quite literally hosted it in the headquarter of his architecture institute (which is now The Prince's Foundation).

The connexion between the King's perennialist "traditionalism" and religious traditionalism in fact comes via people like Rama P Coomaraswamy, who was one of the first generation of Catholic trads to oppose "the changes" that followed Vatican II - and who was of course the son of Ananda K Coomaraswamy, at least one of whose works is available on the Temenos Academy's website.

All of which makes it particularly disappointing that the King's own understanding of revelation is, to put it bluntly, orthodoxly Modernist.

Revelation is not deemed possible from an empirical point of view. It comes about when a person practises great humility and achieves a mastery over the ego so that ‘the knower and the known’ effectively become one. And from this union flows an understanding of ‘the mind of God’. 

[The Prince of Wales, Harmony - A New Way of Looking at Our World, p. 13]

Because this is more or less exactly point 20 (i.e. condemned proposition) in Pope Pius X's Syllabus Condemning the Errors of the Modernists:

Revelation could be nothing else than the consciousness man acquired of his revelation to God. 

[Lamentabili Sane]

My feeling, for what it's worth, is that the new King is a very nice man. But unfortunately his "traditionalism" without an actual belief in the Revelation of Jesus Christ, in person, in our human nature, on earth, via his hypostatic union with the Father, to the Apostles, and thence to His Church by word and by scripture, is not going to count for much more than a vaguely fogeyish, Scrutonian (or even Hitchensite) "small-c conservatism".