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where to buy cenforce online We drove down to Washington D.C. after a funeral in New York. I had my usual repeated meals of pizza while in New York, attempting to stock up on calories. It might be a long time before I have my next good slice.

In D.C. we stayed with Catherine’s aunt and uncle in the Virginia suburb of Great Falls. Their home oozed sophistication and comfort. It was a highly cultured Catholic family, which boasted volumes of John Paul II’s encyclicals and pretty picture-books of the churches of Rome. On the refrigerator were magnets of philosophers – Hegel, Hume, Leibniz, Plato, Aristotle. In the bathroom was a map of Florence. The paterfamilias was a first-generation computer programmer and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who was now an executive at Amazon. He was sophisticated, genteel, and had traveled widely; he was the son of a noted Catholic convert, Fr. Ray Ryland. One of his daughters had just graduated from high school and was weighing whether to attend the University of Virginia or Thomas Aquinas College, a conservative-Catholic great books school; another daughter, in high school, was leaving in a few days for Paris.

“Is this your first time to Paris?” I asked over dinner, which we took at a long table – there are nine children in the family and a long table was needed – in a dining room where the gold lettering on volumes of Horace in Latin glowed by the light of tapers. This was the kind of family where you have to ask teenagers this kind of question. It turns out that she had been there when an infant, which we agreed did not count as a real trip. Her family reminded her that before her departure she should consult with her brotther-in-law, who was an expert in Parisian – especially Parisian Baroque – architecture. When I told of my trip to South Africa, conversation turned to Mark Clark, a professor at Christendom College who was known to the family. (Clark was known to my wife too: he taught her astronomy in college. A beginning of an explanation of his polymathy may be that he was college roommates with David Morgan.) He was considered a great proselytizer for Latin and Greek – recently he had spoken at a local high school and said that what the world needed right now was Classicists, to decode and translate hundreds of palimpsests, whose erased, invisible original texts could now with superior digital imaging be read for the first time in centuries. It was said that I should channel his fervor when in South Africa. I was not certain I could know with any certainty precisely what the South Africans should be doing, so I expressed some doubts about my ability to preach this gospel; I said I wished Clark were going in my place.

I have said already that this was a cultured, as well as comfortable, house. It was also a religious house: before dinner the father said grace; after dinner my wife played piano and we sang hymns; on the wall in the kitchen was a framed picture of Mother Teresa with the motto DO SMALL THINGS WITH GREAT LOVE.

In this context Latin makes sense: it is quite simply the language of all this culture – really the language of our culture. We prayed in English, but using a Latin formula (“Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts” = “Benedic nos, Domine”); we sang Latin hymns; the picture-books of Roman churches were pretty, of course, but they were also our churches – I had prayed in most of them – and they were covered in Latin inscriptions. Rome, and Florence, and Baroque Paris were not just cultural achievements of people on a different continent: they were acts of worship, approved acts of worship, and hence implicitly a means of knowing the nature of the God we loved.

The religious aspect of culture also implies, I think, a kind of democracy. Bramante and Borromini and Giotto are, to the worshipper, also merely worshippers; they are not masters, but fellow-servants. They are relativized; they are not the highest value. Their worship, for all its technical excellence, may not be as worthy as the widow’s mite, and maybe no worthier than our own. And so the Baroque churches of Rome or the Gothic churches of France do not feel, to me, an impossible, irrelevant, alien, or imposed standard: here in America we may build similar churches, or build something new and different. When you are comfortable within the tradition – as believers are – it is no imposition, and no burden.

I am aware that this is the opposite of much of the modern’s experience of culture. Secular Europe often seems to be looking to venerate its artistic heritage primarily as virtuoso works of the masters. To me the fact that another person is excellent at what he does does not guarantee that I have anything in common with him. But that we both are worshippers – that we both bend the knee to the same thing – there I find common ground. Just as in a family – the act of worship, the recognition of a transcendent source makes all differences trivial, and unifies. Instantly I am curious about South Africa’s religious history. I doubt that any apartheid system in the state can be sustained without an apartheid system in the churches – as we had, for instance, in the American South (and still have to some day). If you believe, as believers do, that our worship of God is the single most important aspect of ourselves, you are forced to acknowledge the dignity of anyone who can worship God as well as you can.