The Story of Blackshirt Bert and Redpill Bill

Rev. Fr. Nicholas Mary, CSSR

Many years ago, I came to know a man whom we shall call Bert. His real name was different, though as monosyllabic and as familiar as names like Stan or Reg or Alf once were in the world of his fellow Cockney Londoners, a world long gone.

Bert was then of advanced years, and needed no encouragement to reminisce keenly about the past. There was much to be learnt from his tales, even if, occasionally, a few grains of salt were needed to season the fare. He told of his own conversion to the Faith, and, later, his finding of Catholic Tradition, and certainly had no objection to my telling anyone else his story, as I here do.

One particular episode comes to mind now, a quarter of a century later, as I turn to a subject much more present. 

Bert had been brought up nominally as an Anglican, but like so many, even then, had drifted into a kind of practical irreligion as a young man. These were the turbulent years of the Great Depression, where the modern ideologies were competing for the hearts and minds of angry and disaffected young men unmoored from Christianity. They sought to find some radical remedy to the ills of society and the meaninglessness of their lives through mass political action.

It was also the age of colour-coded vestiary political allegiance, and though Bert might have become a Redshirt (your basic Bolshevik), Greenshirt (Social Credit fanatic) or Blueshirt (British Fascist, not to be confused with the Irish political group of the same name or with the following), he chose instead to become a Blackshirt. He eagerly donned the uniform of the British Union of Fascists until the Public Order Act of 1936 banned the public wearing of “political uniforms”, a prohibition still in effect in Britain.

G. K. Chesterton called it the “Age of Shirts”, observing at the time that “what is happening today has always happened at intervals in human history. There are moments when a civilisation begins to stagger and grow bewildered. People rush about. They form groups. They wear peculiar kinds of shirts.”

And Bert the Blackshirt had many stories to tell of the heady days of the 1930s; of the street fighting and violent protests in London; of the marches and rallies; of the Fascist leader, Sir Oswald Moseley, whom he would salute and serve in the Blackshirt manner.

But then Bert met a girl, and she was Catholic. She was firm in her faith, and explained to him that she would under no circumstances consider marriage with him unless he became a Catholic too. And so Bert began to take instruction from a Catholic priest. At first it was all about marrying a Catholic, but as the weeks and months went by, it became all about knowing, loving and serving Almighty God. In the end, he never married the young lady. They moved off in different directions, as happens in life, but he did become a Catholic, and he hung up his black shirt for good.

Soon afterwards Bert married another Catholic girl, and left London to make a fresh start in rural southern England. His new faith became the centre of that new life, and the previous one seemed like a distant memory — somebody else’s life. 

Every now and then, though, he would run into one or other of his former Blackshirt comrades. Some were sheepish and embarrassed at their youthful naivety and hooliganism; others would gleefully (and somewhat conspiratorially) take him aside, perhaps giving him the Salute, and ask him whether he still believed in the Cause, and still supported the Leader (who only died in 1980).

And here’s the point of the story of Blackshirt Bert: he would then gently but firmly tell each interlocutor, “I’m sorry, I don’t think that you understand. None of that matters to me in the least any more. I’m a Catholic now, and I hope that one day you will become one too.”

Now that is really what anyone who has become a Catholic should be able to say in all sincerity. It matters not what route brought you, by God’s Providence, into the Church. It matters not who you were or what you did before you were a Catholic. It matters not how great were the sins that you committed but have now made amends for, and that God has forgiven. None of that matters in the least any more. Now you are a Catholic, and your fellow-Catholics are your brethren. You may once have had other allegiances and affinities, but now you hope that all men, be they your former friends or enemies, your family or strangers, your countrymen or those who have least in common with you, will likewise share in that same supreme blessing that you have through no merit of your own. To them all you say, “I’m a Catholic now, and I hope that one day you will become one too.”

Along with the black shirt, Bert had taken off the old man and put on the new. He put his hand to the plough and did not look back, immersing himself in the present and the future. He had incomparably more in common with his new brethren than his old, and if some of the new had come to the Church via routes very different to his own, again that mattered not in the least. All that was important was that they had got there. I am not sure whether they ever met, but Bert would have had great affinity with a man like Hamish Fraser, a convert from Communism, and, likewise, a pioneer Catholic Traditionalist. He would have had none at all with the sort of Catholic whose Catholicism must play second fiddle to some primary worldly allegiance.

There is a kind of angry young man in Britain — and all over the world — today who is not so different to Bert and the angry young men of the 1930s. Notwithstanding the enormous changes to society since then, there are yet disaffected and dissatisfied souls — more often than not male — that seek to find some radical remedy to the ills of society and the meaninglessness of their lives. They are not radicalised by public meetings, marches and demagogues as Bert once was. Their world is virtual, and their meeting places and fields of battle are social media. Their leaders are the influencers of those corners of the internet where they hope to escape conformism to our empty culture and to find brethren of like mind. Whereas Bert’s generation was becoming irreligious as the state religion declined, this generation has no connection at all to Christianity, not even a cultural one. Bert and his peers might have been won for Christ or Marx or Hitler, but today’s Berts are there to be won to anything at all that appears to have any substance. They do not carry the baggage of the old anti-Catholic prejudice of Protestant Britain, but likewise they might just as much be won for Islam as for the Church.

In order to get to know them better, please allow me to introduce one of them. His name is Bill, and unlike Bert, who was a real person with a fictitious name, Bill is a fictitious person who stands for many real ones. 

Bill was born around the turn of the century, and belongs to what sociologists call Generation Z. He has never known a world without the internet and smartphones, and his natural habitat is immersively digital. Bill’s parents were baptized, but Bill is not. He has had no classical education. He has grown up in a society in which things like same-sex marriage and gender ideology are well established and deemed normal, and in which functional male role-models are rare and the cultural depiction of them almost non-existent. Bill has long been warned against “toxic masculinity”, whatever that is, and been brought up to think that the only acceptable expression of patriotism is in international sport. Add sport to all the other forms of entertainment, and you have the sum total of what the popular culture offers him as the goal of life.

Nobody can live long on this formula without becoming brutalised. Many do, and live only to feed their mindless addictions to alcohol, narcotics, gaming, gambling and pornography. Others realise instinctively that there must be more to life, and begin to question the accepted version of things. Very often this questioning began during the lockdown period at the beginning of this decade, that vast social experiment which has produced so many bad effects, but also been the occasion of good.

For Bill that process of questioning has taken place online. One YouTube video has led him to another, and the search algorithms as well as the suggestions of the many fellow-seekers he has met on forums and in chat groups have driven him ever further away from the established narrative about anything. Bill describes it all as having been “red-pilled” a reference to a science-fiction film from 1999 (before he was born!) in which the protagonist is offered a choice between swallowing a blue pill (which enables one happily to continue to believe the version of things set forth by the Establishment and society at large) or a red pill. Take that red pill, and you can no longer be brainwashed as others are. Your eyes will be opened to the truth concealed behind the appearances. You will be disabused of your comfortable but wishful thinking. You will be led away from the surface and down the winding paths of the rabbit holes and tunnels of hidden reality. In fine, you will have unmasked the conspiratorial agenda of those who wish you to be lulled into a contented and unquest-ioning subservience to their evil designs. All of this has happened to Bill, he claims. He is now Redpill Bill.

One of the most remarkable trends of our time is that millions of young people — mainly men — see themselves as being on the path to red-pilled enlightenment. They are doing it all themselves, and their guides are online influencers who are often no more than fellow seekers. The official channels of education having failed them, it is as if they are creating their own with regard to what really matters in life.

And so some, like Bill, are brought to religion. The very process which leads many to atheism and the darkness of despair, is also being used by God’s Providence to lead others to His Church. Hundreds of hours of videos and podcasts brought Bill not only to reject conformism to the world in which we live, but also to consider the truth of Christianity, the claims of Catholicism and even the need to return to Tradition from Modernism long before he had even met a Catholic in real life, let alone been to Mass or spoken to a priest.

It is a wonderful thing to behold how precisely at the moment when the Church is at its most discredited — and therefore least credible — during this papacy of Pope Francis, God is giving so many graces to souls in ways which apparently bypass the normal channels of missionary activity. For these souls, contact with the Church comes at the end of the journey, not the beginning. 

Nonetheless, there are many dangers in this DIY approach to Catholicism.

The greatest danger, of course, is the lack of authentic guidance. Bill’s picture of what the Church teaches is a composite of many online voices. These in turn represent many different points on the spectrum of opinion amongst confused Catholics today. Whereas Bert had received solid instruction from a priest back in the 1930s, Bill has put together his understanding of Catholicism from a mixture of good and bad sources. Traditionalists of all tendencies, charismatics, modernists, the well-informed and the (well-meaning but) misinformed; all have left the trace of their views on him. 

Moreover as Bill is by nature prone to black-and-white thinking about everything, he lacks the perspective to discern the essential from the inessential, and the dogmatic from matters of opinion. This in turn has led him into online controversy and argument long before he is equipped for this, and a distorted, relentless focus on all that is wrong with the world and the Church rather than the serenity that comes from resting in the truth and practising the Faith first. Increasingly he has become more extreme in his views. The same process which brought him out of conformism to the world, and led him to the Church, now, without guidance, is driving him onward to a kind of apocalyptic version of Catholicism which isolates him ever more from other Catholics. He is preparing to live in a kind of literal and figurative bunker, where he can await the doom of society in a brace position. Insanity is likely to set in long before that.

Whilst all this is happening, of course, he is failing to engage with life. He is neither ready to try his vocation nor embrace marriage. The years are drifting by, and Bill is becoming as embittered with the Church as he once was with the world. His is now a world of grievance and blame, and his unhappiness is everyone else’s fault. If he is not married, it is the fault of women. If he does not have a career, the system is to blame. If he does not find joy in his faith, then somehow the Church has failed him. There is no going back to the blue pill, he says, but the red pill brings only bitterness. Though at first he was a fervent Catholic, verging on rigorism in his religious practice, now he has become lax and despondent, and his perseverance is flagging alarmingly.

The seeds have been sown in Bill by the Divine Sower, but they have fallen in stony ground, where they had not much earth, and they sprung up immediately, because they had no deepness of earth. And when the sun was up they were scorched, and because they had not root, they withered away. (Mt 13:5–6)

Where has Redpill Bill gone wrong? Unlike Bert, who took off his black shirt and never looked back once he had found Catholicism, Bill has tried to incorporate his faith into his red pill views. Where the former is at variance with the latter, it is the latter that must prevail. Where what is told him by priests in real life differs from what he hears from his counter-cultural online community, the virtual must dominate over the real. In fine, his fundamental mistake has been to forget that whatever path brought him to the Church, whatever were the means used by Providence to detach him from the world, what matters now is that he has arrived at his destination and spiritual home. As he looks back, he must be able to say, “None of that matters to me in the least any more. I’m a Catholic now.”

Then he must, quite simply, turn it all off. He must let go of his online world and virtual friends and become immersed in the Mystical Body of Christ. The “bros” must give way to his Catholic brethren, and he must get out of his mind and into his life, and prepare for eternal life. The social questions which have long vexed him have solutions, but he must find them in the social teaching of the Church. He must come to understand that conflict between ethnic groups, class warfare and the battle of the sexes all serve only the purposes of the enemies of the Church, and that their resolution is not through domination of one side over another but in the submission of all to Christ Our Lord, in Whom there is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither bond nor free; there is neither male nor female. (Gal 3:28)

Online dissipation must be detoxed from and give way to offline focus; the clickbait superficiality of the internet to the methodical study of books; self-led formation to one guided by priests. Real-life friendships must replace virtual ones, and the love even of our enemies must banish the hatred of those whose errors, but for the grace of God, we would likewise espouse. Society may prescribe certain views on race, gender, sexual orientation, equality and so on, but it does not automatically follow that the Catholic position on any particular point is simply a provocative contrariness, often accompanied by crudity and incivility. Even political correctness and the woke ideologies have elements of truth mixed in with falsity. Our position is typically arrived at by the making of distinctions and a willingness to engage with the complexities of reality in the light of objective truth and in a charitable spirit. None of that happens when you are simply lobbing insults at opponents, and deriding them as “normies” or “simps”.

The story of Blackshirt Bert concluded happily. We do not yet know the ending of the story of Redpill Bill. May he and all like him (and the few Redpill Jills) let go of their perception of themselves as being somehow a superiorly enlightened elite. A word to them directly: not a figurative red pill but the very real grace of God has enlightened you all along, and brought you to the Catholic Church. That same grace must be persevered in at all costs if you are to reach Heaven. When you now encounter those who are immersed in the online subculture you have left behind, say to them with Bert, “I’m sorry, I don’t think that you understand. None of that matters to me in the least any more. I’m a Catholic now, and I hope that one day you will become one too.” † 

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