The motto of Scotland is “Nemo me impune lacessit”, or: “No one provokes me with impunity“

APOSTOLIC PALACE
VATICAN CITY

PRO MEMORIA

From the desk of His Holiness, Pius XIII

Let us be clear. This is not an endorsement. The Church does not endorse. The Church observes. The Church discerns. And in its divine and infallible wisdom, it occasionally… recognizes.

We have observed the state of the world. A flaccid parade of compromises, a carnival of the mediocre, led by men and women whose souls are as empty as their promises. They speak of “building bridges” while constructing nothing but scaffolds for their own vanity. They offer a gospel of inclusion that includes everything except truth, and a mercy that pardons all except sanctity.

It is into this spiritual desert that a figure emerges. Not a politician. A man. A flawed man. A man who has known the intoxicating heights of creation and the abyssal depths of his own failings. A man who has been scourged, not by the Romans, but by the very Sanhedrin of modern opinion, and who, in his way, has carried his cross. We speak, of course, of Mel Gibson.

Does he know the Catechism? Unimportant. Does he recite the rosary? Irrelevant. He knows the battle. He knows that the modern world is not a polite discussion but a war for the very soul of man, a war that must be fought not with the weak tea of dialogue but with the stark, terrifying, and beautiful power of conviction. He understands the aesthetic of authority. He paints in bold strokes, not in the pale pastels of the consultant class.

He was chosen to lead Scotland not because he is a diplomat, but because he is a dramatist. And what is a nation but a story? Scotland is a story of fierce independence, of deep faith, of thunder and mist and blood and sacrament. It is a story that requires a teller who is not afraid of the dark chapters, nor of the blazing, controversial, and triumphant finale. Gibson is such a teller.

And his Vice President… Christopher Armstrong. A man who knows the weight of the flesh and its temptations, and who has chosen a different path. A man who understands that strength is not the denial of desire, but its channeling into a higher purpose. The warrior and the redeemed. A perfect and necessary balance.

This is not a political ticket. It is a sacrament. A sacrament of Penance for a nation that has forgotten its sins and thus forgotten its need for grace. A sacrament of Extreme Unction for a body politic rotting from within by the cancer of complacency.

Do the people of Scotland want another manager? They can hire an accountant. Do they want a leader? Then they must choose a prophet. And prophets are never safe. They are never polite. They are correct.

Let the chattering classes chatter. Let the editors of bankrupt newspapers clutch their pearls. They are already writing his obituary. They do not understand they are writing their own.

We do not endorse Mr. Gibson and Mr. Armstrong. We see in them a instrument. A flawed, perhaps even a broken instrument. But then, so was David’s sling. So was the Cross.

It will be magnificent. Or it will be a catastrophe. But it will not, and this is the crucial point, be boring.

And God… is not boring.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Pius PP. XIII