During the brief and inexplicable period of time when Russell Brand was a marketable star who was assumed to be able to pull massive audiences to the movies, he made a movie called “Get Him To The Greek, which was a movie about a rock star who needed to get to a particular theater to perform, a task that is made all the more difficult by the fact that he is living such a disordered life. The life of artists in general is frequently disordered, and the reasons for it are complex. In general, it is hard for people to be creative without having within them somewhat anarchical tendencies that allow them to see outside of the existing order that governs people’s lives. Seeing outside of this order frequently involves wanting to live outside of the discipline and order that other people undergo as a fact of existence. To this temperamental bent towards anarchical tendencies is added other matters, such as the use and abuse of drugs and alcohol, difficulties in forming trusting and lasting intimate relationships, and a lot of issues of abuse in the lives of people that leads them to pursue the creative arts as a means of therapy.

Between my arrival to Rome this morning on a flight from Belgrade and my departure from Rome on a flight to Calgary, my mother and I managed to take a trip to see the Vatican City and some of the other ancient Roman buildings nearby, like the Colosseum. Although I have at various points on this trip been rather irritated at how infirm my mother has been, even by the standards of health that is pretty common to see, I have to admit that this trip would not have been possible without being able to speed through customs upon entering Rome or the knowledge that we would be able to speed through security on the return leg. Even with more than five hours between the arrival and departure, it just would have taken too long to engage in the trip for it to be a feasible option, but with the conditions of being able to fly through customs and security it was just feasible, even if it meant that I was not able to get a meal because there was not quite enough time. In my own personal economy, seeing a new country is worth missing a meal, I suppose.

My ideal situation for seeing the Vatican City would go something like this. I receive an invitation to study some matter of religious history using the Vatican archives, which allow me to say something about the people whom the Roman Catholic Church persecuted during much of its recorded history, and enjoy seeing the gardens and eating meals and perusing books and paperwork that provides what recorded evidence we have of what went on during the Middle Ages in obscure mountain valleys where people sought to worship God in freedom. This was not that sort of opportunity, but any chance to see a new country, and to witness the heart of tourism that lies in Rome, is an interesting experience, to be sure. The Vatican is the smallest country in the world, but its power is far greater than its small size would indicate, because the institution that is run out of that country is far more numerous than the amount of people who live in the city itself.

And one can be sure that anarchical tendencies are a threat to the order that the Roman Catholic Church has always represented. The moments of greatest danger for any institution are those moments where people seek power in order to gratify their own lusts rather than serve the interests of the institution themselves. When people see in a priest’s robe the opportunity to abuse vulnerable members, when people see in higher positions of religious authority the chance to be the law rather than to follow and obey the law and model its observance for others, then institutions become corrupted and subverted for evil. A great many institutions have been created for worthwhile purposes, even divinely blessed purposes, but have strayed far from their roots and become twisted and corrupted by power and taken over by those who want to make the institution serve their own folly and wickedness rather than seek to be shaped to serve what is noble and good. Sometimes the remnants of such matters linger on for thousands of years.