I know I’m getting older for two reasons.  First, not only do I like Judge Judy, I now like the way she looks.  Second, for years I was a young Curmudgeon, but I have now passed beyond Curmudgeon to Crank.  You don’t hit Crank until you have the years to back it up.

For example, I fired an actor last week who was the type that a few years back I would have indulged to no end.  But now I’ve learned to trust my nose – when something smells it smells.  And much of what people do to us and to the Church is not at first overtly inappropriate, but something that smells.  The smoke of Satan that has infiltrated the Church has an odor to it.

Thus, when you research a religious order and find a website devoted to “peace and justice”, there’s a kind of stink you recognize.  Now peace and justice are wonderful things, but they are wonderfully misused by the enemy.  When you later discover that this order has a center devoted to “respect for Mother Earth”, your suspicions are confirmed.

But this is not a popular strategy to pursue.  I have been criticized on this blog for being critical of smelly homilies; any time I point out bad behavior by bishops, I get slammed; and it’s never safe to make fun of Catholic Schools Week, a self-congratulatory exercise in banality that reeks to high heaven.

It’s just not easy being a Crank!  Especially when those around you have lost their olfactory sense – which means they can’t smell.

But we need to follow our noses and to realize the atmosphere that surrounds them.  As Chesterton says in What’s Wrong with the World, “Our age is, at best, a poetical epoch, an age of prejudice.  A doctrine is a definite point; a prejudice is a direction.”  The modern erosion of rational thought brings about an atmosphere of prejudice, of mood.  We find ourselves fogged in.  And lost in the fog of drift, told by all around us that definition is wrong; that distinction uncaring; that discrimination in its intellectual sense is as bad as discrimination in its racial sense; weighed down by the atmosphere that surrounds us and eventually inured to its smell, we find ourselves both excusing and worshipping at The Church of the Vague Sentiment.

Chesterton continues: “Against this there is no weapon at all except a rigid and steely sanity, a resolution not to listen to fads, and not to be infected by diseases.  In short, the rational human faith must armor itself with prejudice in an age of prejudices, just as it armored itself with logic in an age of logic.”

So if I have begun, in my dotage, to exercise not only the faculty of judgment, but also a bit of pre-judgment, it’s because it’s served me well.  On the battleground one does not ordinarily give the benefit of the doubt to a suspected insurgent.  We have been cowed into ignoring the warning signs; we have been holding our noses so long out of deference to our unwashed neighbors that we forget “if it looks like a duck and flies like a duck and quacks like a duck” – and especially, I might add, if it smells like a duck – “it’s a duck”.