BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
I used to attend a friary chapel. Not out of piety, you understand—more out of a grim sense of obligation, and because the coffee afterwards was surprisingly tolerable. But I sat there, Sunday after Sunday, while the priest carped on about the environment as though the Holy Spirit had retired and been replaced by a Greta TED Talk. And then, just when my soul had been sufficiently anaesthetised, a CAFOD representative would step up to explain, with the straightest face in Christendom, that their money was not, repeat not, being used by cassock-lifters to molest children in Africa.
You can imagine the atmosphere. Not so much a Mass as a damage-limitation exercise with wafers.
So I stopped listening to the living and started staring at the dead. Specifically, at a crucifix below which someone had carved three Latin words, old as the hills and twice as hard:
Regnavit a ligno.
I had the entire Mass to work it out. And by the Gloria, I had it.
He reigned from the wood.
Not on the wood, you notice. Not in spite of the wood. From the wood. The cross was not an interruption of His kingship; it was the throne. A splintered, obscene, blood-soaked throne designed by Romans to humiliate, and repurposed by God to save.
Now, here is the lesson that every egotistical muppet currently posing as an overlord—whether in Westminster, in a diocesan office, or behind a CAFOD donation bucket—has forgotten: Real power looks exactly like failure.
The modern leader, and I use the term loosely, believes that reigning requires a corner office, a QR code, a strategic plan, a safeguarding policy, and a press release apologising for existing. He reigns from a swivel chair. He reigns from a climate summit. He reigns from a Zoom tile with a fake bookshelf behind him.
Christ reigned from a gibbet.
And while the priest was telling me to feel guilty about my car, and the CAFOD man was assuring me that his colleagues were probably not diddling children in Lusaka, that gibbet was quietly toppling every empire that had ever laughed at it. Caesar is dust. The cross is not.
Which brings me to today’s crop of overlords. They are, to a man and woman, terrified of wood. Terrified of anything that smells of weakness, failure, or the sort of humility that doesn’t come with a standing ovation. They protect their images like Renaissance princes protecting against poison. They manage their reputations like hedge funds. They have never once said, “I am wrong, I am nothing, forgive me,” and meant it.
Instead, they reign from the safety of moral posturing. The climate priest reigns from his recycled ambo, wagging a finger at your heating bill while flying to Rome for a synod on synodality. The CAFOD manager reigns from a risk-assessment matrix, as though child abuse were an actuarial oversight rather than a cavernous evil. The political overlord reigns from a teleprompter. The corporate overlord reigns from a quarterly earnings call.
Not a single one of them has a nail in sight.
And that is why they will fail. Not tomorrow, perhaps. But soon enough. Because a throne of words collapses the moment the wind changes. A throne of wood—well, that takes a bit more doing.
Here is my challenge to every muppet with a title and an ego: Show me your wood.
Show me the place where you have been stripped, mocked, abandoned, and left to die between two thieves. Show me the humiliation you did not spin. Show me the failure you did not rebrand as a “learning opportunity.” Show me the scandal you did not outsource to a law firm.
If you cannot, you are not reigning. You are performing. And the performance always ends.
Regnavit a ligno. He reigned from the wood. And until our bishops, our politicians, our activists, and our charity executives learn to do the same—or at least to shut up about their own importance long enough to stare at that wood—they are just noise.
I learnt more in one silent Mass staring at three Latin words than in fifty sermons about recycling bins. The wood is the throne. The rest is just CAFOD.
Now pass the coffee.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Dear Townies and Conservatism (2024).