All praise to Saint Patrick, who brought to our mountains
The gift of God’s faith, the sweet light of His love!
All praise to the shepherd who showed us the fountains
That rise in the heart of the Saviour above!
For hundreds of years, in smiles and in tears,
Our Saint has been with us, our shield and our stay;
All else may have gone, Saint Patrick alone,
He hath been to us light when earth’s lights were all set,
For the glories of Faith they can never decay;
And the best of our glories is bright with us yet,
In the faith and the feast of Saint Patrick’s Day.
“MY NAME IS PATRICK. I am a sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all believers. I am looked down upon by many. My father was Calpornius. He was a deacon; his father was Potitus, a [pagan] priest, who lived at Bannavem Taburniae. His home was near there, and that is where I was taken prisoner. I was about sixteen at the time. At that time, I did not know the true God. I was taken into captivity in Ireland, along with thousands of others. We deserved this, because we had gone away from God, and did not keep his commandments. We would not listen to our priests, who advised us about how we could be saved. The Lord brought his strong anger upon us, and scattered us among many nations even to the ends of the earth. It was among foreigners that it was seen how little I was.
“It was there that the Lord opened up my awareness of my lack of faith. Even though it came about late, I recognised my failings. So I turned with all my heart to the Lord my God, and he looked down on my lowliness and had mercy on my youthful ignorance. He guarded me before I knew him, and before I came to wisdom and could distinguish between good and evil. He protected me and consoled me as a father does for his son.
“That is why I cannot be silent – nor would it be good to do so – about such great blessings and such a gift that the Lord so kindly bestowed in the land of my captivity. This is how we can repay such blessings, when our lives change and we come to know God, to praise and bear witness to his great wonders before every nation under heaven. (more…)
Theobald Mathew, by Edward Daniel Leahy (died 1875)
ST. Patrick’s Day means not much more than green beer and drunken reveling for many today, but in late-19th century America it was — believe it or not — a day to honor moderation and total abstinence from alcohol.
In the Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day parade of 1875, some 10,000 people marched and “the majority parading walked with the thirty-nine marching units of the [Catholic] Total Abstinence Brotherhood, an organization with strong religious backing and a missionary zeal for temperance crusading.,” according to Dennis Clark.
It was after the Civil War that parades of all kinds became a sort of national craze. Veterans of the conflict turned out and, in Philadelphia, General St. Clair Mulholland and other heroes of the war stepped smartly along on St. Patrick’s Day each year. Temperance organizations became a big component of the March 17th parades from 1870 through the turn of the century.
Father Matthew of County Tyrone (above) was the popular founder in Ireland of organized temperance earlier in the century. It spread to this country with the creation of state groups and then the national Brotherhood in 1871. On July 4, 1876, the Catholic Total Abstinence Centennial Fountain was dedicated in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, featuring a marble statue of of Fr. Matthew.
Like the Civil War a century later, the Revolutionary War never enjoyed popular support, but was engineered by the proverbial active, well organized minority intent on its peculiar agenda, who “while men were asleep” or otherwise occupied in earning a living, “oversowed cockle among the wheat” (Matt. 13:25). On January 30, 1648, when Charles I of England was “put to death by the severing of his head from his body” as ordained by the Death Warrant issued by Oliver Cromwell and his Republicans, the assembled multitude:
…far from accepting the executioner’s invitation to ‘rejoice at the death of a traitor,’ uttered a dismal universal groan such as one hearer had never heard before nor desired to hear again. She was only twenty when she heard it, and she never forgot the sound.”[15]
A similar reaction on the part of the people would occur at the execution of Louis XVI of France in 1789, so firmly is monarchy rooted in natural law and so ingrained in Catholic hearts is love for their anointed kings.
Had Maryland’s political elite kept the Faith in its integrity, one cannot help wondering whether they might not have been able to check, or even withstand the onslaught of the Revolution as did the French Catholics of Canada, who so indignantly refused the seditious overtures of Benjamin Franklin and the future Bishop John Carroll. Had Maryland followed their example, an effective counter-revolutionary base for royalist sentiment – which actually predominated throughout the Colonies before large numbers of loyalists took flight for Canadian Ontario – might have taken shape in what became the United States. (more…)
When you look at Tel Aviv’s urban renewal agenda, including the districts already marked for demolition and redevelopment under Pinui Binui style planning, and then compare that with the zones now being presented as having been struck by Iran, the story stops adding up.
No one seems to want to ask the obvious question: why would Iran advance Israel’s own redevelopment priorities?
TOO freshly sweet to seem excess,
Too animate to need a stress;
But wider over many heads
The starry voice ascending spreads,
Awakening, as it waxes thin,
The best in us to him akin;
And every face to watch him rais’d,
Puts on the light of children prais’d,
So rich our human pleasure ripes
When sweetness on sincereness pipes,
Though nought be promis’d from the seas,
But only a soft-ruffling breeze
Sweep glittering on a still content,
Serenity in ravishment.
I repost this essay every once in a while because, as a housewife, dust is my vocation. I wish more people were interested in the subject.
DUST is pervasive. Wherever you are, dust is silently gathering, a fleck of everything, fragments of nothing, the particulate manifestation of the truth that all things are disintegrating.
Ordinary household dust is rarely considered a subject worthy of consideration. We live in a superficial world. Perhaps we’re secretly dumbfounded by some of the most commonplace things. We just don’t know what to make of them. We’re holding out for explanations that never appear.
One of the most interesting things about dust is its imperviousness to scientific progress. The scientist in his lab may have the illusion of progress. The duster knows that nature only progresses so much. The world is never cured of dust and no human habitat is without it.
The earliest materialist philosophers may have been sent on their first chain of speculations by the visible clouds of tiny particles they observed while sitting in a room. From there, they may have leapt with intuitive brilliance – before there were any microscopes to confirm their suspicions – to the conclusion that all things are particulate.
The Temptation (detail), Masolino da Panicale; 1426-27
“THERE is but one evil, and that is sin. This evil has many different paths by which it approaches us. These paths are called temptations. It is true that of themselves temptations can not injure us. On the contrary, Holy Writ says: ‘Blessed is the man that endureth, for when he hath been proved he shall receive the crown of life, which God hath promised to them that love Him.’ All depends upon our withstanding them, and to be able to do this we must heed the admonition of Christ, we must watch and especially guard ourselves against those temptations through which Satan most frequently approaches man.”
“IF THE Lord should give you the power to raise the dead, He would be giving you much less than He does when He bestows suffering. By miracles you would make yourself a debtor to Him, while by suffering He may become debtor to you. And even if sufferings had no other reward than being able to bear something for that God who loves you, is not this a great reward and sufficient remuneration? Whoever loves understands what I say.”
Out of the depths I have cried to Thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice. Let Thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication. If thou, O Lord, wilt mark iniquities: Lord, who shall abide it. For with Thee there is merciful forgiveness: and because of Thy law, I have waited for Thee, O Lord. My soul hath waited on His word: my soul hath hoped in the Lord. From the morning watch even until night, let Israel hope in the Lord. For with the Lord there is mercy: and with Him plenteous redemption. And He shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities.
NICK FUENTES roots for the United States to lose in Iran. Calling on your own country to lose in a war is the definition of treason.
I’ve seen other commentators on the right say the same thing.
Iran’s every bit as much part of the club. I don’t know what is going on there, but I don’t hate my country or government so much as to wish that it would see defeat.
“FORSAKE the love of transitory things and seek things that are everlasting. What are all temporal things but deceptive? And what help can any creature be to you if your Lord Jesus forsake you? Therefore, foresaking and leaving all creatures and all worldly things, do what lies in you to make yourself pleasing in His sight, so that you may after this life come to everlasting life in the kingdom of heaven.”
A new documentary (watch for free here) explores the topic of Jewish ritual murder. Using sometimes sensational and bloody computer-generated imagery, it gives an overview of prominent cases through history.
“Is Jewish ritual murder libel, or legitimate? Myth, or murder? Are these accusations the work of imagination fueled by antisemitic hatred, or the dark rites of a race consumed by eternal vengeance.”
This topic is important today because, for one, the accusation of “blood libel” — in other words, that these reports of criminal acts are false — has been used to guilt-trip Western society. Jewish organizations, with immense networks of propaganda, do not present both sides of the story.
FEW things so damage the rights of God in the world than bad religious art.
Images of Jesus that are sentimental and portray Him with as much sublimity as a fitness instructor or rock star are extremely offensive. They are outright lies. Better no image of Jesus than an image that is profane or too-human.
Protestantist groups have long specialized in tawdry representations of this kind. But then the ‘Catholic Church that hates the Catholic Church’ now reigning from Rome does the same. The fact that many Protestants are guilty of vulgar sentimentality is nothing new, but that an institution claiming to be the Catholic Church, which has inspired so much beauty and transcendence in art, should produce an almost daily landslide of imagery inspired by the ethics of advertising and secular humanitarianism rather than supernatural grace is a fact so astonishing as to be difficult to absorb.
Sentimentality in religion is a serious fault. (So is superficiality — and the two are related.) The sentimental person forgets or is incapable of understanding that many people don’t share this gushiness or love of the sweet and cute. A person focused on his own good feelings is a person estranged from the truth of the human condition.
“TO serve God because you are afraid of going to hell, and wish to go to heaven, is a great blessing, and a supernatural work; but it is very difficult. Whereas to serve God because you love Him is so easy that it is hard to account for so many men in the world neglecting to do it. Stupid souls! So miraculously blind.”
“Every kind of suffering.” The things men suffer may be understood in two ways. By “kind” we may mean a particular, individual suffering, and in this sense there was no reason why Christ should suffer every kind of suffering, for many kinds of suffering are contrary the one to the other, as for example, to be burnt and to be drowned. We are of course speaking of Our Lord as suffering from causes outside himself, for to suffer the suffering effected by internal causes, such as bodily sickness, would not have become him. But if by “kind” we mean the class, then Our Lord did suffer by every kind of suffering, as we can show in three ways:
“1. By considering the men through whom He suffered. For He suffered something at the hands of Gentiles and of Jews, of men and even of women as the story of the servant girl who accused St. Peter goes to show. He suffered, again, at the hands of rulers, of their ministers, and of the people, as was prophesied, Why have the Gentiles raged; and the people devised vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the princes met together against the Lord and against his Christ (Ps. ii. i, 2). (more…)
Such was the respect, wherewith everything he wrote was treated, that his very Letters were preserved as so many precious treasures. This immense Correspondence shows us, that there was not a country, scarcely even a city, of the Christian world, on which the Pontiff had not his watchful eye steadily fixed; that there was not a question, however local or personal, which, if it interested religion, did not excite his zeal and arbitration, as the Bishop of the universal Church. If certain writers of modern times had but taken the pains to glance at these Letters, written by a Pope of the 6th century, they would never have asserted, as they have done, that the prerogatives of the Roman Pontiff are based on documents, fabricated, as they say, two hundred years after the death of Gregory.
