ON November 27, 1095 at Clermont in France, Pope Urban II launched the first crusade to reclaim the Holy Land from the Turks with this rousing sermon. Jerusalem was captured by the Catholic forces four years later. He died the year before this victory. (This version is attributed to Robert the Monk.)

Oh, race of Franks, race from across the mountains, race chosen and beloved by God as shines forth in very many of your works set apart from all nations by the situation of your country, as well as by your Catholic faith and the honor of the Holy Church! To you our discourse is addressed and for you our exhortation is intended. We wish you to know what a grievous cause has led us to Your country, what peril threatening you and all the faithful has brought us.

From the confines of Jerusalem and the city of Constantinople a horrible tale has gone forth and very frequently has been brought to our ears, namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation forsooth which has not directed its heart and has not entrusted its spirit to God, has invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by the sword, pillage and fire; it has led away a part of the captives into its own country, and a part it has destroyed by cruel tortures; it has either entirely destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of its own religion. They destroy the altars, after having defiled them with their uncleanness. (more…)

  DR. MARIAN HORVAT offers some good suggestions for finding or making women's clothing.

JON writes:

I have been reading your blog for a few months, and have been enjoying it, though I am Reformed and not Catholic.

I watched the Perestroika Deception video and your other link on the Russia deception was quite taken aback at the suggestions that communism is still in power in Russia and other countries. It honestly makes my head spin, and will at least make me read critically.

I am wondering how you would see the rise of populism in Europe and the increased Christian rhetoric from countries like Poland and Hungary. Would you see these as real and encouraging developments that we can take heart from? (more…)

  The Motorist's Prayer Lord grant me a steady hand and watchful eye That no man may be hurt when I pass by Thou givest life; I pray no act of mine May take away, or mar, this act of Thine. Save those, dear Lord, who bear me company, From shock and pain, and all calamity. Teach me to use my car for others’ need, Nor miss through love of speed The beauty of this world; that so I may With joy and courtesy go on my way. --- Source

  "WHILE Padre Pio was still alive, there was a pious young girl who was engaged to a university student who had lost his faith, disdaining religious practices. She would not go through with marrying him unless he returned to the Church. They had argued about this incessantly but to no avail. Finally he consented to come to San Giovanni Rotondo with her, although he was quite cynical. He did not believe in the holiness of Padre Pio, considering him an impostor and charlatan. They went to early Mass at the friary church, and on the first morning the girl was amazed to see her fiancé looking pale and shocked as he gazed at the altar during the Consecration. He whispered to her, “Does this happen every day?” She said yes, but was not aware of what he really meant by the question. This went on for a number of days. One morning at Mass she saw him crying like a baby. Leaving the church, he explained to her that he sees Padre Pio on the altar with a knotted crown of thorns on his head, and blood running down his face. His priestly garments are illuminated by a dazzling light. He looks like the “Ecce Homo!” with his face transformed into the face of Jesus. The fiancé said he was crying because he was so moved upon seeing that in spite of all his apparent suffering, Padre Pio remained…

ALAN writes:

“Newspapers, like everything else, are subject to abuses.  Even when…restricted, their universal utility may be questioned, for one unconsciously falls into a habit of hasty reading, and this dissipates the mind, rendering it unfit for hard labor.  In old times, when the printing press was imperfect, our fathers had few books and papers; but those which they possessed were not merely skimmed over, but thoughtfully and leisurely read, so that one book developed the intellect more than months of desultory scanning of the news of the present day…..”

              — “Abuses of Newspaper Literature,” in Leaflets of Thought, published by Mrs. Eugenia Cuthbert’s Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies, St. Louis, Missouri.  April 1, 1871, p. 3.

Just as there are too many things to see nowadays [“Pieper on Learning to See,” The Thinking Housewife, Oct. 22, 2012 ], there are also too many things to read:  Too many slickly-fashioned books, magazines, and ephemeral nonsense and worse in daily newspapers.  But newspapers have now been largely supplanted by the even more numerous and more deceptive ephemera on countless Internet sites, thus compounding the problem addressed by Mrs. Cuthbert and her Faculty.  The mass communications industry has not checked the cause for their concern but worsened it.

“But more people today can read than ever before!,” it will be objected by those in the grip of the mass communications monster and the fallacy of “mass literacy.”  The proper reply to that is:  To be able to read is one thing; to understand what one reads is quite another.  Millions are able to do the first but not the second.  Literacy does not make people educated or thoughtful.  (more…)

THIS 2003 INTERVIEW on The McIlhany Report with the English publisher Christopher Story may puncture some of the Putin-worship found among American patriots, who see Russia as representing a revival of Christianity in contrast to a decadent West. Story, who died in 2010, was publisher of Perestroika Deception by Soviet KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn. According to Golitsyn, the West did not win the Cold War. The fall of the Soviet Union was part of a long-range strategy to place Russia at the head of a world government. In an interview in 1995, Story said: "The purpose of perestroika has been to convince the gullible West that Communism is dead, that the Soviet Union has collapsed."

KYLE writes:

The Ron Unz piece on Judaism brought to mind all of the public personalities who have publicly criticized or done something that wasn’t approved by the Jewish community and/or Israel and how in virtually every instance, no matter the context or intent, it led to intense backlash and the obligatory charges of anti-semitism and Nazism. One of the most notable instances was in 1985 when Ronald Reagan defied public pressure and honored his commitment to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who asked him to visit a German military cemetery in Bitburg to mark the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II.
(more…)

RON Unz’s excellent article today, quoted in this previous post, deserves further mention here. Bear in mind, please, that Unz is Jewish. He writes:

… [O]ver the years and the decades, our dominant media organs of news and entertainment have successfully conditioned most Americans to suffer a sort of mental allergic reaction to topics sensitive to Jews, which leads to all sorts of issues being considered absolutely out of bounds. And with America’s very powerful Jewish elites thereby insulated from almost all public scrutiny, Jewish arrogance and misbehavior remain largely unchecked and can increase completely without limit.

I’ve also sometimes suggested to people that one under-emphasized aspect of a Jewish population, greatly magnifying its problematical character, is the existence of what might be considered a biological sub-morph of exceptionally fanatical individuals, always on hair-trigger alert to launch verbal and sometimes physical attacks of unprecedented fury against anyone they regard as insufficiently friendly towards Jewish interests. Every now and then, a particularly brave or foolhardy public figure challenges some off-limits topic and is almost always overwhelmed and destroyed by a veritable swarm of these fanatical Jewish attackers. Just as the painful stings of the self-sacrificing warrior caste of an ant colony can quickly teach large predators to go elsewhere, fears of provoking these “Jewish berserkers” can often severely intimidate writers or politicians, causing them to choose their words very carefully or even completely avoid discussing certain controversial subjects, thereby greatly benefiting Jewish interests as a whole. And the more such influential people are thus intimidated into avoiding a particular topic, the more that topic is perceived as strictly taboo, and avoided by everyone else as well. (more…)

  JOE A. writes: Thank you for the beautiful American songs.  We were a musical family and the American songbook was a part of life, as much as Sunday church and fishing after school. I often wonder, Would our society be so crass and mean if more of us sang together on Friday night? Here’s a gem I found a year or two ago also involving Roy Rogers. It’s the theme song for a Hollywood movie about the 1953 Boy Scout Jamboree in Irvine.  That’s the sound of innocent youth – American boyhood --before the soul-crushing Sixties destroyed it. Rogers was at the Jamboree with Trigger and probably Dale. I grew up in that world and I want this back. It was good.

  AN African man who was an innocent bystander to a shooting was shot seven times by an Israeli security guard in a bus station three years ago. As Haftom Zarhum lay bleeding on the floor, he was kicked, pummeled, beaten with chairs and spat upon by a vicious Jewish mob. One man who tried to save him was also beaten. Medics did not attend to Zarhum for 18 minutes. He died a few hours later. Only one of his attackers, David Moyal, has been convicted in connection with the crime. He was finally sentenced this month --- to $100 days of community service. He was also ordered to pay the equivalent of $560 in restitution. The family of Zarhum has been denied restitution by the national insurance program. The story of Zarhum has received no coverage in the American press. The same week that Moyal was sentenced, Elor Azaria, an Israeli soldier who shot in the head a Palestinian who was wounded and incapacitated on the ground, returned home to a hero's welcome after nine months in jail. Azaria is widely celebrated for his act of murderous vengeance. In Judaism, revenge against gentiles is good. Hatred is a virtue. Christianity teaches its followers that if they do not love their enemies, they will rot in hell for all eternity. Talmudic Judaism teaches its followers that if they do not kill their enemies, paradise on earth will never come. Even secular Jews act…

“THE homosexual is the consumer culture’s version of the ideal citizen because he takes all of the strains of narcissism to their logical anti-essentialist conclusion. The homosexual qua homosexual can form no family and, as a result, no real community; in a culture which promotes sexual liberation as a form of control by breaking down family and community, homosexuality is the most exaggerated form of sexual individualism. The homosexual “lifestyle,” which is based on unnatural sexual acts, is proof that there is no nature and, therefore, no reality.

By promoting homosexuality as a viable alternative lifestyle, the consumer culture is saying that fantasy can triumph over reality, which is the essence of the narcissistic personality disorder.

Homosexuality is a function of father deprivation. The less father, the less reality. The less father, the less family. The less family, the less reality. The less community, the less reality. The reverse of all of those equations is also true. By fostering narcissism and promoting narcissistic personalities—homosexuals, rock stars, etc.—to positions of celebrity and prominence, the consumer culture weakens family and community and strengthens its hold over the weakened individuals who must struggle through life without support from community or family. The only thing they can hold onto without fear of reprisal is their narcissistic fantasies of themselves as grandiose and “special.””

— E. Michael Jones, Culture Wars magazine, Oct. 2014 (more…)

ALAN writes:

One evening many years ago, I was watching the 1942 B-Western Sunset on the Desert. One of its highlights was Roy Rogers’ singing of a song composed by his friend Bob Nolan. It was called “Remember Me.”

One sunny day in 1988, my father took a picture of an old, two-story, red-brick building that was home to a business offering “Vintage Clothing Costume Rental.” The name of the business appeared on a blue awning: Remember Me.

Indeed. How could I ever forget?  How many times have I sat here remembering the days and nights I spent with my father in that old neighborhood of south St. Louis, so much of which has since been willfully destroyed?

Cold and windy winter days in 1969-’70 when he and I stood waiting for a bus outside a corner drug store; winter nights when he and I sat there in the warmth of his kitchen in his modest apartment; and summer days when a pleasant breeze came in through the open window looking out on the back yard.

There were days when we climbed a steep and narrow flight of wooden stairs up to the clean, uncluttered attic to look through one of the few boxes he kept there; and days when we sat on the wooden steps of the back porch, not talking much about anything; casual hours in his life and mine, moments to which I never gave a thought in those years but that now loom in memory as reminders of his unswerving modesty and decency, qualities I took for granted when I was a boy because I had so seldom come in contact with grown-ups who were not that way.

I remember the screen door, the sink in the corner, the radio on the kitchen table, and a picture he kept on a wall showing his brother with his teammates on an amateur baseball team in 1930.  I remember the nights we sat there with a glass of orange juice and a plate of chocolate chip cookies.

I remember the black telephone on the wall and always a stack of daily newspapers on a chair.  A woman who grew up in that neighborhood in the 1940s told me she remembered seeing my father walking many times along those streets and always with a newspaper in his hand.

Between 2000 and 2012, I went back several times to that old neighborhood.  I walked for blocks and blocks along those old familiar streets, pausing here and there to take a picture of some house or building or sign or streetscape that struck my interest because I knew they had been significant to my father.

Most of that neighborhood was demolished in the early 1960s, a work of genius perpetrated by city planners and other do-gooders.  As a boy at that time, I could not imagine what that demolition must have meant to the thousands of people who lived there. (more…)

“THE Creator of the heavens obeys a carpenter; the God of eternal glory listens to a poor virgin. Has anyone ever witnessed anything comparable to this? Let the philosopher no longer disdain from listening to the common laborer; the wise, to the simple; the educated, to the illiterate; a child of a prince, to a peasant.” – St. Anthony of Padua

  WOULD YOU like to replicate in your own home the chutzpah and crowd-pleasing bombast of the man who falsely claims to be pope of the Roman Catholic Church? Would you like to dish out impressive statements such as: To find what the Lord asks of his Church today, we must lend an ear to the debates of our time and perceive the “fragrance” of the men of this age, so as to be permeated with their joys and hopes, with their griefs and anxieties. (Address, October 4, 2014) Would you like to perfect the art of heresy: Our species, like others, will be extinguished, but the light of God, that will not be extinguished, which in the end will invade all souls and then everything will be in all. (Interview with Eugenio Scalfari on September 24, 2013, published on October 1 in La Repubblica) Or would you like to relativize boldly: Every form of sexual submission must be clearly rejected. This includes all improper interpretations of the passage in the Letter to the Ephesians where Paul tells women to “be subject to your husbands” (Eph 5:22). This passage mirrors the cultural categories of the time, but our concern is not with its cultural matrix but with the revealed message that it conveys. (Amoris Laetitia) Impress your friends with this simple recipe: BERGOGLIAN STEW 1 cup Teilhard de Chardin 1/2 cup Darwinian fables 1/4 cup Swami Vivekanda 8 cups Kabbalah 3 cups hot…

A READER recommends this engaging series of videos by David Richins on the perils of Capitalism. Episode 1 can be found here, but this second video is a good introduction too.

IF by capitalism is meant, not diffused ownership of property, but monopolistic capitalism in which capital bids for labor on a market, and concentrates wealth in the hands of a few, then from an economic point of view alone, the Church is just as much opposed to capitalism as it is to communism. Communism emphasizes social use to the exclusion of personal rights, and capitalism emphasizes personal rights to the exclusion of social use. The Church says both are wrong, for though the right to property is personal, the use is social. .... Capitalistic economy is godless; communism makes economics God. -- Fulton J. Sheen, Communism and the Conscience of the West (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1948) See the continuing discussion in this entry.