SISTER WENDY BECKET, in her book The Story of Painting, wrote about this 16th-century portrait, a painting of the artist’s wife with their children, by Hans Holbein the Younger:

Artists have always painted their families, but this is the saddest version on record. He lived very little with his wife and children in Basel (the reasons may have been political, religious or financial), but this tragic little trio has all the withering marks of the unloved.

The dim-eyed wife presses down on the children, plain, pale little beings, all unhappy and all ailing. Holbein, that superb manipulator of the human face, cannot have meant to reveal their wretchedness and expose his neglect with such drastic effect. It is as if his art is stronger than his will, and for once Holbein is without defenses.

The court painter, native to Germany, captured the personalities of the rich and powerful of Europe by maintaining a “dignified distance,” without conveying any intimate knowledge. But here he gets closer:

Here his courtly shield is down, perhaps because of the artist’s personal sense of guilt. He was not a good husband or father, and while he can carry off any portrait with superb technical aplomb, he catches his breath and opens the inner door when he paints the family that he abandoned and neglected. (more…)

A Penitential Litany for Lent

Lord, have mercy on us.
Christ, have mercy on us.
Christ, hear us.
Christ, graciously hear us.
God the Father of heaven, have mercy on us.
God the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy on us.
God, the Holy Ghost, have mercy on us.
Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy on us.

Behold we were conceived in sin; and in iniquity our mothers brought us forth;

Have mercy on us. *

As we have grown in years, we have multiplied our offences; and every day Thy goodness adds to our lives, our wickedness increases the heap of our transgressions; *

The law of our body makes war against the law of our mind, and brings us into subjection to sin; so that the good which we would, we do not, and the evil which we would not, that we do; * (more…)

THE HABIT OF PERFECTION

               — by Gerard Manley Hopkins

ELECTED Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders come
Which only makes you eloquent.

Be shellèd, eyes, with double dark
And find the uncreated light:
This ruck and reel which you remark
Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.

Palate, the hutch of tasty lust,
Desire not to be rinsed with wine:
The can must be so sweet, the crust
So fresh that come in fasts divine! (more…)

A SERMON by Fr. Anthony Cekada on "The Enigma of Suffering" can be found here.

  LAST YEAR'S false flag season, thanks to valiant efforts to bring about gun control, disorient the viewing public before the election and manipulate the consciousness of the entire nation, was bursting with talent. Exceptional talent. Give them a hand.

  DON VINCENZO writes: Since your love of pizza knows no bounds, I thought this would please you. I've often touted the fact that the Neapolitans are the world's greatest pizza makers, and Signor Gennaro (named after the patron saint of Napoli) and a widely used Neopolitan name, shows how it is done, and how simple it is. Of course, without the San Marzano tomatoes, the buffalo mozzarella, and the fresh basil, it can't be what it is in Naples, but such, as they say, is life.

CONSIDER a hypothetical situation:

You have not been feeling well for several weeks. You are run-down and start to become short of breath when you walk up stairs. You’re also not sleeping well and your appetite is poorer than usual. This goes on, progressively worsening, for almost three weeks when you finally make an appointment with your doctor. Something’s not right.

You describe your symptoms to the doctor and he says, “I want you to see a cardiologist right away. Hmm, I think we will have to run some tests.”

You take his prescriptions and go immediately, with some panic, to obtain a series of blood tests and imaging studies. You didn’t like the look on the doctor’s face when he heard your symptoms.

You go to the cardiologist with the test results two days later.

“I’m sorry to say, I have bad news,” he says after studying your results with obvious concern.

“Whaa?!” (more…)

PRESIDENT TRUMP follows through with one of the worst of his campaign pledges: a sharp increase in defense spending. The Anti-New York Times reports: Say it ain't so, Orange Man! From the article [in the New York Times]: "President Trump will instruct federal agencies on Monday to assemble a budget for the coming fiscal year that includes sharp increases in Defense Department spending and drastic enough cuts to domestic agencies that he can keep his promise to leave Social Security and Medicare alone, according to four senior administration officials." So, the $634 Billion dollars that the American taxpayer spent to fund the Department of Offense in 2016 wasn't enough to guarantee our "freedom" TM. Nor will the massive protective moats known as the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, coupled with neighboring vassal land masses of Canada and Mexico, fully protect us from some unspecified foreign invader. No, Supreme General Orange Man thinks we need to spend more money on "defense." To protect us from what? The ... Martians? But, of course, the Trump cultists will be too busy bowing and scraping before this reality TV actor-turned-president to realize what this means. Or maybe they don't care. Maybe they think it's okay to have World War III as long as we have a wall along the border.

GERARD MENUHIN was born in Scotland in 1948. He is the son of Jewish parents, the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin and British ballerina Diana Rosamund Gould. His brother is the pianist Jeremy Menuhin. Their grandfather was Moshe Menuhin, the great, great grandson of Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad Hassidism and an anti-Zionist. Gerard is an actor, novelist and journalist, a graduate of Eton and Stanford University who lived in Germany and England as a child. In his latest book, Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil (2015), Menuhin rejects many of the official and popular accounts of World War II and thus has earned the hateful slur of “Holocaust denier.”

Perhaps only a person of Jewish ancestry could write so intrepidly on such a taboo topic. His book is filled with important historical information from primary sources and daring opinions. Menuhin believes the war should not have been fought at all.

Menuhin is a courageous man — a cultured intellectual reduced to the most infantile, bigoted and deceitful characterizations by a herd of infantile, bigoted and deceitful propagandists. He is not a “Holocaust denier,” but a hero.

At times, his opinions are harsh, as Jews sometimes (though rarely in public) can be toward themselves, and I don’t agree with them all, but he is not a “Holocaust denier” and, in fact, there are no “Holocaust deniers,” at least not any that are taken seriously. No one sane questions the fact that hundreds of thousands of Jews died in concentration camps in Germany, a terrible disaster brought about toward the end of the war when the Allies bombed the supply lines into the camps, where Jews, whose leaders had declared war on Germany in 1933, worked in armaments factories and miserably awaited deportation. What Menuhin and many other abused, hounded and slandered historical revisionists (who receive virtually no support from the intellectual elite of this country, but who definitely will be lionized by our descendants) do deny is that anywhere close to six million died, that gas chambers existed and that there was a plan to exterminate European Jewry. Menuhin has thus earned more slurs: “self-hating Jew” and “anti-Semitic Jew.”

A reviewer at Amazon writes:

Mr. Menuhin does more to honor the real victims of the Holocaust, than any other, since he shames the lies proliferated in their names, and restores their dignity and well earned memory. Furthermore, this is the kind of literature that will contribute to mitigating antisemitism, and not the EU Holocaust laws passed to penalize and imprison those who express those sentiments.

Another reviewer writes:

I have still not managed to finish the book. I had to stop several times because for an half-awakened, still half-indoctrinated German it was too much to take in. Many times I reread parts with tears in my eyes. Too many lies. So much hatred against us which we just ignored. So much destruction of our country, our culture our people we were told was deserved but in fact was just to crush our natural economic development. I now believe that our biggest weakness is our honesty. It makes us incapable to recognize the lies against us. A musician myself I am proud to say that I have met Yehudi Menuhin in person but I now believe that his son Gerard will leave an even deeper mark in human history than his father.

In writing his book, Menuhin fell into one of the most vilified of coteries. Who knows how long it will be before he is arrested and put in jail. In the Spanish Inquisition, people were incarcerated for telling lies. In the modern Inquisition, people are jailed for telling the truth.

He writes of his motives: (more…)

EYES AND TEARS
—-  by Andrew Marvell

HOW wisely Nature did decree,
With the same eyes to weep and see;
That, having viewed the object vain,
They might be ready to complain!

And, since the self-deluding sight
In a false angle takes each height,
These tears, which better measure all,
Like watery lines and plummets fall.

Two tears, which sorrow long did weigh
Within the scales of either eye,
And then paid out in equal poise,
Are the true price of all my joys.

What in the world most fair appears,
Yea, even laughter, turns to tears;
And all the jewels which we prize
Melt in these pendants of the eyes.

I have through every garden been,
Amongst the red, the white, the green,
And yet from all the flowers I saw,
No honey, but these tears could draw. (more…)

A READER writes:

Regarding Rachel Dolezal: Why is it almost always the case that any poor woman must be offered prostitution or porn? I guess when all else fails they always have that. Men have nothing really. (more…)

  SEE more here. (Warning: Vulgar images.)

ALAN writes:

One day recently I reread your remembrance of a woman you admired in your childhood.

There was a Betty in my life, too.  She was there before I was born, as a friend of the woman who would marry my uncle.  The two young women met before World War II when they worked at an industrial plant in St. Louis.  Betty married a Navy man sometime in the 1940s.  But he died unexpectedly of natural causes.  They had no children, and Betty had no siblings.

I first became aware of Betty in 1952 or ’53.  Her name was Elizabeth, but no one ever called her that.  She was always “Betty” to us, plain and simple.  She was of average height and had black hair.  There was nothing pretentious about Betty.  She was as honest and down to earth as they come.  A snapshot from the mid-1950s shows Betty and me sitting on the floor by our Christmas tree.

She drove a mid-1950s maroon Ford.  When I knew she was coming to visit us, I would sit by a window and watch eagerly for her car to come into view.  She chain-smoked cigarettes and helped sustain the Coca-Cola company by drinking countless Coca-Colas in the popular 6½ green-glass bottles. (more…)

  "THERE is no one more rich, no one more free, no one more powerful than he who can forsake himself and all passing things and truly hold himself to be the meanest and lowest of all." --  Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

NOTHING is sweeter than repentance. Nevertheless, many people in the modern world think that Lent, which begins this week, is about wallowing in guilt. They see it as a grim, masochistic, uncharitable season if they think about it at all.

They know nothing of the relief that comes with revealed guilt and true repentance. They don’t understand that Lent is the exact opposite of wallowing in guilt. It is the unburdening of guilt. They know not the beauty of repentance.

But it’s hard to believe in Lent if you don’t believe in the concept of sin.

I read somewhere recently — I can’t remember where — that all we need to do in order to be good and happy is trust in our own consciences. Did the author know anything about human nature? We are so good at lying to ourselves. We are so good at deflecting pangs of conscience.

The Rev. Franz Hunolt wrote in the 18th century about the many ways in which we deceive our own consciences. His essay, “On the False Peace of a Sinful Conscience,” includes the sort of pious language that is off-putting to cold, modern sensibilities, but Fr. Hunolt makes perceptive observations about the psychology of self-deception:

It is true, my dear brethren, that at first conscience cries out in that way to every one who is guilty of sin; but what can one do to silence this voice of conscience, and to free himself from the tortures of remorse? Self-love supplies all kinds of pretexts and false arguments to pervert a man’s judgment and to persuade him that there is nothing wrong in what he is going to do, that it is even good and praiseworthy. (more…)

KIDIST Paulos Asrat considers the reaction by the atheist Alt-Right figure Richard Spencer to the Milo Yiannapoulos case. She wonders what grounds Spencer has for being scandalized by Milo’s controversial remarks. If God does not exist, she asks,

Why is pedophilia immoral? What is wrong with loving little children? After all pedophiles can argue that their behavior is a form of love. Unless it is a “rapist pedophile,” most pedophiles are attracted to one (or two or three) children and maintain long term interactions with them. The young children become attached to them.

Legally society can decided that having sex with five-year-old children (who can say “yes” and “no,” and make decisions) is perfectly acceptable and that it is not a crime.

In a related post at The Orthosphere, Kristor writes that individuals who don’t believe in objective moral truth are prone to political rage: (more…)

  THOMAS D. WILLIAMS, PH.D. explains in a few words why the famous saint and theologian would have opposed today's open borders.

M. OLIVER HEYDORN writes at the Clifford Hugh Douglas Institute for the Study and Promotion of Social Credit:

At the very heart of the modern economy we find this thing called ‘finance’. Finance is to the economy what an operating system is to a computer. For it is the financial system which allows an economy’s ‘hardware’ (i.e., its raw materials, labour, machinery, etc.) to be actualized in the service of specific ‘software applications’ (i.e., production programmes). As far as the formal economy is concerned, it is true to say that finance is the essential interface and animating principle.

But the financial system, i.e., the banking and cost accountancy system, is also a purely human artefact composed of institutions, laws, and conventions. This means that it can function more or less adequately. If it is properly designed, it will serve the common good in an effective, efficient, and fair manner. If it is not properly designed, it will tend, instead, to serve the vested interests of those who own and operate the financial system, thus transforming financiers (both national and international) into an economic and political oligarchy.

Social Credit holds that the conventional financial system is not properly designed and that, in consequence, it has become impossible for any economic association operating under its rules to fulfill its true purpose (i.e., the delivery of those goods and services that people can use with profit to themselves with the least amount of labour and resource consumption) to the extent that such a fulfillment is physically possible. In other words, because there is a ‘bug’ in the economy’s operating system, the economy’s hardware is artificially constrained and its activity is misdirected. Chronic dysfunction in the form of poverty, servility, the recurring cycle of boom and bust, constant inflation, heavy taxation, economic waste and sabotage, forced economic growth, ever-increasing indebtedness, and the centralization of wealth, privilege, and power in fewer and fewer hands is the inevitable result. (more…)