JORGE BERGOGLIO, the man whose credentials for the papal throne do not include being a Catholic, has done it again. He has once again delivered a rhetorical detonation. This time he tells us that all that stuff about hell and damnation was exaggeration. Novus Ordo Watch has the gory details of  his homily this Wednesday, in which he stated, according to a reliable English translation:

Do not be afraid of the final judgment of God, when the good will be separated from the bad, because Jesus will always be at our side, because we can rely on the intercession and the benevolence of the saints and because God “did not send his Son to condemn, but to save” and “he who believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is already condemned,” and in this sense “the judgment has already begun”.

Unsurprisingly, Time magazine has chosen Francis as “Man of the Year”  — oops, make that “Person of the Year.” The magazine, which we know has the highest of standards, calls Bergoglio the “People’s Pope.” There you have it. When a pope is popular in the modern world, that’s a sure sign he is not Catholic.

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  "VOX Clara Ecce Intonat," or "A Thrilling Voice by Jordan Rings," is another beautiful Advent hymn. It was composed in the sixth century. Notice once again the stirring lyrics. O, we of little faith. If only we could have a modicum of the courage of St. Lucy, whose martyrdom is honored today. If only we could hear that thrilling voice. A THRILLING voice by Jordan rings, rebuking guilt and darksome things: vain dreams of sin and visions fly; Christ in His might shines forth on high. Now let each torpid soul arise, that sunk in guilt and wounded lies; see! the new Star's refulgent ray shall chase disease and sin away. Giovanni Vanini performs the ancient hymn here.

AT Reclaiming Beauty, Kidist Paulos Asrat writes about Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists, public policy celebrities and purported experts on marriage and the economy. Interestingly, Stevenson and Wolfers are not married, though they have lived together for years and have two children. They are not married for tax reasons, which is a super-cool reason not to marry. They employ a nanny for some $50,000 a year and outsource almost all domestic chores. Thus have they outfoxed the tedium that has afflicted mankind and been able to devote themselves to the families of the world. Wolfers is the first economist in history to discover fatherhood — and he has long hair, which further boosts his hipness rating. The top universities can’t get enough of these two and they have worked at a bunch of them. They are currently employed at the University of Michigan. Here is a New York Times piece about them from last year.

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AISHA HARRIS, a black columnist for Slate, suggests that Santa Claus be henceforth depicted as a penguin — yes, a penguin — instead of a fat, bearded white man. Harris writes:

Why, you ask? For one thing, making Santa Claus an animal rather than an old white male could spare millions of nonwhite kids the insecurity and shame that I remember from childhood. (more…)

IT makes as much sense for a woman to head General Motors as it does for a man to head the League of Women Voters. In other words, it makes no sense. Automotive engineering and manufacturing have always been a man’s world — and always will be. I am sure Mary Barra, who has been named CEO of General Motors, is a talented and smart woman. Indeed, she may be a brilliant CEO, but it’s still an outrage to have a woman in charge of a man’s world. It’s an outrage against male authority and against female dignity. Women have many more important things to do than manage giant companies and market cars. The corporate world loves the dynamic dualism of the woman executive. Her vitalistic androgyny inspires the sort of denial of reality that makes people want to spend more than they have. But whenever I see a woman CEO, I think of the barren home life she must lead. Fancy vacations and big houses do so little to cover up a soulless home. You have to have a soul, by the way, in order to identify a soulless home. A female executive doesn’t have time to take care of a single houseplant (it would wither under her lack of nurturance), let alone nurture and bring to life a family and a real home.

By the way, how can you take seriously an executive who wears such lurid nail polish? I realize I’m mind-blowingly old-fashioned, but the truth is the woman executive just can’t stop herself. She compensates for her masculine ambition and competitiveness, things which stifle her femininity at its core, by being aggressively feminine in dress, with low-cut blouses, tight skirts and the sort of nail fashion once reserved for tarts. Barra just had to offset her Maoist pantsuit with something suggestive of a brothel.

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I KNOW this has already been widely commented upon, but this photo of Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt and the Obamas at the Nelson Mandela memorial yesterday says it all, doesn’t it? Here we have the aggressively revealing dress and lack of gravitas of the Western white woman in power along with the inflated egotism of her natural ally, the black man in power. They can’t get enough of each other. Then to top it off, we have the stony demeanor of the wife, whose unhappiness symbolizes the unpleasant reality that the black woman is often the loser in the race to elevate and bring together the white woman and black man. Michelle’s expression reminds me of the antipathy black women feel as more and more white women take their men. — And all this at a memorial service, confirming what has been said here about the death of death.

The Daily Mail also has the now famous photo of Obama, David Cameron and Thorning-Schmidt taking a selfie. These are the Teenagers Who Rule Us.

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THE modern world progressively destroys all vestige of the sacred and turns all ceremonies and rites into vulgar exercises in self-love. The funeral is no exception to this rule. In an egocentric, nihilistic culture, the traditional funeral is too sad, too serious and too impersonal. It’s too much of a downer. That’s why instead of praying for the dead and contemplating the hereafter, survivors now commonly celebrate the life of the deceased with upbeat eulogies, mementoes, biographies, songs, and photos. Chad Bird, in his excellent essay “The Tragic Death of the Funeral,” aptly calls it “necronarcissism.”

Surrounded as it is with so much sincere sentiment and seeming good will, the “Celebration of Life” seems innocuous. But, as Bird writes, this kind of Funeral Lite is a symptom of profound social decay:

What makes community life viable, in groups as small as a family or large as a country, is the will of individuals to makes [sic] sacrifices for others, to consider more than their own needs and wants, and to act accordingly. The more robust this other-focused approach to life is, the healthier the community will be. For that reason, there is no greater threat to the cohesion and perpetuation of a society than narcissism. (more…)

FITZGERALD writes:

I was in college during the anti-apartheid movement. I was in the anti-anti-apartheid movement. We once held a campus-wide meeting where we screened a CBC documentary on the ANC exposing its murderous practices and Soviet underwriting and how the Western and especially American press falsely reported the reality on the ground. It was especially condemning of the Mandelas for advocating violent acts of terror including the practice of necklacing. (more…)

IN celebrating the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God today, we celebrate not just the purity and sinlessness of a single woman, but her combativeness, the counterpart to her spotless purity. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira wrote of the intransigence of Mary:

Let us look more closely at what intransigence is. When a person has a very clear notion of what is good and an understanding of the highest expressions of this good, this person knows that the opposite is bad. It is not a theoretical knowledge, like that of a scientist who analyzes a specimen in a laboratory, but rather a knowledge that comes hand in hand with a great love for good. The person naturally recognizes the opposite of such good, which is evil, and hates evil with an intensity proportionate to the magnitude of his love for the good.

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  I AM very behind in posting comments on recent threads. I may not be able to get to them all until later today.

TroperA. writes:

The problem regarding Charles’s Dilemma is one facing many people in this day and age: the infiltration of groups —any and all groups, even ones that are not political in nature — by leftists hoping to turn them into engines for “social justice.”  This can be expressed in a maxim called O’Sullivan’s Law:

Any organization or enterprise that is not expressly right wing will become left wing over time.

The Sodahead explains this phenomenon thusly:

One of the reasons for this is leftist intolerance versus right-wing tolerance. Right wingers are willing to hire openly left-wing employees in the interest of fairness. Left-wingers, utterly intolerant, will not allow a non-Liberal near them, and will harass them at every opportunity. The result over time is that conservative enterprises are infiltrated by leftists but leftist enterprises remain the same or get worse.

Also, leftism is in and of itself a form of decay. It’s what happens not just to television shows but to nations, churches and universities as the energy given off by the big bang of their inception slowly ebbs away. Rather than expend vitality in originality and creation they become obsessed with introspection, popularity and lethargy. Leftism is entropy of the spirit and intellect.

Another reason is that the parasitic nature of Liberals/Leftists attracts them to existing money. (more…)

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

In its race to canonize the late Nelson Mandela before he has even cooled to room temperature (“Nelson Mandela, South African Icon of Peaceful Resistance, Is Dead“), The New York Times shows itself once again to be the natural heir to the Soviet Communist Party’s Pravda.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum, perhaps. But to describe Nelson Mandela as an “Icon of Peaceful Resistance” is to ignore the first half of his life.

There was a reason Nelson Mandela was on Robben Island. Whatever the old Marxist may have been in his later years, in the full flush of his youth he was an active terrorist with plenty of blood, black as well as white, on his hands. (more…)

NATHAN writes:

One of the things Charles wrote in describing a social dilemma in connection with the impending imposition of a homosexual “couple” on his hitherto enjoyable group of oenophiles reminded me of an unpleasant experience I had in 2001. Twelve years later, discord about it lingers with my wife, who believes my sounding off permanently damaged social friendships and probably cost me job opportunities that might have our family in far better financial shape today than we are. She is probably right. The cost of saying what our masters do not want us to hear can be high, if not yet as high as in the Soviet Union. Highly educated Americans — if what elite universities in the United States (American universities no more) offer is “education” — are especially socially programmed, and most are entirely unaware of it.

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    DEBORAH ACUFF writes: As the media and the world begins its commentary upon the death of Nelson Mandela, I would like to recommend the essay "Nelson Mandela and the story of Decius Magius," written by Lawrence Auster in 1990.

  IN ADDITION to Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 and Beethoven's "Egmont" Overture, the distinguished Princeton University Orchestra, which only costs about $60,000 a year for musicians to join, will be performing the "Ballad for Trayvon Martin for Orchestra and Jazz Quintet" at its concert tonight. The ballad is the work of Jazz Professor Anthony Branker, who says Trayvon's death was an act of racial violence. The two-faced professor contends that his composition, obviously born of racial militance, is all about healing. From The Star-Ledger: According to Branker, the work is intended "to be a form of healing and something that could be seen as a composition of hope — one that speaks to all of us to continue to work together so that children of any race, ethnicity or religious affiliation never have to meet such a tragic end." Rather than write from a place of anger, Branker has worked to create a lyrical, peaceful and harmonically beautiful work that incorporates a fugue and Brazilian style. The goal, he said, is to pay tribute to Martin, as well as others who have been victims of racial violence. Yes, I suppose it is a composition of hope: the hope that white guilt will never die. Surely, it implicitly embodies the hope that whites will not wake up one day and say, "Wait a minute. Where are the ballads for the victims of black brutality? What about the hundreds of people raped and murdered…

NEW STATISTICS show that two out of three sodomites infected with HIV continue to have “unprotected sex.” Thus many homosexuals continue to be exposed to a deadly disease by other homosexuals. As the blogger Mundabor writes:

It boggles the mind. It squarely makes of fags the enemy number one of fags, their own willed target for potentially deadly infections. Gaystapo as it breathes and sodomises.

What people still seem not to understand (because they don’t know jack of God, sin, or the devil) is how damaged the soul of an homosexual already is. … [U]nless we understand the gravity of this truly satanical perversion we wil not be able to understand its consequences. Only people firmly in the hand of the devil can be so astonishingly, diabolically self-centred as to put not even their own pleasure, but merely its maximum enjoyment at a premium over other people’s health and perhaps life.

The idea that homosexual culture will ever embrace “unprotected sex” is ludicrous. The culture is based, after all, upon uninhibited sexual indulgence. Don’t you love that bureaucratic phrase: “Unprotected sex?” Every act of anal intercourse is unprotected. Forgive my bluntness, but anal tissues were not designed to be roughed up. They are very different from vaginal tissues. They easily tear, exposing the body to bacteria and viruses. They are in close contact with dangerous bodily wastes. The anus was meant to be an exit way only, not an entryway. The anal passage is homophobic. And nothing can ever be done to change that. Millions of men have died prematurely and suffered all kinds of physical atrocities, including anal cancer, because of violations against this anatomical region. We supposedly live in a medically enlightened age and yet the rudiments of biology are denied every day in The New York Times. The liberal obsesses about secondhand smoke and then applauds the far more unhealthy acts of the sodomite.

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  KARL D. writes: I just came across this article which jibes quite well with your recent posts (here, here and here) on Asians and your reader's suggestion that they are "model immigrants." A Chinese woman in Long Island, New York wants to build an entire gated community (that would cost billions of dollars) specifically for  wealthy Chinese nationals in the Catskill mountains of upstate New York. As you can imagine, the citizens of this tiny community are not exactly thrilled.