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"THE coronation was an excruciating affair, and felt like the country was just going through the motions. The history of Charles and Camilla is so sordid that it was hard to witness them parading around in crowns like paragons of virtue. A broken monarchy for a broken nation." -- Way of the World  

FROM “The Great Sacrilege,” by Fr. James F. Wathen:

[W]e should call attention to the mere token deference given in the ‘New Mass’ to Mary, the Most Blessed Mother of God. It must be recognized that the few begrudging mentions of her represent nothing more than vestiges of the loving attentions paid her in the True Mass. The few references made to her in the “Novus Ordo” were kept only in order to placate the faithful, you may be sure. There is no more place in the “New Religion” for Our Lady than there is for Christ Our Lord. This is a point which needs further comment.

First however, I cannot emphasize strongly enough that the ultimate purpose of all the sacrileges, the trickery, the lawlessness, the discord, and the scandal in religion, as well as of the overthrow of governments, the terrorism, the cruelties, the imprisonments, the murders, and the ruin of souls in the social realm, which are the stock and trade of the Revolution– the ultimate purpose of them all, I say, is the everlasting blasphemy of the sweet Name of Jesus, the God-Man. For the doctrine which inspires in Revolutionaries the most unmitigated hatred and provokes all their audacious perversities is that of His sacred divinity. Once you become aware of this fact, you will be able to comprehend the (poorly) disguised intentions of the “New Mass,” and, to be sure, of the whole drive for “renewal” in the Church. (more…)

"THE very leaders who are entrusted to guard the deposit of Faith and to lead the Faithful to Heaven, have rebelled, becoming the enemy itself, and they are paving the path to Hell for their followers. The enemies are, as they have always been, priests and bishops of the Church. They, as has been the repeated case in history, create the heresies and lead the Faithful away from the Church. No heresy has ever been started by a lay person. The Faithful are seduced into a stupor or misguided false trust in their spiritual leaders and seem to be willing to follow them, even to Hell. The Faithful fall into these heresies without objection, become infected with the disease of spiritual blindness and immediately become the unfaithful. At first, a few fell to the heresies, then more and more, and today, most have fallen. The great difficulty now is that spiritual blindness is so deeply imbedded, that very few will ever see their error, or be willing to admit it. Therefore, many will perish and very few will be saved, just as Christ Himself has foretold. The current conditions are so depraved, that the majority of people in the world place their complete trust in the world alone and in its allurements. People are so removed from the Grace of the True Church of God that any one who attempts to explain the situation to them for their own benefit is…

Therefore God shall send them the operation of error, to believe lying that all may be judged who have not believed the truth, but have consented to iniquity. (II Thessalonians, 2:10-11) JAVIER Morell Ibarra in his Survival Guide and Reference Handbook During the Great Tribulation and the Operation of Error, posted at Betrayed Catholics, explains this era of deception and apostasy and describes what Catholics can do -- the only thing they can do, which is cling to the truth, flee false shepherds and pray at home. Of course, everything he says applies to all people of good will, who cannot be saved outside the Catholic Church. Those few who love the truth during this long-prophesied end to the Christian era will find much consolation in Ibarra's guide, which correctly denounces both the Vatican II Church and "traditionalist" operations: It is my sincere hope that this work will set a humble rule and final consideration to which everyone can turn for safe haven, a reliable guide to finally understanding where we are, how we got here, and lastly, most important of all, how to deal with the perfect storm that is beating down on all of us since the death of S.S. Pius XII, in other words, how to survive the Great Tribulation and the Operation of Error and not die trying. May God Almighty have mercy on all of us and grant us wisdom, understanding, and much humility to understand and…

AVE, GENEROSA
—-Hildegard von Bingen

Hail, girl of a noble house,
shimmering and unpolluted,
you pupil in the eye of chastity,
you essence of sanctity,
which was pleasing to God. (more…)

ALAN writes:

Your comments and those of Robert Manning about the “transgender” Folderol are excellent.

“We are prisoners of our premises. Hence, we had better choose them carefully.” I sat in an auditorium in Syracuse, New York, on a pleasant Saturday afternoon in 1971 and heard Dr. Thomas Szasz speak those words. Truer words were never spoken.

To permit our enemies or adversaries to define our premises and vocabulary is, in effect, to surrender our independence of mind and judgment – they know it, but people who are too trusting don’t.

People who imagine they can surrender or alter their vocabulary to placate their most conniving enemies or not to “offend” them will soon surrender everything. Bet on it. I have watched gullible Americans do this over the span of my life. The “transgender” Folderol is merely a current example.

Men will not even call thugs “thugs” for fear of hurting their feelings. That is one proof not only of cowardice by grown men but of moral-philosophical bankruptcy throughout the culture. Nothing reveals moral courage or cowardice more clearly than the words men choose to speak and write. (more…)

THERE IS no such thing as a cloud made out of cottage cheese. There is no such thing as a frog who walks on two feet. There is no such thing as a blue tree. There is no such thing as a flying moose.

There is no such thing as a “transgendered” person. There are no “trans men” or “trans kids” or “trans women.” They don’t exist. A man cannot become a woman. A woman cannot become a man, no matter how much surgical or chemical mutilation she may undergo.

To engage in debate about “transgenders,” except to say that they don’t exist, is to dialogue with delusion. To try to overcome “transgenderism” with logic is to draw oneself into a web of insanity and give fantasy rights over reality. You can never win if you step through that door. If you enter that house of lies, you too have lost your mind.

There is no “trans community.” There are only people who agree to embrace delusion and who aim, knowingly or not, to take every single person who entertains their delusions down with them.

“Transgenderism” is a heavily promoted, artificially created assault on the use of reason that has very little to do with its actual participants. It is easier to control people if they cannot think, if they are cut off from the very physical essence of their beings, if they are wandering from an early age in a lifeless desert of confusion and if words are brutally disconnected from their accepted meaning. (more…)

"AN unhappy generation has of necessity to distract itself from its own emptiness. Since the beginning of the world, men have sought distraction in sin; our own world has found a further distraction, special to itself, in science. Take science first. It is incredible how long science has succeeded in keeping men’s minds off their fundamental unhappiness and its own very limited power to remedy their fundamental unhappiness. One marvel follows another — electric light, gramophone, motor car, telephone, radio, aeroplane, television. It is a curious list, and very pathetic. The soul of man is crying for hope or purpose or meaning; and the inventor says 'Here is a telephone,' or 'Look, television!' — exactly as one tries to distract a baby crying for its mother by offering it sugar sticks and making funny faces at it. The leaping stream of invention has served extraordinarily well to keep man occupied, to keep him from remembering that which is troubling him. He is only troubled. His sense of futility he has never got round to analysing. But he is half strangled by it." --- Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity, Sheed and Ward, 1946; pp. 337-8.  

"DRINK of the chalice which Jesus Himself offers you; if it be bitter to the palate, it is sweet to the heart." -- St. Paul of the Cross  

"FOR a long time now, I have thought that feminism has at its heart a rejection of the idea of virtue (and well that makes sense as virtue comes from the Latin for man.) For instance, humility is not something that a woman is supposed to have anymore — only men are supposed to be humble. Nor are women (according to feminism) supposed to be modest or kind or patient, but men are. In short, women have already been “virtuous enough” and they might sin heartily, egregiously, as they have already 'expiated in advance an eternity of misconduct.' And to look around us I suppose we have entered into that brave new world now: into the 'eternity of misconduct.' Now, thanks to feminism, women can behave badly without shame." --- From "The Anti-Feminist Propheciies of Henry James," 2012  

It is to St. Mark that we owe the many slight touches which often give such vivid coloring to the Gospel scenes, and help us to picture to ourselves the very gestures and looks of our blessed Lord. It is he alone who notes that in the temptation Jesus was "with the beasts;" that He slept in the boat "on a pillow;" that He "embraced" the little children. He alone preserves for us the commanding words "Peace, be still!" by which the storm was quelled; or even the very sounds of His voice, the "Ephpheta" and "Talitha cumi," by which the dumb were made to speak and the dead to rise. So, too, the "looking round about with anger," and the "sighing deeply," long treasured in the memory of the penitent apostle, who was himself converted by his Saviour's look, are here recorded by his faithful interpreter. Read more on this feast day about the author of the second gospel here  

ROBERT ROBBINS writes in comments here:

I guess I took especial interest in this article because as of late I have rediscovered my boyish love of beautiful cars, though not so ardent a love as when I was ten. I think that fast cars are an expression of power like Alan quotes someone as saying in the article, but that is not a bad thing. On the contrary, power is very good. Weakness is evil. Spiritual or physical weakness is nothing to rejoice in. We only rejoice in Christ on the Cross because He freely laid down his life. No one forced the Omnipotent to lay down is life for His beloved. That’s power. (more…)

TONY S. writes: From your description, it sounds like the film Late Spring is concerned with depicting a certain type of life that at the time of its production was disappearing with the encroachment of modernity. Films like this are time capsules, they are historical lessons in how people used to live, what they cared about, where they found purpose and value. Meanwhile, today a film such as The Whale has an agenda to destroy. It seems to me that all modern entertainment, including film, TV, sports and more, is just one major brainwashing effort to demotivate, demoralize, and degenerate an entire people. In Orwell’s novel 1984 the population was exposed daily to two minutes of hate. In modern America we are exposed to 24 hours of hate. It helps explain the high levels of mental illness present in American society.  

ALAN writes:

Shortly after nine o’clock on Easter Sunday night, I was watching an old movie when a strange noise outside attracted my attention. It was not the sound of an auto collision or screeching tires, but rather a muffled thump, followed by silence. I did not go out to investigate, but I suspected an auto accident of some kind. A few minutes later, the sirens proved me right. For ten minutes, the night air was filled with sirens.

In far south St. Louis, there is a bridge that spans a wide drainage ditch, and two roads that run parallel to the ditch on either side.  Traffic is heavy on all three roads.  Nearby residents call them “speedways,” because that is how they are used by anarchists and morons who compete to show how much they hate traffic laws.

What about traffic law enforcement, you ask? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! That’s a good one! You must be from another planet or another century. There is no traffic law enforcement in St. Louis or any other kind of law enforcement.

Astronomer Oliver Justin Lee wrote in 1939:

“Every day, when driving, I experience keen pleasure in showing some courtesy of the road or receiving evidence of it from others, usually the mature drivers, rarely the youthful. Note how jealous many drivers are about their cars. They must go fast, they must prove to every other driver that their car can go faster, climb easier or roar louder than anything else on the road. I often feel like saying ‘Don’t be cocky. Anyone, even a witless moron, can push down an accelerator’ …  There is much hysterical driving of automobiles, much ill-nature and thoughtlessness…..”  [Oliver Justin Lee, Beyond Yonder, Chapman & Grimes, 1939, p. 23]

It was precisely one such moron who caused the accident Easter Sunday night by driving his truck at 80 miles per hour along one of the roads perpendicular to the bridge. (more…)

THE 1949 feature film, Late Spring, is a simple masterpiece about a family in postwar Japan.

Available with subtitles on the Internet Archive, it is one of a trilogy directed by Yasujirō Ozu in the style of Japanese cinema known as shomin-geki, a genre that realistically portrays the ordinary daily lives of working class and middle class people. These films though involving a far different culture and people are similar to some of the British movies from that era discussed in previous posts in that they lack the glamorous clothes and settings common to so many Hollywood productions of that time. They do not hide domestic banalities and elevate ordinary conflicts into compelling drama.

Late Spring made it through the postwar censors of American-occupied Japan, but not without some significant alterations. Though it takes place in Tokyo, no scenes of the immense destruction from firebombing were permitted. And while the main characters are dealing with lost relatives and friends, the cause of the deaths is never mention in the film. Changes also were made to modernize some aspects of traditional Japan, part of the American social engineering the conquered nation faced at that time.

It is special too in that it deals realistically with a subject matter — Ozu tackles it elsewhere — so often neglected in movies: the bonds and universal conflicts between grown children and their parents. The film is based on the short novel Father and Daughter (Chichi to musume) by the novelist Kazuo Hirotsu. It centers around a 27-year-old unmarried woman, Noriko, played unforgettably by Setsuko Hara, and her widowed father, Professor Shukichi Somiya, played by the outstanding Chishu Ryu. The two characters live together and Noriko, who also works at an office job, is dedicated to her father. She clearly enjoys the domestic tasks of caring for him and in traditional Japanese style, she brings him tea, prepares his bath or lays out his clean clothes at his command.

Noriko is so attached to her home as it obviously was when her mother died (no cause of death is mentioned) that she is shocked when a widower friend of the family reveals that he plans to remarry. She laughs when her father advises that she herself think of marrying.

Her paternal Aunt Masa, played by Haruko Sugimura, is not happy with this state of affairs. And the professor too is deeply worried about his daughter’s future. They both want the young woman to marry, despite her reluctance to leave her father.

Aunt Masa is a steely negotiator and sets about arranging a marriage for Noriko. She announces she will also find a wife for the professor and this prospect is highly upsetting to his daughter.

Aya, played by Yumeji Tsukioka, is another interesting character in the film. She is the cynical divorced friend of Noriko, a representative of the forces of modernity which by now, in 2023, have thoroughly transformed a society in which the relations between men and women were highly ritualized and differentiated. Aya openly admits she hates her husband, has no intention of ever marrying again, and relishes the luxuries of dress and food she enjoys outside her job.

The man Aunt Masa chooses for Noriko is never shown on screen and, according to Wikipedia (please don’t read the entry before you see the film), this was because the American censors disapproved of arranged marriage. To say more about Aunt Masa’s schemes would be to ruin this beautiful film and its character studies for readers.

Here is a movie both sad and wonderfully uplifting, a story essentially about loyalty and the terrible price it must pay in the onward march of the generations. As the father Shukichi says to his daughter “that’s the order of human life and history.” Late Spring takes its title from Noriko’s belated consideration of a husband, evoked later in the movie by scenes of the gardens of Kyoto. The film conveys the deepest of love between not two lovers, but a daughter and father. If love is to have good will toward another person, then the characters of Late Spring love truly. The film shows a Japan far removed from the vicious stereotypes of American war propaganda and one cannot watch it today perhaps without sensing the terrible cost Japan paid not just in the war but in the onward march of modernity. (more…)