St. Nicholas Eve, Richard Brakenburg; 1685

HERE is a detailed description at the St. Nicholas Center of the history and legends surrounding St. Nicholas, who was born in third-century Greece on December 6. The account includes the stories of how this patron saint of children and unmarried women provided the dowry for three poor girls and how he saved a ship from sinking. He is also the patron saint of sailors:

Several stories tell of Nicholas and the sea. When he was young, Nicholas sought the holy by making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There as he walked where Jesus walked, he sought to more deeply experience Jesus’ life, passion, and resurrection. Returning by sea, a mighty storm threatened to wreck the ship. Nicholas calmly prayed. The terrified sailors were amazed when the wind and waves suddenly calmed, sparing them all. And so St. Nicholas is the patron of sailors and voyagers.

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IN CONTINUATION of the discussion about refusing state marriage licenses, Jeremy Morris writes:

America has been reduced to a culture filled with distractions, light shows that do nothing more than hold our attention just long enough to cause us to forget our duty to God almighty. It is the “Vanity Fair” of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Its days are numbered, the evil that is rampant can only destroy itself eventually. The hold it has on people will eventually be loosened. Similar, to how the beauty and distractions offered by a luxury cruise liner can only hold the passengers attention so long before they realize it is sinking. No matter what the people in authority over the ship say, the discovery of its true fate is inevitable. The crew down below are the first to realize with absolute certainty that the ship is bound for a watery grave. The story of the Titanic is a great metaphor for what is happening to America as we speak. Many will perish in the confusion, many more will perish in denial. My sincere prayer is that Christians will break the hold that “Vanity Fair” has upon them, remember their duty to God, and seek him before it is too late. Read More »

THERE is a vacuum of authority at the  highest levels of the Church. Once again last night, Joe Biden, whose diabolical smirk dominated the vice-presidential debate, stated his support for Roe v. Wade. He said he doesn’t support abortion in his private life, but doesn’t believe it’s right to impose his belief on others, including Jews and Muslims, as if  opposition to abortion was a private religious practice, comparable to abstaining from meat on Friday or attending Mass. Biden, who met privately with Pope Benedict XVI just last year, knows full well that his position is rejected by the Church. When Benedict met with Nancy Pelosi in 2009, he explained to her why her position was wrong. He surely did the same with Biden. The Vatican News Service reported after Pelosi’s visit: Read More »

IN THIS article at the Washington Post, Maria Mazzenga, a scholar at Catholic University, is quoted regarding tonight’s vice-presidential debate. Both Biden and Ryan, as everyone knows, consider themselves Catholic. Heading off the glaring fact that one of these men is clearly anti-Catholic, Mazzenga says neither man follows Catholic teaching perfectly. Read More »

IN THIS recent entry, readers discussed anecdotal evidence that a baby boom has occurred in some affluent, predominantly liberal white communities. This may be true in certain areas, but recent census figures suggest the trend is not widespread. As Jesse Powell reported previously, in the ten wealthiest zip codes discussed by Charles Murray, author of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, fertility and family stability all declined between 2000 and 2010. In Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, a suburban town of multi-million dollar homes large enough to accommodate families of ten in style, the number of white children went from 859 to 788 and the proportion of white children living with both of their natural parents went from 91.7 to 87.9 percent. In Chappaqua, New York, another “Super Zip Code,” the number of white children went from 3,585 to 3,355 and the proportion of those living with their own parents declined from 93.6 to 92.5 percent.

Of course, the deterioration was far worse in communities farther down on the economic scale, as has been documented here many times. However, this class divide does not represent a true cultural divide; rather it is the reflection of disparities in intelligence and inherent levels of restraint.

Murray believes that at least some stability can be returned to places where single motherhood and divorce are now common if America’s ruling classes preach the values of marriage and stigmatize illegitimacy again. As I wrote in this previous entry,

[Murray’s] notion that there is a great American divide is problematic. America’s elite does not believe in sexual restraint. It does not believe in traditional sex roles any more than America’s working classes. The well-educated simply suffer less from the consequences of the cultural revolution. How could they possibly preach what they don’t themselves endorse?

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ALAN ROEBUCK, in a “A Nation That Honors Sin,” an essay at Intellectual Conservative, argues that neither political action nor Christian evangelism are enough to counter the overwhelming success of liberalism in America. No society in history has institutionalized the approval of sin to the extent the modern West has. He argues that a focus on individual virtue at the expense of the proper ordering of society has rendered Christians ineffective.

Roebuck writes: Read More »

St. John the Baptist, Frederic Shields

THESE are days of darkness for white European civilization. The sky is darkened. The sun is in near total eclipse. Illumination comes not from great schemes of political reform. It comes, if it comes at all, from the lighted candle of the human soul. It comes from the burning heart.

 The author of Cambria Will Not Yield writes:  

Reason alone cannot restore the European’s sanity, because reason lacks vision. Faith transcends reason, because faith involves the heart, which is the spiritual organ of sight. From an empirical, rational standpoint it makes no difference if one European stands before the great liberal tribunal and declares his eternal defiance of the tribunal and his unyielding support of the ancient Europeans. The tribunal is the sea, and the drowning men still drown. But in the spiritual realm, which we see when we look through, not with, the eye, every human soul contains a world. And the world of one antique European can outweigh the principles of a legion of liberal Babylonians. Satan conquers by distorting and diverting man’s spiritual eye, his heart. So keep thy heart, thou man of Europe, and thou shalt ride triumphant over ruin and death.

MR. R. writes:

You know, I just realized for the first time in my adult life that I have grown quite accustomed to addressing women as “Ms” in letters and emails, even when I am reasonably sure they are married. I think that has become a convention resulting from feminism, where it MUST NOT be assumed that a woman is a “dependent” and that she should not be addressed in a way that would insult her independence. How ludicrous!?! Is it not? Read More »

THE BLOGGER Tiberge at Galliawatch reports that some Catholic schools in Marseilles are now 80 percent Muslim. Citing French press accounts, she writes:

For the archbishop, training through inter-religious dialogue will permit these questions to be answered: “How to announce the Gospel? How to accept Muslim holidays? What can we accept or not accept?” According to archbishop Georges Pontier, “We must not run from these questions. Even if the subject is delicate and marks a juncture of the religious dimension and identitarian issues.”

NEW YORK Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is divorced, has been living with his girlfriend, the Food Network celebrity Sandra Lee. Under Catholic canon law, that makes him guilty of “public concubinage” and he is not entitled to take communion. While many thousands of Catholics appear to be unaware of canon law, Cuomo cannot plead ignorance. As reported in The New York Times, Edward N. Peters, a consultant to Vatican court, has publicly criticized the governor for continuing to receive communion and has called for denying him communion. This is a positive development.

By the way, Cuomo took his young daughters to the gay pride parade in Manhattan last fall. He is an exemplary Catholic all around. Read More »

IN THIS previous entry, a reader described the outright worship of femininity in his mainstream Pentecostal church. In this follow-up, he goes on to recount the full horror of it. The experience nearly ruined his marriage and home, erupting into full-blown emotional confrontations with his wife and pastor. His story is long, but gripping and worth reading in its entirety. [The reader was previously identified as “K.” I now use his full first name, Kevin.]

Kevin writes:

I think you’ll find that there are a lot of Christian men “out there” who for years have maintained a careful silence on the issue of feminist indoctrination in the Church. In retrospect it all seems like a bad dream. The women in my former church group were incredibly domineering, but in a “holy” way, so that it never appeared as it truly was–religious manipulation.

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CHARLES WRITES:

In the entry “The Christian Wimp,” Lawrence Auster asks: 

How could anyone, with any normal amount of spirit in him, be a part of such a congregation and swallow such a message? 

There are a number of reasons this can be so. In a general sense, if one has been raised in the Evangelical church all of one’s life, it is akin to the proverbial frog being boiled in oil. Read More »

K. writes:

I’ve been a visitor to your blog for some time now, having discovered it by accident, and, for me, it’s been a cool drink of water in a cultural desert. Thank you so very much for your stand against feminism, and for Biblical womanhood. I can’t tell you how much this site, and its contributors (in the form of comments) means to me. Like most men, I’ve been pounded for most of my life with the idea that “women are superior” to men, and for the better part of my 53 years I believed it. I had a serious “awakening” several years ago, when it hit me like lightning that women, in general, can be as corrupt, licentious, and brutal as men, and that the leeway I characteristically granted to them as superior and unblemished (even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary) was the result of decades of drinking the propaganda Kool-Aid. I am what you would call an “old school gentleman.” I am hopelessly chivalrous, passionate about the woman I’ve been married to for more than 25 years, and a lover and practitioner of both poetry and the martial skills–which includes both weaponry and hand-to-hand combat. Read More »