“Sin is not only a foolishness and vileness, but considered in relation to God it is also the blackest ingratitude, the greatest injustice, and the gravest outrage. God is a father who has given us all: existence, life, intelligence, a conscience to distinguish good from evil, a will to choose the good, and a heart to love it. To show us His love He gave us His Son, who died for us on the Cross; he restored us again to grace making us His friends; He has called us with a special vocation to live even here on earth in the intimacy of His love; and He calls us daily to Communion and surrounds us with a thousand interior graces. Instead of thanking Him, we put ourselves at a distance. We even come to the point of deliberately despising the graces He offers us, even His friendship itself. Sometimes we forget that we have received all from Him. Instead we boast of our intelligence and puny talents; we deliberately prefer ourselves to others; we abandon ourselves to a friendship that is based too much on feelings, thereby offending the divine friendship and saddening our adored Friend. This wound inflicted on the heart of Our Lord leaves us cold and indifferent. What kind of gratitude is this?

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WITH her phony Catholicism, Candace Owens promotes an anti-Western, pro-Russia narrative.

How this actress fools anyone is beyond me, but she does.

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“DO not love the world, do not let yourself be ensnared by its deceitful caresses; it flatters its followers, but only to lead them astray. It offers them honey in a golden cup, but this honey is poisoned. The love of Jesus, on the contrary, begins with bitterness and ends in sweetness. Christian, you were created for heaven, do not forget your glorious destiny. What are you doing in this world, my brother, you who are greater than the world? (Saint Jerome)”

— Calendar of Saints by John Stephen Grosez, SJ; 1956

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ANOTHER American song for this July Fourth: a 1948 song by Oscar Brand about German immigration into colonial Pennsylvania.

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“TO experience the tremendous power of genuine, unaffected folk songs, you must sing them yourself, sing them often, and sing them well. You cannot possibly experience the beauty of folk music if you simply hear the songs performed by a choir in picturesque costume. In folk singing, the goal is to sing, and this fact distinguishes the folk song from all other types of song. In the concert hall, in the cabaret, on the radio, the singing is a means to excite emotion in a passive audience who sit quietly and listen. The art song and the modern popular song are founded entirely on an appeal to the ear. But the folk song is founded on the joy of active singing, the joy of rhythmic movement of the entire voice organism. The frequent repetitions of a refrain which are so characteristic of the folk song are evidence that folk music is basically kinesthetic in its appeal. These refrains are a pure delight to the active singer, he does not tire (as a silent listener would) of repeating the same chorus many times. Folk singing is active in goal and method. It is essential to join in the singing to experience the deep beauty hidden in the music.

“If you begin to sing folk songs and to make them a part of your life, you will soon discover that they have the power to form your taste and to cultivate your artistic judgment. You will become aware of the pretension and insincerity in works of art which perhaps you admired before. You will find that you have come to prefer simplicity to sophistication, genuine feeling to empty sentimentality, real joy to superficial amusement.”

— Dr. Jop Pollmann, Laughing Meadows Songbook, Grailville Publications, 1947

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“THAT the illiterate may nevertheless reach a high level of culture will surprise those only who imagine that education and cultivation are convertible. The reason, I take it, why these mountain people, albeit unlettered, have acquired so many of the essentials of culture is partly to be attributed to the large amount of leisure they enjoy, without which, of course, no cultural development is possible, but chiefly to the fact that they have one and all entered at birth into the full enjoyment of their racial heritage. Their language, wisdom, manners, and the many graces of life that are theirs, are merely racial attributes which have been gradually acquired and accumulated in past centuries and handed down generation by generation, each generation adding its quotum to that which it received. It must be remembered, also, that in their everyday lives they are immune from that continuous grinding, mental pressure, due to the attempt to ‘make a living’, from which nearly all of us in the modern world suffer. Here no one is on the make; commercial competition and social rivalries are unknown. In this respect, at any rate, they have the advantage over those who habitually spend the greater part of every day in preparing to live, in acquiring the technique of life, rather than in its enjoyment.

 —- Cecil Sharp; English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1917)

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HERE’S another American song to wish you a Happy July Fourth. This is cowboy Harry Stephens singing “The Night Herding Song” in Dallas in 1942.

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AN OLD woman in the mining region of Central Pennsylvania describes her troubles in this ballad by Felix O’Hare, sung here by Daniel Walsh. From the George Korson Recordings of Pennsylvania Coal Miners Collection at the Library of Congress:

This ballad articulates the thoughts of the miners in the depression of the early ’70’s. In 1871 the little mine patch of Valley Furnace received a blow from which it never recovered: the mine gave out. Normally the miners might have found jobs at the Shoofly, a nearby colliery. There, however, a bad seam had been struck and men were being laid off. The only alternative to starvation was to gather meager belongings, leave old associations, and trek across the Broad Mountain in to the Mahanoy Valley then being opened to mining. [Songs and Ballads of the Anthracite Miners, Recorded and Edited by George Korson, 1947 ]

THE SHOOFLY

As I went a-walking one fine summer’s morning,
It was down by the Furnace I chanced for to stroll.
I espied an old lady, I’ll swear she was eighty,
At the foot of the dirt banks a-rooting for coal;
And when I drew nigh her she sat on her hunkers
For to fill up her scuttle she just had begin
And to herself she was singing a ditty,
And these are the words the old lady did sing: (more…)

NELSON EDDY sings “Goin’ Home” in 1944. The melody is from Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, also known as the New World Symphony,  composed in 1893 in Iowa. (more…)

“THE strongest piece of evidence for government criminality is the Supreme Court decision Brown v Board of Education and there is no judicial interpretation that can save it because it requires the government to carve out race as exceptional, which is impermissible.

“The Court’s insistence that racial segregation is ‘inherently unequal’ stands in tension with the fact that many forms of separation — such as sex‑segregated facilities—are widely accepted as compatible with equality, suggesting that the Court treats race as an exception where separation is unique.

“From this perspective, this line of reasoning highlights how the Court’s doctrine constructs race as a constitutionally singular category, functioning like a state religion, granting the judiciary extraordinary authority to invalidate majority preferences in racial matters while permitting other forms of classification, thereby reinforcing the argument that the Court’s interpretive power in this area resembles a kind of modern, self‑legitimizing sovereignty, allowing it to pronounce moral truths with the same finality that monarchs once claimed by divine sanction, turning racism into blasphemy.

“Finally, and most important, the Court’s racial jurisprudence functions as a pre-textual mechanism for constraining majority rule, using race not as the true object of concern but as the doctrinal lever through which the judiciary limits the political authority of the numerical majority. (more…)

“A critical institutional‑theory reading might argue that the Constitution — adopted through procedures that exceeded the amendment rules of the Articles of Confederation — was less a social contract than a deliberate elite project to replace the older hereditary and status‑based political order with a new framework of structural power insulation.

“In this interpretation, the Constitution’s real significance lies not in its amendable rights provisions but in its tripartite architecture, where checks and balances function as elite insurance mechanisms designed to prevent popular majorities from radically redirecting state power.

“Rather than expressing collective consent, the document can be seen as a calculated reconfiguration of authority: a shift from lineage‑based legitimacy to institutionalized guardianship, in which political stability is maintained by distributing veto points among mutually reinforcing branches.

“Under this view, the Constitution’s form—not its amendments—embodies the true logic of American governance: a system engineered to manage social volatility by ensuring that no surge of popular will can easily override the entrenched custodians of the state.

“The Constitution’s architects deployed Enlightenment language —consent, liberty, natural rights— not to empower the governed but to legitimate a transfer of authority from open hereditary rule to secret elites whom the governed would not willingly accept, unlike a theocratic white Christian male whom they would, transforming covenantal ideals into instruments of control. (more…)

“Birthright citizenship for people unlawfully present was never explicitly established by the Constitution, because the Fourteenth Amendment’s phrase ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ historically referred to those fully and legally subject to U.S. sovereign authority.

“Any recent Supreme Court interpretation that retroactively extends citizenship to individuals outside that original jurisdictional meaning would be seen as an unconstitutional act of judicial revision rather than interpretation.

“Such retroactive validation effectively legitimizes a century of improper administrative practice, which enabled electoral and immigration fraud.

“To put what I’m saying in perspective had the Supreme Court correctly declared that birthright citizenship never existed and removed citizenship from millions of U.S.‑born residents, the public reaction would likely have been explosive because many people would interpret the decision as proof that decades of elections were shaped by an improperly expanded electorate. (more…)

PAUL Michael Clark writes:

I read with interest your readers’ recent thoughts about classic screen musicals. One film I think particularly noteworthy in that context is 1958’s Gigi. It serves as a reference point in the erosion of Hollywood’s Motion Picture Production Code (“Hays Code”), the industry’s now-extinct set of moral guidelines — that’s to say, in the erosion of cultural standards in general.

Gigi’s creepy plot, about a teenager being groomed by female relatives as a courtesan, became defused in the eyes of many Eisenhower-era moviegoers thanks to the film’s cheerful cinematic sweep and high production values (including first-rate songs by Lerner and Loewe of My Fair Lady fame, another adapted story about female transformation). Certain concessions were necessary, of course, in the face of what filmmakers considered the public’s stilted bourgeois values.

For starters Gigi’s age was left unstated, as opposed to being 15 in the source material, a 1944 novella by Parisian author Colette. Filmmakers also chose an actress in her mid-twenties, Leslie Caron, for the title role though they patently portrayed the character as significantly younger.

Those involved in the production, to be certain, held no illusions about Gigi’s age. In 2024, at age 93, Miss Caron gave an interview to British magazine The Oldie, whose reporter noted how “When filming Gigi, she was a 26-year-old mother with an infant son, yet she carried off the part as a gamine 14-year-old,” then quoted the actress herself:

I was still feeding my little Christopher. My bosom was a little too voluptuous for a girl of 14 and I said to [costumer] Madame Karinska, “Why don’t we have braids to keep this little gilet?” Otherwise I looked too maternal. 

Nine years earlier, a French movie adaptation of Colette’s tale earned a Condemned rating from the Catholic-sponsored National Legion of Decency, which concluded that the film “condones and glorifies immorality.” But the Legion proved lenient toward the Hollywood version, classifying it as “Morally Unobjectionable for Adults.” This was due primarily to two factors besides fudging Gigi’s age: an ending that putatively affirms marriage, and the framing of her courtesan training more as aristocratic etiquette lessons than what they subtly represented.

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IF you receive an invitation by e-mail from me, please disregard it and do not sign into it.

I did not send it.

It is a virus that came into my inbox. I am very sorry for any inconvenience.

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 “IF you wish it, the blood of your Lord was given for you; if you do not wish it, it was not given for you.”

— St. Augustine

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“AND Pilate seeing that he prevailed nothing, but that rather a tumult was made; taking water washed his hands before the people, saying: I am innocent of the blood of this just man; look you to it.

“And the whole people answering, said: His blood be upon us and our children.”

— Matthew 27:24-25

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Hymn for Feast of the Precious Blood

He who once, in righteous vengeance,
Whelmed the world beneath the flood,
Once again in mercy cleansed it
With the stream of his own blood,
Coming from his throne on high
On the painful cross to die.

Blest with this all-saving shower,
Earth her beauty straight resumed;
In the place of thorns and briars,
Myrtles sprang, and roses bloomed:
Bitter wormwood of the waste
Into honey changed its taste.

Scorpions ceased; the slimy serpent
Laid his deadly poison by;
Savage beasts of cruel instinct
Lost their wild ferocity;
Welcoming the gentle reign
Of the Lamb for sinners slain.

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“AND Saul, as yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest, And asked of him letters to Damascus, to the synagogues: that if he found any men and women of this way, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. And as he went on his journey, it came to pass that he drew nigh to Damascus; and suddenly a light from heaven shined round about him. And falling on the ground, he heard a voice saying to him: Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?  Who said: Who art thou, Lord? And he: I am Jesus whom thou persecutest. It is hard for thee to kick against the goad.”

— Acts of the Apostles, Chapt. 9:1-4

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