Part One of this essay can be found here.

ALAN writes:

On many days I worked on upper floors where I would comb through hundreds of boxes of books in perfect disarray, many of which had not been opened in years. I was excavating for books or periodicals or ephemera that I knew would sell or that I would set aside for myself or for customers whom we knew were looking for certain subjects or authors. As a booklover, I enjoyed the work. It was clean work except for the dust. Occasionally I opened a box and found a spider or two dwelling within. But I tried not to disturb them because they didn’t make all that much noise. Some customers were not that courteous. I remember one woman who climbed a ladder to reach books on a high shelf and then purposely dropped them on to the floor. We objected to that. She was one of a kind.

At the end of many workdays I would come downstairs by way of the ancient freight elevator at the back of the building and then walk down a two-tiered carpeted staircase leading to the ground floor. The proprietor and one or two employees (there were never more than two or three) would be standing there, getting ready to close the shop in late afternoon, and I would say to no one in particular, “Is everybody happy?” Read More »

San Augustine, Texas. Children having an Easter egg hunt on the school grounds on the last day of school before Easter vacation in 1943 (Library of Congress)

IN 877, Alfred the Great ordered all his subjects in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom to abstain from servile labor during the week after Easter. In the seventh century, Kings Receswind and Wamba in Spain issued similar decrees, but this was not uncommon; for more than a thousand years, church and secular leaders commanded Easter joy and celebration for the entire week after Easter Day, a week which was typically filled with festivities, dramatic reenactments of the Resurrection and solemn liturgies. The faithful were considered newly sanctified and thus in need of strength against new assaults by the devil and his legions, who are steaming mad when people make spiritual progress and hatch new plans to ensnare the unwary.

Americans, despite all their material wealth, have never lived the sort of collective festivity, leisure and sacred ritual that was common during those times.

Easter week — well, it’s back to normal. A tree expert I had called a couple of weeks ago showed up at our house early yesterday morning to look at a dead limb we needed to be removed. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t make it last week,” he said. “I was sick from the vaccine.”

He was ready for a full week of work. Americans used to at least take Monday off and some schools once had even the full week after Easter off. The most important event in human history, honored to this day in every nation of the world, does not warrant much fun anymore.

Of course, this year, even Easter Day celebrations were ruined.

The Virus Taliban and their fundamentalist adherents continued to enforce the new state religion of germaphobia. They puritanically eradicated signs of social pleasure. A holiday of festive gatherings is an especial target for their decrees. They can’t stand it when people have fun!! I wouldn’t be at all surprised if masked Virus Clerics started to patrol the streets with whips, disbanding pick-up whiffle ball games and small groups of profane leisure-seekers.

Defy these fanatics and their “invisible enemy” whenever and wherever you can.

Laugh at their floating microbes. Laugh at their superstitions. Laugh at their morbid statistics. Become a criminal if you must, but please have fun. At the very least, enjoy being an infidel, you wicked, wicked sinner.

By the way, Alfred the Great ordered the non-essential workers of his day to take off the week before Easter too so they could engage in the last penitential exercises of Lent (for real sins, not phony sins). Ordinary workers were viewed by Christian kings as human beings of incomprehensible spiritual value, not robots. In Christian societies, workers had, if you count Sundays, well over a hundred mandatory days off. Leisure is good for the soul. The devil wants nothing more than societies of Calvinistic workaholics, too busy and tired to lift their spirits to higher things. He truly hates a good time.

Since you live in a post-Christian world, you have to do the second best thing and that is, cultivate a festive outlook in your own life.

ACCORDING to the World Economic Forum, there has been a “regression” in women’s progress due to the “pandemic” (i.e., the pandemic of Corona Dictatorship). One of the terrible results, it says, is that women are spending more time with their children and doing more housework. Can you imagine?

Women have been disproportionately affected, the report shows, as lockdowns shuttered sectors including hospitality, in which they are more often employed, and they took on more unpaid work, like childcare and homeschooling.

This opened up a new frontier for equality that policy-makers can help address as part of the global recovery plan, says Klaus Schwab, the Forum’s Founder and Executive Chairman.

“Leaders have a remarkable opportunity to build more resilient and gender-equal economies by creating more equitable care systems, and by encouraging women to transition into new roles based on their potential,” he says. “Gender parity can become embedded into the future of work.”

“A frontier for equality…” That’s a beautiful euphemism for organized theft. It’s amazing that so few women see through this pandering. Aren’t they sick of the lies by now? Apparently not.

If the WEF has its way, which it will, many women in the long run, as the family wage for men becomes more and more a thing of the past under global “equality,” will be spending less time with their children and under more financial pressure.

The control freaks in Davos want women as their busy worker bees, paying off the debt burden of its slave nations, and that’s exactly why it demonizes unpaid domestic labor. (Notice how it’s okay to work for a multinational corporation from home, but it’s not okay to work for your own family.) Global feminism is the organized, glamorized transfer of wealth from the many to the few. “Equality” eases the pain. It’s all manipulative rhetoric. Feminism causes inequality.

Here’s a little dose of 19th-century wisdom I offer in response to this stale bigotry against domestic labor. It’s from Cardinal Henry Manning’s book The Four Great Evils of the Day:

“[W]e now are hearing of the rights of women ; and if there can be a sign of a society inverted, and of the moral order of the world reversed, it is the putting of woman out of her proper sphere the domestic life where she is sovereign, and the putting her in that sphere where she ought never to set her foot the public life of nations. To put man and woman upon an equality is not to elevate woman, but to degrade her. I trust that the womanhood of England to say nothing of the Christian conscience which yet remains will resist, by a stern moral refusal, the immodesty which would thrust women from their private life of dignity and supremacy into the public conflicts of men. This, again, is a part of the lawlessness of these days, and shows a decline of the finer instincts of womanhood, and a loss of that decisive Christian conscience which can distinguish not only between what is right and wrong, but between what is dignified and what is undignified both for women and for men. This clamour about women’s rights may be taken as one of the most subtle and most certain marks of a lawlessness of mind which is now invading society.”

Alexander Adriaenssen, Still-Life with Flowers in a Glass Vase; c. 1650

I HOPE this glorious day fills you with happiness and peace of soul.

The Incredulity of Thomas, Caravaggio; 1601-02

“OUR Lord’s resurrection is the strongest proof of His being what he declared Himself to be. If Christ is not risen, says St. Paul, our faith is vain and we are still in our sins. Christ’s resurrection is also a pledge of our own resurrection from the dead.

“The reality of Christ’s resurrection is substantiated by the most solid proofs that any historical fact can possess. In the first place Christ foretold His resurrection. It was known and feared by his enemies. See St. Matt. Chapters xii. and xxvii. on these two points. On that account they took every possible means to prevent it, and, if possible, to give the lie to His prediction and so discredit His teaching. That He rose as He foretold is a fact beyond all possible doubt. On the morning of the third day His body had disappeared from the tomb, though guarded by a band of soldiers.

“But, it is said, His body was stolen while the soldiers slept. Both were impossible. That they should have slept and not be put to death for it, and that the timid Apostles could have taken it while they were awake, either suggestion is childish.

“Modern disbelievers say that He had only swooned on the cross and had revived in the sepulcher. It is hard to imagine how He could revive, whose Heart was pierced with a spear and who was then embalmed, or how, if He had revived He could have removed the great stone with which the tomb was closed. This is in keeping with the other objections.

“The account of the Apostles [who themselves did not initially believe in his Resurrection] on the other hand is absolutely trustworthy. They were not deceived themselves, nor could they deceive others, even if they wished. They were not deceived themselves, because Christ was seen not by one person alone, or by a few, or a few times, but again and again, now to some and now to all the Apostles at the same time. They ate with Him, conversed with Him, touched Him, put their hands in His wounds, saw Him work miracles and at last He was seen by five hundred people at once. They were not credulous, they were the reverse, and the only consequence of their telling what they saw was to lose their lives for it. They were all put to death precisely because they were witnesses to His resurrection. To suppose hallucination in themselves, or a desire to deceive others in such circumstances is absurd.”

—- What Christ Revealed, Louis Jouin (St. John’s College, 1897); pp. 52-54

“SUFFERING spoils many souls. There are many pious souls who turn away from God through suffering. Self and its claims to attention are too strong and — then love and devotion or fidelity to Our Lord give way to self-pity, murmuring, resistance, bitterness. Punishment and purification too frequently embitter the heart, turn it from its end — from its Divine Master and Lover — and harden it in perversity. But if under sufferings, humiliations, trials and repugnances, we have the light, grace and courage to accept them in submission, in resignation and in self-humiliation, and with a closer movement to the bosom of our Heavenly Father, our Loving Lord and Master, then never, never has our love of that Father in heaven, that blessed Master, been more thorough, more effective and more intensely sincere.

“The history of the Sacred Passion and Death of Our Lord contains excellences and advantages of its own above all other subjects on which we can exercise ourselves in meditation. Meditation on the Passion of Our Lord is good for all persons and for all conditions of men. It has the power to turn sinners from evil and rouse them to sorrow for their sins and abhorrence of them. It gives strength and a powerful example of virtue to those who are making progress and it is the most forcible incentive to love for the perfect.”

—- Meditation on the Passion, Compiled from Various Sources, with an Introduction by Rev. Reginald Walsh, O.P.

Edgar Degas, Olive Trees Against a Mountainous Background, c.1890

“My soul is sorrowful even unto death. Stay you here and watch with me.” [St. Matt. 16:38]

FROM “Discourse 16: Mental Sufferings of Our Lord in His Passion” by Cardinal John Henry Newman:

There, then, in that most awful hour, knelt the Saviour of the world, putting off the defences of His divinity, dismissing His reluctant Angels, who in myriads were ready at His call, and opening His arms, baring His breast, sinless as He was, to the assault of His foe,—of a foe whose breath was a pestilence, and whose embrace was an agony. There He knelt, motionless and still, while the vile and horrible fiend clad His spirit in a robe steeped in all that is hateful and heinous in human crime, which clung close round His heart, and filled His conscience, and found its way into every sense and pore of His mind, and spread over Him a moral leprosy, till He almost felt Himself to be that which He never could be, and which His foe would fain have made Him. Read More »

Christ Taken Prisoner (scene 7), Duccio di Buoninsegna 1308-11

“THE LAST HOURS OF JESUS” (Sheed and Ward, 1960) by the Rev. Ralph Gorman, C.P. provides many interesting historical details connected with Christ’s Passion, from his seizure in the Garden of Gethsemane to his trial to his burial in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea.

“It has been my effort to tell the story of the last hours of Jesus accurately and in a manner that is interesting and intelligible to the ordinary reader,” Fr. Gorman wrote. He largely succeeded.

The Jewish rejection of Jesus; the dilemma faced by the Roman procurator, who was already in trouble with his superiors for inciting rebellion, and many other events of that fateful week are difficult to fathom without some context. It’s easy to get distracted and forget that this is the most sacred and profound week of the year. If you would like to know more about figures such as Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas and Judas, I recommend his book.

AT OffGuardian, a civil rights lawyer explains why “vaccine” mandates are unlikely and unscientific:

Government scientists admit that the Covid-19 vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission of the virus they say causes Covid-19, but many of these same scientists also dishonestly claim the vaccines will somehow prevent the spread of the virus, leading to herd immunity.

Such an approach is not only unscientific and dishonest. It’s nonsense.

What a nightmarish scam by Big Pharma. We are all unpaid actors in a non-stop, twisted pharmaceutical commercial.

EMPLOYEES of the nation’s second largest school district contend they are being forced to participate in a medical experiment. They have filed a lawsuit with help of the Health Freedom Defense Fund:

All Covid-19 vaccines available in the US at present have been issued under Emergency Use Authorizations (EUA) – none have been licensed or approved by FDA. In an emergency, federal law allows the issuance of medical products under an EUA but specifically defines any such products as “investigational” and requires that recipients be informed of the benefits, risks, and “the option to accept or refuse administration of the product.” Read More »

 
FROM the 1977 movie Jesus of Nazareth, which features the excellent portrayal of Jesus by the actor Robert Powell, comes this recreation of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. It’s not a perfect movie and takes liberties with the Gospels, but does include realistic scenes.

From Meditations for Lent, a compilation of excerpts from Thomas Aquinas:

The Passion of Christ is by itself sufficient to form us in every virtue. For whoever wishes to live perfectly, need do no more than scorn what Christ scorned on the cross, and desire what He there desired. There is no virtue of which, from the cross, Christ does not give us an example.

If you seek an example of charity, Greater love than this no man hath, than that a man lay down His life for his friends (John xv. 13), and this Christ did on the cross. And since it was for us that He gave his life, it should not be burdensome to bear for Him whatever evils come our way. What shall I render to the Lord, for all the things that He hath rendered to me (Ps. cxv. 12).  Read More »

PAUL Philpott M.S. is a Mechanical Engineer and the former Editor of the Rethinking AIDS newsletter.
 

MILES MATHIS shoots holes through the Boulder “mass shooting.” He comes up with connections to Hollywood, intelligence, the military, Wall Street and AstraZeneca. It’s no accident that this event took place in the Denver suburbs, where other fake massacres distracting and terrorizing the American public into submission have been staged. He ends his research article with this:

OK, I am tiring of this, but if you want to do more, I suggest you read closely the Washington Post victims announcement, which doesn’t read like it should. What a sensible person would expect is a few lines about each victim, sticking to the facts. You wouldn’t expect them to be unloading a lot of tearjerking emotionalism on you, since—if real—the event is sad enough on its own. You don’t need your response telegraphed like this, do you? You don’t need to be told what to feel. But as is usual with these events, the whole thing is being keyed up with pregnant women, dancing people, balloons, and other sugary anecdotes. To be blunt, the whole page reads like amateurish propaganda, composed by the usual set of barely literate recruits in sub-basement 10 at Langley. You don’t really learn anything about the victims; instead you read a bunch of unverifiable treacle about how they loved puppies or puppies loved them or something. It’s pathetic. You could judge the whole event by the tone of this article, and I do. The way it is written tells us without further research we are being yanked. The page reeks of desperation and miscalculation.

This is not a blanket endorsement of Mr. Mathis. I sincerely appreciate his hard work here. (Please avoid his artworks page.) You have to have courage, a healthy sense of outrage and a capacity for hours of thankless tedium to go into the details of these events. Read More »

MOST PEOPLE know that children are experiencing high levels of pain and depression because of the cancelation of many of their activities. Few care.

From a doctor at one of the largest children’s hospitals in France:

“We are very surprised by the intensity of the desire to die among children who may be 12 or 13 years old. We sometimes have children of 9 who already want to die. And it’s not simply a provocation or a blackmail via suicide. It is a genuine wish to end their lives.” Read More »

Fra Angelico, The Annnciation; 1442

WHERE Eve was pride, she was humility.

Where Eve was action, she was surrender.

Where Eve was novelty, she was birth.

Where Eve was outward, she was inward.

Where Eve was death, she was life.

Where Eve was self, she was compassion.

Where Eve was shame, she was modesty.

Where Eve was materialistic, she was maternal.

Where Eve was wealth, she was poverty.

Where Eve was doubt, she was trust.

Where Eve was foolishness, she was wisdom.

Where Eve was liberation, she was restraint.

Where Eve was impulse, she was thought.

Where Eve was confusion, she was clarity.

Where Eve was virtue signaling, she was virtue.

Where Eve was slave, she was queen.

“At that time: the angel Gabriel was sent from God into a city of Galilee, called Nazareth, to a Virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the Virgin’s name was Mary. And the angel being come in, said unto her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women. Who having heard, was troubled at his saying, and thought with herself what manner of salutation this should be. And the angel said to her: Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found grace with God.” [St. Luke, Chapter 1]

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Donatello, Annunciation (detail); c. 1435

“ANGEL of strength, friend of mankind! continue thy ministry of aiding us. We are surrounded by terrible enemies: our weakness makes them bold; come to our assistance, procure us courage. Pray for us during these days of conversion and penance. Obtain for us the knowledge of all we owe to God in consequence of that ineffable mystery of the Incarnation, of which thou wast the first witness. We have forgotten our duties to the Man-God, and we have offended Him: enlighten us, that so, henceforth, we may be faithful to His teachings and examples. Raise up our thoughts to the happy abode where thou dwellest; assist us to merit the places left vacant by the fallen angels, for God has reserved them for His elect among men.

“Pray, O Gabriel, for the Church militant, and defend her against the attacks of hell. The times are evil; the spirits of malice are let loose, nor can we make stand against them, unless with God’s help. It is by His holy angels that He gives victory to His bride. Be thou, O strength of God! foremost in the ranks.”

— Dom Prosper Gueranger, Feast of St. Gabriel, the Archangel

Leonardo DaVinci, Annunciation (detail)

THIS IS beyond creepy. This is supposedly a government agency.

See more at The Millennium Report.