THE TOYS
— Coventry Patmore

My little Son, who look’d from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey’d,
I struck him, and dismiss’d
With hard words and unkiss’d,
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darken’d eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart. (more…)

TERESA BENNS, at her website BetrayedCatholics, has made the astounding and alarming claim that tens of thousands of marriages conducted in Vatican II churches and Traditionalist chapels during the past 60 years are invalid and that spouses are free to leave and contract new marriages. See here and here.

My comments are quoted in both the first and the second entry, but I have to say I am somewhat speechless and overwhelmed by the potentially dire and destructive consequences of this evidently false claim.

A correspondent writes,

“One can extrapolate from her heretical posturing that in fact, practically no one is married today.”

Robert Robbins, at CatholicEclipsed, responds at length to Benns’ posts here and here. Robbins uses strong language (I am not prepared to call Benns a “cult leader”), but he persuasively counters her arguments. He writes: (more…)

ARE Jews dramatically over-represented in admissions at top colleges and positions of influence in our society because, as is often claimed, they have higher intelligence?

Here is a thorough, balanced and reasonable examination of the issue. (more…)

"NEW YORK CITY'S controversial COVID-19 vaccine mandate for municipal workers was enacted illegally and employees who were fired for refusing to comply must be immediately reinstated with back pay, a state judge has ruled. "'It is time for the City of New York to do what is right and what is just,' Staten Island Supreme Court Justice Ralph Porzio wrote in a decision made public Tuesday. "More than 1,750 city workers were fired for refusing to get vaccinated, including 36 members of the NYPD and more than 950 Department of Education employees." Read more.

TREES
— Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

(more…)

"LIFE IS bound to prove a disappointing adventure for those who, through a weak yielding to their emotional and imaginative impressions, tend to substitute feeling for thought. Such persons develop minds that are but a passive reflection of phenomena.They are unable to transform a fact into an idea. They have no power to synthesize their experience into a judgment. They see only what meets the eye. Their determinations are but an automatic response to external stimuli. Their views are mere emotional reactions to outward circumstances. They are at the mercy of every fashion. Their impressions are without analysis and their reflections without comparison. Their observations are a query and their wisdom a platitude. Their sayings are an echo, and their lives a quotation. Recent times have been prolific in the growth of this type of human being. Their mentality is that which, in the jargon of the day, is described as bourgeois. It is marked by a smug self-satisfaction and is very resistant to spiritual impressions. The deep things of existence always elude this bourgeois mind. Such a mind merely touches but the fringe of reality. It is shallow, without individuality, lacking in noble ideals and unspiritual. The bourgeois type drifts through life without discovering itself or its God or even the world in which it passes its days. The rapid increase of men of this kind has made of the world a spiritual desert. "With desolation is all the land…

"WHOSOEVER drinketh of this water shall thirst again: but he that shall drink of the water that I will give him shall not thirst for ever. But the water that I will give him shall become in him, a fountain of water, springing up into life everlasting." -- St. John, iv, 14  

ALAN writes:

The skeptical attitude that many Americans adopted in response to the Covid and “vaccines” propaganda should be applied equally to the self-serving claims of all other medical, psychiatric, and “behavioral science” propagandists and racketeers.

Recently I spoke with a friend whose brother was my fourth-grade classmate just as the 1960s were dawning. He and I remained friends for six years. His family then moved to New York City. He died in 1972. It was always my understanding that he died of natural causes.  He seemed a healthy, husky, robust fellow and had taken an interest in weightlifting, which I imagined may have put a lot of strain on his heart. But several years ago, his sister told me that he had had some involvement with drugs. I never suspected it, because he was not the type.

This matter came up in our recent conversation. She told me her brother had had a “mental breakdown.” At age 23? It seemed to me that most people at that age are energetic and eager to go on, not give up. Even if it were so, why would it lead to death? Many older people who are said to have had a “breakdown” live nonetheless for years after. Why would my friend have been any different?

I did not doubt what she told me because I am confident it was what she and her parents were told by some doctor or doctors at the time of his death. My interest was to penetrate the fog of those words: “mental breakdown.”

Precisely what did it mean? (more…)

"THE air is full of objections to religion, and every objection should be met on the spot and refuted. If any one denies, in your hearing, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, the divinity of Christ, the inspiration of Scripture, or any other truth of religion, it is your duty to affirm these fundamental truths at once, and it is a great honor to do so. If you say you have no learning, I answer, that the highest learning is not so good a quality as sincere conviction; and I answer again that those who assail the truth in common conversation are generally the reverse of learned. The enemies of religion are, for the most part, as ignorant as they are bold. Learning is good, but it is not learning we need most. We need to have sincere convictions, and we need to have the courage of them. 'I believed,' says the Psalmist, 'and therefore did I speak.' Truth sounds so well that its bare mention is a powerful argument. Furthermore, the honest Christian who defends his religion will not be without the divine assistance to do it well. "But we should not only defend the truth; we should attack error. If you have friends who are in error, you can do them no better service than to set them right. This must be done with discretion, to be sure. But do not be too anxious about…

"ONLY THOSE who do not fight are never wounded." -- St. John Chrysostom  

"Apples are still more various, yet rigidly retain their own species, and are highly useful in families, and ought to be more universally cultivated, excepting in the compactest cities. There is not a single family but might set a tree in some otherwise useless spot, which might serve the two fold use of shade and fruit; on which 12 or 14 kinds of fruit trees might easily be engrafted, and essentially preserve the orchard from the intrusions of boys, &c. which is too common in America. "If the boy who thus planted a tree, and guarded and protected it in a useless corner, and carefully engrafted different fruits, was to be indulged free access into orchards, whilst the neglectful boy was prohibited--how many millions of fruit trees would spring into growth--and what a saving to the union. The net saving would in time extinguish the public debt, and enrich our cookery." -- Amelia Simpson, American Cookery; 1796  

"REMEMBER that it is not the multitude who are being saved, but the elect of God. Be not then affrighted at the great multitude of the people who are carried here and there like winds on the waters of the sea." -- St. Basil, Letter 257, 4th century  

"A European politician, in a pronouncement of fairly recent date, stated that Christianity had failed. It did not seem to him that his assertion needed proof. The actual condition of things in his own country and in other countries appeared to him to be ample justification for what he said. Yet the statement, so far from being indisputable, can be shown, on analysis, to betray a gross confusion of thought. "Christianity has not failed, for the simple reason that it has scarcely been tried. It certainly has not been tried on any extensive scale. It could be branded with failure, if having been guaranteed by its founder to be able to achieve certain definite results, it had been, when put to the test, found wanting. But if Christianity is but imperfectly or incompletely applied to the task of reducing to order the confused issues of human existence, it cannot be blamed for the relative chaos which results." -- Fr. Edward Leen, Why the Cross? (Sheed and Ward, 1938)  

 MANY girls go through a tomboy stage. Most grow out of it and embrace femininity. Chloe Cole was prescribed toxic drugs and had her breasts removed. But she's still a girl.  

FROM Chris Fogarty’s book Ireland 1845-1850: The Perfect Holocaust And Who Kept It “Perfect:”

What England extracted from its colonies varied from country to country. In addition to usurping the land for distribution to its Crown- connected undertakers, it also looted the colony’s other resources. For example, from Australia from 1851 through 1862, after the easiest gold was gone, 21 million additional ounces of gold were taken into the British Government’s Gold room in Melbourne. Fertile Ireland’s main resource was the human energy that produced a torrent of agricultural products. The Irish were made tenants on their own land, and forced to pay rents that consumed most of their year’s labor. With force supplied by the British army, Irish output was commandeered by English landlords (many if not most absentees) on the basis that the English, not the Irish, owned the land on which it was produced. (more…)

FROM a 2017 article by Jude Duffy at Fitzpatrick Informer: "John Dee, the occult magician at the court of Elizabeth I, was apparently the first person to coin the term “British Empire”, so from the very get go the Empire was an occult cabalist project—all its main propagandists, and indeed actors, being occultists of one sort or another. According to Stuart Piggot’s book The Druids, Dee “grew up surrounded by the controversy and currents” of what became known as the British Empire—and “sought to merge the Arthurian Imperial tradition with cabalistic interpretations of Hebrew scripture”. “Dee created the concept of British Israel, which gave the British and the Jews a common racial identity, and invoked biblical prophecy to show the inevitable triumph of British imperialism, the British as Abraham’s seed were to inherit the earth.” Far from being simply an ethnocentric take on Biblical Christianity, Dee’s pseudo-genealogical supremacist theory was steeped in pagan druidism, being “Christian” only in the sense that New Age pantheism is “Christian”, i.e., it co-opted elements of Christian doctrine and ritual, the better to insinuate itself almost effortlessly into the mainstream of British Christian life. Read more.