WHEN POLITICS is everything to people, they become aggressive and cruel when they don't get their way. This fanatical nastiness, with the happy end of Roe v. Wade, is now more obvious than ever. Some thoughts on this phenomenon from Eddie Scarry, written before last week: Even when Democrats emerged victorious from the suffocating bonfire of 2020, having control of the White House and all of Congress for two years, has their mood change? No. It’s only gotten worse. They may have traded their pussy hats for Fauci prayer candles, but the attitude has never been angrier or more spiteful. Vengeance has animated them each and every day. There are scores of studies, surveys, reports and data to back up that truism. Spoiled brats are everywhere. And mostly they're grown adults. Stay away. There's nothing to gain from engaging them in any political conversation.
THOMAS DROLESKEY’S detailed commentary on the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organizationis must reading. (Please consider tipping the author if you find it of value.)
Mr. Droleskey writes:
While it is indeed wonderful that abortuaries in [some] states have shut their doors, none of this represents any kind of victory, especially when one considers that laws delineating at what age baby-killing can be prohibited makes it appear that his life is fully negotiable and thus expendable before that age. A human being is a human being at conception, and all the talk of gestational age is simply sophistry upon sophistry.
Moreover, do we really think that those who kill for a living are going to scrupulously observe all the terms of these laws even if they have to be confined to the space of a hospital rather than an abortuary to do so?
The Fifth Commandment admits of no exceptions to the inviolability of innocent human life, which can be targeted deliberately for execution. The laws listed above have such “exceptions” and are thus nothing to celebrate.
Am I saying that Roe v. Wade should not have been overturned or that its being overturned is meaningless?
No, I am not saying such a thing.
It is very good that Roe v. Wade and its false reasoning have now been consigned to the proverbial dustbin of history.
Roe v. Wade has, as noted earlier, miseducated generations of people, including many Catholics, that they had a “right” to [murder] innocent unborn babies, whose own “crime” was to be conceived as the natural consequence of that which is used properly in the married state alone for the procreation and education of children according to the mind of Holy Mother Church. Those who created that “right” did so illicitly as it is not given unto men to dispose of the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandments, but it remains to be seen whether the overturning of Roe v. Wade will correct the errors that have become deep-seated in a world where men act as beasts and do not fear the just judgment of Our Divine King and Judge, Christ the King. (more…)
Although it may be a concern that abortions may increase, I think this misses the point.
Individuals can always choose to sin whether it is against the law or not. They could have already traveled to abortion-friendly states to obtain an abortion. They can already quite easily get abortion pills and they can do tele”medicine” from wherever. The primary benefit of overturning Roe v. Wade is that it is no longer a national sin. As nations can’t suffer the effects of judgment in purgatory as they only exist here on earth we must corporately suffer the consequences for our national sins (whether you agree with or directly participate in them or not you are still a member of that nation).
The primary purpose of the government is to create the conditions for the common good of the people to aid them in getting to heaven. Getting rid of Roe just made that a lot easier. The temptation of committing the mortal sin of murder has been removed from tens of millions of people. And people who grow up in states with it being banned will grow up with that being normal for them. The ruling, and specifically thanks to justice Thomas, has also opened up the possibility (or at least the conversation) of addressing other laws that are anti-religious/moral such as sodomy, contraceptives, and sham-marriages that were ruled “constitutional” in the same way Roe was.
God bless these justices and credit where it is due Donald Trump. May this accomplishment be large expiation for their many sins. (more…)
“THE United States Supreme Court finally issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Friday, upholding Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, overturning Roe v. Wade, and delivering the pro-life cause its most transformative victory since Roe unleashed nationwide abortion-on-demand in 1973.
“Justice Samuel Alito delivered the opinion of the Court, which was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The ruling declares Roe ‘egregiously wrong from the start.'”
There is cause for concern about the ultimate political repercussions. Brian Shilhavey writes:
I have previously written that if the Supreme Court does strike down the infamous Roe vs. Wade abortion decision, that this will NOT decrease abortions in the United States, but actually increase them.
The issue of abortion will now be dealt with at the State level, and some states, like California, will increase abortion services and become “Abortion Tourism States.” (more…)
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He has everything. He lacks nothing. In His three Divine Persons, He even has love. He is a furnace of eternal love.
Think of the world He created out of nothingness with its physical, intellectual and moral splendors. Then why? Why does He love creatures who are so far beneath Him, who can do nothing by comparison?
Theologians have pondered this question for thousands of years. In his book, The Creator And The Creature; Or The Wonders Of Divine Love, Fr. Frederick William Faber devotes an entire chapter to it. We cannot understand God’s ways completely, but the simplest answer is,
God loves us because He created us.
We are different from all His other creatures. We have the freedom not to love Him, the very Source of our being and all that is good. Our love when it comes is freely given.
In the meantime, God showers us with visible proof of His tenderness and devotion, a love that is both universal and personal. He loves each creature as if it were the only one. He knows and loves each of us more than we know and love ourselves. “Reason and revelation, science and theology, nature, grace, and glory, alike establish the infallible truth that God loves His own creatures, and loves them as only God can love.” More from Fr. Faber:
The whole creation floats, as it were, in the ocean of God’s almighty love. His love is the cause of all things and of all the conditions of all things, and it is their end and rest as well. (more…)
Sentimentality is the over-use of the heart, and heartlessness is its under-use. We live in a world awash in a sentimentality that disguises heartlessness. It is a brilliant seduction, the heartlessness clothed in talk of love. Love is cheapened and misrepresented. Warmth can be coldness and animosity when forgetful of the soul.
These are human imperfections, in which we all in some way have participated. Today, the Feast of the Sacred Heart, is a day to meditate on the perfection of divine love, on the ineffable, mysterious and indulgent qualities of the heart of God.
The Heart of Jesus is both wounded and perfect; wounded with compassion and perfect in love; divine and human. No heart is capable of greater sorrow because no heart loves so intensely, so completely.
Behold this heart which has loved men so much that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming itself, to testify to them its love…
These words were spoken to a pious nun in a vision in the 17th century, when Christ opened up this new source of grace in the souls of men, another manifestation of the profound change in the relationship between man and God that occurred with the Incarnation.
Hence it is before the Incarnation of the Word, however great the prodigies God performed in favor of his people, He was always feared more than loved by them; but finally God made Himself perceptible, so to speak, by becoming man, and this Man-God has done things that go beyond anything that we can imagine to induce men to love Him. [Fr. John Croiset, The Devotion to the Sacred Heart; TAN Books, p. 71]
He can never be entirely eradicated from the human heart, even from the most unmoved human being. He speaks to us from within, as the great French clergyman, Cardinal Pie, explained in the 19th century: (more…)
ONLY IN SLEEP Only in sleep I see their faces, Children I played with when I was a child, Louise comes back with her brown hair braided, Annie with ringlets warm and wild. Only in sleep Time is forgotten – What may have come to them, who can know? Yet we played last night as long ago, And the doll-house stood at the turn of the stair. The years had not sharpened their smooth round faces, I met their eyes and found them mild – Do they, too, dream of me, I wonder, And for them am I too a child? -- Sara Teasdale Music composed by Ēriks Ešenvalds
THE WOODS are his concert hall. High up in the trees, flute-like music resounds from his little breast. He says farewell to the summer day. Farewell to the feeding and rushing. Goodbye to the verdant profusion of life. "Enough for now." But what a day it was! The tree limbs touched the sky. The song of the wood thrush is the breath of his being. It "is calm, unhurried, peaceful, and unequaled in both power and beauty by any other woodland songster of New England," wrote an observer in 1929. It can be heard today in deciduous woods and backyards throughout eastern North America. "It is usually composed of a series of triplets, each beginning with a high note, then a low one, then a trill, often highest of all, but the different phrases varying in pitch." (Source) We once knew a thrush who preferred jazz. He was a pianist in a romantic hotel bar and he knew we applauded him. The thrush's practiced melodies are a message of territory, but destined for human ears. They announce the tranquility of a summer night. They are a requiem for a June day in all its glory. A softness pervades the woods as he sings, and an assurance that all will be well in the end. Nature will come to a close in this way, with a chorus of such profound love. Our hearts are full. We have room for no more. …
FROM H.L. Mencken’s In Defense of Women, written in 1918, in the final years of that bleak, primitive, unimaginably hellish age before women had the vote:
Men, as every one knows, are disposed to question this superior intelligence of women; their egoism demands the denial, and they are seldom reflective enough to dispose of it by logical and evidential analysis. Moreover, as we shall see a bit later on, there is a certain specious appearance of soundness in their position; they have forced upon women an artificial character which well conceals their real character, and women have found it profitable to encourage the deception. But though every normal man thus cherishes the soothing unction that he is the intellectual superior of all women, and particularly of his wife, he constantly gives the lie to his pretension by consulting and deferring to what he calls her intuition. That is to say, he knows by experience that her judgment in many matters of capital concern is more subtle and searching than his own, and, being disinclined to accredit this greater sagacity to a more competent intelligence, he takes refuge behind the doctrine that it is due to some impenetrable and intangible talent for guessing correctly, some half mystical super sense, some vague (and, in essence, infra-human) instinct. (more…)
"THE creature cannot serve the Creator except with a service of love. Love is the soul of worship, the foundation of reverence, the life of good works, the remission of sins, the increase of holiness, and the security of final perseverance. Love meets the first of our requirements; for of all the services it is the easiest. Its facility has passed into a proverb. It is also the noblest and happiest of services, the noblest because it is the least mercenary, the happiest because it is the most voluntary. It is the only one which calls out and occupies the whole man; and it is naturally a creature's obvious service; for it is the only service which he would care to have rendered to himself. Love alone fulfills all the commandments at once, and is the perfection of all our duties." --- Fr. Frederick William Faber, The Creator and the Creature, or the Wonders of Divine Love
FROM THULETIDE: So-called “conspiracy theorists” are often accused of fabricating the concept of the New World Order. They need a Big Bad Guy to scapegoat for all of the world’s problems because they cannot cope with the intricate complexities of reality, or so the story goes. I’m sure you’ve heard this a thousand times: You explain that wealthy and powerful people conspire beyond borders to attain more wealth and power, only to be met with a fluoride stare and an “uhhhhh… the world is actually way more complicated than that… there’s… umm… tons other factors at play here…” (these factors are rarely elaborated upon). This mindset is perfectly understandable. Of course the modern political landscape would seem quasi-mystical to the masses when it is strategically designed to be as incomprehensible as possible. Basic truths — like social hierarchy or the existence of race and human sexual dimorphism — are obfuscated by an endless torrent of lies, psyops, and disinformation. Fortunately, with access to the right information, the mystical veil falls and the perceived complexities of politics fade away. The origin of the New World Order concept is a perfect case study. Read more.
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"SACRIFICE may not be offered but to the one true God, for it is the effective acknowledgment of the Creator’s sovereign dominion, and of that glory which belongs to him, and which he will not make over to another. It is essential to religion, be the state that of innocence or of fall; for religion, the queen of moral virtues, whose object is the worship due to God, necessarily demands Sacrifice, as its own adequate exercise and expression. Eden would have witnessed this Sacrifice offered by unfallen man; it would have been one of adoration and thanksgiving; its material portion would have been that garden’s richest fruits, those symbols of the divine fruit promised by the tree of life; sin would not have put its own sad stamp on such Sacrifice, and blood would not have been required. But man fell; and then, Sacrifice became the only means of propitiation, and the necessary center of religion in this land of exile. Until Luther’s time, all the nations of the earth held and lived up to this truth; and when the so-called Reformers excluded Sacrifice from religion, they took away its very basis. Nor is the duty of Sacrifice limited to man’s earthly existence; no, the creature when in heaven, and in the state of glory, must still offer Sacrifice to his Creator; for he has as much, and even more, obligation when he is in the brightness of the Vision,…
The world is no better than a complication of awkward riddles, or a gloomy storehouse of disquieting mysteries, unless we look at it by the light of this simple truth, that the eternal God is blessedly the last and only end of every soul of man. Life as it runs out is daily letting us down into His Bosom; and thus each day and hour is a step homeward, a danger over, a good secured.
Hence it is, because God alone is our last end, that He alone never fails us. All else fails us but He. Alas! How often is life but a succession of worn-out friendships? (more…)
I am here only because of the Big Band Era. If such music had not become popular in ballrooms and dance halls in American cities in the 1930s-‘40s, I might never have been.
One place where people could enjoy such music was the Casa-Loma Ballroom in south St. Louis. Young men and young women went there to meet each other. That is how and where my parents met.
My father preferred the music of the “sweet” bands over that of the “swing” bands. That kind of music and that ballroom would hold a place in his memory for the rest of his life.
My father’s grandfather was born in Bavaria in 1837. When I was from four to six years old, my father would take me for walks on Saturday afternoons. We often walked past a building in south St. Louis called the Bavarian Inn. He knew all about it, but at my age I couldn’t make any sense out of it. It was a restaurant and bar with a large fireplace, stained glass windows, and outdoor beer garden. It was “a landmark of gemutlichkeit” where customers enjoyed oom-pah-pah music and the Ducky Dance.
We also walked past a shop that made awnings and tents. Across the alley from there was a vacant lot next to a house. It was there on that lot that we played a game of imagination wherein we would take turns naming good things to eat, and each of us would try to outdo the other.
My father in south St. Louis, about 1918
In the middle of another block was a small confectionary. My father would buy a soft drink for each of us, and I was permitted to reach down into a large cooler filled with ice and pull out a frosty glass bottle of grape or orange soda.
As did my mother, my father lived by a scale of moral values that is wholly unknown to generations born after the revolutionary 1960s. (more…)
