Aztec burial of a sacrificed child at Tlatelolco

“IN the Amazon region, we have inherited great riches from the pre-Columbian cultures. These include ‘openness to the action of God, a sense of gratitude for the fruits of the earth, the sacred character of human life and esteem for the family, a sense of solidarity and shared responsibility in common work, the importance of worship, belief in a life beyond this earth, and many other values.”

— Antipope Francis,“Apostolic Exhortation” Querida Amazonia, “Beloved Amazon”

From the Wikipedia entry on human sacrifice in the Incan empire:

The male victims were no older than ten and girls could be up to age sixteen but must be a virgin when chosen; they had to be perfect, unblemished by even a freckle or scar. When they were looking for tributes the children would be sent along with other goods of tribute, like silver and gold, and camelids.[5] Until the time of the sacrifice, the tributes were fed well, and those too young to eat would have their mothers with them to breastfeed.[20] This was to ensure that they would be well fed and happy when they prepared to reach the gods.[20] The children were paired off, girl and boy, and dressed finely like little royals.[5] They were paraded around four large statues, of the Creator, the Sun God, the Moon God, and the Thunder God. The Sapa Inca would say to the priests then to divide the children, along with the other sacrifices, in four, for each of the four suyu regions. He would then order the priests to make their sacrifices at their main huaca. Read More »

The Crucifixion, Jacopo Di Cione; c. 1365

“THE spirit of Christ is a spirit of martyrdom, at least of mortification and penance. It is always the spirit of the cross. The remains of the old man, of sin and of death, must be extinguished, before one can be made heavenly by putting on affections which are divine. What mortifies the senses and the flesh gives life to the spirit, and what weakens and subdues the body strengthens the soul. Hence the divine love infuses a spirit of mortification, patience, obedience, humility, and meekness, with a love of sufferings and contempt, in which consists the sweetness of the cross. The more we share in the suffering life of Christ, the greater share we inherit in his spirit, and in the fruit of his death. To souls mortified to their senses and disengaged from earthly things, God gives frequent foretastes of the sweetness of eternal life, and the most ardent desires of possessing him in his glory. This is the spirit of martyrdom, which entitles a Christian to a happy resurrection and to the bliss of the life to come.”

— Rev. Alban Butler, Lives of the Saints (1866 Edition)

The fossil of a fish buried quickly, while eating

AMERICA is filled with natural wonders of tremendous beauty: gorges, waterfalls, rock formations and canyons. Tourists who visit these sites will almost always encounter “educational” plaques that are insistent: What you see before you is many millions or billions of years old. These dates are always presented as beyond dispute. And it’s not surprising. Evolutionary theory has not produced conclusive evidence for gradual creation of species and must appeal to long stretches of time. The naturalists who create the commentary at our national and state parks are often actually making philosophical statements under the guise of science. It is a worldview that cancels true wonder.

The average person never encounters — in scientific language — the evidence that the earth is much younger. When you stand by a gorge and read that little plaque that tells you its almost incomprehensible age, there is never any footnote that warns you that radiometric dating is not a settled matter. The science has definitely not been settled, either in favor of an old earth or a young earth. But in recent years the arguments for the latter have become stronger.

Here is a list of 101 evidences for a young earth. Don Batten writes:

The widely accepted age of the universe is currently 13.77 billion years and for the solar system (including Earth) it is 4.543 billion years. However, no scientific method can prove the age of the earth and the universe, and that includes the ones we have listed here that strongly suggest that these accepted ages are in serious error. Although age indicators are called ‘clocks’ they aren’t, because all ages result from calculations that necessarily involve making assumptions about the past. The starting time of the ‘clock’ has always to be assumed as well as the way in which the speed of the clock has varied over time. Further, it has to be assumed that the clock was never disturbed. Read More »

 
I
 

“AFTER the year 1900, toward the middle of the 20th century, the people of that time will become unrecognizable. When the time for the Advent of the Antichrist approaches, people’s minds will grow cloudy from carnal passions, and dishonor and lawlessness will grow stronger. Then the world will become unrecognizable.

“People’s appearances will change, and it will be impossible to distinguish men from women due to their shamelessness in dress and style of hair. These people will be cruel and will be like wild animals because of the temptations of the Antichrist. There will be no respect for parents and elders, love will disappear, and Christian pastors, Bishops and priests will become vain men, completely failing to distinguish the right-hand way from the left.

“At that time, the morals and traditions of Christians and of the Church will change. People will abandon modesty, and dissipation will reign. Falsehood and greed will attain great proportions, and woe to those who pile up treasures. Lust, adultery, homosexuality, secret deeds and murder will rule in society.”

— The Prophecy of St. Nilus

Super Bowl 2020

“WHEN a country’s Christianity is reduced to the proportion of domestic life, when Christianity is no longer the soul of public life, of the power of the state and of public institutions, then Jesus Christ will treat such a country as He himself is treated. He will continue to bestow His Grace and His blessings on those who serve Him, but He will abandon the institutions and authorities that do not serve Him. And such institutions, authorities, kings and races become like sands in the desert or like the dead leaves of autumn which can be blown away by a gust of wind.”

— Cardinal Pie

PETE BUTTIGIEG has been propelled into national politics by the super wealthy. According to Forbes,

Forty billionaires and their spouses have donated to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, according to an analysis of federal election filings, making the South Bend, Indiana mayor a favorite among America’s richest people.

See the magazine’s analysis of the fortunes behind the donors. And from Winter Watch:

Mayor Pete … has raised $75.4 million in campaign donations to date and is well positioned for the primaries with $14.5 million on hand. Among those funds, $42.2 million came from large donors.

[…]

Buttigieg’s list of endorsers …. includes Karen Mathiasen, former acting executive US director at the World Bank; as well as Julie T. Katzman, COO of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Both organizations have long histories of using debt to impose the will of U.S. policymakers onto poor countries.

Usury and sodomy: a perfect match. As E. Michael Jones says, “Homosexuals are proxy warriors for the oligarchs.” In a world a family can’t survive on one income anymore, the homosexual couple represents ideal employees and consumers.

Many Americans will never support Buttigieg, but it doesn’t matter. As Chuck Baldwin says, Buttigieg is one of the “unelectable wackos” running for the Democrats. But it doesn’t matter. The point isn’t for him to win. His campaign is a win/win for the usury class. As a public relations campaign alone, it succeeds.

THE Christmas Eve radio address of Pope Pius XII in 1944 contains wise observations and warnings about modern democracy:

[T]he state does not contain in itself and does not mechanically bring together in a given territory a shapeless mass of individuals.

It is, and should in practice be, the organic and organizing unity of a real people. The people, and a shapeless multitude (or, as it is called, “the masses”) are two distinct concepts.

The people lives and moves by its own life energy; the masses are inert of themselves and can only be moved from outside. The people lives by the fullness of life in the men that compose it, each of whom—at his proper place and in his own way—is a person conscious of his own responsibility and of his own views.

The masses, on the contrary, wait for the impulse from outside, an easy plaything in the hands of anyone who exploits their instincts and impressions; ready to follow in turn, today this flag, tomorrow another.

From the exuberant life of a true people, an abundant rich life is diffused in the state and all its organs, instilling into them with a vigor that is always renewing itself, the consciousness of their own responsibility, the true instinct for the common good.

The elementary power of the masses, deftly managed and employed, the state also can utilize: in the ambitious hands of one or of several who have been artificially brought together for selfish aims, the state itself, with the support of the masses, reduced to the minimum status of a mere machine, can impose its whims on the better part of the real people: the common interest remains seriously, and for a long time, injured by this process, and the injury is very often hard to heal. Read More »

Josiah – Jechoniah – Shealtiel (detail); Michelangelo, 1511-12

“WE ARE sojourners upon this earth; we are exiles and captives in Babylon, that city which plots our ruin. If we love our country, — if we long to return to it, — we must be proof against the lying allurements of this strange land, and refuse the cup she proffers us, and with which she maddens so many of our fellow captives. She invites us to join in her feasts and her songs; but we must unstring our harps, and hang them on the willows that grow on her river’s bank, till the
signal be given for our return to Jerusalem. (Psalm 115) She will ask us to sing’ to her the melodies of our dear Sion: but, how shall we, who are so far from home, have heart to sing the Song of the Lord in a strange Land ? (Psalm 136) No, — there must be no sign that we are content to be in bondage, or we shall deserve to be slaves for ever.

These are the sentiments wherewith the Church would inspire us, during the penitential Season, which we are now beginning. She wishes us to reflect on the dangers that beset us, — dangers which arise from our own selves, and from creatures. During the rest of the year, she loves to hear us chant the song of heaven, the sweet Alleluia! — but now, she bids us close our lips to this word of joy, because we are in Babylon.

—- Dom Prosper Guéranger, “The Mystery of Septuagesima,” The Liturgical Year, Volume II (English translation, 1867)

Montgomery Clift in a courtroom scene in the 1953 Hitchcock movie, “I Confess”

A PRIEST walks into his church late at night. The parish caretaker is kneeling in a pew and is highly distraught. He asks the priest to hear his confession.

So begins the 1953 Alfred Hitchcock movie, I Confess, which takes place in the 1950s in Quebec City. This is one of the lesser known films of Hitchcock, but it deserves much more acclaim. Here is a very good movie which you may never have seen.

Montgomery Clift plays Father Michael William Logan, who ends up being accused of the crime that has been confessed. Anne Bancroft plays the elegant Ruth Grandfort, who is now married to an attorney and politician, but still loves Logan. The murder victim had been trying to blackmail her and Logan. (The original script apparently involved an illegitimate child, but Hitchcock trashed that detail.) Otto Blank, the caretaker who has committed the crime, is not surprisingly a German and comes across in the performance by OE Hasse as the sort of arch villain common to World War II propaganda.

What really makes this movie is the stellar performance by Clift as a person undergoing a devastating accusation with calm fortitude.

Phillip Otterman wrote in a review for The Guardian:

Lead actors matter in Hitchcock’s films, but mainly because of what they do rather than what’s going on inside them. Here it’s different: it’s almost as if the former Jesuit schoolboy Hitch is caught off-guard, not so much confidently directing as being slowly mesmerised by Father Logan’s inner turmoil. Hollywood’s original method actor before Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift filmed with his acting coach just out of shot, but his performance is a masterclass in subtlety. He interiorises so much, you sometimes start to wonder if he’s acting at all.

[…]

In the work of someone so exhaustively appreciated as Hitchcock, you wouldn’t expect to find forgotten masterpieces but   is one. It might never catch fire, but it smoulders gloriously. (Spoiler alert: The review reveals the ending.)

You can watch the movie online. With its adult themes, it’s not for children, but by today’s standards it’s wholesome for adults.

Its moody evocations of the time and place have an art house cinema feel. Some scenes have that familiar leaden Hitchcock grimness, similar to scenes in, say, The Birds, but overall it captures the era with beauty and fidelity, especially in a charming scene in which two French girls are interviewed by police and in the moments in the parish rectory and dining room. Some characters speak with a heavy French accent, which helps remind viewers of the setting. Many Americans are unacquainted with Quebec, a place so rarely portrayed in movies, even though the province was influential in the founding of America. The Quebec Act of 1774, in which King George III and the British Parliament allowed the French Canadians to practice their faith, is believed by reputable historians to be a major provocation of the American Revolution.

The strict moral obligation for a priest to keep confidential what is revealed in a confessional is the main cause of the tension in this film. Fortunately, the movie was made in, and depicts, an era when there was still grave seriousness surrounding the confessional. Overall, the atmosphere of this film is radically different from the happy-go-lucky, we’re-too-joyful-to believe-in-sin character of counterfeit Catholicism. This is a real blast from the past.

THE atrocities of one the most reviled figures of Holocaust history, Dr. Josef Mengele, have been proven to be hoaxes, according to a former director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

In a new book, David G. Marwell argues not only that Mengele did not perform gruesome operations on the inmates of Auschwitz, but that he saved many Jewish lives. According to Eric Striker at Unz Review:

Marwell’s work is considered the most well-researched mainstream biography of Mengele to date. In it, he cross references witness testimony from “survivors” with hard evidence and primary sources, only to conclude that their “memories” were “unreliable.” In other words, they [were] lying.

Stitching together humans to create siamese twins, smashing babies against train cars, attempts to transform boys into girls – all of the barbarism etched into the popular mind about a German in a labcoat, Marwell concludes, is nothing but a pack of atrocious hoaxes. Read More »

St Dorothy (detail) by the Master of the Rottal Epitaph; c. 1500 AD

ST. DOROTHY, or Dorothea, was one of many young women martyred in the first three centuries of Christianity because they wished to remain virgins and refused to adore idols. She was tried during the persecution of Diocletian at Caesarea in Cappadocia. The prefect Sapricius had her tortured her on the rack and after she refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods, condemned her to beheading on February 6 in the year 311 A.D. There is a famous legend associated with her death:

St. Dorothy suffered in the dead of winter, and it is said that on the road to her passion a lawyer called Theophilus, who had been used to calumniate and persecute the Christians, asked her, in mockery, to send him “apples or roses from the garden of her Spouse.” The Saint promised to grant his request, and, just before she died, a little child stood by her side bearing three apples and three roses. She bade him take them to Theophilus and tell him this was the present which he sought from the garden of her Spouse. St. Dorothy had gone to heaven and Theophilus was still making merry over his challenge to the Saint when the child entered his room. He saw that the child was an angel in disguise, and the fruit and flowers of no earthly growth. He was converted to the faith, and then shared in the martyrdom of St. Dorothy. [Source]

Dorothea, often represented with an angel and a wreath of flowers, is regarded as the patroness of gardeners. Trees are blessed in some places on her feast day, Feb. 6.

May blessed Dorothy, Thy Virgin and Martyr earnestly entreat for us pardon from Thee, we beseech Thee, O Lord: for both by her chastity and by her acknowledgment of Thy power she ever pleased Thee well.

St. Dorothy, Lucas Cranach; 1530

Phyllis McGinley

THE housewife and writer Phyllis McGinley wrote these words in the early 1960s and they are more true today than ever. The phenomenon she discusses — the stress of children being made to excel early, and often, at a whole range of activities, including athletics, music, art and academics — is related, in my view, to other changes in family and community life, especially feminist careerism, materialism and low fertility. But more importantly, a society with no sense of the sacred cannot truly value leisure.

Youth is a perfectly wonderful commodity and far too valuable, as Shaw has pointed out, to be wasted on the young. Yet like all human benefactions, it has its penalties, which in today’s urgent society have frighteningly increased. I don’t think I am merely nostalgic when I contend that being a child nowadays is a tougher proposition than it was when my generation and I compared arithmetic answers between classes or devoured bread-and-pickle sandwiches on the front porch after school. For one thing, it isn’t as much fun.

On the surface this assertion may sound like gibbering nonsense. Never before in history has childhood had so much attention paid to its welfare and its amusement. It is cosseted, pampered, immunized against unhappiness as against polio or whooping cough.

Read More »

619 Frans Hals (Dutch artist, 1581-1666) Catharina Hooft with her Nurse Detail

“INQUISITIVENESS …. is of the greatest possible value in the education of the child, for, if properly directed, it leads to reverence and awe, and enters largely into the adoration and worship of God.”

— Father Alexander, O.F.M.

VLADIMIR MOSS writes:

The question therefore is: is the present-day Putinist regime Leninist in essence?

In order to answer this question we have to separate what is essential to Leninism from what is not, and ask whether Putin retains that essence even if in many other ways his regime may be very different… Our thesis is that the essence of Leninism is loyalty to Lenin himself, and that while many things have changed since 1917, devotion to Lenin, and a refusal to condemn him or his reincarnation, Stalin, remains the bond binding together all the epochs of Soviet and post-Soviet history to the present day, as witnessed above all by the continuing worship of his body in the mausoleum on Red Square. Lenin’s teachings are no longer believed in, his party no longer holds power, even his vitriolic hatred of God and Christianity has gone. But he himself remains alive and well in the hearts of the majority of the Russian people. And it is this psychological and spiritual bond, more powerful than any ideological sympathy or antipathy, that makes Leninism a continuing force. Moreover, it is a force that any succeeding leader like Putin can tap into – so long as the idol still remains in place. And why does the idol still remain in place? Because neither in 1991 nor at any other time has there been any thoroughgoing repentance for the sins of the Soviet past or formal renunciation of Lenin.

Read more.

IN 1948, BBC Radio broadcast a debate between Bertrand Russell and Frederick Copleston, a Jesuit historian and philosopher, on the existence of God.

Here is Part one; a recording of Part two can be found here.

Copleston argued that the existence of God could be proven philosophically, while Russell maintained that neither the existence or non-existence of God could be proved.

“CONSIDER first, the reason why so many persons become bolder every day in sinning. It is because God is slow to punish. If every time that a man uttered a blasphemous word he felt his tongue suddenly torn by cruel vermin, if his hands were withered as soon as he committed a theft, if whenever he was guilty of deception his intellect were clouded, if when any one falls into some shameful act of sensuality he were instantly covered with a disgusting leprosy, thinkest thou that there would be so many blasphemers, thieves, cheats, and dissolute persons in the world? It is because God is so slow to punish, because He is so longsuffering and silent, because He seems to take no notice, that men become so audacious: ‘Because sentence is not speedily pronounced against the evil, the children of men commit evils without any fear (Eccles. viii. 11).’ What monstrous wickedness; such persons are, indeed, “children of men,” and not of God. To sin deliberately because God is good! It is easy to see that such children cannot belong to God, since they are so entirely different from Him. They are children of perdition, for this is the meaning of the expression ‘children of men.’ ‘The Son of Man” is always used in the best sense in the Sacred Scriptures; but ‘children’ or ‘sons of men,’ always, or nearly always, in a bad sense. ‘O ye sons of men, how long will ye be dull of heart (Psalm iv. 3)?’ ‘The children of men have spoken vain things (Psalm xi. 3).’ Thou seest, therefore, that to abuse God’s mercy by sinning the more shamelessly, is to be in the number of the reprobate.”

— Fr. Paul Sgneri, 1892

A 1950s public broadcast warns young men about homosexual predators.