HEAR, O merciful Creator! the tearful prayers we present to thee, during these forty days of Fast.

O loving Searcher of the heart! thou knowest that our strength is weak: grant us the grace of thy pardon, for we are converted unto thee.

Grievously have we sinned; yet, spare us, for we confess our sins to thee: and, for the glory of thy Name, heal our languid hearts.

Grant that we may subdue our flesh by abstinence; that thus our hearts may leave what nourishes sin, and fast from every crime.

O Blessed Trinity: O Undivided Unity! grant to us thy servants, that our fasts may produce abundant fruits. Amen.

(From the Vespers of Lent)
 

Carl and Betty Friedan divorced after 22 years of marriage. Carl vigorously disputed that he was abusive toward his wife.

CARL FRIEDAN, the husband of feminist icon Betty Friedan, was so incensed by her claims that she was an abused spouse that he responded in a website of his own. (Carl, who worked in advertising, died in 2005 and Betty died in 2006). Here from that website is an account of an evening Carl and Betty spent together in 1966 when they were still married. I do not post this to gloat over Friedan’s personal problems or the sad state of their marriage, but as one bit of evidence that she was not the normal suburban housewife she claimed to be when she wrote her famous book The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, and that her fanatical belief in ambition and the overthrow of traditional sex roles does not lead to human happiness. By the way, Betty admitted on national television that she had mischaracterized their marriage. From Carl’s account:

A really terrible episode occurred when in late summer of 1966 we made a weekend visit to my parents in Sharon, Mass. where my father had retired and established a four-acre blueberry farm. It was more of a hobby than anything else. And quite an attraction for his grandchildren. He would squint up at you with his good eye and show off his quarter-size blueberries with great pride. Nets covered about two acres of blueberry bushes. And a small third-acre pond, stocked with fish, was home to a small flat bottom rowboat.

The house, which he had built himself, was cramped and uncomfortable so this trip we stayed at a motel on Route 1, a main highway, about three miles from the farm. It was an old-fashioned kind of motel consisting of a row of small self-standing bungalows. Our two younger children, Emily and Jonathan were with us – they were then 10 and 14. Read More »

FROM a review by Salwa Balchar of the 2019 movie Lion King:

What effect does this virtual reality have on the mind? To have an idea: According to the safety regulations of HTC’s virtual reality headset and system (see page 2), virtual reality technology “could trigger increased heart rate, spikes in blood pressure, panic attacks, anxiety, PTSD, fainting, seizures, loss of awareness, convulsions”… you get the idea.

It is safe to say that virtual reality works to break a person’s psychology, since it blurs the lines between what is real and what is not. By extension, it does harm to the soul in a different way: You become immersed in a reality where there is no God, no Faith, no Cross…

If this is what VR does to adults, what effect could it have on young people with malleable minds? One is left to imagine. [emphasis added]

FUNDED by the same people.

 

THE TRUE CATHOLIC faith cannot be found in any of the church buildings you see, not even in “traditional” chapels. But that is not cause to be discouraged or sad, angry or upset. Separate yourself from the fake Church, embrace the true and a shower of graces will rain down upon you.

(Caution: I cannot vouch for all the content of the website from which this video comes. See further links on this subject in my post “Christmas and Reality.”)

[updated]

“THOUGH the academic authorities are actually proud of conducting everything by means of Examinations, they seldom indulge in what religious people used to describe as Self-Examination. The consequence is that the modern State has educated its citizens in a series of ephemeral fads.”

– G.K. Chesterton, Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, April, 1935

 

THE “pancake race” is part of the traditional English observance of Shrove Tuesday (the day before Ash Wednesday).

Read more about this and other customs in the season before Lent at Tradition in Action:

“So integral is the pancake in the English Carnival celebrations that they hold pancake races on this day. According to legend, in 1445 a housewife was baking pancakes in her kitchen when she heard the shriving bell ring. She was in such a hurry that she ran out of the door and into the streets with her frying pan.

“This inspired pancake races all over England, but especially in Olney where the women of the village gather to have a race where they run to the finishing line flipping the pancakes at least three times.”

This day should be a day of wholesome fun. Happy Shrove Tuesday!

By the way, the day gets its name from the ancient English custom of seeking confession, or shriving, from the priest before Lent. After confession of sins, the obligation for meatless meals began — thus the tradition of pancakes on this day. “Collup Monday” (the day before) included the custom of eating bacon (that’s because fresh strips or “collups” of pork were set to cure until the season was over) and was the last day meat was eaten until Easter.

“THE purest, most peaceful moments of my life have happened on my yoga mat,” says filmmaker Kate Churchill in the opening of her 2009 film Enlighten Up! A Skeptic’s Journey into the World of Yoga. “The problem is the closer I look at yoga, the more contradictions I find.”

She finds a multibillion dollar industry devoted to what some maintain is exercise and what many fervently claim is a spiritual discipline. Nevertheless, Churchill decides to prove that yoga can transform anyone both physically and spiritually.

For a quick overview of the world of yoga and its major figures, I recommend this light and inconclusive documentary. Though it is now more than 10 years old, the film’s subject matter is as relevant. Obviously, yoga continues to be hugely popular and a major American obsession.

Churchill recruits Nick Rosen, 29, a likable, unemployed journalist who lives in New York City and has no interest in spiritual matters. He is her guinea pig. She wants to prove that even he can become “enlightened” and also resolve her own confusion about yoga. Rosen sets out with Churchill to visit, practice with and interview famous practitioners in America and India. The interviews include South African Tantric and Kriya Yoga Master Alan Finger, who channels the body’s life force into healing directions; Diamond Dallas Page, the former pro wrestler who offers macho yoga for men; B.K.S. Iyengar, since deceased, who became the foremost popularizer of modern yoga in America after befriending and instructing the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and many others.

Rosen’s happiest moments in life, he says, have been those in which he has been physically fit. He insists that whatever yoga claims it must appeal to him intellectually, and not just through feeling. “I’m not interested in believing in anything that cannot be proven.”

In the popular yoga studios in New York City that Rosen visits, yoga is clearly not just exercise for even its mainstream practitioners. The students chant the Hindu incantation, “Om,” and are instructed to alter consciousness along with their movements. Rosen is surrounded by young women. One tells him that yoga is better than sex because it gives her “an overwhelming feeling of good will and warmth.” A 62-year-old woman tells him that yoga has given her a new lease on life. Read More »

“‘DOGMAS make nations.’ — So says M. [Louis] de Bonald: such is one of the most profound remarks of this profound thinker. And if they make nations, they also make men.

“I shall never cease saying or thinking,” says another deep thinker, M. [Joseph] de Maistre, “that a man’s worth depends  upon his belief.” Man’s worth does, indeed, depend upon his ideas, and he is what he thinks. It is the weakening of truth that makes sanctity vanish from amongst mankind.

“Hence, my most urgent and primary necessity is to rectify my ideas as to myself, as to creatures, and as to the use I ought to make of them. As long as these remain uncorrected, nothing will be restored in me; as long as my efforts are not directly brought to bear upon this point, they will remain fruitless. It is faith that purifies the heart. Faith is the vision of the truth; truth is God’s glory seen in everything.”

— François de Sales Pollien, The Interior Life Simplified and Reduced to its Fundamental Principle, 1853-1936.

FROM a letter by Bishop Gerald de Proenca Sigaud, Bishop of Jacarezinho in Brazil, written on August 22, 1959:

DARWIN’S missing link has been discovered by some enterprising scientists.

This revelation will radically change your understanding of human origins — and provide some comic relief.

IN the mid-nineteenth century, when Europe was still convulsed with revolutions that overthrew Christian rulers and the existing social order, the French Benedictine monk Dom Prosper Guéranger wrote these prophetic words, so applicable to our own time:

God promised Noah that He would never more punish the earth with a deluge. But, in His justice, He has many times visited the sins of men with a scourge which, in more senses than one, bears a resemblance to a deluge: the invasion of enemies. We meet with these invasions in every age; and each time we see the hand of God. We can trace the crimes that each of them was sent to punish, and in each we find a manifest proof of the infinite justice wherewith God governs the world.

It is not requisite that we should here mention the long list of these revolutions, which we might almost say make up the history of mankind, for in its every page we read of conquests, extinction of races, destruction of nations, and violent amalgamations, which effaced the traditions and character of the several peoples that were thus forced into union. We will confine our considerations to the two great invasions, which the just anger of God has permitted to come upon the world since the commencement of the Christian era. Read More »

The Ark, from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493)

MOST people, even professed Christians, dismiss the idea that the story of Noah’s Ark is literally true. How do they explain then that the memory of a catastrophic flood exists in the collective traditions of reportedly hundreds of highly divergent cultural groups?

Quoting once again Hugh Owen:

Hundreds of people groups all over the world have preserved an historical memory of a global Flood.  It is significant that the histories handed down by people groups who settled close to the location of the Tower of Babel, resemble most closely the true history related by Moses in the sacred history of Genesis.

This chart compares Flood accounts from all over the world and shows the remarkable similarities that exist among them.  Not only do these accounts recall the Flood as a global event and a judgment upon mankind from which only one family and some animals were spared on an Ark; many of them include details contained in the Mosaic account of the Flood, such as the release of a bird to determine if the flood waters had receded at the end of the Flood.

Chart adapted from B.C. Nelson, The Deluge Story in Stone, Appendix 11, Flood Traditions, Figure 38, Augsburg, Minneapolis, 1931.

According to Dr. Monty White:

Hawaiians have a flood story that tells of a time when, long after the death of the first man, the world became a wicked, terrible place. Only one good man was left, and his name was Nu-u. He made a great canoe with a house on it and filled it with animals. In this story, the waters came up over all the earth and killed all the people; only Nu-u and his family were saved.

Another flood story is from China. It records that Fuhi, his wife, three sons, and three daughters escaped a great flood and were the only people alive on earth. After the great flood, they repopulated the world.

As the story of the Flood was verbally passed from one generation to the next, some aspects would have been lost or altered. And this is what has happened, as we can see from the chart. However, as seen in the given examples, each story shares remarkable similarities to the account of Noah in the Bible. This is true even in some of the details, such as the name Nu-u in the Hawaiian flood story. “Nu-u” is very similar to “Noah.”

Dr. Duane Gish, in his book Dinosaurs by Design, has accounted for 270 stories around the world that describe a devastating flood.

The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, first translated in 1872, is a long poem that describes a coming flood. “A man is chosen to build a boat, animals are gathered, a single door opens into the boat, heavy rains fall, the man sends out a dove and a raven, the boat lands on a mountain, and the man offers sacrifices in thanksgiving,” says Troy Lacey and Lee Anderson.

The only myth that is strikingly similar to the Bible account came from the Babylonians. (The Babylonian tablet is dated from the eighteenth century BC, while Moses wrote Genesis in the fifteenth century BC.) The similarities make sense if both were written near the time of the actual Flood. Later myths, however, have little in common with the Bible. Indeed, the Chinese myth says the flood was caused by an argument between a crab and a bird!

“…AND DON’T tell me you don’t wish to fight; for the moment you tell me that, you are already fighting; nor that you don’t know which side to join, for while you are saying that, you have already joined a side; nor that you wish to remain neutral; for while you are thinking to be so, you are so no longer; nor that you want to be indifferent; for I will laugh at you, because on pronouncing that word you have chosen your party. Don’t tire yourself in seeking a place of security against the chances of war, for you tire yourself in vain; that war is extended as far as space, and prolonged through all time. In eternity alone, the country of the just, can you find rest, because there alone there is no combat. But do not imagine, however, that the gates of eternity shall be opened for you, unless you first show the wounds you bear; those gates are only opened for those who gloriously fought here the battles of the Lord, and were, like the Lord, crucified.”

—- Juan Donoso Cortés, Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism, 1879.

FROM Lifesite News:

Italian-American Beverly Stevens, editor of Regina magazine, told LifeSiteNews that the sexual revolution is to blame for the low Italian birth rate.

“It’s a perfect storm, aimed straight at the heart of the Great Italian Bulwark, la famiglia (the family),” she said via social media.

“It started when the sexual revolution legitimized male philandering. Suddenly, wives found themselves outclassed by girlfriends and divorced,” she continued.

“This destabilized the next generation, depriving boys of role models and hardening girls’ hearts.”

Stevens said that contemporary Italian women believe “fervently” in a feminism that has doomed them to unstable marriages or living alone.

“And their men protest the fact that they are alone on Christmas in Rome’s piazzas because the ex won’t allow them access to their kids,” she added.

“Nobody wins. Families fail to form. Italians strive endlessly to show a ‘bella figura’ (beautiful face, i.e. keep up appearances) as they age relentlessly, alone.”

“It’s cultural-level suicide.”

The Flood, Jan van Scorel, c. 1530

THE physical evidence for a global flood that occurred thousands of years ago is consistent with the biblical account of Noah, according to Hugh Owen, of the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation:

In recent years, geologists have reinterpreted several huge sedimentary rock formations in light of empirical research in sedimentology, including the Tonto Group, a large section of the Grand Canyon depicted below.  According to a peer-reviewed article published in the journal of the French Geological Society, careful analysis of the sediments that make up this formation indicate that the whole deposit was laid down rapidly—in a matter of days or weeks, not millions of years—by an enormous body of water moving from east to west across what is now the Southwestern United States.

Another common observation consistent with the historical reality of the Global Flood is the beautiful sharp folding of multiple sedimentary layers within uplifted and folded mountain ranges which can be witnessed all over the Earth.  If these layers had been laid down over millions of years, there ought to be some evidence of cracking and fracturing of the more ancient layers during the folding and uplifting of the mountains.  Instead, all over the Earth, one observes multiple layers of sedimentary rock, folded in beautiful tight folds, without any fracturing—a clear indication that all of the sediments were laid down rapidly at more or less the same time, and that there were no long intervals of time between them. Read More »

IS Russia seeking to undermine American and Canadian energy independence?

According to Timothy Fitzpatrick, it has spent $100 million on anti-pipeline protests in Canada that are blocking railways and harassing politicians.