Coade Stone statue of Edward the Confessor, College of St. George

“ST. EDWARD [c. 1003-1006] was a saint in the midst of a court, and in a degenerate age. Such an example must convince us, that for any to impute their want of a Christian spirit and virtue to the circumstances of their state or situation, is a false and foolish pretence: a proof of which is, that if these were changed, they would still remain the same persons. The fault lies altogether in their own sloth and passions. One who is truly in earnest, makes dangers and difficulties a motive of greater vigilance, application, and fervour, and even converts them into the means of his greater sanctification. Temperance and mortification may be practised, the spirit of true devotion acquired, and all virtues exercised by the divine grace, even in an heroic degree, where a desire and resolution does not fall short. From obstacles and contradictions themselves the greatest advantages may be reaped: by them patience, meekness, humility, and charity are perfected, and the soul is continually awaked, and quickened, into a lively sense of her duty to God.”

— “St. Edward, King and Confessor,” Lives of the Saints, Volume X, Alban Butler (1866)

Mother and Child, Mary Cassatt

“A GOOD Christian mother feels her love for her child, whom she holds in her arms, more than her love for God, whom she does not see; yet if she is truly Christian, she loves the Lord with an efficacious love of esteem more than her child. For this reason, theologians distinguish commonly between appreciative love (love of esteem) and intensive love, which is generally greater for loved ones whom we see than for those who are at a distance. But, with the progress of charity, the love of esteem for God becomes more intense and is known as zeal; in heaven its impetuosity will exceed that of all our strongest affections.

“Such is the nature of the virtue of charity; it is the principle of a love of God that is like the flowing of our hearts toward Him who draws us and vivifies us. Thus we ultimately find a great gratification in Him, desiring that He may reign more and more profoundly in our souls and the souls of others. For this love of God, knowledge is not necessary; to know our heavenly Father through faith suffices.”

—- Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., The Three Ages of the Interior Life, Volume Two (Tan Books, 1948), p. 190

LEARN more about the Social Credit solution to the debt-based economy here.

Believe it or nor, debt slavery is not necessary. Nor are high taxes, endless war, ever-expanding government, the centralized economy, full employment and the pervasive lack of leisure we see today.

UNHARVESTED

— Robert Frost

A scent of ripeness from over a wall.
And come to leave the routine road
And look for what had made me stall,
There sure enough was an apple tree
That had eased itself of its summer load,
And of all but its trivial foliage free,
Now breathed as light as a lady’s fan.
For there had been an apple fall
As complete as the apple had given man.
The ground was one circle of solid red.

May something go always unharvested!
May much stay out of our stated plan,
Apples or something forgotten and left,
So smelling their sweetness would be no theft.

Publisher of Screw magazine, Al Goldstein: “The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don’t believe in authoritarianism.”

FROM a video by Mark Collet:

“A frank discussion on the disproportionate role played by Jews in the porn industry. Whilst not all Jews are involved in encouraging and supporting pornography [in] the West, leading Jewish authors on the subject admit that Jews have played a disproportionate role in the industry and their motivation is not simply financial. Whilst in the West we are seeing an increasing amount of sexualised material pushed upon society, in Israel family values take centre stage and by law internet pornography is blocked by internet service providers.”

The video provides interesting quotes from Jewish authors. Read More »

Hampstead Heath with Bathers, John Constable

FROM Mementoes of the English martyrs and Confessors for Every Day in the Year, by Henry Sebastian Bowden (1836-1919):

PAST AND PRESENT
—- William Blundell, 1600

THE time hath been we had one faith,
And strode aright one ancient path;
The time is now that each man may
See new Religions coin’d each day.

Sweet Jesu, with thy mother mild.
Sweet Virgin mother, with thy child,
Angels and Saints of each degree,
Redress our country’s misery.

The time hath been priests did accord
In exposition of God’s word;
The time is now, like shipman’s hose,
It’s turn’d by each fond preacher’s glose.

The time hath been that sheep obeyed
Their pastors, doing as they said;
The time is now that sheep will preach,
And th’ ancient pastors seem to teach.

The time hath been the prelate’s door
Was seldom shut against the poor;
The time is now, so wives go fine,
They take not thought the beggar kine.

The time hath been men did believe
God’s sacraments his grace did give;
The time is now men say they are
Uncertain signs and tokens bare.

Giovanna Garzoni

A COOKED pear is more subtle and interesting than a cooked apple. The French, being subtle and interesting people, tend to cook pears more often than we do in America. They poach them in wine, roll them in pastry and make puddings with them. Here, thanks to another blogger, is a fantastic French pear tart from Patricia Wells’s book, Bistro Cooking. It is easy to put together and makes a good fall or Thanksgiving dessert. Cut the pears into quarters rather than in half as pictured in these photos.

I entered this tart in a family bake-off, but took home no prize. I don’t think that reflects poorly on this recipe. The chocolate-y, gooey, marshmallow-y entries were a big hit. This pear tart will take you to Paris without having to get on a plane.

AN Amazon tribal chief made interesting comments to those gathering in Rome for “Pope” Francis’s highly-touted Amazon Synod.

Edward Pentin from The National Catholic Register reports:

An Amazon tribal chief told a Rome conference on Saturday that a “dictatorship” of missionary workers teaching liberation theology has sought to prevent development in the region, thus keeping indigenous people in poverty and misery.

Jonas Marcolino Macuxí, the chief of the Macuxi tribe, asserted such promotion of “primitivism” (an ideology that pre-Christian indigenous traditions and mores were largely noble and good and should be conserved) brought conflict to the region from the 1970s on, undoing all that earlier missionaries and indigenous peoples had achieved in terms of positive cultural assimilation for more than a century.

He also expressed concern that many of those advising the Pope on the synod have this same ideology and that the indigenous invited to attend it have been “indoctrinated to remain in their primitive state.” Read More »

LEARN more about the Russian political thinker Aleksander Dugin in this video, which is not well made (language warning) but contains many quotes from Dugin’s works. [Update: Apologies, but I have decided to remove the video because it’s just too hard to follow and contains a few vulgar words. See excerpts from Dugin below.]

It is important to try to understand this intellectual who exudes occultism and seems to cast a spell with his ideas. Russian subversion is active in so-called American patriot websites, including those which portray Western leaders over and over as “Satanic.” For these reasons, I recommend this amateurish documentary by way of introduction.

Dugin advocates the overthrow of the decadent West under a neo-Bolshevik banner which joins an imperialistic, racially supremacist Russia with a united Europe and parts of Asia. This is “Eurasianism.” He attracts some nationalists in the alt-right who reject multiculturalism and liberal intolerance. I don’t get why anyone would fall for him, but apparently people do, obviously more so in Russia than here. Read More »

FROM GAB News:

Some researchers from the University of Cornell decided to build artificial intelligence in order to identify “hate speech” and “offensive content.” It turns out that the remarks from white people were “substantially” less hateful than the comments purportedly made by minorities in the study. What is most interesting here is that the data was sourced from Twitter, which allegedly bans “hate speech,” unless of course that hate is coming from minorities apparently.

Of course now that the data isn’t matching the expectations of researchers and journalists they are making excuses. The AI must be racist or something!

Landscape with Woman and Child, Albert Pinkham Ryder

ALAN writes:

In “Life in a Lighthouse” (Sept. 20), you wrote “often the very best life is one that is somewhat deprived….”

My father would certainly testify to that, and so would many of his contemporaries. It was always his firm judgment that children were better off by far who grew up with too little than with too much. He would look upon a nationwide culture of people who are drunk on material excess, toys, and amusements as vindication for that judgment. And he would be right.

People who wrote about growing up in the 1920s-‘30s often said that their families were poor but happy.

“….These were happy days in our lives at that time.  …I have never forgotten those wonderful years…  To me, the neighborhood was very safe.  We were all poor people but happy….”, a woman wrote at age 87 about growing up in St. Louis in the 1920s.

St. Louisan Lois Kendall wrote about her childhood in the 1950s:

“When I was growing up, we never had a lot of money….   As little girls, a big Saturday treat for (sister) Myra and me was walking to Cherokee Street with mother and Auntie Vi.  Mostly we just looked at the wonderful wares that beckoned from the colorful counters at Woolworth’s and Kresge’s, making mental wish lists of all we’d buy if we had $100….  I don’t remember ever feeling deprived because I couldn’t actually buy those things.  Looking and wishing was really quite enough….”  [Lois Kendall, “The simple life is sweet”, South Side Journal, Oct. 27, 1996 ]

Joanna Francis, a woman in England, prefers life as it was in 1939 over what it is today.  She is quite comfortable with the way the English people lived then and has no yen for modern toys and excess.  [See “Desperately seeking wartime husband for woman who lives like it’s permanently 1939 “]

Of course many people today would look upon her as a freak—the proper response to which would be:  “Look who’s talking.” Read More »

“TALES OF CHESTER continues here. As the city declines so does the sanity of a teacher.

AT THE END of her stories, she would intone: “The mills of God grind slowly …,” and, by mid-October, we would reflexively join in the refrain, …. “but they grind exceeding fine.” 

This would set her off. That didn’t stop us; we couldn’t help ourselves. “I don’t need your help!” she would scream, spittle spraying onto her starched bib like rain drops onto a white car hood. That was just to clear her throat for the main event that always followed. “You ig-norant, ig-norant, ig-norant PIGS! You NO-bodies from NO-where.”

Monday mornings were the worst. We had an overwhelming dread of confronting another endless week with Sister, and the week would begin with a tirade as sure as a baseball game began with a first pitch. On Sundays, we were required to attend the 8:45 a.m. Children’s Mass. We sat in assigned pews in front of our respective nun. The Sisters had already been to the early Mass and had had their sacramental experiences, so they were free to count heads and pay attention to everything we did.

We sang children’s hymns during the Latin liturgy; listened to a sermon targeted to the audience, amid announcements about bingo times, block collections and other fund-raising activities; and marched solemnly back from the Communion rail, our fingertips pointed to heaven, if we valued our health and immortal souls.

On the first Sunday of the school year, I noticed that Sister was not taking attendance. This was unprecedented, and something else that very much separated her from “the Sisters before me.” On Monday, she asked how many had failed to attend the Children’s Mass. This, too, was unprecedented; in the previous seven years, there had been no need to ask. Eleven kids stood up that first Monday after the first Sunday. Read More »

THE INTERESTING STORY of my husband’s eighth-grade teacher was never completely told here even though I promised to continue his account. I apologize for the long, long delay.

I’m going to repeat the first part today and then pick up where we left off on Thursday. The whole series Tales of Chester can be found here.

****

“This place,” she would snarl day after day, morning and afternoon, pausing to grit her teeth and bunch her pleated black habit in two clawed fists. “I can’t wait to get out of this place.”

This was our eighth-grade nun at St. Michael’s School, and it was a refrain we would keep with us the rest of our lives. Compared with our experiences in the first seven grades and with other nuns, her behavior was shocking and left us with an overwhelming sense that something had gone terribly wrong in her life – and our’s.

Watching the dissolution of an important authority figure was unsettling and challenged a truth we held to be beyond self-evident: Sister does it, therefore it is right. It was so hard for us to believe that this was happening at St. Michael’s, the neighborhood’s axis of order, that we didn’t believe it.

Although it was a close call, the Catholic Church was the only institution more powerful than the Republican Party. In that era it was impossible to overrate the pull of the parish, the axis upon which everything else rotated. St. Michael’s Church was the cathedral of Chester. God couldn’t have had a better house, with its immense stained glass, marble altars, stately organ and palatial heights. The priests were celebrities. They drove black cars and smoked cigars, except for Father Higgins, the pastor. They lived in a sumptuous rectory with a housekeeper who cooked all their meals and screened all visitors.

It was the downtown parish, the one frequented by businessmen and the mayor. The church was always open. No religion or denomination on earth could match the Catholics for quantities or services, or fund-raising activities, and St. Michael’s had more than most: Masses, novenas, benedictions, processions, bingos, card parties, Communion breakfasts, block collections, the works.

Like Renner’s house among the humble homes of Madison Street, the grandeur of St. Michael’s, a cathedral in all but name, was out of scale with downtown Chester. The gilded cross atop the 180-foot stone tower and spire, was by far the closest object to the heavens above. The solemn stone facade was an elegant evocation of the late Middle Ages among the otherwise prosaic and unassuming buildings that housed the shops in the business district. No one escaped the influence of the church, named for the Archangel who was chairman of the joint chiefs of staff in the war against the bad angels. A 30-foot mural to the left of the altar depicted St. Michael, his foot on Satan’s throat, downwardly thrusting a spear into the Satanic stomach.

Renner’s house was a mystical mansion; St. Michael’s, a mystical kingdom. A corridor of statuary overlooked perfectly varnished, sumptuous pews. The stained-glass windows depicted complicated scenes in detail that belied the limits of the medium: Jesus changing water to wine at Canaan, the fingers of the miraculous hand visible; Jesus walking on water, down to the sacred toenails; Jesus ascending to Heaven, through the rounded perimeters of cumulus clouds. The scenes were emblazoned to life when the sunlight animated the south-facing windows. The original church was built at the behest of Irish stoneworkers and completed in 1843. When the milling industry, along with the immigrant population, exploded, the congregation jumped eight-fold, and construction of the new church began in 1874.

From the choir loft on the Wednesday nights of the Lenten novenas, we could hear Joe Hoffman’s amplified voice intoning “I-29” to the blue-headed bingo ladies frantically scanning their multiple cards in the church basement. Everyone, including the children, was expected to give to the Sunday collections, even the poor people, of which there were many. Everyone in the house received packages of coded and colored envelopes for each Sunday, each with an identification number in the upper left-hand corner. At the end of the year, the parish published a list, ranked by contribution total, of what everyone had given during the calendar year. If you gave 25 cents, that’s what appeared next to your name.

This increased the pressure to give, obviously. Parents had to stuff their own and their children’s envelopes to prevent public embarrassment. Children were expected to give a quarter a week, $1 to $5 on Christmas and Easter, so that at the end of the year, $15 would be an acceptable total. The system also raised the stakes for the major benefactors. The two funeral directors, George White and Johnny Clancy, maintained a brisk competition. Both were church regulars. Clancy looked appropriately corpse-like, and White had a magnificently luminous bald head that seemed to be covered with skin-colored patent leather. Both typically would put in $300 – or about $2,000 at today’s rates – on Christmas and Easter alone.

Almost every family sent the children to St. Michael’s school, where arithmetic, grammar, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost and the Apostles’ Creed were branded into your soul before you knew you had one. We looked down on the kids who went to Larkin School, where they were allowed to wear play clothes and walked back and forth to school any which way. We wore jackets and ties and stayed in line on the way home.

We were held to a higher standard of discipline, and, we imagined, academic expectations. Parents didn’t question the nuns or the curriculum, and corporal punishment was accepted, if not encouraged. We complained, but we were proud of it all.

The popular images of nuns, including the legends we perpetuate in our family, are mere caricatures. We never called them “nuns,” a word that suggested a secular, if not pejorative, categorization. They were “Sisters,” and what they did was quite remarkable. They had their complexities and nuances. They were not all holy terrors, at least on most days. Read More »

IN a timely article in Culture Wars magazine about the children’s author Jacqueline Wilson, Sean Naughton analyzes the use of children (think Greta Thunberg) as cultural revolutionaries:

The destruction of adult authority has very deep roots. Whether you take the Reformation’s rejection of the motherhood of the Church and the fatherhood of the priest, or the Enlightenment rejection of tradition and authority, the evolutionists’ exaltation of the latest as the greatest, or the myth of the authoritarian personality, the sexual revolution hammered the last nails into the coffin of adult authority. After all, if sex is just glorified masturbation, men forever will be boys and women forever will be toys.

The third change follows inevitably as a result of the second. If the adult is no longer the figure of authority, somebody must be in charge. Father and mother and teacher and preacher have been dethroned. Who is to rule us now? Jacqueline Wilson gives us the answer: “I’m Tracy Beaker. Mark the name. I’ll be famous one day.”28 The tyrannical child had finally been born. The age of the child had finally come. The gospel of child-centredness was taking over the world. Jacqueline Wilson had found her true calling.

The weaponization of children as revolutionaries is not as new as Dame Jacqueline might have thought, or as novel as Tracy Beaker fans might have imagined. It involves an inversion of the call by Jesus Christ that we “turn and become like children” (Matthew 18:3). Rather than imitating the perfections of the child – purity, innocence, dependence, trust in the goodness of others and in the goodness of God – the revolutionary uses the child as an image of himself through whom his own revolutionary gospel is proclaimed to the world as a thing of purity, innocence and goodness. Read More »

THE FACT that white America constantly puts up with systematic defamation is proof that it is not a “white supremacist” country. In fact, it’s just the opposite, a country in which whites bask in self-criticism and neurotic guilt. Someone like Professor Kyle Kusz would be otherwise professionally censured for this article in Newsweek, in which he states that star quarterback Tom Brady is popular because of white racism:

New England Patriot quarterback Tom Brady is one of the most accomplished and decorated NFL stars of all time, but Kyle Kusz, an associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Rhode Island has a much different take on the 42-year-old.

According to Campus Reform, Kusz does not think Brady’s popularity stems from his six Superbowl titles but instead due to white supremacy and white male rage. Read More »

Woman Walking Down Path, Edward Mitchell Bannister; 1882

SOME people mistakenly believe that spiritual perfection consists in prayer, in going to church, and in other pious exercises. It does not. It consists in one thing, for which prayer and the sacraments are aids.  Spiritual perfection consists in entirely conforming ourselves to the will of God.

[F]rom the emotions of your heart, a cloud of dust will sometimes arise, and it will give you much trouble on the road you have to travel. God permits this for your greater good. Remember that this is the war in which the saints have carried off crowns of great merit.

In all the things that disturb you, say, “Behold, Lord, Thy servant; let Thy will be done in me.”

— Lorenzo Scupoli

This is the whole purpose of existence: to live God’s will, to love God’s will, above our own or anything else in this world. And never will we find a moment’s true peace outside this supernatural reality. We are tools in the hands of an artist, indeed the only Artist, who uses the dark and light of our lives to create scenes of sublime beauty. We cannot see the canvas on which He works because we are part of it.

It may be God’s will that we face sickness, or loneliness, or poverty, or betrayal or constant petty annoyances. It may be God’s will that we struggle with our own indifference to spiritual things.

Let Thy will be done in me. Read More »

 

THIS warm and nostalgic song by Ysaye M. Barnwell is about a mother’s love, remembered in a cold and impersonal world. It is performed beautifully by the vocal group Cantus.