AT THE terrific blog A Clerk of Oxford, Eleanor Parker, Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford, reviews the 1944 British film, A Canterbury Tale, which is set in wartime Kent and can be viewed online here:

Love draws forth love, and I’m sure that one reason people love this film so dearly is that it’s transparently born of love – particularly love for the countryside and the people of the director’s own childhood home (Michael Powell was born in Bekesbourne and went to school in Canterbury, and several of the minor characters are directly based on, or played by, local villagers he knew). It’s a film about love, of various kinds: love of home and nature, a poignant love for the lost and the absent, and a love of history which manifests itself in an intensely romantic, almost mystical sense of longing and connection with the past. In fact, the whole plot of the film is driven (this is a little bit of a spoiler!) by one character’s desire to share his love of history with others. He goes about it in an obsessive and bizarrely coercive way, but the film argues – and itself superbly demonstrates – that the same goal can be achieved by wooing your audience, rather than bullying them: instead of frightening them or chastising them, invite people in to love what you love. There’s no love story in this film – one of the things it was criticised for – but the whole thing is a meditation on love and desire in a way few overtly romantic stories manage to be. Its central metaphor is pilgrimage, specifically medieval pilgrimage; and for medieval writers pilgrimage was above all the journey of the questing heart, the outward embodiment of the soul’s restless, yearning desire to love and seek after truth.

ALESSO DI BENOZZO Crucifixion (detail)

WHOEVER does not believe in the oft-ridiculed “conspiracy theory” of history quite simply does not believe in the devil, who moves both men and events. Great numbers of his dupes labor to promote satanic causes without necessarily being aware of the source of their inspiration. This is the essence of conspiracy, literally a “co-inspiration.” Harnessing masses of witless sinners by appealing to their vices and appetites, fallen angelic intelligences do indeed influence the course of history. The less their victims know the better.

There will have to be historians of the eleventh hour who can tell it like it is. These are not the days of Herodotus or Julius Caesar, when history could be written on a purely natural level. Since then the Son of God has entered history as man and proclaimed himself Christ the King. He has endowed human events with a completely new dimension. Not to take into account their metaphysical main-springs in our day is to slip into unreality, into a miasma of unrelated “facts” lending themselves to any kind of manipulation. Faith alone can assess them properly, through the gift of knowledge imparted by the Holy Ghost. It is simple truth to say that only a Christian can know what really goes on in the world.

— Solange Hertz, The Star-Spangled Heresy: Americanism (Tumblar House)

KYLE writes:

The ongoing saga of illegal immigration brought to mind this presentation from several years ago.

I’m sure the numbers Roy Beck of NumbersUSA mentions have fluctuated, but the principle remains the same. I’ve nothing more to add to what seems to be bulletproof logic on display in this short video.

ACCORDING one of America’s leading associations of librarians, the author Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote The Little House on the Prairie, was a white supremacist. Lifesitenews reports:

For more than half a century, the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) has named its annual award for children’s book authors after “Little House on the Prairie” author Laura Ingalls Wilder, but the acclaimed novelist has just become the latest cultural hallmark to be condemned for depicting the biases of a bygone era.

The association, a division of the American Library Association, voted over the weekend to remove Wilder’s name from the award, the Washington Post reports, and rename it the Children’s Literature Legacy Award.

Citing “anti-Native and anti-Black sentiments in her work,” the association declared that Wilder’s literary legacy “includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness.”

The “Little House” series told fictionalized versions of stories from Wilder’s own life, as her family traveled the United States’ western frontier in the nineteenth century. “In my own life I represented a whole period of American history,” she once said.

At issue is the fact that those stories sometimes reflected the era’s prevailing attitudes about blacks and Native Americans, particularly the hatred and fear between settlers and natives. Among the offending passages are characters who say things like “the only good Indian is a dead Indian,” and depictions of men wearing blackface as part of performance

FRANCISCO GUTIERREZ writes at Tradition in Action:

There is a story I would like to share with you to illustrate just how ludicrous the pet situation has become. One day a man whom I shall call Thomas got the news that his mother-in-law and maternal aunt had passed away within days of each other. Thomas had to deal with these losses and pains, and his wife was very sad at the death of her mother. As the story continues, Thomas notified his co-workers about his losses. Most were sympathetic about the situation.

Later that day Thomas learned that a co-worker’s cat had died. The same co-worker and other office workers who had showed a polite sympathy for the death of his relatives became traumatized over the death of the cat. Several made statements like these, “The cat was like her child,” “She had no children, and the cat was her child.”

One person actually told him that she read an article pointing out that a person grieves more for an animal than a family member. To say the least, I was taken aback by the contradiction: more sympathy and grief for the loss of a pet than for persons. Read More »

Flower Seller with Child, Victor-Gabriel Gilbert

PRESENT WITH her Amish family unloading flowers at a rural Pennsylvania produce stand today, a little girl of about five years looked up for a moment, puzzled and curious. They arrived in a buggy pulling a wagon crammed full of bouquets. While her brothers and mother emptied the cart, she shyly waited for them in the background. It could have been the 17th century or the 15th. There was nothing in what they were doing that was new or cool.

I wondered what this girl, who was dressed in a long skirt, her head covered with a purple scarf, makes of her glimpses of the modern world, of the whizzing cars, of the passengers — some so obese that they have trouble walking, of the children who whine out loud and seem not to stand still. She lives far removed from all that. I have never seen an Amish child insolently talking back to parents. It probably happens, but they seem so busy being children. This little girl has probably never watched TV. She may never ride in an airplane or play on a beach in a bathing suit or ride a roller coaster or stand in a sports arena. She may never have “deconstructed” jeans or purple hair. She will miss out. But she has some of the best things a child can have. She has many siblings and fresh air. She has a mother who is not taught to be ashamed of being a woman. She has a father who is a man. She has hard work. Or she will soon. She has constant lessons in self-restraint. Already you can see certain qualities in her face: patience and self-deprecation.

You can see another thing: innocence. It’s an unmistakeable and intangible quality that comes from not knowing. Children should be oblivious. They don’t need to know. They need not to know. The producers of popular culture hate innocence. This girl’s innocence won’t be systematically destroyed by the world around her. The Amish were truly wise to turn their backs on it all.

The kingdom of adults grows stale when there are few true children left. We don’t know what we’re missing because it’s not there. Innocence deeply motivates and energizes adults. But then I suppose you have to have known it to appreciate it. You have to have known what it is like to believe, however temporarily, that you are surrounded by goodness, safety and protection. Innocence is only delusion to those who believe that paradise doesn’t exist. If only a child could explain those moments in between the boredom and the waiting.

A delicate flower may bloom majestically in its field with no awareness of all the diseases that could afflict it or that ugliness rules. It doesn’t need to know. Let the world have its sophistication. Every real child, its innocence slowly unfolding, is a small, inarticulate condemnation of modernity. The flowers in the field can’t explain either.

It’s very difficult to be a flower unless you were once a seed. It’s very difficult to be an adult unless you were once a child.

AN INTERESTING talk by Dr. John Rao on Calvinism and “Americanism.” His talk is based on this essay.

FROM NPR:

Hungary’s parliament passed a series of laws on Wednesday criminalizing the act of aiding undocumented immigrants seeking asylum in the country, despite strong objections from leading European rights bodies. [Notice that this bill does not punish immigrants themselves; it punishes those who encourage migrants to leave their home countries.]

The suite of bills, called “Stop Soros,” allow the government to imprison individuals and nongovernmental organizations for up to a year if they’re deemed to be facilitating what it says is illegal immigration by people not entitled to protections, the BBC reported. A separate amendment to the constitution declared that an “alien population” can not be settled in Hungary.

The latter is in direct defiance of the EU’s migrant relocation plan that would spread more than 150,000 Syrian, Iraqi and Eritrean asylum seekers among member countries — a quota policy Hungary has been fighting since it was first rolled out. Read More »

DRONES, not passenger airplanes, hit the World Trade Center on 9/11, argues James Perloff:

9/11 wasn’t just the crime of the century, it was arguably the crime of the millennium. An extraordinary crime required extraordinary planning and spending. No conventional civilian Boeings would have been used for it. And I think, for many of us in the Truth Movement (myself included), we have tried to analyze the “plane strikes” based on the characteristics of ordinary planes. Since no ordinary planes could achieve the results of 9/11, some of us made the “either or” mistake, and discarded planes in favor of “no planes at all,” “holograms,” or “CGI added after the fact.”

I do believe that jetliners, modified in the types of ways this post has suggested, could resolve the observed phenomena, including the “impossible” penetration of the second tower (even the “nose out”), the entry gashes in both Towers, the holes in the Pentagon rings and Shanksville soil, and the presence of aircraft wreckage (but in scant amounts untraced to the original aircraft).

A drone, unlike the original jetliner, would also allow for the pod visible on the undersurface of “Flight 175.”

A “feckless and useless clergy incapable of transmitting the Catholic Faith” was responsible for the recent abortion referendum in Ireland, writes Bishop Donald Sanborn.

Their sermons are boring and trite, not concerned about objective Catholic dogma and morality, but about purely naturalistic ideas of being good to your neighbor, being concerned about the environment, and being generally “nice.”

[…]

Modernism is the most lethal enemy of the virtue of faith, and we have seen the result of this poisoning of souls in the public immorality and worse, in the legalization of immorality, indeed in the murder of babies and unnatural vice, both abominations in God’s eyes in countries which were once staunchly Catholic.

The Novus Ordo clergy, as a whole, and with only a few exceptions, are guilty of this moral apostasy and have on their hands the blood of the innocent babies who will be aborted in these once Catholic countries.

In related news, Frank the Fake has received yet another hideous and inhuman crucifix for his collection:

Novus Ordo Watch writes:

Francis can add this abominable piece of junk to his ever-growing collection of blasphemous and twisted “art”, which already includes a Communist hammer-and-sickle crucifix, an occultist crucifix, a monster-ance, and many other ugly things. Read More »

OLD WOMEN, locked in a state of perpetual immaturity, try to look sexy and cool. The New York Times applauds.

They look ridiculous. It’s an Emperor-Has-No-Clothes world.

The old lady had too much dignity, too much wisdom. She often aged gracefully. She had to go.

Elizabeth Lewis, John Singleton Copley; 1771

IF MOST Americans understood the basics of our monetary system, they would rise up as one — left and right, black and white, Christian and non-Christian — to overturn it and take the power of money creation out of private hands. Most don’t understand it because important details are never mentioned in the media or in schools. Bill Still’s 1996 documentary The Money Masters: How International Bankers Gained Control of America is an outstanding introduction. It can be viewed in its entirety here. A transcript is available here. From the opening:

Since the turn of the century, there has occurred throughout the world a major increase in debt and a major decline in the freedom of individuals, and of states, to conduct their own affairs. To restore a condition of widespread, modest wealth is therefore essential to regaining and preserving our freedom.

What’s going on in America today? Why are we over our heads in debt? Why can’t the politicians bring debt under control? Why are so many people – often both parents now – working at low-paying, dead-end jobs and still making do with less?  What’s the future of the American economy and way of life?

Why does the government tell us inflation is low, when the buying power of our paychecks is declining at an alarming rate? Only a generation ago, bread was a quarter and you could get a new car for $1,995!

ROBYN writes:

Your reader Paris asks for your help in her struggle to convince her husband to have more children. I agree that they should stop using contraception as this is a mortal sin that is highly offensive to God. Abstinence may be necessary when it is for reasonable causes such as while a woman is recovering from a previous pregnancy, if she is not healthy enough to have another child, or like you said, if there were dire financial or other family circumstances to deal with first. However, we shouldn’t avoid our procreative role in order to shelter ourselves from the struggles that come along with a new baby or how older children might react. We need to have trust in God’s providence, and we must do our part to bring new life into the world.

I am currently reading a book that I think would help Paris and her husband. It’s titled “Searching for and Maintaining Peace: A Small Treatise for Peace of Heart” by Father Jacques Phillippe. Read More »

SEBASTIEN writes from France:

Hervé Ryssen, well known in France for his books on the psychology of Judaism, was recently summoned to appear in court for publishing a book on large scale international frauds that are based in Israel.

In his six major books on the psychology of Judaism, Ryssen presents facts and documentation that leads to the incontrovertible conclusion that Jews are deeply traumatized by their psychology. His book Understanding the Jews, Understanding Anti-Semitism can be read here.

Someone has kindly taken the time to subtitle an interview of Ryssen outside the 17th chamber in Paris, the courtroom where all thought crimes cases are heard. Even if you don’t understand his French, you can clearly see how rapidly he thinks, how well he expresses himself and how courageous he is. Read More »

“Attribute to God every good that you have received. If you take credit for something that does not belong to you, you will be guilty of theft.”

— St. Anthony of Padua