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!

The answers to these question can be found in an examination of our financial system, in which banks create credit based on their own interests rather than upon real credit, which is the value of goods, services and our collective cultural inheritance.

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

David Hockney

ALAN writes:

Wherever a man is engaged in contemplation, it is common for people to say about him that he is “lost in thought.”

I suggest that this is nonsense. They have it backward: Such men are not “lost” in thought. They are at home in thought. They do not “lose” themselves in thought. They create themselves in thought.

If they are “lost,” it is in the “real world” as they attempt to navigate through a maze of liars, fools, frauds, airheads and swindlers.

How is one’s mind assaulted in public places today so that it is nearly impossible to be lost in thought?  Let me count the ways:

Traffic: The endless din of trucks, buses, and monster vehicles.

The beeping of vehicles used for landscaping.

The indescribable, mind-destroying noise of motorcycles and vehicles deliberately engineered to be as loud as modern technology makes possible.

The noise mendaciously called “music” from passing vehicles. Read More »

I WENT into Target the other day to look for a new thermal lunch-bag for my husband when I noticed a big rack with Father’s Day cards. I stopped to look at them — most of them were $6! — and noticed one that was for “two Dads,” obviously a card for a “gay” couple. Would anyone buy this card? I wondered. Very possibly.

It is heart-breaking to think about it. It’s heart-breaking for any child to be forced to live a lie. One father is all we get. Some may seem like fathers to us. But we only have one. Nothing else is possible.

That’s the beauty of fatherhood. Nothing — not death, not divorce, not abandonment, not a cultural revolution against fatherhood — can change this fact. And nothing can entirely sever the tie between a father and his child. That tie is biological and spiritual. People who haven’t seen or spoken to their fathers for years still think of them and are affected by them. Fatherhood used to be cultural too but that is very much breaking down. An enormous, heavily-funded state apparatus is directed to keeping fathers out of their homes. But no tyranny can ultimately succeed at this project however many families it cruelly and coldly destroys. Fathers will always live in their children’s hearts and cannot ever be entirely exiled from them. Even a bad father lives on.

In Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, the protagonist is a young boy born without a father. The trajectory of his life is established from the beginning by his fatherlessness.

I was born at Blunderstone, in Suffolk, or ‘there by’, as they say in Scotland. I was a posthumous child. My father’s eyes had closed upon the light of this world six months, when mine opened on it. There is something strange to me, even now, in the reflection that he never saw me; and something stranger yet in the shadowy remembrance that I have of my first childish associations with his white grave–stone in the churchyard, and of the indefinable compassion I used to feel for it lying out alone there in the dark night, when our little parlour was warm and bright with fire and candle, and the doors of our house were—almost cruelly, it seemed to me sometimes—bolted and locked against it.

The book goes on to give what seem to be living examples of every kind of father: the cruel stepfather, the indebted and reckless father, the overly protective father, the devoted father. And it ends in great happiness. David Copperfield becomes a father himself. Could Dickens have imagined a world with “two Dads?” He might not have been able to imagine it, but he could understand it. The human scene, he knew, was varied and constantly produces new eccentricities.

What about those children with “two Dads?”

Stay tuned. They will someday tell the world they only have one. Greeting cards and big, corporate retailers cannot change nature.

Happy Father’s Day to all fathers, both good and bad, both appreciated and under-appreciated. Never doubt that you are loved and have a permanent place in the hearts of your children. Read More »

PARIS writes:

I would like your opinion on my situation. I’m 35 years old, and have three kids. I’ve always felt like I was meant to have two more. I always feel, whether it be in taking pictures or sitting on our living room couch, that there is this empty spot left for this child or children that I was supposed to have.

My youngest is now 10. And I feel like I’ve been in mourning for at least five years over not having more kids. I still have “baby fever” so to speak. My husband didn’t want more kids after last one because we didn’t have much money then and he was attending school. We were also on food stamps. Now ten years later, our income has more than doubled (financially we’re probably middle class), and we are not on any government assistance, yet husband still doesn’t want any more kids. I feel so horrible. Read More »

HEART OF JESUS, glowing furnace of charity, king and center of all hearts, have mercy on us. 

June is the month of the Sacred Heart. Pray the Litany of the Sacred Heart (below). Read More »

An ad for Frances Valentine, Kate Spade’s last fashion business

STEPHEN IPPOLITO writes from Australia:

You really nailed it in your post about Kate Spade with your observation on that “black hole above the…fireplace” suggesting a world view that life is “dark and purposeless.” Spot on! There’s even a second such image in that sequence of shots – it’s in the second photo, in a frame above Mrs. Spade’s right shoulder, as she is shown gazing at herself in a mirror – a duplication that hints that something in Mrs. Spade perhaps may have been drawn to bleak images.

I felt very uneasy as I studied these shots and couldn’t understand why. It seemed to me that I had felt the very same unsettling sensations somewhere before. I found that quite surprising because I share your view about the stylishness and good taste of the branded products bearing her name. Then I recalled where I’ve felt the same uneasy sensations: every time I watch the famous opening title sequence of Hitchcock’s atmospheric film, Vertigo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q42Jdx6T7nI

The sequence was obviously very deliberately composed around the image of a black hole to reflect the film’s bleak central themes of obsession, alienation and above all: the morbid appeal that death holds for many people who are drawn to the darker side of life. The sequence features segmented shots of the face of a woman who is never shown whole and does not appear in the world of the film at all. It dwells particularly on the image of the pupil of one of her eyes – oversized, perfectly round, black and empty. It strikes me, as I think it must strike most people, as a portal into a terrible void. Such a strange and unsettling image to find as a decoration on the walls of a family home.

Fans of Vertigo will already know that the appeal of suicide looms front and centre among the film’s themes: the central female character Madeleine, like Ms Spade a stylish and elegant woman, is obsessed by the spirit of a long-dead woman who committed suicide, attempts suicide, herself, in San Francisco Bay and describes life as a walk down a long corridor “and at the end of the corridor is nothing but darkness.” She confides in the Jimmy Stewart character early on that: “I don’t want to die, but there’s someone within me and she says I must.” Read More »