“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. (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. (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. (more…)

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. (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.

  A FRIEND told me the sad story last night of a couple who had had an on-and-off relationship for many years but never married or had children. They both ended up unhappy and alone. What went wrong? They failed to follow the rules. They had a sexual relationship outside marriage. They did it for pleasure but also decided they could not marry because the man's career was not established. She waited and waited. He did what he wanted and liked to do --- but it didn't earn much. She got pregnant. They aborted the child. She waited and waited. Finally, she left him after ten years and they were both miserable. They were "meant to be together." Now what might have happened if the woman (or man) had refused a sexual relationship before marriage from the beginning? Maybe his lassitude would have vanished and they would have married. Maybe she would have found someone else. Maybe they would have still ended up alone, but their loneliness would not have been embittered by the terrible regrets and venomous, mutual recriminations that followed the killing of their child. When women generally withheld sex before marriage, men had more motivation to take on the unpleasant tasks of survival, and the incentive to kill one's own child was less common. This couple is definitely not entirely to blame for their tragedy. A river of tears runs through modern society. It was created by the…

IT'S SUPPOSEDLY BAD to tell children about hell, which they can avoid by being good and loving God. But it's not bad to threaten them with mass extinction, which can only be avoided by political hysteria and totalitarian government. Read about Greta Thunberg's financial backers here.

IN May, 2000, the writer Lawrence Auster wrote a letter to the pastor of St. Thomas Church, the Anglo-Catholic parish on Fifth Avenue in New York where Mr. Auster was then a parishioner. Mr. Auster, who was raised Jewish, was baptized in 1998 and converted to Catholicism shortly before he  died in 2013, made some important observations in this letter. They apply not just to Episcopalianism but also to the Vatican II religion that has taken over Catholic churches. This is an excerpt from the letter:

Dear Fr. Mead:

If you were wondering what I was talking about with Bishop Sisk in the narthex after Sunday services, this is what I said to him: “Where in the Bible does it saw that we discover the meaning of Christ’s resurrection by ’embracing our particularity?'”

He replied, “That’s my interpretation.”

When I objected to his interpretation, he clarified that he did not mean that it’s about all of us just going off in our own direction (which had been my impression), but that we live “in Christ.”

I was glad he said this. Combined with his evident sincerity of manner, it mollified me somewhat. However, that’s not what he said in his sermon. In his sermon, he said nothing about living in Christ. In his sermon he threw out an endless series of rhetorical and sophomoric-sounding questions (there must have been about twenty of them), such as “How do we know what the meaning of the Resurrection is?,” “How can we tell that Christ is risen?” and so on and on. They were questions that led nowhere, questions that to my mind betokened a lack of genuine engagement with the Gospels. They were posed not in the spirit of a man who is looking for truth, but in the spirit of a man who is saying that there isn’t any truth. (more…)

A [white] Gentile in America, even a child, is raised to accept a very heavy sense of personal responsibility that far exceeds anyone else's normal sense of personal responsibility. It creates a neurotic personality who is always feeling guilty and thus is too weak to stand up to Zionist criminal behavior and the comical, obviously non-factual Zionist ideology. Jews in America are socially empowered to go way beyond the learned trauma of the Jewish experience that results in typical reactionary behavior. They actually participate in group behavior that is deliberately manipulative and abusive - aimed at punishing activists who stand up for human equality and justice. Over the years, US Jews have become increasingly nutty not only due to current events but due to the internet "alerts" coming to them from Jewish lobbyists, who solidify their brains in this self-righteous fantasy world where Hamas is a terrorist organization, where Israel has some kind of right to kill and rob non-Jews. So we are dealing with not only dangerous reactions based on past trauma - actually learned trauma based on a glorified and fictionalized past - but American Jews are actually being trained since childhood to interact with non-Jews in a deceitful and arrogant manner, in coordination with each other, to emotionally destroy Gentiles and Israel critics, in addition to wrecking their careers and interfering with their social relationships. This is actually deliberate, wicked, planned behavior motivated by a narcissistic self-righteous fury.…

ALL news stories, especially those broadcast instantly around the globe, should be approached with critical thinking skills. Think before you swallow.

This story about an American man, Stephen Weber, drowning while proposing to his girlfriend at a luxury resort in Zanzibar suggests scripting and orchestration. The story supposedly originated from a Facebook post by his girlfriend Kenesha Antoine, the allegedly bereaved bride-to-be. Agence France Presse reports:

An American man has drowned while proposing to his girlfriend underwater at an idyllic island off the coast of Tanzania, a luxury resort said in a statement Sunday.

His girlfriend Kenesha Antoine posted on her Facebook page footage of Steven Weber proposing to her through the window of their underwater hotel room at the luxury Manta Resort in Zanzibar.

“You never emerged from those depths so you never got to hear my answer, ‘Yes! Yes! A million times, yes, I will marry you!!’,” she wrote Friday in a post confirming his death.

It’s odd that this accidental death so quickly became international news and that so much is known about the deceased so soon after his death.  So much is known, that is, except any details about why or how he died. (more…)

  GOD has made the rich depend on the poor, and the poor on the rich. The rich should take care of the poor, in order that the poor may take care of the rich. The misery of the poor is corporal. The misery of the rich is generally spiritual. The rich, therefore, should give corporal relief to the poor, in order to receive from them spiritual aid in turn. Without the assistance of the rich, the poor would die corporally. Without the prayers and blessings of the poor, the rich would die spiritually. Graces and chastisements are in the hands of the poor. When they implore mercy for him who aids them, God grants their prayers. When they demand justice against those who send them away empty, God also grants their prayers. "Son, defraud not the poor of alms, and turn not away thy eyes from the poor. For the prayer of him that curseth thee in the bitterness of his soul shall be heard: for He that made him will hear him." (Ecclus. iv., 1, 6.) A rich man is in danger of losing his soul when he has not the prayers and blessings of the poor. In this world, the rich are the judges of the poor. In the world to come, the poor will be the judges of the rich. Those who have not the poor for their advocates, will not find grace with their judge. He who…

ALAN writes:

I know exactly how Paul A. feels.  [“Hardships of the Single Life, cont.”, Sept. 2 ] He is only 50. I am 20 years older and intimately acquainted with the kind of life he describes.

“Everything is far away,” he wrote. And that is true. But I remember a time when it wasn’t true.  Cities once consisted of self-sufficient neighborhoods where everything was not far away.  Older men and women in St. Louis have written about how, during their childhood years, everything their family needed could be found within walking distance.  That was true for us in the 1950s.

Then came a variety of factors to explode that arrangement:  Motor vehicles, highways, the development of mass marketing, the invention of the teenager and then the youth subculture, the destruction of neighborhoods, and the surrender of local power and law to distant places, among others.  Alan Ehrenhalt discussed many of these factors in his 1995 book The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s, which I recommend.

I once knew an older man who lived alone for 50 years. He and his wife had separated and neither ever remarried.  In some ways, he told me, it was a terrible way to live, and it could be terribly lonely.  He was right.  I learned it, too, from long experience. (more…)

  LIGHTHOUSES are romantic vestiges of a less sophisticated time. Many historic American lighthouses have been destroyed, which is a shame, because the lonely vigilance of their resident lighthouse keepers and the stories of the lives they have protected make old lighthouses objects of fascination. My husband and I visited the Saugerties Lighthouse on the Hudson River this summer. The Hudson is one of the most beautiful rivers in the world and here, 110 miles north of New York City, where it wends its way through the Catskill Mountains, the river is surrounded by charming, low hills and lush foliage. The lighthouse is not far from where Henry Hudson stopped in Turkey Point in 1609 during his explorations along the mighty river. The first Saugerties lighthouse was constructed in 1834 at the mouth of the Esopus Creek off a swampy shore on land donated by Robert Livingston. The much larger existing lighthouse, completed in 1869, sits on a stone pier on 65-foot pilings in the water. The lights were initially illuminated by whale oil, later replaced by mineral oil and eventually electricity in 1947. Its oil lens was visible from ten nautical miles away. It was one of nine lighthouses from Albany to New York when the Hudson was a main commercial artery in the nineteenth century, providing transportation for passengers and essential goods with its direct connection to the Atlantic Ocean. Sailboats owned by the great estates that sprang…

  GOOD TIMES are good. Fun is very fun. Joy and happiness are necessary. But so is sorrow. Sorrow is necessary too. He who can not shed tears is lacking in compassion. For sickness, disappointment, loneliness, enmity, and death are always nearby. Sorrow opens our hearts to the truth of the human condition and to the mystical importance of the soul. Some are chosen to feel more sorrow. This is an undeniable fact. Equality in the department of suffering does not exist. (If you are hanging out with people who cannot give a plausible explanation for this disturbing inequality, you are hanging out with the superficial.) In this increasingly impersonal, alienated and artificial world, some may feel such intense sorrow, such a heavy load of sadness, that physical heart disease seems minor in comparison to this spiritual heart disease. Sorrow of this kind is a grace from God, who draws the sorrowful closer to Him. He appoints to them the office of grief for a reason. At the Foot of the Cross the second Eve fulfilled her destiny. She who had lived in human intimacy with God experienced complete sorrow, greater than any other, sorrow being a counterpart of love. This sorrow is the source of her great compassion, which is why millions of people have found consolation in suffering with her and appealing to her compassion. But why? Why this inner suffering? "What is the reason of all this suffering…

FELIX Kjellberg, the Swedish Youtube sensation who goes by the name PewDiePie (I’ve never heard of him before today), is the subject of a major news story.

Under pressure from his fans, PewDiePie, who reportedly has the largest Youtube audience in the world, rescinded a $50,000 donation to the Anti-Defamation League, which many of his followers claim is the country’s leading instigator of thought control and censorship. This is a big story because no one in popular culture publicly stands up to the ADL. But Kjellberg not only canceled the gift, he also apologized to his followers for even considering it. According to E. Michael Jones, this decision represents a “revolution in consciousness.” That may be an overstatement but it is true more and more people know that the ADL is a vicious organization that spies on Americans and ruins people’s lives when they express opinions the ADL doesn’t like. The ADL is a defamation league (not an anti-defamation league) deceptively operating under the mask of respectability, militantly supportive of Jewish nationalism while condemning nationalism for Americans, connected with organized crime, supported by political leaders of both parties and reminiscent of the Bolshevik Cheka, the secret police that terrorized Russians. The ADL terrorizes not just its opponents, but ordinary Jews too with scenarios of “hate” that cause paranoia and hysteria. The ADL is a major force behind censorship on the Internet, which is, again, why so many of PewDiePie’s fans were angered by his planned donation. The Internet has been purged in the last year of, among other things the ADL considers unacceptable, thousands of videos that explain and provide evidence for recent false flag mass shootings.

How was the ADL started? An adjunct of the international Jewish fraternal order and secret society (non-Jews excluded), B’nai B’rith, the ADL was started for the express purpose of defending murderer Leo Frank, who in 1913 [was accused of having] molested and brutally killed a 13-year-old girl, Mary Phagan, who worked in his factory. Frank [actually it was Frank’s defense team] then blamed it on a poor black janitor and cried “anti-semitism.” Ever since that time, the ADL has been doing the same, protecting Jewish criminals and smearing innocent Americans. Good for PewDiePie. Unfortunately, he too can certainly expect retaliation. It may happen now or it may happen later. But Jewish supremacists never forget. And they never forgive. (more…)