EVOLUTIONISTS would have us believe that the mystique of late summer is a trick.

The hummingbirds and the bees, the fields of ripening corn, the blackberry’s clever pockets bursting with juice — all are nature’s way of getting us to propagate the species. Talk about hoaxes! Though these scientists-turned-philosophers claim to believe in random events, they impute to nature itself — an entirely material reality — a form of mind and design.

The poets know otherwise. They know that the mysterious bounty and beauty of summer correspond with an invisible, intangible, immaterial reality. Robert Frost wrote of a summer caterpillar:

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one’s going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

The very summer breeze communicates love and thought. How can we prolong this delightfulness? How can we absorb it?

We can put it in a food processor and eat it.

My husband said yesterday that if he were to have blood tests right now, they would show that 60 percent of the contents of his veins is corn soup. We have eaten it all week. It is a simple recipe I thought up as I went along. The important ingredient is summer:

Lightly sauté chopped sweet summer onions in a heavy pot with a small amount of butter, putting the lid on so that the onions do not brown. When they are soft, add the corn (preferably sweet white corn) scraped from a dozen or so ears. Add enough chicken or light vegetable broth to just a few inches below the top of the corn. Return the lid and cook on medium low heat until the corn is just tender. Do not overcook. Add one cup of light cream (or more to just cover the corn) and bring to a simmer. Turn off the heat and let the soup cool. Process to a puree in a food processor or blender. (If you don’t have either, you can leave as is.) Return to stove. Add salt and fresh pepper to taste and more broth or cream to achieve the right smooth consistency.

Sometimes soup can have the same effect as a poem. It can summarize summer.

IN his 2002 book Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption into the Catholic Church, author Michael S. Rose argued that for decades normal Catholic men were being turned away from seminaries in favor of men who supported the sexual revolution. For instance, men who did not believe women should be priests — that is, men with a healthy and normal sense of masculine identity — were being turned down for the priesthood. The rough, cigar-smoking, golf-playing priest of yesteryear was long ago replaced by men who were noticeably un-manly, reflecting changes in the culture at large, but more importantly changes in the mental universe of those leading Catholic institutions. The ongoing sex abuse scandal — and the explosive revelations of the last few days — are not surprising in light of Rose’s findings. In fact, that there would be anything but widespread sexual crimes in the institutions of what was once the Catholic Church would be a major surprise.

In an interview, Rose stated:

In bringing the “sexual revolution” into the Church, liberals have welcomed—even preferred—radicalized active homosexuals to orthodox seminarians in the name of “tolerance.” Now that tolerance has been exposed as a toleration of criminal acts. The extent of the sex abuse scandals and the accompanying payoffs and cover-ups has mystified many of the faithful who are simply at a loss to understand how this could have occurred, and why it was swept under the rug for so long. Goodbye, Good Men presents evidence that the root of this problem—both the cover-up and the sex abuse itself—extends down to the very place where vocations to the priesthood germinate: the seminary. The corrupt, protective network starts in many of these seminaries, where gay seminarians were encouraged to “act out” or “explore their sexuality” in highly inappropriate ways.

Through the seminaries, moral and religious liberals have brought a moral meltdown into the Catholic priesthood. If the sex scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church are to end, the individuals responsible for this moral meltdown must be rooted out. Only then will the “dark shadow of suspicion,” as the Pope calls it, be removed from “all the other fine priests who perform their ministry with honesty and integrity, and often with heroic self-sacrifice.”

But the problem is not just “liberals” in the Church. The problem is that with the Vatican II Revolution — comparable in the ecclesiastical sphere to the French and Communist Revolutions in the civil realm — Catholicism was replaced with a new faith. Known as “modernism,” it is a faith with its own dogma, morals and worship, a faith opposed to the Catholic religion despite the many things it shares in common with it. That it shares so much in common with the Catholic faith was the main reason why this religion was so successful.

The problem in the seminaries that Rose described originates at the top — in the papacy itself and the men who by virtue of their very sophisticated and artful deformations of the faith, however sincere their belief in the new religion was, deceived many sincere, devout and well-intentioned Catholics and thereby lost all claim to the offices they held — and hold.

The sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church will never end and never be solved until true popes and traditional worship once again uphold the true faith. The Catholic Church is a hierarchical institution, deformation of the faith at the top leads to a massive falling away from the perennial truths.

“With John XXIII taking control of the papacy in 1958 the modernists had enough power then to bring in their modernist false faith — their anti-faith — and to begin immediately to construct a religion to go with their modernist faith,  to do that they had to deconstruct the traditional Catholic religion, its mass, its sacraments, its catechism, its code of canon law, its devotions and all the rest and replace them.” says Fr. William Jenkins, SSPV. “A new faith requires a new religion… The modernist brought in their own morality, which is basically what the Church has always condemned … It was therefore just a matter of time before all this played out. When they brought in their new modernist morality, they opened the floodgates to the homosexuals and the homosexuals flooded the seminaries.”

But also the male priest was undermined in his masculine identity by virtue of the immense changes to Catholic liturgy with Vatican II. No longer was the priest on the altar only with men. He was increasingly surrounded by women and women now dominate the liturgical life of many parishes. The rule of women leads inescapably to homosexuality and effeminacy.

Therefore what else could we expect?

“Pope” Francis and then Cardinal Theodore McCarrick

NOVUS ORDO WATCH has been vigilantly (and perceptively as always) following the events which may represent the death knell to “Pope” Francis’s pseudo-papacy — the accusations by “Archbishop” Carlo Viganò that Francis was personally involved in the cover-up of “Cardinal” Theodore’s McCarrick’s sex abuse crimes:

Yesterday we published a post chronicling what had happened since “Archbishop” Carlo Viganò released his 11-page dossier accusing Francis of having known about and covered up Theodore McCarrick’s shameful immoral acts. As this is becoming nothing less than an ecclesiastical Chernobyl, we’re going to start providing daily updates on the day’s developments and links to commentary, in addition to our usual postings on other topics. Please bear with us as we navigate through this unprecedented disaster that could bring the end of the Francis “pontificate”.

The claims against Francis are reportedly highly credible. How will the cunning spinmeister ever attuned to public opinion spin this? So far, the man who is an ever-flowing fount of public statements has been uncharacteristically silent.

See more posts here, here and here. Get an overview in the audio “Tradcast” episode. Read More »

St. Augustine, Gian Lorenzo Bernini; 1650

“MY iniquities were like a snowball growing in size as it rolls.”

— St. Augustine, speaking of his days in Rome

“SADDAM Hussein is a megalomaniacal tyrant whose cruelty and offense to the norms of civilization are infamous” Saddam’s government is a clear and present danger to the United States of America…..

“He has developed stocks of germs and toxins in sufficient quantities to kill the entire population of the earth multiple times. He has placed weapons laden with these poisons on alert to fire at his neighbors within minutes, not hours, and has devolved authority to fire them to subordinates. He develops nuclear weapons with which he would hold his neighbors and us hostage.

No, this is not just another self-serving, oil-rich potentate. He is the worst kind of modern-day tyrant — a conscienceless murderer who aspires to omnipotence who has repeatedly committed irrational acts since seizing power. Given this reality, containment and deterrence and international inspections will work no better than the Maginot Line did 62 years ago.”

— John McCain, Oct. 10, 2002, on the floor of the Senate

SEVENTY-FOUR people were shot, 12 fatally, in Chicago over the weekend of August 3.

These shootings have not prompted intense coverage and a non-stop campaign for gun control in the media as did the alleged school shootings at Parkland and Sandy Hook. Why? It cannot be that black lives categorically don’t matter, in the political sense. Remember Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown? They were single black victims and their deaths were the focus of apocalyptic coverage.

If you cannot explain this relative silence, dear reader, you should not be following the news at all (which is a good idea anyway).

MARKY Mark writes:

Your post about the drug war resonated with me, as I was a front line participant in the drug war during the 1980s. I used to serve in the U.S. Navy, and we did a couple of drug patrols when I was based on the East Coast.

During one patrol, we were in too close to shore, and the water was too shallow for us to use SONAR; I was a SONAR operator when I served. Since we couldn’t use SONAR, we stood watches in the RADAR room. Though I didn’t work up there long enough to become an expert, I learned a few things as we helped the RADAR guys track possible drug smugglers. Read More »

IN THE VIDEO LECTURE below, national security analyst Joseph D. Douglas explains the thesis in his book Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America and the West. The book can be read in its entirety here. He contends that drug trafficking has been deliberately employed to demoralize Western society. From his prefatory warning to the 1999 edition:

This book has been known to generate strong emotional responses. Red Cocaine is a case study of evil: of the governments and people responsible for flooding the United States with drugs; of American public officials who have suppressed intelligence and looked the other way to favour ‘special interests’ and also to advance secret political agendas.

The information presented in Red Cocaine explains why the so-called war on drugs in the United States has been so ineffective. It challenges the erroneous belief that the drug problem is ‘home-grown’, the result of America’s otherwise unexplained ‘thirst’ for drugs. This erroneous belief, carefully nurtured by politicians and drug traffickers, stands between America and the waging of an effective war on drugs for a very simple reason: a nation simply cannot wage war on its own people. This belief that Americans themselves are the cause is used by public officials to justify their poor results – and doing nothing about the nefarious activities of governments, politicians, intelligence services and the banks. Red Cocaine was written to explode this belief, to expose the real forces behind the illegal drug trade, and to reveal the political protection that enables drug trafficking to survive and grow.

(H/t Fitzpatrick Informer)

Read More »

Mollie Tibbetts

MOLLIE TIBBETTS, a 20-year-old University of Iowa student, disappeared on July 18th while jogging on a country road. Her body was found in a field yesterday and the worst fears have been realized. An undocumented immigrant from Mexico has been charged with murdering her. Tibbetts sadly is now a poster girl for the dangers of excessive immigration.

“As Iowans, we are heartbroken, and we are angry,” Gov. Kim Reynolds wrote on Twitter.

“We are angry that a broken immigration system allowed a predator like this to live in our community, and we will do all we can to bring justice to Mollie’s killer.” Read More »

FROM the unpublished writings of the late Lawrence Auster:

Before multiculturalism, [non-traditional theater] casting had been practiced in a modest and unobtrusive way for decades. The first Shakespeare play I ever saw on stage was a production of Macbeth at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association in Elizabeth, New Jersey, around 1960. Playing the part of Macduff was a Negro actor with a wonderful deep voice, whose thrilling delivery of the play’s climactic speech,

Despair thy charm,
And let the angel whom thou still has served
Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb
untimely RIPPED

made a great impression on me. The actor’s race, while certainly introducing an exotic element into the play, was not disruptive in the slightest. I have had the same experience at other performances of classic stage plays by Shakespeare, Shaw and Wilde that have featured black actors playing the parts of Englishmen.

[However,] in matters of cultural identity, numbers are of key importance. Just as a small number of minorities can fit into a society without altering its basic identity, one or two nonwhite actors can fit into a classic Western play without changing the play’s essential character and spirit. Read More »

A QUEBEC woman challenges Justin Trudeau — and is threatened with arrest.

JAMES FETZER reports on WordPress’s deletion of several blogs, including Fellowship of the Minds, that challenged the official version of the alleged Sandy Hook massacre.

This action by WordPress is an implicit admission that at least some of what these blogs were reporting is true.

PROTESTANTS have disagreed about many things, but they have joined together in deriding voluntary celibacy and the unmarried state. Dr. Marian Horvat writes:

By closing the convents and insisting that every woman should marry, Protestantism also stripped the high respect and honor the Catholic Church had always given to virgins. Some of this Protestant spirit certainly seeped into the American culture, from the Colonial Period to our times.

Following the English Protestant tradition, the lay celibate – women in particular – became an object of scorn. Single women, even Catholics who voluntarily chose to remain celibate to dedicate themselves more fully to acts of charity, family duties  and prayer, have been labeled “spinsters” or frustrated “old maids.” An example of this negative image of unmarried women: the unpopped kernels in a pot of popcorn are called “old maids,” worthless kernels that fail to reach their full and proper end.

This is an abhorrent position, opposed to the doctrine of the Catholic Church and denigrating to the women who choose to be celibate. I believe many women with vocations to the lay celibate life choose to marry just to avoid these offensive labels.

Virgin in Adoration (detail), Fra Filippo Lippi

“SOMETIMES we doubt; often enough we have failed to be faithful to grace; and so we think ourselves unworthy to receive God’s help. But that is precisely why God has given us our heavenly Mother, to whom He turned over the whole order of His mercy, as though He wished to protect us from His justice. A way has been pointed out to us; and so long as we walk therein we can always obtain God’s grace. Never must we say that henceforth grace is beyond our reach.

Even if we have serious sins on our conscience, we can rise again. All we need is to turn to the Immaculata. So, let the sinner who has fallen come to her in full confidence. Don’t concentrate your thoughts only on yourself. Saint Paul said: I can do all things in Him Who strengthens me, and in the same way we can say, ‘I can do all things, thanks to her who gives me strength.'”

—- Fr. Maximilian Kolbe