Silent Night, George Sotter; 1932

SNOW falls on the good and the wicked.

It falls on the proud and the humble, the arrogant and the shy, the successful and the incompetent, the rich and the indebted.

Snow is undiscriminating. It lands on the heads of snow lovers and snow haters. An invisible painter, working only in white, reaches out with his brush. He dabbles on the car, on gloves, on the wings of chickadees, on industrial wastelands. He erases the outlines of the world with his dissolving medium. John Ruskin, the 19th century art critic, wrote, “Pictures of winter scenery are nearly as common as moonlights, and are usually executed by the same order of artists, that is to say, the most incapable.” Perhaps, but who can compete with the original artist?

Emily Dickinson explains:

It sifts from leaden sieves,
It powders all the wood,
It fills with alabaster wool
The wrinkles of the road.

It makes an even face
Of mountain and of plain, —
Unbroken forehead from the east
Unto the east again.

It reaches to the fence,
It wraps it, rail by rail,
Till it is lost in fleeces;
It flings a crystal veil

On stump and stack and stem, —
The summer’s empty room,
Acres of seams where harvests were,
Recordless, but for them.

It ruffles wrists of posts,
As ankles of a queen, —
Then stills its artisans like ghosts,
Denying they have been.

We cannot hold up our hands and stop it from falling. We — and the roof over our heads — are part of the canvas.

EVERGREEN STATE COLLEGE devours its own as searing white guilt destroys any semblance of rational debate.

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MARY WAGNER was dragged out of an abortion clinic in Toronto on Saturday, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Lifesite News reports:

She carried red roses. Attached to each was a model of a 10-week-old unborn baby, a card with contact information for the Sisters of Life, and another that read: “You can choose life for your baby. Love will find a way.” Her companion, Immolatia, carried a poster with the same message.

BOTH THE National Menorah, which as the largest public menorah in the world stands 30 feet tall, and the National Christmas Tree, which is also very imposing (its exact height this year is unclear), currently occupy the Ellipse outside the White House. At the base of the tree, there is also a smaller menorah and a small nativity scene. For all the fanfare about Trump being a staunch Christmas traditionalist, the tree is decorated this year in the unconventional, non-Christmas-y, presidential colors of gold and blue — in keeping with Trump’s nationalism.

The idea that these two symbols — the menorah and the tree — can be reconciled is strange.

More than strange, it is irrational. Read More »

“AND above all else, we know this, America doesn’t worship government, we worship God. And all of us here tonight are united by the same values. We believe the United States military is the greatest force for justice in the history of the world, and we are going to take care of it, and we are going to properly fund it and we are going to have the finest weapons because when we do all of that, we are much, much safer, and far less likely to have to use them. It’s amazing how that works. Isn’t it?”

— Donald Trump [Quoted in “Trump Serves the War Gods” by Brother Nathanael Kapner]

THOUGH the Hindu custom of sati in which a widow — even if she is still in her teens or twenties — is buried alive with her husband or burned to death on his funeral pyre was outlawed in India in 1987, the life of a Hindu widow remains one of misery and loneliness in many parts of the country. Showkat Shafi wrote in 2016:

The women often live in acute poverty and are ostracised by society due to various superstitions – even the shadow of a widow can wreak havoc and bring bad luck, people believe. Lack of education and any source of income forces them to beg on streets and many turn to prostitution for survival.

“My children threw me out of the house after my husband died,” says Manuka Dasi. “I try to earn money by singing devotional songs in temple and manage to get one meal for the day. I am just waiting to die so that I can be out of this life of misery.”

The barbaric treatment of widows is an indication of the falseness of the Hindu worldview. There is nothing even remotely comparable in Christian history.

See moving examples of Indian widows here.

Read More »

MANY MORE girls participate in athletics than ever before. Federal social engineering under Title IX has led to an explosion in female athletics at lower levels.

In 1972, just 1 in 27 girls participated in high school sports; today, about two in five do, according to the Women’s Sports Foundation. The number of women playing at the college level has skyrocketed by more than 600 percent [as of 2012]. [Source]

While returning from a conference in Florida this weekend, I noticed this phenomenon close up. The airport was filled with female high school soccer players who had been competing in a tournament nearby. The girls, with their skimpy clothes and pack behavior, seemed to be part of a primitive tribe. The softness and individuality of their faces was lost with their ugly, synthetic uniforms, messy hair, beefy muscles, and loudness.

It’s true that girl athletes are taught discipline and hard work. Parents are proud of their daughters’ athletic skills and believe that intense competition is good for them. You can’t blame them really as they are nowhere taught the truth. Many girls intensely enjoy their athletic experiences. Athletic exercise for girls is not inherently wrong. The problem is not physical activity but the level and style of competition.

Trained to be immodest, aggressive, overly competitive and overly scheduled, the girl athlete of today is deprived of the basics. She is set up for failure as a woman. Intense competition cultivates willfulness, a quality that is often disastrous for the adult woman, whose primary sphere in life requires nurturing qualities. As Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira wrote:

The feminine soul is a fountainhead of grace, delicacy and sensibility, which enriches the moral and social life of humanity with spiritual values that man does not give it. The equilibrium of mankind demands women with a rich mental structure displaying all the gifts proper to their sex, just as it demands men with profoundly virile souls. It would be absurd to educate a generation of boys in the most effeminate way possible. No less absurd would it be to educate a generation of girls with the intention of making them as masculine as possible.

A certain pedagogy of our days, however, seems to have completely forgotten this trivial truth. And, instead of forming girls for the role that they will naturally have in society, it forms them precisely as if she were a boy intended in the future to assume the weight and the responsibilities proper to men.

Girls are not meant to travel in teams or battalions the way boys are. The more athletic women become, the less of an elevating influence they are. The boyish girl athlete loses the chance to flower. She becomes a fighter, not a nurturer of individuals and a defender of beauty. Modern girl athletes bring the world down to an infra-human level. Read More »

Carlo Crivelli – Madonna and Child with Saints, 1490

It was due to His own infinite sanctity that God should suspend, in this instance, the law which His divine justice had passed upon all the children of Adam. The relations which Mary was to bear to the Divinity, could not be reconciled with her undergoing the humiliation of this punishment. 

— Dom Gueranger, O.S.B., on the Immaculate Conception of Mary, which is celebrated today

JAMES PERLOFF writes:

Trump recognizing Jerusalem as Israeli, like his bombing Syria & upping Afghan war, shows his “MAGA” speeches were only rhetoric. [The Powers That Be] knew US military wouldn’t follow Hillary into new Middle East wars, so opted for Trump to keep endless wars & illusory left-right paradigm going.

Some relevant links:

See “Trump Gives Away Jerusalem to Settle $100m Campaign Debt” at Global Research.

Trump’s move is a “declaration of war.”

Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, repeatedly promised that Jerusalem would not be included in the Jewish state.

And from The State of the Nation: “Trump, himself, has literally triggered an international firestorm, the flames of which may burn down the entire Middle East.”

SOME theories as to Trump’s motives for moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It is not a popular step:

Even the US public rejects the idea. A recent survey from the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, shows that 63 percent of Americans oppose the move, against 31 percent who back it. Democrats more strongly oppose relocation, while Republicans are almost evenly split. Read More »

Charlotte Yonge

ELEANOR PARKER recently reviewed the novel Abbeychurch by the Victorian author Charlotte Yonge. Parker writes:

She was a very popular author in her day and, though little read now, she is a fascinating guide to the tastes and interests of a certain class of bright, intellectually engaged young women of the 19th century. One of those tastes is a fervent passion for history and in Abbeychurch two characters – clever, well-read girls of 16 or so – have a conversation of just the kind to catch a historian’s attention.

One is making a collection of ‘true knights’ throughout history – men who exemplify her ideal of chivalric perfection, from Alfred the Great to Philip Sidney. It is a romantic and motley collection, inspired as much by the novels of Walter Scott as by more sober works of history, but the girls discuss with real insight how far they should allow the standards of different historical periods to modify their ideal of ‘knighthood’. Is it right to include in the collection men who committed acts of cruelty which would be unacceptable in the 19th century, since the views of an earlier age were different?

These girls find their own way to a critical approach, balancing the impulse to hero worship or to condemn with an understanding of historical context and how ideas change over time.

SHERYL SANDBERG says putting even more women in power will lead to a decline in sexual harassment. By that logic, sexual misconduct in the workplace should have declined dramatically in recent years.

Feminists are so tedious. They constantly talk about how great women are. If women lack the ability to ward off sexual aggression, how can they have the ability to lead major companies?

Sandberg is a home-wrecker. It’s in her interest to weaken the domestic fortress. Read More »

THE Pizza Industrial Complex is not to be out-done when it comes to fashion. Pizza Hut offers this stylish winter coat — something to consider this gift-giving season. (Thank you to Reader Dan R.)

KYLE writes:

It’s really not my style to pay tribute to strange people on the internet whom I’ve never met in person, but you should know that your observations have helped me see life differently. When I found your site it was like I’d finally found a cozy, Austenian place I could go and see the pure things in life through the eyes of someone who understands what true beauty is.

I pray that you don’t lose heart in these times. I guess we all struggle with despair in today’s world. I do, too. I know many people of your generation who are decent people, dismayed by the vulgar culture around us. I’m a millennial Kentucky boy. I grew up in a time of Jerry Springer, online pornography, hook-up culture, DARE drug resistance education and the urbanization of suburban America through rap “music.” I’ve had my fill of it all. As long as I have an ounce of gumption and the Lord wills it, I’ll do my part to inform others of my generation and help bring back the good times, if there are any to be had.

I have more gray hair than I did ten years ago, I’ve carried too many coffins for my age and my joints ache a little bit more each year but I still have gas left in the tank. Read More »

Mother and Baby, Elizabeth Nourse

ALAN adds to the ongoing discussion on the death of parents:

The loss of my parents within a span of two years left the worst, most sickening feeling of emptiness I had ever known.  The absence of siblings made it still worse:  There is no one left afterward who shares the memories of a lifetime, who knows exactly what we mean when we talk about memories of our parents.

As to the question When do you get over it?, my reply is:  Don’t even think about it.  You never get over it.

The memories will come at unpredictable moments, may often be intense, and may be prompted by seemingly-small things.

The little tugboat night-light on top of a chest of drawers in an ancient black-and-white snapshot, or the memory of Perry Como singing the four words “Dream along with me…” at the opening of his Saturday night television program are instant reminders to me of the warmth and security my mother provided in my boyhood home in the early 1950s.

She left a collection of three thousand color slides from the years 1955-’69.  They are at once a priceless possession and a painful reminder of the loss of the most important person in my life.

When I remember some act of stupidity or misbehavior on my part as a boy or teenager, I can feel exactly how I know my mother must have felt at those moments, an awareness that youth or stupidity denied to me in those years.

To live with a vault of memories that we shared only with our parents—and now to have no one among us who can understand precisely what we mean when we talk of that person or those people or that setting or that occasion from years ago—is quite a challenge.  And never is that challenge greater for me than at Christmas.  In the only years I care to remember, Christmas Eve was always the most joyous day of the year, not because of toys or games or gifts, but because of the setting:  A houseful of aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins and conversations and laughter and warmth and good cheer—and my mother at the center of it all.  In their place today are only silence, emptiness, and memories in the head of a late-life orphan.  It is that “empty space in life” that Lydia Sherman describes, and I share with her the regrets of not having remained in closer contact with all the older generation and not having talked with them at far greater length than I did. Read More »

“Any secular power that is not Christian necessarily means a theocracy, or rule, of evil. Christians may endure such a rule, but if they promote it, they are betraying their fellow-men, just as a maker of idols is an accomplice to idolatry.” — Louis Veuillot

See Stephen Heiner’s review of The Liberal Illusion, a mid-19th century work on the centuries-long struggle between Revolution and Revelation by the French author Louis Veuillot.

Francis in Myanmar — Find the Christian from Jorge Bergoglio on Vimeo.

ONCE again we see in reports of his visit to Southeast Asia that Francis says and does things that a pope would never say or do.

This is a good time to consider the “Thesis of Cassiciacum,” which resolves the main stumbling block in coming to the conclusion that Jorge Bergoglio and his Vatican II predecessors are not true popes. They occupied (and occupy), under this thesis, the Apostolic throne materially, but not formally. In other words, their elections were valid but they had, and have, no authority. Under this view, there is no prolonged material break in the line of succession extending from St. Peter.