The Virgin And Child Surrounded By Four Angels, Master of the Castello Nativity

BLESSED are you, O Virgin Mary, by the Lord the most high God, above all women upon the earth.
 

 
Image courtesy of It’s About Time blog.

THE CASE OF BARRONELLE STULTZMAN, the Christian florist who was sued by two “marrying” homosexual men and the Washington State Attorney General because she would not create a floral arrangement for their “wedding,” is going to the U.S. Supreme Court. This video tells her story.

BELLINI, Giovanni; Four Allegories: Falsehood (or Wisdom) c. 1490

There is but one evil, and that is sin. This evil has many different paths by which it approaches us. These paths are called temptations. It is true that of themselves temptations can not injure us. On the contrary, Holy Writ says: “Blessed is the man that endureth, for when he hath been proved he shall receive the crown of life, which God hath promised to them that love Him.” All depends upon our withstanding them, and to be able to do this we must heed the admonition of Christ, we must watch and especially guard ourselves against those temptations through which Satan most frequently approaches man.

— Fr. Francis Xavier Weninger, 1896; Source

JORGE BERGOGLIO, the Man Who Would Be Pope, loves to be interviewed. On his latest interview, Novus Ordo Watch wrote recently:

[S]ome time ago, German journalist Alexander Kissler referred to Francis as a “U.N. Secretary General with a pectoral cross.” That is a pretty apt description of Mr. Bergoglio, except that even his pectoral cross leaves a lot to be desired, as it looks more like a bottle opener than anything else — although it is a fitting reflection of the man’s shoddy theology.

In essence, there is nothing that Francis says that couldn’t just as well be affirmed by a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Zoroastrian, a Jain, a Wiccan, an agnostic, or an atheist. One day people will figure out that if that is the case, nobody needs a “Pope”, a “Catholic Church”, or even a great variety of religions — they could all just come together under one false “Messiah” who preaches fraternity, dignity, and solidarity.

Clarence Johnson, Back Road to Carversville

BOND AND FREE

— Robert Frost

Love has earth to which she clings
With hills and circling arms about—
Wall within wall to shut fear out.
But Thought has need of no such things,
For Thought has a pair of dauntless wings.

On snow and sand and turf, I see
Where Love has left a printed trace
With straining in the world’s embrace.
And such is Love and glad to be.
But Thought has shaken his ankles free.

Thought cleaves the interstellar gloom
And sits in Sirius’ disc all night,
Till day makes him retrace his flight,
With smell of burning on every plume,
Back past the sun to an earthly room.

His gains in heaven are what they are.
Yet some say Love by being thrall
And simply staying possesses all
In several beauty that Thought fares far
To find fused in another star.

PEOPLE ARE NOT ALWAYS aware of their own hopelessness. That’s bad. Modern philosophy offers them no hope whatsoever, but to be unconscious of this state of hopelessness is worse than being distracted from it.

Frank Sheed, a mid-20th century author who had a brilliant way of summing up complicated phenomenon, wrote in his 1946 book Theology and Sanity:

An unhappy generation has of necessity to distract itself from its own emptiness. Since the beginning of the world, men have sought distraction in sin; our own world has found a further distraction, special to itself, in science. Take science first. It is incredible how long science has succeeded in keeping men’s minds off their fundamental unhappiness and its own very limited power to remedy their fundamental unhappiness. One marvel follows another— electric light, gramophone, motor car, telephone, radio, aeroplane, television. It is a curious list, and very pathetic. The soul of man is crying for hope or purpose or meaning; and the inventor says “Here is a telephone,” or “Look, television!”— exactly as one tries to distract a baby crying for its mother by offering it sugar sticks and making funny faces at it. The leaping stream of invention has served extraordinarily well to keep man occupied, to keep him from remembering that which is troubling him. He is only troubled. His sense of futility he has never got round to analysing. But he is half strangled by it.

Sheed, Frank (2015-03-17). Theology and Sanity (Illustrated) (Kindle Locations 5292-5296). Aeterna Press. Kindle Edition.

The Artist’s Wife with Katherine and Philip, Han Holbein the Younger; 1528

SISTER WENDY BECKET, in her book The Story of Painting, wrote about this 16th-century portrait, a painting of the artist’s wife with their children, by Hans Holbein the Younger:

Artists have always painted their families, but this is the saddest version on record. He lived very little with his wife and children in Basel (the reasons may have been political, religious or financial), but this tragic little trio has all the withering marks of the unloved.

The dim-eyed wife presses down on the children, plain, pale little beings, all unhappy and all ailing. Holbein, that superb manipulator of the human face, cannot have meant to reveal their wretchedness and expose his neglect with such drastic effect. It is as if his art is stronger than his will, and for once Holbein is without defenses.

The court painter, native to Germany, captured the personalities of the rich and powerful of Europe by maintaining a “dignified distance,” without conveying any intimate knowledge. But here he gets closer:

Here his courtly shield is down, perhaps because of the artist’s personal sense of guilt. He was not a good husband or father, and while he can carry off any portrait with superb technical aplomb, he catches his breath and opens the inner door when he paints the family that he abandoned and neglected. Read More »

A Penitential Litany for Lent

Lord, have mercy on us.
Christ, have mercy on us.
Christ, hear us.
Christ, graciously hear us.
God the Father of heaven, have mercy on us.
God the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy on us.
God, the Holy Ghost, have mercy on us.
Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy on us.

Behold we were conceived in sin; and in iniquity our mothers brought us forth;

Have mercy on us. *

As we have grown in years, we have multiplied our offences; and every day Thy goodness adds to our lives, our wickedness increases the heap of our transgressions; *

The law of our body makes war against the law of our mind, and brings us into subjection to sin; so that the good which we would, we do not, and the evil which we would not, that we do; * Read More »

THE HABIT OF PERFECTION

               — by Gerard Manley Hopkins

ELECTED Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders come
Which only makes you eloquent.

Be shellèd, eyes, with double dark
And find the uncreated light:
This ruck and reel which you remark
Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.

Palate, the hutch of tasty lust,
Desire not to be rinsed with wine:
The can must be so sweet, the crust
So fresh that come in fasts divine! Read More »

A SERMON by Fr. Anthony Cekada on “The Enigma of Suffering” can be found here.

LAST YEAR’S false flag season, thanks to valiant efforts to bring about gun control, disorient the viewing public before the election and manipulate the consciousness of the entire nation, was bursting with talent. Exceptional talent. Give them a hand.

DON VINCENZO writes:

Since your love of pizza knows no bounds, I thought this would please you.

CONSIDER a hypothetical situation:

You have not been feeling well for several weeks. You are run-down and start to become short of breath when you walk up stairs. You’re also not sleeping well and your appetite is poorer than usual. This goes on, progressively worsening, for almost three weeks when you finally make an appointment with your doctor. Something’s not right.

You describe your symptoms to the doctor and he says, “I want you to see a cardiologist right away. Hmm, I think we will have to run some tests.”

You take his prescriptions and go immediately, with some panic, to obtain a series of blood tests and imaging studies. You didn’t like the look on the doctor’s face when he heard your symptoms.

You go to the cardiologist with the test results two days later.

“I’m sorry to say, I have bad news,” he says after studying your results with obvious concern.

“Whaa?!” Read More »

PRESIDENT TRUMP follows through with one of the worst of his campaign pledges: a sharp increase in defense spending. The Anti-New York Times reports:

Say it ain’t so, Orange Man! From the article [in the New York Times]:

“President Trump will instruct federal agencies on Monday to assemble a budget for the coming fiscal year that includes sharp increases in Defense Department spending and drastic enough cuts to domestic agencies that he can keep his promise to leave Social Security and Medicare alone, according to four senior administration officials.”

So, the $634 Billion dollars that the American taxpayer spent to fund the Department of Offense in 2016 wasn’t enough to guarantee our “freedom” TM. Nor will the massive protective moats known as the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, coupled with neighboring vassal land masses of Canada and Mexico, fully protect us from some unspecified foreign invader. No, Supreme General Orange Man thinks we need to spend more money on “defense.” To protect us from what? The … Martians?

But, of course, the Trump cultists will be too busy bowing and scraping before this reality TV actor-turned-president to realize what this means. Or maybe they don’t care. Maybe they think it’s okay to have World War III as long as we have a wall along the border.

GERARD MENUHIN was born in Scotland in 1948. He is the son of Jewish parents, the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin and British ballerina Diana Rosamund Gould. His brother is the pianist Jeremy Menuhin. Their grandfather was Moshe Menuhin, the great, great grandson of Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad Hassidism and an anti-Zionist. Gerard is an actor, novelist and journalist, a graduate of Eton and Stanford University who lived in Germany and England as a child. In his latest book, Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil (2015), Menuhin rejects many of the official and popular accounts of World War II and thus has earned the hateful slur of “Holocaust denier.”

Perhaps only a person of Jewish ancestry could write so intrepidly on such a taboo topic. His book is filled with important historical information from primary sources and daring opinions. Menuhin believes the war should not have been fought at all.

Menuhin is a courageous man — a cultured intellectual reduced to the most infantile, bigoted and deceitful characterizations by a herd of infantile, bigoted and deceitful propagandists. He is not a “Holocaust denier,” but a hero.

At times, his opinions are harsh, as Jews sometimes (though rarely in public) can be toward themselves, and I don’t agree with them all, but he is not a “Holocaust denier” and, in fact, there are no “Holocaust deniers,” at least not any that are taken seriously. No one sane questions the fact that hundreds of thousands of Jews died in concentration camps in Germany, a terrible disaster brought about toward the end of the war when the Allies bombed the supply lines into the camps, where Jews, whose leaders had declared war on Germany in 1933, worked in armaments factories and miserably awaited deportation. What Menuhin and many other abused, hounded and slandered historical revisionists (who receive virtually no support from the intellectual elite of this country, but who definitely will be lionized by our descendants) do deny is that anywhere close to six million died, that gas chambers existed and that there was a plan to exterminate European Jewry. Menuhin has thus earned more slurs: “self-hating Jew” and “anti-Semitic Jew.”

A reviewer at Amazon writes:

Mr. Menuhin does more to honor the real victims of the Holocaust, than any other, since he shames the lies proliferated in their names, and restores their dignity and well earned memory. Furthermore, this is the kind of literature that will contribute to mitigating antisemitism, and not the EU Holocaust laws passed to penalize and imprison those who express those sentiments.

Another reviewer writes:

I have still not managed to finish the book. I had to stop several times because for an half-awakened, still half-indoctrinated German it was too much to take in. Many times I reread parts with tears in my eyes. Too many lies. So much hatred against us which we just ignored. So much destruction of our country, our culture our people we were told was deserved but in fact was just to crush our natural economic development. I now believe that our biggest weakness is our honesty. It makes us incapable to recognize the lies against us. A musician myself I am proud to say that I have met Yehudi Menuhin in person but I now believe that his son Gerard will leave an even deeper mark in human history than his father.

In writing his book, Menuhin fell into one of the most vilified of coteries. Who knows how long it will be before he is arrested and put in jail. In the Spanish Inquisition, people were incarcerated for telling lies. In the modern Inquisition, people are jailed for telling the truth.

He writes of his motives: Read More »

EYES AND TEARS
—-  by Andrew Marvell

HOW wisely Nature did decree,
With the same eyes to weep and see;
That, having viewed the object vain,
They might be ready to complain!

And, since the self-deluding sight
In a false angle takes each height,
These tears, which better measure all,
Like watery lines and plummets fall.

Two tears, which sorrow long did weigh
Within the scales of either eye,
And then paid out in equal poise,
Are the true price of all my joys.

What in the world most fair appears,
Yea, even laughter, turns to tears;
And all the jewels which we prize
Melt in these pendants of the eyes.

I have through every garden been,
Amongst the red, the white, the green,
And yet from all the flowers I saw,
No honey, but these tears could draw. Read More »

A READER writes:

Regarding Rachel Dolezal: Why is it almost always the case that any poor woman must be offered prostitution or porn? I guess when all else fails they always have that. Men have nothing really. Read More »

SEE more here. (Warning: Vulgar images.)