Based on the removal from the West’s eyes of the communist threat, Moscow went one decisive — and very bold — step further: They shape-shifted, more than under Yeltsin, into a “Russian-nationalist and Christian nation”. This was of course all eyewash. The Party people weren’t even able to properly cross themselves. Church attendance throughout so-called “Russia” remained as miserable as in Soviet times. If you think abortion is bad in America (and it is), look at the numbers in Russia. And Russian society stayed what it had been in Soviet times: dysfunctional and rotten to the core. But this new theme of alleged Russian traditionalism (with strong Stalinist characteristics!) opened new strategic avenues for Moscow to even further shake up and confuse the West: They were now infiltrating and manipulating the Western Right. Communism was gone, it was believed, and the Russians were all just wonderful, weren’t they? Read More »
FOR three centuries, the Irish refused to give up their Catholic altars on pain of heavy fines, imprisonment and death. The practice of their religion was strictly prohibited by the British crown and their churches, including St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, which was dedicated in 1191, were all taken over by the new clergy.
It is one of the great mysteries and miracles of history that the Irish persisted for so long, establishing secret altars in homes, on rocks, in caves, in ditches and even in holes in the ground. Those who could not find their way to these hidden places often turned toward the direction of those sacred altars and prayed their Spiritual Communions as the unseen Host was lifted.
“From the golden hour in which St. Patrick as bishop said his first Mass on Irish soil down to the coming of the Normans, love of the Blessed Eucharist was one of the dominant characteristics of the Irish race,” Fr. Augustine Hayden wrote in 1933.
This devotion was never diminished by oppression. On April 14, 1655, to cite one example of that oppression from Hayden’s book Ireland’s Loyalty to the Mass, three priests were brought before a Protestant jury in Wexford. The jury concluded that no crime had been committed, to which the judge replied, “No crime could be more heinous than to be a priest,” and the three priests were hung.
Priests and bishops were constantly on the run after England broke with Rome. Some of the laity lost all their wealth for the crime of harboring a priest or assisting at a Mass.
From the penal times to engineered mass starvation in the 19th century, there was a continuous, unrelenting effort to break the faith of the Irish, and it failed.
It is also one of the great mysteries of history that the very thing the Irish resolutely refused to accept — a “Mass” in English instead of Latin that was stripped of many of its prayers and redefined as, or at the very least strongly confused with, a commemoration of the Last Supper rather than a propitiatory sacrifice — they later willingly embraced during the 1960s. [For more on the similarities between the reforms of Thomas Cranmer and those of Vatican II, see Hugh Ross Williamson’s The Modern Mass: a Reversion to the Reforms of Cranmer (1969).]
The key to instituting the reforms in England was their gradual institution. And so it was with the Novus Ordo Mass in the 20th century. And this time it appeared to come from the papacy itself. What Thomas Cranmer and Oliver Cromwell could not impose, “Pope” Paul VI did. It was not the papacy that betrayed the Irish, but a supremely clever imposter, speaking a double-tongued social gospel of the “dignity of man,” his successors traveling the world like rock stars always approving more enthusiastically the wonders of man than God, and promoting the changes the Irish had so long and so heroically opposed.
Most of the Irish have fallen away from the new thing. It’s inconceivable and truly absurd to think that they would in large numbers face death, imprisonment or impoverishment to preserve it. It would be ridiculous to die for it now that everyone is saved and everyone has a right to God’s good pleasure, even the unrepentant sinner (if one may be so bold as to mention the phenomenon of sin.) The “loving God with one’s whole heart and mind and soul” was for a backward time when God was mistakenly considered superior to man and everything in an Irishman’s life was enchanted by and suffused with the supernatural. God will get a stern rebuke from many an Irishman today if he is turned away from the gates of heaven. Church attendance was about 90 percent in the 1950s and is below 30 percent today. The attack of the Modernists was, firstly, on worship and, secondly, on the Catholic family. And so we also see their great success in the collapse of the Irish birthrate — and now even abortion and sodomy. It’s very hard for man to support a family in Ireland today.
From Insula Sanctorum to land of apostasy — many simply deceived and unknowing, some still greatly devoted and with the right intentions. We cannot judge or see inner realities and that is for God alone to know.
In 1725, Jonathan Swift, then Anglican dean of St. Patrick’s of Dublin, wrote that while the Irish were “absolutely starving by the means of every oppression that can be inflicted on mankind,” the Protestant clergy of that country were “gorged with wealth and sunk in indolence.”
The Irish may not be “gorged with wealth” today; with junk food and drink, they are engorged as Ireland is now shockingly obese, another outward sign of its fall from the transcendent. The Irish now fit in with the world in ways they long ago refused. Are they happier? The question would be irrelevant to their ancestors. For the Irish were not born for this world alone. Irish poet Fearghal Og Mac-a-Ward wrote when he visited Reformation Scotland:
…”in this bright-flowered land of shining fields I receive not the Lord’s Body. By my art, I swear, I was deceived, and though I owned all Alba … better were one Mass.”
St. Patrick’s Day means not much more than green beer and drunken reveling for many people today, but in late-19th century America it was — believe it or not — a day to honor moderation and total abstinence from alcohol.
In the Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day parade of 1875, some 10,000 people marched and “the majority parading walked with the thirty-nine marching units of the [Catholic] Total Abstinence Brotherhood, an organization with strong religious backing and a missionary zeal for temperance crusading.,” according to Dennis Clark.
It was after the Civil War that parades of all kinds became a sort of national craze. Veterans of the conflict turned out and, in Philadelphia, General St. Clair Mulholland and other heroes of the war stepped smartly along on St. Patrick’s Day each year. Temperance organizations became a big component of the March 17th Parades from 1870 through the turn of the century.
Father Matthew of County Tyrone (above) was the popular founder in Ireland of organized temperance earlier in the century and it spread to this country with the creation of state groups and then the national Brotherhood in 1871. On July 4, 1876, the Catholic Total Abstinence Centennial Fountain was dedicated in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, featuring a marble statue of of Father Matthew.
The saloon has fastened itself upon society as an ulcer living upon the life-blood of the people. The saloon, building itself upon the ruin of broken lives and shattered homes, spreads desolation every where, respecting no class or sex. The union recalls the countless boys ruined, the fathers changed into destroyers of their little ones, the industry paralyzed, the prisons filled, and it asks each saloon how much of this is its work. It calls on the law to place about the saloon such reasonable restrictions as will remove as far as possible the evils that spring up from it. It demands the enforcement of those laws for the protection of home. The arrogance of the saloon and the power it wields in political affairs, all for its own interests and against those of society, have awakened a stronger interest in the cause of total abstinence organized on Catholic principles.
The union did not publicly lobby for Prohibition, but it passed a resolution stating, “That this convention, though not deeming it expedient to take part in any political of legislative action in reference to prohibitory liquor laws, recognizes, however, the great good that would accrue from the suppression of public drinking-places, and from such legislation as would restrain the manufacture of intoxicating liquors within the bounds consistent with public morality, and will gladly hail such legislation whenever the proper authorities may grant it.”
The abstinence brotherhood disbanded sometime in the 20th century. The “arrogance of the saloon,” the unrestrained love of alcohol and the intense misery it often causes remain strong as ever. St. Patrick’s Day means green beer.
It was there that the Lord opened up my awareness of my lack of faith. Even though it came about late, I recognised my failings. So I turned with all my heart to the Lord my God, and he looked down on my lowliness and had mercy on my youthful ignorance. He guarded me before I knew him, and before I came to wisdom and could distinguish between good and evil. He protected me and consoled me as a father does for his son. — St. Patrick
“Patrick, a native of that part of Britain now called Scotland, was born about the middle of the 4th Century. The Romans having left this Island naked and defenseless, it’s inhabitants were an easy prey to their troublesome neighbors the Irish, who made several incursions, and carried off considerable booty. Our Saint was sixteen years old, when he fell into the hands of those plunderers; and was carried into Ireland, where the hardships of slavery were to prepare him for the labors of an Apostle; and the experience he had of the spiritual necessities of that people was to inspire him with the charitable design of carrying the Light of the Gospel amongst them. Read More »
I arise today Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, Through belief in the Threeness, Through confession of the Oneness of the Creator of creation. I arise today Through the strength of Christ’s birth with His baptism, Through the strength of His crucifixion with His burial, Through the strength of His resurrection with His ascension, Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of doom. I arise today Through the strength of the love of cherubim, In the obedience of angels, In the service of archangels, In the hope of resurrection to meet with reward,Read More »
THE system of beliefs created by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) rejects Catholicism and is not the same religion.
For a sound list and explanation of some of the heresies included in the council documents and promulgated by leaders of the new religion, often referred to as Modernism, I recommend the article “The Principle Heresies and other Errors of Vatican II” by John Daly and John Lane. Read More »
Gioachino Assereto, Christ Healing the Blind Man; 1640
“AND Jesus said: For judgment I am come into this world; that they who see not, may see; and they who see, may become blind. And some of the Pharisees, who were with him, heard: and they said unto him: Are we also blind?
“Jesus said to them: If you were blind, you should not have sin: but now you say: We see. Your sin remaineth.”
“IF some rich and powerful friend were to enter your home, you would quickly clean the entire house for fear something there might offend your friend’s eyes when he entered. Let anyone then who is preparing his inner house for God cleanse away the dirt of his evil deeds.”
Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist Mourning, c. 1460 (detail), Rogier Van Weyden
“BUT the couching of our spiritual sight is not the only operation which the senses of our soul undergo on Calvary. All souls are hard of hearing with respect to the sounds of the invisible world. The inner ear is opened upon Calvary. The sounds of Jerusalem travel up to us through the darkness, and perhaps the sounds of labour in the gardens near. But they rise up as admonitions rather than as distractions. They come to us softly and indistinctly, and do not jar with the silence of our endurance, or the low whisperings of prayer. Least of all do they muffle the clearness of our Saviour’s words when He vouchsafes to speak. Down below, how the world deafened us by its tumultuous noises, and jaded our spirits with its multiplicity of sounds! We knew that Jesus was at our sides, and yet we could not converse with Him. It was like trying to listen, when the loud wheels are rattling harshly along the streets, when listening is no better than an unsuccessful strain, or a perplexed misunderstanding. The mere noise the world makes in its going so amazes us that it hinders our feet upon the road to heaven. It is only on Calvary that earth is subdued enough to make music with heaven; for it is there only that God is heard distinctly, while the low-lying world murmurs like a wind, a sound which is discordant nowhere, because it is rather the accompaniment of a sound than a sound itself.”
“EVERYWHERE evil is undermined by good. It is only that good is undermost; and this is one of the supernatural conditions of God’s presence. As much evil as we see, so much good, or more, we do know assuredly lies under it, which, if not equal to the evil in extent, is far greater in weight, and power, and worth, and substance. Evil makes more show, and thus has a look of victory; while good is daily outwitting evil by simulating defeat.”
— Fr. Frederick Faber, Bethlehem(Tan Books, 1978); p. 191
