A MOTHER writes from New Mexico:

I am Catholic and I understand you don’t believe in the post-Vatican II church. Do you take your children to mass? Do they do CCD classes through a local parish? Should I attend these masses? Also I would like your advise on what you think of the Church’s rule of being open to life. I am 28 years old and have four children ages eight, four, two, and four months. I’m not sure I should have any more. I am constantly tired and don’t have family nearby to help. I would appreciate your thoughts. Thank you.

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IN A 2014 article on Mardi Gras traditions, Charles A. Coulombe wrote:

Our ancestors celebrated [Mardi Gras] to the best of their ability because they kept Lent very strictly: indeed, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the wise author of The Physiology of Taste, tells us what Lent was like in pre-Revolutionary France:

No body breakfasted, and therefore all were more hungry than usual.

All dined as well as possible, but fish and vegetables are soon gone through with. At five o’clock all were furiously hungry, looked at their watches and became enraged, though they were securing their soul’s salvation.

At eight o’clock they had not a good supper, but a collation, a word derived from cloister, because at the end of the day the monks used to assemble to comment on the works of the fathers, after which they were allowed a glass of wine.

Neither butter, eggs, nor any thing animal was served at these collations. They had to be satisfied with salads, confitures, and whitemeats, a very unsatisfactory food to such appetites at that time. They went to bed, however, and lived in hope as long as the fast lasted.

I hope you are planning to enjoy some of your favorite things today, dear reader, (perhaps a triple-stuffed-crust pizza hubcap with extra latex) and then say goodbye to all that until Easter. I personally think that giving up industrial-grade pizza does not count as a form of penance. In fact, I think indulging in it is a form of penance (forty days of Domino’s is the ultimate Lent), but it really depends on what gives you pleasure. Far be it for me to define your sacrifices.

Luscious Pillsbury Pizza Pockets

HANNAH writes:

I have read your website for some months. I differ with you on several issues but that’s not important now. I agree wholeheartedly on the subject of race, and black criminality in particular and I would like to tell you about something that happened the other day which illustrates this.

I don’t want to go into a long-winded bio, so, in brief: I was raised a liberal. I learned the hard way how to deal with blacks. I will provide anecdotes in future, if you want, but here’s an example from today.

I live in Brooklyn now. And I’ve noticed that any neighborhood except black ones is mixed – because that’s the way it goes in modern urban America. Blacks go where ever they please. Whites and Asians stay out of black neighborhoods. Read More »

ALAN writes:

If the FBI Director wants “to learn from our mistakes,” a good place to begin is with his statement that the FBI’s wiretap of Michael “Martin Luther” King was “without fact or substance, and is predicated on the naked assertion that there is “communist influence in the racial situation.”

His statement and implication are utter nonsense.  J. Edgar Hoover said King was the most notorious liar in the country.  He and the Kennedy brothers knew that King surrounded himself with his Communist friends and “advisers.” There is good reason to believe that King was a Communist-trained agitator.  The Communists were involved up to their ears in the “Civil Rights Revolution” of the 1950s-‘60s. It is a sad state of affairs indeed when Mr. Hoover’s successor either does not know or does not want to know or does not want to acknowledge these facts. Read More »

PAUL writes from Louisiana:

I finally watched The Help a few weeks ago.  It is a 2011 movie about the supposed life of black maids in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 60s. It was wonderfully acted, cast, and directed. But was it accurate? It was fiction. The author is much too young to have witnessed the events.  Maybe she interviewed some maids, or maybe she did not.

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FROM the unpublished writings of Lawrence Auster:

Deep in the American mind there is the ideal of America as a country where advancement is open to anyone, where “it doesn’t matter who your parents were.” The problem with this lovely-sounding ideal of race-blindness is that it can only work within reasonable limits, i.e., when it is applied to groups and persons who, notwithstanding some mutual differences, share a civilizational commonality. Taken literally, it becomes absurd and dangerous. Applied en masse to radically diverse populations and cultures, the ideal of race-neutrality turns out to be not race-neutral at all, but becomes a weapon used by some groups to dispossess others.

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TALES OF CHESTER, my husband’s recollections of his childhood, continues here with his memories of his neighbors, the Weirs.

Weiry, as in “weary,” that’s what we called her, had slicked-back gray hair and a face very much like Renner’s, only puffier with prominent swellings beneath the eyes. She looked like a man, and she had the most unusual walk. With every other step, her head would drop a foot or more, so that if she were walking on the other side of our hideous wooden fence, you would see her head appear and then disappear in a dolphin-like rhythm, as she walked to the end of the yard to water her tomato plants.

After the fire at Renner’s, which happened when I was ten, I began spending more time with the Weirs, who inhabited the ground-floor apartment in the red-shingled building on the north side of our house. Their place was across an alleyway that was so narrow you could shimmy up to the roof by bracing your hands and feet on the brick walls on either side. Their lives had been far different from Renner’s.

We often said that if Weiry had gone on that old TV show, Queen for a Day, she would have walked off with the studio. We watched Queen for a Day every afternoon. Three women chosen from the audience would tell horrible stories about the abject state of their lives. The audience would vote for the most-pathetic case, the results tabulated on an applause meter. They applauded hardship. The winner got crowned by the host, Jack Bailey, and received a gown and a Speed Queen washing machine.

No one we saw could match Weiry.

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ALAN writes:

 A Progress Report from St. Louis

December, 2014:  Black female, 16, shot and killed by black thug, 21, two blocks from the Catholic high school that I attended in 1964.

December, 2014:  Black thug smashes windows at “Nu Fashion Beauty” store to steal “hair extensions”.  This was a repeat performance:  One day in 2006, the two doors and large glass windows at that store were completely boarded up.

This is called “breaking down barriers,” a cultural trend vigorously promoted by Liberals, Progressives, Anarchists, Feminists, Do-Gooders, and the Socialists and Communists who call themselves “Catholics.” The point of “breaking down barriers” is to get what you want.  Blacks understand this perfectly.  That is why they “break down barriers” in the form of inconvenient windows at “Nu Fashion Beauty” and other beauty supply stores, shoe stores, and electronic entertainment stores throughout St. Louis. It is a new and improved way of shopping.

Quintessential black culture:  A store owned and run by blacks that caters to blacks is targeted for theft repeatedly by blacks.  How does that improve my old neighborhood? I want to know.    Read More »

FBI Director James Comey, in a speech at Georgetown in reaction to the Ferguson riots, indulges in transparent historical revisionism to excuse crimes by blacks. There is nothing original in his speech, in which he ridiculously claims that black crime is no worse than the former crimes of Irish immigrants. It’s all been said millions and millions of times, including the idea that white racism is a “hard truth.” It’s all taught every single day in high schools and colleges. Still it is noteworthy when a chief law enforcer denies the very notion of free will in law-breaking.

Do you see the logic here? If lawbreakers are not responsible for their own behavior, or at least some of them are not responsible for their own behavior, then the government is responsible for everything. Comey’s speech is just another bureaucrat’s plea for bureaucratic tyranny. That’s what racialism is about. It’s about power, not benevolence towards blacks. Comey could care less about the true welfare of blacks, who are destroyed by this country’s leniency towards crime and the fatuous insensitivity of people like Comey towards its victims. Instead, Comey demands that his underlings worship at the grave of Martin Luther King:

I am descended from Irish immigrants. A century ago, the Irish knew well how American society—and law enforcement—viewed them: as drunks, ruffians, and criminals. Law enforcement’s biased view of the Irish lives on in the nickname we still use for the vehicles we use to transport groups of prisoners. It is, after all, the “paddy wagon.” 
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THE POET and essayist Mark Anthony Signorelli examines the idea that art, particularly high culture, is not an elevating influence on human nature because some individuals who have committed great moral crimes have been either cultured people or actual artists,. He cites the example of Nazi officers who listened to Mozart.

It appears very likely to be the case that the corrosive politics of the era simply exerted such a fierce influence over that generation, that no amount of erudition or aesthetic refinement could consistently counteract it. Read More »

JEANETTE V. writes:

I can’t go anywhere without being bombarded by perversity. Here’s a military spouses’ site sympathetic to same sex couples. And at Redbook magazine, once for housewives, a mother publicly sentences her daughter to a lifetime of mental illness.

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A CONVERT to Catholicism desperately attempts to persuade “Pope” Francis to become a Catholic. Weird, eh? Dr. Maike Hickson writes in a letter posted at Rorate Caeli:

I came out of a world that is now more and more subverting and invading, if not permeating, the life of the Catholic Church and a world to which you now seem to bow down and to pander. I grew up without any faith, from a broken family, in a cohabiting, aborting, divorcing and selfish world. I did not even know fully the Ten Commandments. I certainly did not live them. Nor did I have an intact family to give me a strong identity, a safe haven, or moral guidance. This way of life led me into many an impasse and even into depression. It was when I met my future husband that the light of Christ seemed first to enter my heart, slowly but steadily.

If Jorge Bergoglio officially approves divorce in the next installment of the Synod on the Family, Dr. Hickson will be required to approve it too. No Catholic can resist the pope’s official teachings.

Or Dr. Hickson will come to the inescapable conclusion that a non-Catholic such as Mr. Bergoglio cannot be a pope and that he is in fact an anti-pope whom Catholics must shun and reject.

I

IN 1858, at the Massabielle Grotto in an obscure French village, Our Lady appeared to a poor girl named Bernadette Soubirous. The movie, Song of Bernadette, is historically accurate and tells the story of how Bernadette was rebuked by parents, teachers, priests and the police before her account of the apparitions was believed. The Catholic Church approved the Lourdes apparitions on June 18, 1862. Bernadette was canonized in 1933.

Millions of people have traveled to Lourdes since that time and many miraculous cures have occurred. However, the real message of Lourdes is not relief from suffering, but acceptance of it.

See Pope Pius XII’s inspiring reflections on the apparitions of Lourdes on the occasion of the 100th anniversary in 1958. Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. Pope Pius XII said:

To a society which in its public life often contests the supreme rights of God, to a society which would gain the whole world at the expense of its own soul and thus hasten to its own destruction, the Virgin Mother has sent a cry of alarm.

Rockefeller Hall at Bryn Mawr

THE INCLUSIVE women’s college must now include men. Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania has decided to accept “transgender, non-binary and gender nonconforming applicants.” (Not sure what a “non-binary” person is. Please, I don’t want to know.) According to the college news service:

In addition to those applicants who were assigned female at birth, the applicant pool will be inclusive of transwomen and of intersex individuals who live and identify as women at the time of application. Intersex individuals who do not identify as male are also eligible for admission. Those assigned female at birth who have taken medical or legal steps to identify as male are not eligible for admission.

I’m wondering: Does Bryn Mawr have a biology department? What do they do in that biology department? They certainly can’t be pursuing science in any meaningful sense. “Assigned?” No one is assigned anything. Sex is really quite obvious at birth. Scientists have noticed this for a while now.

Given that it has supported the spiritual mutilation of women for years and has wanted men to become women for years, I guess it should be no surprise that Bryn Mawr now supports the surgical and chemical mutilation of human beings and the ultimate pretense of femininity. I wonder if a student will actually be favored for admission if his parents have hired a surgeon to chop off his male organ? Well, the women at Bryn Mawr have been fantasizing about castration for decades now. They have it at last. I say the castrated male should get first pick of dorm rooms.

If the school accepts men who are pretending to be women, maybe someday it will accept bad students who are pretending to be good students. (Actually, it already does that under the banner of “diversity.”) Or middle class students who are pretending to be rich. (Actually, it already does that by saddling students with a lifetime of debt.) But who cares? Here we see yet another institution that is fundamentally unsound and can’t possibly recover and become civilized without engaging in repentance for many, many, many years for the souls and bodies it has helped destroy. In the meantime, we are living in a post-satire age, dear reader. How can you satirize insanity? P.G. Wodehouse would be an accountant if he were alive today. We are doomed to seriousness and deprived of jokes. Take it as yet another form of chastisement.

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The Garden of Eden, Unknown German master; 1410

THE WORD “diversity” has been corrupted. It’s almost impossible to use the word today without conjuring something that is opposed to diversity, which stands for variety and multiplicity. “Diversity” to egalitarians is not diversity but its opposite: an imposed homogeneity and stifling of differences.

It’s a shame because “diversity” is a good word. All of the created order is diverse. God loves variety and differences. He could have made all people the same, but he did not. He deliberately created differences. Therefore difference must be good. There could be no other way, given the imperfections and limitations of creatures, for God to express divine goodness. St. Thomas Aquinas explains this:

[T]he multiplicity and distinction existing among things were devised by the divine intellect and were carried out in the real order so that the divine goodness might be mirrored by created things in variety, and that different things might participate in divine goodness in varying degrees. Thus, the very order existing among diverse things issues in a certain beauty, which should call to mind the divine wisdom.

[Aquinas’s Shorter Summa, Chapt. 103; Sophia Press, 1993]

This world is a celebration of diversity.

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IF whites are guilty of oppressing non-whites then shouldn’t journalists, academics and politicians try to prevent non-whites from entering majority-white countries instead of encouraging mass migration?

Hubert Collins addresses this question:

Leftist pundits and academics are paid to analyze, and the more turmoil there is, the more there is to analyze. The more racism is “found,” whether it be in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or Jesus Christ, the more money is to be made through books, lectures, essays, and classes that denounce racism.

All anti-racist commentators benefit from high racial tensions–real or imagined–since it is their source of income. Read More »