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.
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.
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.
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.
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. (more…)
DAN R. writes:
In Sunday’s New York Times, columnist Frank Bruni asks, “Do gays unsettle you?” And my answer? Frankly, yes.
I am unsettled, first off, by the very use of the word “gay,” a corruption of a word once universally viewed in a positive light.
DEAN ERICSON writes: An excellent corrective for the idiotic adulation recently accorded Saint Mohandas Ghandi by Obama is Richard Grenier's article, published in Commentary magazine in 1983, which was inspired by Richard Attenborough's hagiographic movie on Gandhi released that year. From the piece: "But it is not widely realized how much violence... was associated with Gandhi's so called non-violent" movement from the very beginning."
IT’S amazing how much a false president and a false pope can have in common. On February 5th, at the National Prayer Breakfast, Barack Hussein Obama did such a brilliant Jorge Bergoglio imitation that one might suspect that Obama is pitching for the “pope’s” job. Why not? After all, you don’t have to be Catholic to be a papal pretender. In fact, it’s best if you’re not.
In his speech, the president, who also believes all religions are true (and thus no religions are true), said:
So how do we, as people of faith, reconcile these realities — the profound good, the strength, the tenacity, the compassion and love that can flow from all of our faiths, operating alongside those who seek to hijack religious for their own murderous ends?
Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. (more…)
IN THE entry on the former athlete Bruce Jenner, who believes he is a woman in a man’s body when he is, and always will be, a man in a man’s body, the reader James writes:
Don’t get me started on these so-called “sex change” operations. It is disgusting — hack doctors taking these disturbed people’s money in exchange for what is essentially elective genital mutilation. “Sex change” is impossible. It can’t be done. “Oh, I’m a woman/man now” sounds absurd. NO, you aren’t. You are now an “it,” a monster of a person. You are left with a non-functional, ruined genitalia, artificial hormones ravaging your body, and a broken mind that the brainwashed masses will tell you is completely “natural” and “normal.”
I RECEIVED a long e-mail from the author E. Michael Jones that was sent to subscribers of his magazine, Culture Wars. In the message, Jones described his recent trip to India. Here is a priceless excerpt: The juxtaposition of Hindu Temple and Nehru Science center on the Mumbai bus tour was instructive. India has gone from worshipping elephants, monkeys and cobras to worshipping science, with no metaphysical experience in between. It reminds me of what George Bernard Shaw said of America: “a country that went from barbarism to decadence without finding civilization along the way.” India seems destined to become a country of cobra worshipping computer programmers.
THE EDUCATED LAYMAN writes:
The Valhalla, New York train disaster involving the collision of an MTA train and a Mercedes SUV has been receiving a good deal of media attention. All of it, however, is of the judgmentally neutral variety. I live very close to where this occurred and I’ve written about it from a standpoint that I think many traditionalists share, or may at least appreciate. My two posts on this matter can be found here and here. I write:
This is not the case of a mere accident. To call it that without any further explanation strips this event of its moral implications. We do not know Brody’s exact state of mind in her final moments, but we don’t need to. What we know is sufficient to evaluate these events in a moral context. Brody, for whatever reason, was faced with imminent danger but failed to recognize it. This is not surprising, as most middle class whites have never faced imminent danger. Most of us live our lives completely insulated from all threats, natural and man-made, by the institutions of Western civilization. These luxuries certainly make us comfortable, but we have come to take them for granted. We’ve decayed into a people who are utterly incapable of decisive action at critical moments. White, affluent Ellen Brody fastening her seat belt in her Mercedes SUV, blissfully ignorant of the impending catastrophe staring her in the face, is the personification of that decay.
DAN R. writes:
Bruce Jenner is the newest poster child for the JokeNation formally known as the United States of America, suggesting that the phenomenon described by the title of Charles Mackay’s 1841 book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, goes beyond the author’s focus on financial panics.
I watched the television coverage of Jenner’s 1976 Olympic decathlon victory. He was the real deal, a great athlete. What happened? Someone who lived off of that success for the past forty years and perhaps needed some new way to distinguish himself from a somewhat sad run of post-gold medal mediocrity? In the end, whenever I think of the idea of Bruce Jenner “becoming a woman” I either shake my head or am tempted to burst out laughing. And I’m reminded of the common-sense truth (transcending the vulgarity) in Gavin McInnes’s banned essay: “Transphobia Is Perfectly Natural.”
CHARLOTTE ALLEN reports the latest sordid details in the case of Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia University student who has been carrying around a mattress for months to protest an alleged rape by another student. It all is too disgusting to keep up with, but I offer it to you in case you feel out of the loop when it comes to the campus “rape” war. Sulkowicz, whose case was dismissed by campus authorities and who refused to pursue her charges with the police, was not raped at all, the accused says. She texted love messages to him in the weeks after the alleged incident and had had trysts with him before, which has been known from the beginning. She admits to the messages and the previous involvement. She says her love messages were expressions of rape trauma.
DARTMOUTH COLLEGE is an epicenter of white guilt. Ritual sacrifices are routinely made to the Noble Negro in the once proudly WASP milieu. A recent exhibit on civil rights at Dartmouth’s Hood Museum featured an “artwork” that was simply a white sink hanging from a black wall. (Get it — white and black. Profound, eh?) It was a sort of confessional for whites, a place where they could repent and reflect on the horrible day when blacks were killed and tortured en masse —- oops, no, the day when blacks used separate bathrooms.
The problem with ersatz confessionals, aside from the warped concept of sin, is that there is never absolution. It’s no surprise then that a total of 15 professors will be teaching a class this spring on the Ferguson riots. Fifteen professors. The class, titled “#Black Lives Matter,” will surely spark nasty debates, with a few hopelessly taking the side of Darren Wilson and most valiantly taking the side of Michael Brown. Tempers will flare. And that’s just the point. Anything but thought.
The Ivy League is mass intellectual suicide. It’s a Jonestown of the mind.
LENT begins early this year, on February 18th. At its best, this season is a great adventure of self-denial and inner participation in the mystical events of the Incarnation. Think about Lent ahead of time. Thomas Droleskey writes:
The penances we are asked to undertake need not be anything extraordinary. That is, a voluntary self-denial of some sort of food that we really like is an act of penance. God knows how much we become attached to sensible pleasures and delights. (more…)
“WOMEN’S CULTURES: EQUALITY AND DIFFERENCE,” the conference sponsored by the “Pontifical Council for Culture” and taking place this week in Rome, is more Vassar than Vatican. The outline document is filled with deliberate ambiguities, attempting to appeal to both feminists and non-feminists. It’s a stunning piece of non-Catholic, junk writing. Some of it is unreadable.
An excerpt:
Today, generally speaking, women seek to reconcile professional life and family commitments. They can renounce maternity but those who do have children cannot avoid raising, educating and protecting them. In any case, women who are not married or have no children, welcome, include, and mediate; they are much more capable of tenderness and forgiveness than men. (more…)
TIM writes from Brazil:
I am still astonished by the following words written by you: It’s hard for men, a curse really, to choose character over beauty.
It feels as if you had access to my most inner thoughts.
Could you please elaborate on that? What are the roots of this phenomenon? What are the consequences? How to overcome this obstacle?