FROM Campus Reform: Mount Holyoke College, an all-women’s school, announced in a campus-wide email that the Theatre Board has cancelled its annual production of the “Vagina Monologues.” The board has decided to retire the feminist classic as it is not “inclusive” enough to those who identify as women but do not have vaginas. The school recently decided to admit male students who identify as women.

  PADRE PIO said the ideal family size is eight children. Papa Frank says Catholics must not think of having "children in a series."

JORGE BERGOGLIO’S latest air raid against immutable Catholic dogma took place yesterday. The Man Who Would Be Pope, while on a plane from the Phillipines, discussed the issue of contraception, initially seeming to endorse the Catholic view, which is nothing less than a recognition of the objective reality that human life is always good, and then wildly veering off into the vaporous Bergoglian stratosphere in order to hone in on his target. [There are many news reports on what he said to a plane full of reporters. Here is one.] He clearly suggested parents have the moral responsibility to limit births through natural means.

Now that he has embraced global warming and hugged Marxist Cuba, it was only a matter of time before Jorge said the world is too crowded.

Catholics should not “breed like rabbits,” Bergoglio anti-pontificated, as if human beings when in abundant supply are akin to animals, as if Catholics have bred like rabbits.

Well, you know. Anything contemptuous that can be said about believing Catholics and Divine Law will be said by the Argentine Bomber. “God gives you methods to be responsible,” he said. In other words, it is irresponsible to welcome children with no limitations.

Fatuous Frank, who by virtue of his defection from the Faith isn’t even a member of the Catholic Church let alone the reigning pontiff, even went so far as to criticize a Catholic woman for having an eighth child when the pregnancy was risky. His statement, coming as the Western world (and much of the rest of the world) descends into demographic winter, was so bold it’s hard to absorb. “That is to tempt God,” he said. “… That is an irresponsibility.” Compare Bergolio’s words to those of Pope Pius XII in his “Address to Large Families” in 1958:

Large families are the most splendid flower-beds in the garden of the Church; happiness flowers in them and sanctity ripens in favorable soil. Every family group, even the smallest, was meant by God to be an oasis of spiritual peace. But there is a tremendous difference: where the number of children is not much more than one, that serene intimacy that gives value to life has a touch of melancholy or of pallor about it; it does not last as long, it may be more uncertain, it is often clouded by secret fears and remorse.

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HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

Christian Scripture, Old Testament and New, repeatedly and unconditionally condemns the Sin of Sodom, one of the four that “cry to Heaven for vengeance.”  In our dismal day, however, sodomy has gone from being the “love” that dare not speak its name to the lust that won’t shut up.  That isn’t news.  And perhaps the chaotic and disordered spread of “elite” support for what is disingenuously called “gay rights” is also no longer news.

Its spread to the World Economic Forum’s Davos confab of the rich and notorious, however, is.   (more…)

HERE is an unusually honest article on international adoption by Maggie Jones in The New York Times. More adoptees, especially from South Korea, are becoming outspoken opponents of the practice of removing children from their homelands and their people to be raised in a strange land. They include Kim Stoker, who returned to South Korea after being raised in America.

“I get parents’ desperation to have children,” said Stoker …. “Accepting diverse families is great,” she said. But, she added, “I don’t think it’s normal adopting a child from another country, of another race and paying a lot of money. I don’t think it’s normal to put a child on a plane away from all its kin and different smells. It’s a very modern phenomenon.” (more…)

IN DECEMBER, Brendan O’Neill wrote in The Spectator on the advance of “gay marriage” in Australia:

Has there ever been a sweeter-sounding, more goosebump-inducing phrase than ‘Freedom to marry’? Everyone likes freedom (even illiberal politicians pay lip service to liberty), and who doesn’t love a good wedding? Marry these two things together (pun intended) and you end up with an endorphin-releasing buzzphrase that will make anyone grin wildly.

So it has been following Senator David Leyonhjelm’s unveiling of the Freedom to Marry Bill. Across Oz, right-minded people who think gays must be allowed to get hitched experienced paroxysms of joy at the introduction of this new phrase into the political vernacular. (more…)

AT Galliwatch, Tiberge reports that an anti-Islamization rally in France was scheduled for today but was banned by the government. This obviously is the height of hypocrisy, contradicting the “freedom of speech” mania that emerged from the Charlie Hebdo massacres. The French government blatantly does not believe in pure freedom of speech. It reeks of hypocrisy.

Even so, anti-Islamization rallies, calling for “Islamistes” to be expelled from France, are massively misguided. What do they stand for? Pure negativity. France welcomed millions of Muslims. And now it is going to shove them out the door with nothing but abuse? Anti-Islamization rallies at this point can only mean violence, hatred and misunderstanding. Anyone who plans a rally such as this, oblivious to all the Muslims who don’t take their religion seriously and don’t understand why even their passive acceptance of Islam doesn’t belong in France (or anywhere else), and to all the French who are sincere, ignorant multicultural zealots, is truly autistic. French nihilists and revolutionaries are every bit as much to blame for the Muslim presence in France and are enablers of murder too, having sanctioned the killing of French children in the womb. Will they be kicked out? Obviously not. And what will France stand for once all its Muslims are gone? Nationalism? Pure self-love? When the French are great, they are really great. When the French are stupid, they are the most stupid, the most blind, the most obtuse people on the face of the earth. The godless French are acutely stupid.

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T. writes:

I had to send this to you.  I read your blog daily and am always curious to see your take on the modern world.  So much has changed with regard to men and women.  Your blog is a reminder that I’m not crazy after all.  Anyway, I don’t really have much to add to the article I’ve sent you;  the lunacy speaks for itself.  A Canadian female member of Parliament doesn’t actually show up to vote in the Parliament because …. well, she has kids.

What more can I say?  Who knows, maybe one day we will have on-site daycare in our houses of government. It’s not impossible.  I guess I just find it strange. She won’t stay late in Parliament, only during normal working hours will she stay … because she has kids.

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MANY people erroneously believe that peace on earth comes about through passivity and outward tranquility. If one never makes waves, if one never causes friction, then one contributes to peace. This view that whatever appears tranquil and compromising is good is, in reality, a great enabler of disorder. It is opposed to true peace. It also happens to be easy.

In order to have peace, we must take the hard road. We must make waves. We must cause friction. We must battle for the truth — in the right way, at the right time and in the right places. This is true because evil and its promoters are always aggressive though they sometimes adopt a pose of outward tranquility and are great champions of “love.” Satan energetically seeks to make people believe not only that he does not exist and that he is an absurd fairy tale believed only by the psychologically unbalanced but that combat is intrinsically bad. What a clever and highly effective way to disarm his enemies.

Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, on the occasion of the Feast of Our Lady of Peace, whose intercession we should humbly seek in our exhausting battles, explains this rule:

I can only be faithful to God if I openly fight against [the unjust aggressor] and, more broadly, against the currents of thought, organizations and political parties that work with him to realize this goal.

In final analysis, giving liberty to those who are evil or making peace accords with them is tantamount to delivering the good to be persecuted by the evil. (more…)

Skaters and Tents Along the Ice, Hendrick Avercamp; 1620

  A READER writes: Regarding your excellent entries on the decline of libraries, here is confirmation: an article describing (celebrating, really) their new function as "vibrant and attractive community hubs," the phrase quoted from U.K. research. The photograph alone says everything. For the record, I did not know Good magazine, but felt immediately comfortable (cough, cough) when I saw that it is "a magazine for the Global citizen."

  I SAID in a previous post that "Pope" Francis had become a Buddhist. I'm afraid this report is already quite dated. Jorge Bergoglio has converted to Islam. Dear friends, I am sure of it, judging from his words on the Charlie Hebdo attacks. When asked yesterday about the attacks, the pseudo-pope implied, in so many words, that it is reasonable for a Muslim to kill someone who offends his "religion." Only a believing Muslim would say this kind of thing. During the press conference, Pope Francis was asked by a French journalist about the relationship between freedom of religion and freedom of expression. He replied saying that both are "fundamental human rights" and stressed that killing in the name of God “is an aberration.” But he said there were limits to that freedom of expression. By way of example he referred to Alberto Gasparri who organizes the papal trips and was standing by his side on the plane. The Pope said if “his good friend Dr Gasparri” says a curse word against his mother, he can “expect a punch”, and at that point he gestured with a pretend punch towards him, saying: “It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.” Jorge Bergoglio is a one-man argument for strict limits on freedom of expression. Stay tuned. We don't know what religion the Argentine Bomber will adopt next. His religious affinities…

IT’S more of the same in sunny California.

Pagan Hollywood overwhelms children with material things and sentimental attention, giving them the appearance of being cherished, while denying them kinship and bonds with their true parents. It’s a brutal place to grow up, all the more so because of its glittering surfaces.

And it’s all perfectly legal in the U.S.A.

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A GRATEFUL READER writes:

The latest issue of Touchstone magazine includes many excellent articles on the root problems of the Sexual Revolution. Anthony Esolen in his article “Mission Impossible” writes about how difficult it is to evangelize slaves to technology who know no tradition:

We are now among people who are better and worse than savages. They are, in most places, and for the time being, less likely to break the crockery, as Chesterton put it, than were the savages of old. They will cut babies to pieces in the womb, more than a million a year, but only rarely out of it; and they will be roused to the height of righteous wrath should they see someone leave a dog in a hot car in the summer.  (more…)

  THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes: Concerning Duke's embrace of the call-to-prayer, it occurs to me that a bunch of ugly people with their butts in the air and their faces buried in the ground is the image par excellence of modern higher education.

FROM Breitbart:

In a new initiative to promote religious pluralism, Duke University will broadcast the Muslim call to prayer every Friday on campus. The call to prayer—also known as “adhan”—will be chanted by the Duke Muslim Student Association.

The prayer itself is set to start this Friday at 1:00 p.m. and will be broadcast and amplified from the Chapel bell tower on campus.

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  FROM The International Business Times: One of the biggest education publishers in the world has warned its authors not to mention pigs or sausages in their books to avoid causing offence. Oxford University Press (OUP) said all books must take into consideration other cultures if they hope to sell copies in countries across the world. As a result, the academic publisher has issued guidance advising writers to avoid mentioning pigs or "anything else which could be perceived as pork" so as not to offend Muslim or Jewish people. The inclusion of Jews is obvious. We know that Jews have done terrible things after reading about "pigs in blankets" or seeing the letters P-O-R-K together.

ACCORDING to Annetta Ramsay, writing for a feminist site, the soap opera “Downton Abbey” appeals to women primarily because the female characters are working to subvert the patriarchal system.

For female viewers, Downton’s pleasure is … that of a historical nightmare from which we can escape. The wardrobes and ease that some women enjoy presents an enviable fantasy but the overall class system depicted by the series imposes an oppressive system of patriarchy on every woman.

What a hoot.

“Downton Abbey” is a domestic spectacular. The hugely popular series lavishly celebrates domestic order and beauty, highly feminine dress, traditional sex roles (as we can see from the scene above in which the chauffeur Branson carries the swooning and not-all-that-liberated suffragette Lady Sybil away from a political rally) and the English nobility, all of which depended on the “patriarchal system.” Women viewers, many of whom live amid the domestic chaos and sterility which today’s nominally egalitarian elite has imposed on the lower orders, love these scenes of a house well run. Some view this as a guilty pleasure. Almost all bask in it. Look at the busy and efficient kitchen! Look at the lovely wallpaper! Look at the exquisite clothes of landed aristocrats and the starched servants’ dress, both so different from the unisex uniform of denim and T-shirts which factories churn out for the New Order proletariat! The servants are better dressed by any standards but those of purveyors of nihilistic ugliness than wealthy CEO’s in Silicon Valley. In short, look at the manners and civility of it all. This is a world in which even a paid servant would NOT eat dinner from grease-stained boxes of industrial grade pizza (though probably a handsome percentage of viewers are eating pizza while watching it all, such being the internal contradictions and demands of entertainment).

Such retro themes and domestic romanticism are interspersed with heavy doses of socialist and feminist rhetoric so that viewers from this very different world are not so overcome with guilt or nostalgia that they become radicalized in the wrong direction and so that the female viewers in particular, upon whom the success of the series depends, are the beneficiaries of ceaseless pandering. To pander to a woman today is to tell her she can have absolutely everything. She can be a feminist pitted against the past and its evil ways and a princess indulging in her ancestral civilization and the boons of male authority. Her emotional instincts are unfailingly right. It is not surprising that Ramsay approves of this pandering given the aggrieved narcissism of the publication for which she writes, which is calculated political pandering to the max and leads to true female oppression.

Ramsay has a few of her historical facts wrong. But that’s nothing new for feminists.

At that time, British women couldn’t own property, not all of them could vote and they had no rights if their husbands died. Like water penetrating cracks, even the upper-crust women of “Downton Abbey” seem eager to subtly dismantle the British class system holding them back.

Not all men could vote either. For most of British history voting rights were severely restricted for men. Most men couldn’t vote. (more…)