Entombment of Christ, Sisto Badalocchio

ARS ORANDI, a Catholic website devoted to art, the Holy Mass and liturgical contemplation, was one of the most beautiful blogs on the Internet. It sadly vanished a couple of weeks ago. There has been no public word from the author, David Werling, to explain its disappearance. The archives from December 8th and earlier are available here. I am very grateful to Mr. Werling for creating and maintaining his site, a lovely tribute to the highest form of prayer that exists. It must have been extremely time-consuming to keep the site running.

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IF you were the very first black First Lady in America, you would think you would at all times stress and foster the dignity of the black woman. After all, the dignity of black women — their dignity as mothers and wives — is far more important to the health of children than whether they eat vegetables — or rather a normal and healthy life for children inevitably flows from the dignity of the mother. And even a poor woman can possess dignity. Michelle Obama has not done much to help the ordinary black woman acquire a sense of her own vital importance.

WHEN OBAMA said he would bridge the racial divide, he apparently meant that he would introduce a whole new level of racial bullying. A recent case is that of Ally Bank, which was accused by Eric Holder’s office of discriminating against blacks in auto lending. According to Investor’s Business Daily, the case against Ally was shockingly weak. Prosecutors never documented or researched the creditworthiness of loan applicants who were allegedly overcharged. “That’s right, they never looked at credit scores, down payments, debt or other key risk-related factors banks consider to set interest rates. Not for blacks, or for supposedly “similarly situated” whites.” Read More »

BOB L. writes:

Today, the news out of Virginia is that former Governor Bob McDonnell and his wife have been indicted on 14 federal corruption charges and face decades in prison (although will probably get away with far less.)

Gov. McDonnell was a popular, well-liked governor. When he ran for Governor, the media publicized his university thesis, which spoke intelligently (although I have only skimmed it) about issues facing the family. Most controversially, he criticized Griswald and argued for an end to no-fault divorce, alongside more standard Republican proposals like ending abortion and promoting school vouchers. He won in the 2009 landslide by running away from his original positions on these matters and instead, speaking about bread-and-butter issues like relieving traffic congestion.

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 ANTI-GLOBALIST EXPATRIATE writes:

The almost hilariously over-the-top narcissism in the way Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis speaks about herself, and the passivity of her ‘husband’ who paid her way through Harvard Law School and was then left holding the bag with two children to take care of – she left him quite literally the next day after the tuition loan was paid off – is a scathing indictment of the qualities liberal women admire and seek to cultivate in themselves, and how liberal men have been conditioned to accept that their role in life is to enable supposedly self-empowered women who in reality use men to achieve their ambitions.

Davis is being challenged for discrepancies in her life story. In the article at The Dallas News, a political colleague of hers is quoted as saying:

“She’s going to find a way, and she’s going to figure out a way to spin herself in a way that grabs at the heart strings. A lot of it isn’t true about her, but that’s just us who knew her. But she’d be a good governor.” Read More »

Visit to a Country Doctor, Norman Rockwell

BUCK writes:

When my father was a boy, there wasn’t much in the way of health care, not a tenth of what is available today. Most surgeries were still done in your own home. Antiseptic methods had not yet been well established. There was no income tax, no Medicare, no Medicaid, no Social Security, no health insurance.

A 1919 study revealed that four times more money was lost in wages for missed work than was spent on whatever ailed you. Why would anyone buy health insurance? They didn’t; they bought “sickness” insurance instead, like today’s disability insurance, which arguably is under utilized. They also bought a good bit of burial insurance. These were risks that people could understand and calculate.

In 1940, about 10 million of our 132 million were enrolled in a health insurance plan. By 1948, when I was born, there were almost 60 million enrolled. By 1960, 130 million of our 180 million were enrolled.

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Aja Riggs

BY judicial fiat, New Mexico has become the fifth state in America in which assisted suicide is legal. Aja Riggs, 49, was one of the plaintiffs in a case which successfully overturned the state’s assisted suicide statute. She has advanced uterine cancer. She was backed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the well-funded pro-suicide organization Compassion and Choices, an offshoot of the Hemlock Society. Second Judicial Judge Nan Nash ruled earlier this week that under the state constitution, terminally ill citizens have a right to receive help in ending their lives. Once again, the most extreme and inhuman views become institutionalized by a judge. She wrote:

“This court cannot envision a right more fundamental, more private or more integral to the liberty, safety and happiness of a New Mexican than the right of a competent, terminally ill patient to choose aid in dying,” the judge wrote.

Got that? Suicide is “integral” to safety and happiness.

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WHAT can be said about Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent chastising and threatening of Nigeria for its new anti-sodomy laws except that the U.S. Government is a great force for evil in the world. As the blogger Mundabor points out, it’s interesting that Kerry has not publicly condemned Saudi Arabia even though sodomy is a capital offense there. “People everywhere deserve to live in freedom and equality. No one should face violence or discrimination for who they are or who they love,” said Kerry this week. Everyone deserves freedom and equality except those who don’t particularly want to see their relatives and friends pulled into the land of AIDS, drug use, suicide and homosexual promiscuity.

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READ about the latest in the ongoing saga of the Wunderlich family in Germany at Lifesitenews. The Wunderlichs have been forced to send their children to public school and denied legal custody so that they might obtain visas to move. The judge who ruled on an aspect of the case last month called homeschooling a “straitjacket.” Good heavens, what does he think human beings did before modern schools were invented? Most of the European monarchs never went to school.

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A protester makes the sign of the “quenelle”

A French black comedian, Dieudonné, has been censored by the government for allegedly inciting anti-Semitism with a crude gesture, now known as the “quenelle,” which some say resembles a “reverse Nazi salute,” a rather far-fetched interpretation of what it appears to mean. His tour was banned as a result, as Galliawatch reports.

Dieudonné has come to symbolize, for a certain segment of the French population roughly between the ages of 20 and 30, the elevation of the Holocaust, or Shoah, to a state religion and the demonization of French patriotism, writes Dian Johnstone:

By placing Auschwitz as the most significant event of recent history, various writers and speakers justify by default the growing power of the European Union as necessary replacement for Europe’s inherently “bad” nations. Never again Auschwitz! Dissolve the nation-states into a technical bureaucracy, free of the emotional influence of citizens who might vote incorrectly. Do you feel French? Or German? You should feel guilty about it – because of Auschwitz. Read More »

From the British Library’s Collection of Illuminated Manuscripts.

SOPHIA writes:

I wrote to you in the past (see here and here) regarding my strong desire to become a housewife. As you know, I’m young, (miserably) in college, and had until recently little hope of meeting someone whom I could marry, i.e., with the same traditionalist views. Of course, similar-minded individuals are not too difficult to find on the Internet; so, to keep things concise, I’m rather convinced we’ve found each other. For about the last half year, I have been in intimate communication with a young man (my age, same year of college) with whom I have striking compatibility. We want the same things: a traditionalist Catholic home, wherein our large number of children are schooled, to live as self-sufficiently as possible. We dream of eventually owning a farm, but looking at things realistically makes that appear to be in the far-off future. We are not taking our future lightly; our conversations most often revolve around how we will live out our married state.

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IN the entry about the social decline of celibacy, Lou Hanson writes:

Thanks for your piece about happy virgins. One of the odder things about being single today is that one is so often assumed to be ‘gay!’ I am 60, and would be far more tolerated and approved of if I were a homosexual woman, or in a sexual, unmarried state with a man! But being single is seen as so odd and unnatural. And, I have to say that the Catholic parish down the street from me does not feel very welcoming either — I love all the young families, happy couples, I do, but the older parish ten miles down the road feels better to me – still many young families, happy couples, but a nearly equal number of singles. Read More »

YET ANOTHER study has allegedly shown that married couples without children are the happiest couples of all. This is somewhat like saying people who don’t own houses make the happiest home dwellers. Well, duh. If you don’t own a house, you don’t lie awake at night thinking about the leaking roof. Similarly, people without marriages (marriage as an institution is intended for procreation) do not have many of the hassles of marriage.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman

IT IS striking how many of the most vocal feminists have been intellectual women less suited by nature to the life of motherhood and domesticity. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a prominent America feminist who died in 1935, is one example. But there are many others: Mary Wollstonecraft, Gloria Steinem, Simone de Beauvoir.

Their rebellion is arguably a result of modern society’s rejection of the ideal of the noble virgin. Catholic society always upheld this ideal and gave a role to women who were not suited to marriage. It was not shameful to be unmarried and women were permitted to go against their father’s will in deciding to join a convent. In fact, the Church taught that virginity is higher than the married state. But with the Protestant Revolution, this tradition was overturned. As Marin Luther said, “The word and works of God is quite clear, that women were made either to be wives or prostitutes.” The virgin was no longer hallowed. And Judaism never exalted her. A woman’s role was to produce as many children as possible.

This scorn for the single woman increased in the 20th century, wrote Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira in 1967:

As our century is becoming increasingly tolerant toward the woman who sins against chastity, it is becoming increasingly intolerant toward the single woman. To be a single woman is seen as an almost shameful state of life. The single woman is viewed as a person to be scorned because no one wanted to marry her. Her fate is a useless life off in a corner. She is often pictured as a gossiper, a busybody, an intruder in other people’s lives, with all kinds of complexes and defects.

While people have pity for a woman who falls into sin and wants to help her, they are rude to and scorn the single woman who maintains virginity for noble reasons. As if vice should produce compassion and virtue should be despised. This is a true aberration!

The Church considers that to be single is a better state than to be married for both the man and the woman.

Here is a closer look at Gilman’s life, which ended with medical suicide. I think of all these legions of unhappy intellectuals and how much less revolutionary they might have been if they could have accepted their vocation without waging war against femininity.

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THE blogger Mark Moncrieff examines the differences between the two.

Speaking of hard feminism, Tiberge at Galliwatch writes about a call to disband the group Femen.

MY sincere apologies to readers for failing to keep up with the latest pizza developments in recent weeks. To tell you the truth, the loneliness of my position on the pizzafication of our nation sometimes gets me down and I simply have to back away from it all. However, in the latest news, there is the “flavor-packed” pizza burger above, which actually is old news since pizza burgers have been around since the early days of the Pizza Revolution. Its entrenchment is still worth noting. There is also the laser-guided pizza cutter here. Technological innovation in the field is breathtaking. The average number of pizza vendors per acre will continue to rise as there will be greater accuracy and speed in slicing. Call that a prediction or a prophecy, whatever you will, it is almost certainly true.

A word of caution to readers who live in cold climates: Pizza deliverers do not as a rule slow down in icy weather. Here is the disturbing account of a close call involving a pizza delivery, as told by the editor of the industry publication Pizza Today:

The other night, I was driving home from a meeting. It had been dark for about an hour and our area had experienced snow, lots of ice and exceptionally blustery weather. The temperature was dropping fast, and on my drive home I quickly found myself wishing that I would have had enough common sense not to get out in the first place. At several intersections, despite driving slowly, braking slowly and being generally cautious, I found myself sliding on the ice when I attempted to stop my vehicle. Read More »