From these reflections on All Saints Day:

The saints are friends of God. They are like the angels in heaven. We honor them, not as we honor God, but on account of the relation they bear to God. They are creatures of God, the work of His hands. When we honor them, we honor God; as when we praise a beautiful painting, we praise the artist.”

We do not believe that the saints can help us of themselves, but we ask them to “pray for us.” We believe that everything comes to us “through Our Lord Jesus Christ.” With these words all our prayers end. It is useful, salutary, and reasonable to pray to the saints and ask them to pray for us. No doubt all will admit the reasonableness of this practice if the saints can hear and help us.

That they hear and help us is evident from many passages of Scripture. Read More »

Psalter of Henry of Blois, c. 1150

FROM the first chapter of The Dogma of Hell, Illustrated by Facts Taken from Profane and Sacred History (1883), by Fr. F.X. Schouppe S.J.:

It has been reserved for modern and contemporaneous atheism, carried to the pitch of delirium, to outdo the impiety of all ages by denying the existence of hell.

There are, in our day, men who laugh at, question, or openly deny the reality of hell.

They laugh at hell; but the universal belief of nations should not be laughed at; a matter affecting the everlasting destiny of man is not laughable; there is no fun, when the question is of enduring for eternity the punishment of fire.

They question, or even deny the dogma of hell; but on a mater of religious dogma, they cannot decide without being competent; they cannot call in doubt, still less deny, a belief so solidly established, without bringing forward irrefutable reasons.

Now, are they who deny the dogma of hell competent in matters of religion? Are they not strangers to that branch of the sciences, which is called theology? Are they not oftenest ignorant of the very elements of religion, taught in the Catechism?

Whence, then, proceeds the mania, of grappling with a religious question which is not within their province? Why such warmth in combating the belief in hell? Ah! It is interest that prompts them; they are concerned about the non-existence of hell, knowing that if there is a hell, it shall be their portion; these unhappy men wish that there might not be one, and they try to persuade themselves that there is none. In fact, these efforts usually end in a sort of incredulity. At bottom, this disbelief is only a doubt, but a doubt which unbelievers formulate by a negation. Read More »

“Hallowe’en.” Postcard, ca. 1910. Missouri History Museum 

The giant Halloween toys that were nowhere to be seen when I was a boy have multiplied in recent years in proportion to the real horrors that generations of soft-headed Americans have permitted to overtake their children, their culture and their nation.

[Reposted from October, 2021]

ALAN writes:

When I was a boy, American grown-ups did not decorate their homes, lawns, and yards with extravagant Halloween toys and displays, as they do today.  Such people spend considerable time and expense on pretend-horrors: ghosts, goblins, witches, spooks, skeletons, spider webs, graveyards, and coffins. Such toys begin to appear on lawns in early September. Parents who imagine they are grown-up compete with each other to stage the most outlandish and bizarre spectacles of pretend-horror.

That should tell us something about the moral-philosophical frame of mind of such people. If my grandparents and great-aunts and great-uncles could see such ostentatious displays, they would conclude:  Americans have become a nation of infants.

People who do such things might argue that they are making Halloween more fun for their children than it was for them. Is that so? They may claim that children deserve more fun at a moment in American life as difficult and trying as this one.  How superior they must imagine themselves to parents a hundred years ago who could give their children “only” books of stories without pictures or who could “only” read stories aloud to their children. I suggest modern parents have it backward.

Childhood imagination is a source of rich wonder, curiosity, delight, possibility, beauty, and inspiration—if it is not pre-empted or short-circuited by grown-ups.

Up to approximately the years when Americans invented the “teenager” and allowed an entire subculture to arise around that weird species, it was common for grown-ups to expect children to depend on their imagination for entertainment and inspiration.  Halloween in those years was a much more modest affair than it is today.  It is not evident that children who grew up in that former setting suffered from impoverishment of imagination or too little fun.  On the contrary:  Many people who grew up in those years recall how much enjoyment they found in making up stories and adventures and characters out of their imagination.

How could children today do that when their parents flood them with yards-full of oversize Halloween toys? What is left for such children to imagine? Do such toys not constrict childhood imagination? Do they not reduce or destroy outright the magical allure to children of what cannot be seen but imagined?  I venture the guess that those are generally the same kinds of parents who see nothing wrong in planting their babies and children in front of TV screens. Thus is the potent but delicate structure of childhood imagination effectively annihilated by modern parents, encouraged of course by the toy manufacturing industry and the mass communications and entertainment industries.

The more thoughtful children in today’s world might wonder why grown-ups devote so much energy and expense to creating pretend-horrors like extravagant Halloween toys and displays and so little energy and determination to controlling real horrors like lawlessness, vandalism, crime, lowered standards of competence, lowered expectations, widespread contempt for rules and laws, degenerate schools, degenerate music and entertainment, the destruction of historic statues, medical racketeering, government tyranny, and the horrors that DIE agitators (Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity) have brought to previously-civilized towns and cities. Read More »

VIDEO link

FROM The Star-Spangled Heresy: Americanism by Solange Hertz (Tumblar House, 2012):

“It would be difficult to overrate the natural genius of this extraordinary man. In his Epitaph he calls himself a printer. And so he was, printing playing much the same role in his life that gold-making played in Alchemy. By its means he put together the first controlled press in America, his Pennsylvania Gazette soon heading a whole network of subsidiaries throughout the Colonies like the New York Journal, the Boston Gazette, and myriad lesser breed.

“These constituted a Masonic press, staunchly anti-Papist and preaching its own doctrine indefatigably in political dress. Franklin was a master propagandist. It is well known how he maintained European indignation at fever pitch against the British and loyalist Americans by atrocity stories which could not get by at home, but which he circulated via his fake newspaper the Boston Independent Chronicle, regular “reprints” of which were distributed abroad from Holland. Bernard Fay concludes it was such papers, in conjunction with taverns, the Lodges and the cooperation of certain preachers and merchants which actually fabricated the American Revolution. Read More »

ALAN writes:

Ten years ago, I wrote about the fifty-year reunion of my eighth-grade parochial school class.(TTH, Nov. 4, 2014)

Last month I attended the sixty-year reunion. Fewer classmates were there, but it was a glorious feeling once again to be among the living; to be among people who can see straight, think straight, and talk straight. For one afternoon, we lived on an island of memories, laughter, animated conversations, and once-upon-a-time anecdotes. We shared reminiscences of life at St. Anthony of Padua grade school and high school and the neighborhood around it in the years 1956-’68. Both schools closed years ago because the kind of people who ran them and the parish and that neighborhood moved away in later years because they preferred to go on living.

We talked about the streetcars on Meramec Street and the Chariton Restaurant and Al Smith’s Restaurant, each a landmark for decades in that predominantly German neighborhood; about plays and other events that were held in the high school auditorium; and about teachers whom some of us remembered from pictures the parish included in a booklet it published in 1963, and Catholic nuns who were 125 years old (or so it seemed in those years to some of us children). Read More »

“THE big commercial concerns of today are quite exceptionally incompetent. They will be even more incompetent when they are omnipotent. Indeed, that is, and always has been, the whole point of a monopoly; the old and sound argument against a monopoly. It is only because it is incompetent that it has to be omnipotent. When one large shop occupies the whole of one side of a street (or sometimes both sides), it does so in order that men may be unable to get what they want; and may be forced to buy what they don’t want. That the rapidly approaching kingdom of the Capitalists will ruin art and letters, I have already said. I say here that in the only sense that can be called human, it will ruin trade, too.”

— G.K. Chesterton, Utopia of Usurers

His power shall be an everlasting power, which shall not be taken away; and His kingdom a kingdom that shall not decay. 

— (Daniel 7:14)

“LEWISTON, Maine is a primary inflection point of the demographic replacement of White Mainers. In 2000, Lewiston was 95% White. As of the 2020 US Census, Lewiston’s White population has been smashed down to 77%.

“Not content with merely replacing the White population of Maine, lawmakers have passed legislation to silence White Mainers from even speaking about the war being waged against them for being White. A 2023 law passed “in response to the rise in White Nationalism” makes it a violation of civil rights to ‘attempt to cause emotional distress if motivated by race.'”

Read more

“TRUMP’S rhetoric is not anti-White, but his policies, actions, and inactions are absolutely anti-White.”

Read more.

“Psychopolitics is the art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, officers, bureaus, and masses, and the effecting of the conquest of enemy nations through mental healing.”

FROM Brainwashed into Slavery by Kenneth Goff (1949):

The first thing to be degraded in any nation is the state of Man, himself. Nations which have high ethical tone are difficult to conquer . Their loyalties are hard to shake, their allegiance to their leaders is fanatical, and what they usually call their spiritual integrity cannot be violated by duress. It is not efficient to attack a nation in such a frame of mind. It is the basic purpose of Psychopolitics to reduce that state of mind to a point where it can be ordered and enslaved. Thus, the first target is Man, himself. He must be degraded from a spiritual being to an animalistic reaction pattern. He must think of himself as an animal, capable only of animalistic reactions. He must no longer think of himself, or of his fellows, as capable of “spiritual endurance,” or nobility.

The best approach toward degradation in its first stages is the propaganda of “scientific approach” to Man . Man must be consistently demonstrated to be a mechanism without individuality, and it must be educated into a populace under attack that Man’s individualistic reactions are the product of mental derangement . The populace must be brought into the belief that every individual within it who rebels in any way, shape, or form against efforts and activities to enslave the whole, must be considered to be a deranged person whose eccentricities are neurotic or insane. and who must have at once the treatment of a psychopolitician. Read More »

MOST compassionate Archangel St. Raphael, who, by a miracle wonderful in its simplicity restored the precious gift of sight to the blind Tobias, free my life, I beseech thee, from the blindness which afflicts and dishonours it, so that I may know things in their true aspect. Never permit me to be deceived by appearances, but help me always to walk secure in the way of the divine Commandments.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.

Source

WHAT explains Trump’s fanatical devotion to all things Israel?

You decide.

IF YOU know of any trustworthy organization taking donations for those in the path of Hurricane Helene, please let me know at thinkinghousewife@pm.me.

Thank you. Read More »

KATHY G. writes:

When Kamala Harris mocked Jesus, she joined Obama, Hillary, and Biden in the relatively new tradition of antagonizing potential voters, something we never saw before the Kenyan was installed. Politicians never insulted any voter, and went to great lengths to try to appeal to everyone in order to win votes. Curiously, after Obama became president, he had no problem revealing his disdain for the conservative “bitter clingers to guns and religion”, Hillary exulted in ridiculing the “basket of Deplorables” who supported Trump, and Biden called them “white supremacists” and “terrorists”. It appears the tradition of insulting American voters signaled the end of any actual votes electing representatives, and the actual installation of operatives by “elites”.

Kamala Harris’ triumphant rejection of Jesus Christ may well be a bridge too far for the Novus Ordo religionists who were so gleeful at Trump being ousted in 2020, uncaring of the very shady circumstances. We will see if these “Catholics” support this communist even after she openly scorns Christ.

Will their Trump-hate overcome their love of Christ? Read More »

A MAN yells “Jesus is Lord” and “Christ is King” at a Kamala event while she’s promoting abortion.

To wild applause, she tells him he’s at the wrong rally and should be at the “smaller one” down the street.

First Snow, Grafton Maine; William Hart

OCTOBER

— Robert Frost

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

CHARLIE DAVENPORT, at age 100, reminisced about his days as a slave:

Us Niggers didn’ know nothin’ ’bout what was gwine on in de outside worl’. All us knowed was dat a war was bein’ fit. Pussonally, I b’lieve in what Marse Jefferson Davis done. He done de only thing a gent’man could a-done. He tol’ Marse Abe Lincoln to ’tend to his own bus’ness an’ he’d ’tend to his’n. But Marse Lincoln was a fightin’ man an’ he come down here an’ tried to run other folks’ plantations. Dat made Marse Davis so all fired mad dat he spit hard ’twixt his teeth an’ say, “I’ll whip de socks off den dam Yankees.”

Dat’s how it all come ’bout.

My white folks los’ money, cattle, slaves, an’ cotton in de war, but dey was till better off dan mos’ folks.

Lak all de fool Niggers o’ dat time I was right smart bit by de freedom bug for awhile. It sounded pow’ful nice to be tol’:

“You don’t have to chop cotton no more. You can th’ow dat hoe down an’ go fishin’ whensoever de notion strikes you. An’ you can roam ’roun’ at night an’ court gals jus’ as late as you please. Aint no marster gwine a-say to you, ‘Charlie, you’s got to be back when de clock strikes nine.’”

I was fool ’nough to b’lieve all dat kin’ o’ stuff. But to tell de hones’ truf, mos’ o’ us didn’ know ourse’fs no better off. Freedom meant us could leave where us’d been born an’ bred, but it meant, too, dat us had to scratch for us ownse’fs. Dem what lef’ de old plantation seamed so all fired glad to git back dat I made up my min’ to stay put. I stayed right wid my white folks as long as I could. Read More »