CHRISTINE LAGARDE, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, says such shocking things and yet no one challenges them. In this recent Wall Street Journal article, she is quoted as saying that women make the majority of consumer decisions and yet the world economy would be better off if many more women worked. Low birthrates prevail throughout the Western world. Old people are not great consumers. Economies run on people. But to Lagarde, the world economy is a competition between men and women. And she is willing to risk the whole thing so that women can win.

She also noted the key role of women in bringing Iceland out of its recession. When its economy crashed, “the banks, the funds, the government—everything was taken over by women,” she said. “So when it’s messy, you get the women in. But when the mess is sorted, keep the women,” she added, chuckling.

You see, if women can run Iceland, they can run anything. This woman is one of the most powerful financial figures in the world. She lobs insults against men. She has said that too much testosterone interferes with the ability of men to make responsible financial decisions. And no one raises the slightest objection. Read More »

From Inside Student Blogs (http://blogs.iesabroad.org/jasmine-hunter/a-moveable-feast-paris/)

MANY people are drawn to atheism not because of the philosophical arguments for it but because they are egalitarians suspicious of any form of hierarchy. They are not just suspicious of hierarchy, they are downright uncomfortable with it. This suspicion and discomfort make prayer almost impossible. After all, prayer is the act of addressing an infinitely higher being.

The egalitarian who attempts to pray is similar to a man dressed in a T-shirt, jeans and baseball cap appearing in the court of a king. To the man in the baseball cap, the regalia of the court is absurd and embarrassing. He may approach it with the interest of an antiquarian visiting a museum, but not as something real. The trappings and ceremony are so unnecessary. But more than that, the authority of the king makes the egalitarian intensely uncomfortable. He can either ridicule the ceremony that surrounds him or feel how primitive his own position is, which would be a shattering discovery.

The egalitarian finds it difficult, if not impossible, to pray. (I am referring to serious praying of course, not the squishy, self-centered emoting, in which God is a guy in a baseball cap too, that often substitutes for it today.) The problem with this is that God often does not communicate with a person until the person communicates with him first. This puts the egalitarian in a bind. He cannot discover God because he cannot speak to him.

For the egalitarian who truly wants to pray but feels that to do so is alien and foreign to him, there is a solution.

He must present himself in the court and say nothing. Even with his baseball cap on.

He should, as St. Francis de Sales once wisely advised, stand in this magnificent court like a statue and simply offer his presence. That is the first step for the person steeped all his life in equality to learn how to pray.

“In the palaces of kings there are statues arranged, which serve only to recreate the royal vision. Be content, then, as one of the these in the presence of God. He will animate this statue when he pleases.” [Consoling Thoughts, On Trials of an Interior Life, St. Francis de Sales; Tan Books]

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“Nuns must not be too spiritual, and must endeavour to be experts in humanity in order that convent life is not purgatory.”

—-    Pope Francis, Oct. 4th, to the nuns at the Santa Chiara cloistered convent in Assisi

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WHY NOT? 

JANET BENTON in The New York Times, of all places, writes a moving account of the maternal neglect she suffered when her mother became a feminist. Benton doesn’t disavow feminism — she points out that her homemaking grandmother “flew into rages” — but she recognizes the great misery feminism causes and nicely describes why the presence of a woman in the kitchen goes beyond mere food. She writes:

For my mother, the kitchen felt like a trap. When the women’s movement blossomed in the late 1960s, she was ready. She vanquished the spirit of homemaking the way Virginia Woolf had killed her “Angel in the House.”

And then a tidal wave of rage, disappointment and raw desire overtook her. I saw it in her vehemence toward my father and in the raucous consciousness-raising groups that met in our living room. I saw it in the changed contents of our dinner plates: a dried-out chicken leg, a potato collapsed inward from overbaking.

When my mother banged out work correspondence on an electric typewriter way past bedtime, my needs had no standing. On other nights I would lie awake for hours, unable to sleep until she came home at midnight.

Complaining got me nowhere. My mother was an unstoppable force, powerful, beautiful and finally happy. As her days and nights expanded to include solo shows, romance and the founding of feminist organizations, I could see in her radiant face and laughter that she was fulfilling her potential. Her red hair grew ever upward, a hood of curls that shouted out her freedom.

This is a good description of the energizing nature of feminism. It’s a raw and dazzling form of energy, as is all revolutionary fervor. It shoots across the sky of a woman’s life and falls to the ground. Compare it to the “boredom” of homemaking, which is an invisible anchor that holds all in place.

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NEW comments have been added to recent discussions (here, here, and here) on race.

The Madonna of the Rosary by Tommaso Minardi, 1841

FROM an essay by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira in commemoration of the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, which is observed on October 7th:

The feast day of Our Lady of the Rosary was instituted by St. Pius V in commemoration of the victory of the Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571 against the Turks who were threatening Europe. In 1716, the feast was extended to the entire Church in thanksgiving for the defeat of the Muslim Crescent in Hungary.

The devotion of the rosary was revealed to St. Dominic by Our Lady. It was born, therefore, in a private revelation. And we know that such revelations are abhorred by the enemies of the Church – internal and external. Although it came from a private revelation, the praying of the Rosary was extended to the entire Catholic Church, and was considered by St. Louis Grignion de Montfort as the characteristic devotion of predestined souls. Read More »

IN an excellent VFR entry from 2007, Lawrence Auster addressed the question, “Is it wrong for me to talk about race?” He went on to explain the difference between a race reductionist and someone who believes race is a “constituent element” of culture.

By the way, the beginning of that entry includes a reader’s comment that contains several minor grammatical errors. That is unusual. Mr. Auster, who died in March, spent many hours correcting even the most minor of grammatical mistakes in comments submitted to his blog and had devised a unique and complicated system of Microsoft Word macros for quickly fixing common errors and style irregularities, such as punctuation marks outside of quotation marks. It was an awe-inspiring system, a writer’s wrench set for fixing anything minor.

That entry begins: Read More »

JOHN G. writes:

Thank you for posting the link recently to the article by Susan Faludi on “The Madness of Shulamith Firestone.” Although painful reading, it was very informative. As you said, it is startling to realize how the most radical of the feminists has seen her vision of an androgynous “Brave New World” realized.

What was also most telling about the piece was the fact that Firestone’s life — as miserable and futile and excruciating as it was — actually was typical of what happened to so many other feminist leaders. By their own admission, many of them suffered from similar sorts of psychoses. At a memorial service, the very famous feminist pioneer Kate Millet read a passage from Firestone’s memoir of her descent into madness: Read More »

AS predicted in a recent post, Gov. Jerry Brown has signed into law a bill that will allow children to have more than two legally recognized parents. Those who said homosexual “marriage” wouldn’t lead to more radical innovations have been quickly proven wrong. According to The Los Angeles Times:

Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Friday that will allow children in California to have more than two legal parents, a measure opposed by some conservative groups as an attack on the traditional family. Read More »

THE former Celtics basketball star Bob Cousy reflected recently on his marriage of 63 years. His description of how his marriage was better when he and his wife, Missie, were old and of how he cared for his wife for ten years while she was suffering from dementia is sweet and moving. Missie died in September.

Notice, however, this statement:

“I was busy playing a child’s game,” Cousy said last week, sitting in the living room with daughters Marie and Ticia. “I thought putting a ball in a hole was important. Looking back, I should have participated more in the lives of my family. But my girls were in the best possible loving hands.”

Actually, Cousy wasn’t just busy playing a child’s game. He was involved in a demanding, competitive sport and he was supporting his family by pursuing excellence in that sport.

Cousy said these words in a vulnerable state of mourning, so my point is not to criticize him but to note how familiar this lack of appreciation of the male provider is. A man who is working hard and cannot be home much is often believed to have failed his family while at the same time his wife and children flourish because of his hard work. This view is common. It is part of the general, pervasive effort to destroy the sort of loyalty exemplified by this couple.

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MY first thought on seeing images two weeks ago of the Kenyan military police who responded to the jihadist massacre at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi was that these men were not real soldiers. They looked like children playing a military game. They wore dazed expressions under helmets that appeared too big. Their assault weapons seemed unwieldy and out of place in their hands. It was almost touching how ill-suited they seemed to a disciplined military operation of any kind.

It turns out that my intuitions were correct. The soldiers, it is now believed, behaved like naughty children in the mall. According to The New York Times:

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THE Great Catholic Love Fest that began with Vatican II has culminated in the bombastic, pseudo-humble love-talk of Pope Francis. Vatican II was a sort of Woodstock for modernist theologians and Pope Francis was nurtured in its atmosphere. Every day, it seems, he leaves smoking ruins around him.

The blogger Mundabor says divine justice is at work:

Understandably, many good Catholics are now praying every day that the Lord may, in His Mercy, free us from Francis, the Scourge of Catholicism. They rightly reflect that due to the unique position of this man, as I write this on the morning of the 3 October 2013 it is fair to say no one else on the entire planet is making – unwittingly, I hope – the work of the Devil as effectively and as destructively as this man. Read More »

ALEX writes:

While Nancy Verhelst’s plight was indeed horrible, she did do her share of damage to the remnants of normal society. Since she wanted to die, why didn’t she, say, jump from a roof? Instead, she made her very death a strike against normalcy, against decency. She made her own death a further step in cramming depravity down the normal people’s throats. Read More »

FROM The New York Times:

President Obama said in an interview on Wednesday that he had been “hugely impressed” with Pope Francis, “not because of any particular issue” but because he seemed to be “thinking about how to embrace people as opposed to push them away.”

“He seems somebody who lives out the teachings of Christ. Incredible humility, incredible sense of empathy to the least of these, to the poor,” the president said in an interview on CNBC. “He’s also somebody who’s, I think, first and foremost, thinking about how to embrace people as opposed to push them away. How to find what’s good in them as opposed to condemn them.”

We can assume the socialist pontiff is hugely impressed that the socialist president is hugely impressed.

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St. Michael and the Devil by Raffaello Sanzio, 1518

(Prayer to St. Michael)

Saint Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle;
be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray:
and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host,
by the power of God,
thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits
who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.
Amen.

THE CASE of Nancy Verhelst is one more horror story that is all too true.

First Belgian doctors consented to Verhelst’s delusional desire to be a man. They treated her with synthetic hormones; cut off her breasts and constructed phony male genitalia. Verhelst, 44, apparently realized she was the creature of a  Frankenstein-like hoax. A Belgian doctor then consented to her desire to end her life and killed her by lethal injection in a hospital.

It’s all legal in Belgium, where someone who attests to psychological suffering can be put to death by doctors.

Now after all this, journalists reporting on Verhelst’s case refer to her as “Nathan,” her chosen male name. Even when she is dead, the world plays along with this woman’s disastrous confusion and defiance of nature. She was surrounded by lies, in life and in death. First she was told she had no immutable nature. Then she was told she had no immutable soul.

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“Proselytism is solemn nonsense, it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us. Sometimes after a meeting I want to arrange another one because new ideas are born and I discover new needs. This is important: to get to know people, listen, expand the circle of ideas. The world is crisscrossed by roads that come closer together and move apart, but the important thing is that they lead towards the Good.”

— Pope Francis, in an interview with avowed atheist Eugenio Scalfari, La Repubblica, Oct. 1, 2013

Below are astute Catholic commentators poised to respond to the interview. They will say he didn’t really say what he said.

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