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.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

“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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STEVEN B. writes:

I’d like to run something by you if I may.

I’ve been thinking heavily about interracial marriage. I found myself not opposed to it because I couldn’t find what I considered an objective reason to preserve one’s race (in my case, the white race). But then I thought, “What ‘objective reason’ is there to protect one’s family?” All of mankind agrees that one’s family is to be protected, but yet I couldn’t think of a ‘rational’ reason for it. Read More »

TRUTH, beauty and goodness are intimately connected. A culture that upholds lies about existence cannot be beautiful.

At her website, Reclaiming Beauty, Kidist Paulos Asrat explains some of her ideas on the subject.

B.E. writes:

Well, well, well, is it that time of year already? Here we are in the middle of “Hispanic Heritage Month,” so it’s time to celebrate America’s Hispanic heritage!

We have to go back to the beginning, of course, and remember the Hispanic voyagers on the Mayflower, of whom there were … oh. Zero.

Well, then, let’s commemorate those brave Hispanics who fought, and sometimes died, for the fledgling United States, good men like … oh, wait. There weren’t any Hispanic heroes of the Revolution, no Hispanic Founding Fathers. Read More »

THE  fashion designer Rick Owens recruited black American college students who are members of step teams to exhibit some of his 2014 collection in Paris. According to Robin Givhan of New York magazine, Owens’s aesthetic is “rooted in nontraditional beauty, confidence, and power.” Gee, that’s strange. It looks to me more like homicidal rage than “confidence;” more like primitive and Satanic ugliness than “nontraditional beauty,” but then I’m not marinated in chic hideousness and revolutionary nihilism every day of the week as Givhan is.

Even in the world of haute couture, blacks are incited to hatred. Givhan, who is black, mindlessly praises the “energy” of the show. And who would dare to correct her? Givhan writes:

From the first models who strode out to thumping drumbeats, the Rick Owens spring 2014 presentation projected an energy not typical on a Paris runway, or any other in recent memory. Standing mostly in silhouette on high scaffolding with a pair of unadorned staircases, the models pounded their chests with a synchronized audacity, then descended the stairs and moved into the vast open performance space en masse, with scowling expressions of determination and ferocity. They twisted and rocked to the beat, throwing their heads back, their arms moving in sharp, angular gestures and their legs rising up in back kicks, side kicks, and deep forward lunges.

Owens says the purpose of the show was to say (something not very nice and unprintable) to conventional beauty. The idea that this is somehow an original stance would be laughable if Owens was just one more black-clad, grungy, tattooed art student. But he is a top designer.

Read More »

DIANA writes:

In September 2012, Jerry Brown vetoed the bill (introduced by homosexual legislator Mark Leno) to legalize the status of more than two parents per child. Governor Brown didn’t do that because he was opposed to it. He vetoed the bill because its passage came in the middle of an especially fraught period, in which the Defense of Marriage Act was being considered. He didn’t want to rock the boat by saying to people, in effect, “Listen up, here are the consequences of same-sex “marriage.” This is the next step in the road to perdition.” Smart move on his part.

Prediction: in two years or less, the bill will come up, it will pass, and children in California will be able to enjoy the benefits of three, four and who knows how many “moms” and “dads.” And parts of the rest of the country will follow. Other parts will not, they will be demonized as “bigots,” and yadda yadda. It’s all so familiar by now. Read More »