A DELUGE of words has burst from the marauders in Rome.

You can get a taste of it in the “National Synthesis of the People of God in the United States of America for the Diocesan Phase of the 2021-2023 Synod.”

It’s a synthesizing synod on synodality for the synodally synodal. Or is it a synthesizing synod for synodal synodality? Only the synodal can say.

Socrates died rather than face tricks of language like those emanating from the sinfully synthesizing Synod of Apostasy. The ancient Greeks with an affinity for reality hated this kind of thing. Indeed, death seems like a picnic by comparison.

Failing businesses often resort to focus groups to tell them what they are doing wrong. The participants in focus groups haven’t given the slightest thought to the company’s problems. But the company listens reverently to their every half-baked observation and then compiles them in a formal report.

Soon the failing business is the bankrupt business.

So it is with the synodal synod. So it is with its “Listening Church.”

The Listening Church listens to the “People of God” but not God. Read More »

Jayant Bhandari, an Indian immigrant to Canada, reflects on the effects of immigration now that 26 percent of the country is first-generation immigrants:

Did I leave India because of its utterly venal and oppressive government? Not really. They [sic] are utterly stupid, and bribes take care of everything. But the character of the government is a symptom of the underlying society. It was the Indian society that I ran away from, which has no concept of honor, integrity, moral values, rationality, or interest in anything except the material, which is money and sex.

More precisely, I ran away from Indians.

With time, the institutions the British left behind have been hallowed out in India, and the civilizational constraints that they had imposed have fallen apart. With time, India is bound to become increasingly barbaric and savage. Not because of so much because of the Indian government but because of Indians.

India provides 27% of Canada’s new immigrants. Most other immigrants come from other Third World hellholes and have similar cultural backgrounds, one rooted in materialism and the absence of civilizational constraints and moral values.

Every Indian city today has at least one high-rise building devoted to housing agencies that help people immigrate to Canada, most offering help creating fake documents or getting admission to colleges structured not for education but for assisting people to stay in Canada long enough to become citizens.

Crazy, isn’t it, that Canada has given itself away to those who faked documents? So much for the much-touted skilled-class immigrants!

Lullaby and good night,
with roses bedight,
With lilies o’er spread
is baby’s wee bed.
Lay thee down now and rest,
may thy slumber be blessed.
Lay thee down now and rest,
may thy slumber be blessed.

Lullaby and good night,
thy mother’s delight.
Bright angels beside
my darling abide.
They will guard thee at rest,
thou shalt wake on my breast.
They will guard thee at rest,
thou shalt wake on my breast.

Guardian Angel, Bernardo Strozzi

FROM “The Twelve Works of our Guardian Angel” by St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, OFM, Doctor of the Church:

According to Sacred Scripture there are twelve works of charity which our guardian Angel does for us.

THE FIRST is to rebuke us for our faults. According to the Book of Judges, chapter 2, verse 1: The Angel of the Lord ascends from Galgala to the place of those weeping and says: I have lead you forth from the land of Egypt . . . And you have not heard my voice.

THE SECOND is to absolve us from the bonds of our sins. According to Book of Acts, chapter 12, verse 7: The Angel stood by . . . and the chains fell from his hands; yet this must be understood as disposing this to happen.

THE THIRD is to take away from us those things impeding our progress in goodness, which is signified in the Book of Exodus, chapter 12, verse 12: where the Angel struck the first born of Egypt.

THE FOURTH is to constrain those demons afflicting us, according the Book of Tobias, chapter 12, verse 3: “He chased the demon from my wife”, says Tobias of the Archangel St. Raphael.

THE FIFTH is to teach us, according to the Book of Daniel, chapter 9, verse 22: Now I have entered, to teach you, and so that you might understand. Read More »

“COLONEL Robert L. Stirm was a US airforce pilot who was taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese communists in 1967. He was held captive and tortured for over five years until his release in 1973. His reunion with his family is the subject of the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo Burst of Joy, which you see [above]. Odd, then, that I have highlighted the face of his wife, Loretta.

“While this reunion should have been a moment of unbridled joy, it was not for Colonel Stirm, who had received a letter from his wife three days prior, informing him that she wanted a divorce. Within a year of his capture, Loretta began a series of affairs. Within days of the Colonel’s return to US soil, she took his two youngest children, his house, car and 40% of his future pension for life. The Colonel challenged this in court, but lost. He had to go live with his mother and provide for his two older children.

“I think this story deserves to be constantly retold as a case study in human betrayal and an early example of how the court system in the US and wider West treats men like dirt – even heroes who have fought and suffered for their country.”

— Way of the World Read More »

THOU Prince of the angelic Hosts,
I lift my heart to thee.
And call to mind with grateful soul
Thy wondrous victory.

Chorus: Oh first of all the mighty Seven,
Before thy throne we bow,
And worship thee amidst the light
That streameth from thy brow.

For when dark Satan and his hosts
Rebelled against our Lord,
Thy mighty war-cry pierced the dark:
Who is like God adored? Read More »

 

Spirit of Autumn, George Inness, 1891

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.

ACCORDING to VAERS, the federal database for vaccine injuries and deaths, girls as young as six have experienced menstrual bleeding after mRNA vaccination.

Dr. William Makis looks into the widespread phenomenon of women and girls experiencing abnormal bleeding and continues his daily coverage of the casualties. His work is not a condemnation or attack against those who have been vaxxed. Not all: it is a defense of them. His site is, however, aimed at those who are still arrogantly and cruelly promoting these drugs despite the extensively-documented harms.

NOTE: Dr. Makis also has recommended cures for spike protein effects on his Substack — all of them natural and easily obtainable.

Jan Cossiers – Prometheus Carrying Fire (detail)

“IF WE refer to idealism as a system of thought that proclaims the primacy of the intelligence over reality, the world in which we live today is an idealist world. It is built by intellectuals with tremendous reinforcements of abstractions, and it is superimposed on the world of experience which is constantly put in doubt.

“Our twentieth century world is so minimally materialist that it is a construction of the mind, from one side to the other, right down to its moral turpitude and its eroticism. Despite its pretensions and bluster, Marxism is not in any way materialist. It is an idea projected onto society in order to destroy it, knead it into dust, blend it into a mushy and obedient paste, and impose on it a form that is matured for a long time in a mind that is sequestered into itself, far from reality. It is all a lie, right down to the terms it decks itself out in, “dialectical materialism” or “scientific materialism.” Its idealism bursts out in its hate of all divine and human reality, in its desire to subjugate nature to its will to power, and in the extraordinary waste of material resources in which it engages to maintain its ideological orthodoxy in the countries where it has installed itself. Our world, in the so-called free democracies, is no longer materialist. It underwent transformations in its innermost depths brought about by the mind of modern man. Matter no longer appeared as its own reality. It is always transformed there by human contrivance.

“‘The illustrated prelate,” whose conversation with one of his disciples is recounted by Maurras, says it well:

‘Young man, you believe that materialism is the great error of the moment. False! It’s idealism.”
‘Why?’
‘It lies the most. Materialists are rightfully looked down upon. Because they are swine. But we can see them as such. We do not always see what social or political idealists are: Fellows who let everyone see their hearts, which are huge, and who pound their own chests while making a lot of noise, in order to put the world to flames in order to make it better.’

“With its sublime false airs, its pharisaism, its blissful elevation of thought and heart, and its hypocrisy, which is so deep that it is not self-aware, the idealism, for which modern intelligence is dying is without doubt the greatest sin of the mind.”

— Marcel de Corte, Intelligence in Danger of Death; transl. Brian Welter (Arouca Press, 2023), pp. 15-16

Autumn Colors, Edwin Wilkins Waite

Autumnal Sonnet
— William Allingham

Now Autumn’s fire burns slowly along the woods,
And day by day the dead leaves fall and melt,
And night by night the monitory blast
Wails in the key-hold, telling how it pass’d
O’er empty fields, or upland solitudes,
Or grim wide wave; and now the power is felt
Of melancholy, tenderer in its moods
Than any joy indulgent summer dealt.
Dear friends, together in the glimmering eve,
Pensive and glad, with tones that recognise
The soft invisible dew in each one’s eyes,
It may be, somewhat thus we shall have leave
To walk with memory,–when distant lies
Poor Earth, where we were wont to live and grieve.

Prometheus Brings Fire by Heinrich Friedrich Füger

THE quaint notion that the intellectual is an enlightened guru leading the masses out of darkness cannot be seriously maintained. In the modern world, the intellectual is often a destroyer. His alienation from the ordinary person grows more and more pronounced.

At the root of their estrangement is this: the ordinary person needs something the intellectual doesn’t need.

He needs reality.

Falsehood and fantasies are, for one, expensive. Tell the plumber or the store clerk that reality is a figment of his imagination, a mere product of his thoughts; that there is no transcendent God and no absolute morality; that the past was a series of mistakes and cruel tyranny, and the plumber or store clerk will quickly run up an onerous bill. He can’t really afford the divorces, the drugs, the therapists and the purposelessness.

The intellectual supported by a foundation, a university, or a publisher, on the other hand, may actually be paid to be irrational. He can afford to abandon common sense. He can afford to entertain utopia. His mental work may also so satisfy that the simple pleasures of stability and routine lose their savor. He doesn’t need them to the same extent as the common man and he has more self-control anyway. Ideas, disconnected from reality, are the opiate of intellectuals.

The examples of intellectual destroyers are legion. Let me offer just one.

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, head of the gender clinic of at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, is ostensibly a medical doctor but her primary field is in ideas. It is here she has had her greatest impact. Ideas motivate and drive her.

When a 12-year-old boy feels he would be happier if he was a 12-year-old girl then she helps him embark on a long road of expensive and painful medical procedures. What the boy feels must become physical reality. According to Olson-Kennedy her work is a “congregation [sic] of science and human rights and social justice and medicine.” Her patients are “chasing authenticity” and what she gives them is nothing less than a “second birth.”

Dr. Olson-Kennedy is a real life version of Victor Frankenstein, the character in Mary Shelley’s novel of the same name.

Frankenstein was also an intellectual who got carried away. At a university in Germany, the fictional scientist immersed himself in his studies of chemistry. He developed a secret technique for creating life from inert matter. Things did not go well. The human simulation he created ended up killing what he valued even more than science: his young bride.

Olson-Kennedy says quite openly that she is creating life.

Parents, the doctor contends, are not competent to make decisions on this issue. She (and her “husband”) tell parents that if they do not accede to their wishes for their children, their offspring will commit suicide. (See minute 12:45 in this interview.) The problem with parents, according to Olson-Kennedy and their like, is that they are too caught up in reality. In the mind of an intellectual unbound, the ordinary person just can’t past what is and always has been.

According to Olson-Kennedy, if an adolescent girl who wants to be a boy has “chest surgery” and later regrets her decision, it’s no problem. She can just “go and get them.” Excuse my bluntness, but for the ordinary person a decent pair of fake breasts is prohibitively expensive, not to mention a sad substitute.

The intellectual’s fantasies are oh-so costly.

Frankenstein was, according to Shelley, a ‘modern Prometheus.” Indeed the Greek god was another “Intellectual as Destroyer,” so enamored of ideas that he stole forbidden fire from Mount Olympus. The Promethean fire will ever tantalize the man or woman of mental gifts. Today, it is their many victims who are pinned to the rock.

FROM ThinkingWest:

Transgender ideology stems from the dualist philosophy of the gnostics. In transgenderism, a person’s feelings and beliefs about their identity reveal their “true” self, while the physical reality of their genitals or hormones can be false. If a person believes themselves to be a female despite having male reproductive organs, the will wins out, not the material reality. Whether the adherents understand or not, they are promoting a dualist interpretation of the cosmos. There is the spiritual “real” (divine) world of the mind which cannot be wrong, and then there is the physical (fallen) world of material, which can be mistaken if it conflicts with the reality created in the mind.

Like its gnostic roots, transgender ideology is in direct opposition to Christian beliefs, which firmly state that mankind was created by God as a union between spirit and body. Though subordinate to the spirit, the body is intrinsic to a person’s identity, hence the importance of the “resurrection of the body” referenced in the Apostle’s Creed. The Creed affirms the goodness of God’s physical creation and rejects the idea that salvation is gnosis or any other merely esoteric transformation or enlightenment.

Read more. Read More »

“TREMBLE, earth, and you who proclaim yourselves as serving Jesus Christ and who, on the inside, only adore yourselves, tremble, for God will hand you over to His enemy because the holy places are in the state of corruption.”

— Our Lady of La Salette, 1846 

FROM “Black People and Morality” by Richard Knight:

In the nineteenth century, the explorer Richard Lander wrote that Africans did not appear to have the least affection for their children: “A parent will sell his child for the merest trifle”.[13] Sir William Harris wrote that Africans would sell their children for the sordid love of gain.[14] “So little do they care for their offspring”, wrote John Duncan, “that many offered to sell me any of their sons or daughters as slaves”.[15] All over Africa, according to Mungo Park, parents might sell their children.[16] Strangely enough, Herbert Ward found that the cannibals of the Congo showed more affection for their children than did the non-cannibals.[17] Only among the cannibals did he ever see a father kiss his child.

Black people still show less love for their children than they might do, as seen in the fact that social services departments are always short of suitable Black foster-parents for Black youngsters. The race produces more neglected or mistreated children than it will take. We sometimes hear of cases like that of Victoria Climbié, whose great-aunt took her in to increase the welfare payments she would receive. She ended up torturing the six-year-old to death.

If John Duncan saw little affection between Black parents and their children, he saw no more between Black adults, nor did Herbert Ward ever witness “any display of tenderness betwixt man and wife”.[18] The naturalist Samuel Baker concluded that there was no such thing as love in Africa: “the feeling is not understood”.[19] One rarely sees Black couples holding hands today. Read More »