Such are the inexhaustible riches of the spirit that they can be the property of all and yet satisfy the desires of each. Indeed, only then do we possess a truth completely when we teach it to others, when we make others share our contemplation; only then do we truly love a virtue when we wish others to love it also; only then do we wholly love God when we desire to make Him loved by all. Give money away, or spend it, and it is no longer yours. But give God to others, and you possess Him more fully for yourself. We may go even further and say that, if we desired only one soul to be deprived of Him, if we excluded only one soul -- even the soul of one who persecutes and calumniates us -- from our own love, then God Himself would be lost to us. --- Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Three Ways in the Spiritual Life
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Paradise Inc., in Plant City, Fla., is the nation’s largest producer of candied fruit and peels.
JANE S. writes:
This is the season when my mother and I undertake our annual ritual of producing one of the most hated things on earth: fruitcake. If you’ve ever looked at that luridly colored candied fruit in the stores and wondered “who buys that stuff?”—it’s us. The only time I have ever had a supermarket clerk make wisecracks about my groceries, it was when I was buying ingredients to make fruitcake. Fruitcake-hatred is passed down as a family tradition. People are taught to hate it even if they’ve never tried it.
Fruitcake is so ancient, its origins are unclear. There are stories that the Egyptians and Sumerians packed it away in tombs for people to enjoy in the next world. Roman soldiers are said to have carried fruitcake on military campaigns and medieval knights took fruitcake along on Crusades. One wonders how something so hated has managed to survive for such a long time. (more…)
Last week, we buried the choir director in our small church cemetery in northern Virginia. For the funeral Mass, which was said in the Traditional Latin Rite, there was not an empty seat in our church, and not too many dry eyes either as the pastor gave his homily praising this magnificent woman and mother who died unexpectedly one month after her 50th birthday. She left eight children, ranging in ages from seven to 25.
I had known Cheryl Kraus for the 17 years that my wife and I have attended St. Athanasius Church, during which time she directed the choir, but she was far more than that. She was a veritable force of God’s Nature. (more…)
HERE’Sa good piece by Benny Peiser of The Spectator. Peiser writes:
According to news reports, Typhoon Haiyan, which struck the Philippines a few days ago, is now overshadowing the UN climate summit in Warsaw. Some delegates and climate campaigners have been quick to suggest that global warming was to blame for this disaster.
AT Reclaiming Beauty, Kidist Paulos Asrat writes in an entry about Todd Park that the image that pops up the most frequently when googling Obamacare, or Affordable Care Act, is the one above. She writes: I don't understand the juxtaposition of the young Asian woman with the older one, which clearly shows a mother and a daughter. Why not the father as well, or a husband for the younger woman? Why two generations of Asian women? Still, this shows that Asians have become a strong participants in government-initiated programs. This deflates the myth of the financially secure, independent minded Asian, and exposes them as entitlement seekers. Asian-Americans happen to be the highest-earning group in the U.S., out-earning whites, and they generally place enormous emphasis on family. A perfect fit for Republicans, no? No. Asians voted for Obama by 73-26 [in the 2012 elections]; they were more Democratic than Hispanics. [Source: Asian Voters Send a Message to Republicans]
WHAT is the normal person’s reaction to a devastating storm in a distant country, a storm that has swept thousands of helpless people out to sea and flattened hundreds of thousands of homes? The normal person prays for the comfort of the afflicted. The normal person sends a check to a relief organization. The normal person reflects on the fragility of life and the vanity of all things.
But, when a major storm devastates a region, as Typhoon Haiyan has done in the Philippines, the liberal views the catastrophe in light of his political agenda. The storm must be the result of evil Westerners who drive cars. Never mind that this past hurricane season in the Atlantic was uneventful. The liberal never proclaims when storms aren’t happening that catastrophic scenarios related to global warming have been disproved. For the liberal, mankind and life itself are perfectible. Thus even storms are someone’s fault. Curiously, he does not ever seem to entertain the possibility that some storms may be more devastating than they need be because of corrupt or inept officials who allow overbuilding in fragile zones.
Here is a risks assessment map put out by the UN in 2011 which stated that Tacloban, the city hit especially hard by Haiyan, had a 10 percent chance of just such a storm in the next ten years.
Haiyan is the fifth Category 5 storm (the top category) on Earth so far in 2013, Masters says. The global average since 2000 has been 4.4 Category 5s per year, and the record was set in 1997 with 12 of them. September’s massive assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found only “low confidence” that intense tropical cyclone activity had increased measurably since 1950.
Also:
The IPCC found that, “more likely than not,” global warming will drive an increase in intense tropical cyclone activity in the western North Pacific and North Atlantic by late in this century.
The possibility of somewhat stronger storms is a serious concern and the moral necessity of reducing man-made emissions is indisputable, but one must bear in mind the size and complexity of the atmosphere and the limits of human power.
MY Protestant brethren have been roughed up here in recent days. I realize this leads nowhere and we must strive for unthinking, ecumenical harmony. I will try to behave. I promise I will, but before I do, I would just like to offer indisputable proof of a few points that have been made in favor of the Church. In this photo of the Man Who Would Be Pope, we see all the glory, majesty and infallibility of the Catholic Revelation. If you need help finding a Catholic church near you, just let me know.
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IN commemoration of Veterans Day, here is a repost of a World War I letter from my maternal grandfather, who volunteered to serve with the British medical corps. My grandfather died years later from injuries sustained in the war.
Dearest Mother,
I happened to see in the Paris paper that Sunday, the 12th is Mother’s Day and that we might celebrate by writing to our Mothers, such letters to receive special consideration in the mails. So these are my thoughts to you Mother mine.
You must know it is not necessary for me to have a special day in which to remember you, for in my thoughts every day is Mother’s Day and many are the spaces of the day and the restless moments of the night that I think of Mother and of home and how much I wish I could see them both. (more…)
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THIS month, Ukrainians will observe the 80th anniversary of the Holodomor, the famine and destruction imposed by the Communists on the independent farmers of the Soviet Ukraine. The famine and the many simultaneous deportations of farmers resulted in an estimated 10 million deaths in a once flourishing agricultural region that was known as the breadbasket of Europe. According to a website run by the Connecticut Holodomor Awareness Committee:
In Soviet Ukraine, of course, the Holodomor was kept out of official discourse until the late 1980’s, shortly before Ukraine won its independence in 1991. With the fall of the Soviet Union, previously inaccessible archives, as well as the long suppressed oral testimony of Holodomor survivors living in Ukraine, have yielded massive evidence offering incontrovertible proof of Ukraine’s tragic famine genocide of the 1930’s.
On November 28th 2006, the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament of Ukraine) passed a decree defining the Holodomor as a deliberate Act of Genocide. Although the Russian government continues to call Ukraine’s depiction of the famine a “one-sided falsification of history,” it is recognized as genocide by approximately two dozen nations, and is now the focus of considerable international research and documentation.
There are a number of moving stories and live links at the BBC website of the commemoration of the 95th anniversary of the Great War armistice. All of Britain stops to observe two minutes of silence at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. This and their practice of wearing poppies were abandoned long ago in our country.
The images brought tears to my eyes. This is perhaps the most traditional public ritual still practiced.
On my visits long ago to Harrow and Winchester School, as on public memorials in Britain, I noted how the World War II dead were an appendage to the far greater number of dead from the First World War, or the Great War.
VIRTUALLY every week another outrageous murder is committed by American policemen who kill at the slightest provocation, as in the case of Jonathan Ferrell. This week, 19-year-old Tyler Comstock was shot dead when he fled in a pickup truck to the campus of Iowa State University after a family dispute.
WHEN discussing matters of faith with Catholics, Protestants often attest to their superior devotion to and understanding of the Bible. It is unquestionable that the average Protestant spends more time reading, studying and memorizing the Bible than the average Catholic. Unfortunately, this reading is selective and Protestants of various sects routinely deny things that are said in the Bible. Thus the true Catholic, though he reads the Bible less, possesses a superior understanding of the Bible. This is because he is not only guided by what the Bible actually says, he is guided by the deposit of faith and more than 2,000 years of authoritative interpretation of the Bible. The Bible refutes major beliefs held by Bible-reading Protestants:
The Bible teaches that man is not justified by faith alone.
The Bible teaches Mary’s Immaculate Conception, Perpetual Virginity and Assumption into Heaven; and the importance of venerating Mary.
TYPHOON HAIYAN, in the Philippines, is one of the strongest storms ever recorded to hit landfall. It is creating sustained winds of up to 195 miles per hour.
I wanted to comment on your post “Are All Religions ‘True?'” because it is something I have been thinking about a lot recently. I regularly interact with white liberals of the “spiritual, but not religious” variety and they all tend to think that the major religions are interchangeable and equal.
Not only is this view incoherent, it displays a breathtaking hubris which masquerades as humility. It is incoherent because it violates logic at the most rudimentary level: it maintains that contradictory propositions can be true simultaneously. The liberal refuses to face up to fact that either Jesus is God incarnate or he isn’t; either Muhammad is God’s prophet or he isn’t; either the soul will face divine judgment after death or it won’t; either the extirpation of all desire is highest goal of spiritual enlightenment or it isn’t. The liberal refuses to face this because, once these stark alternatives are seriously acknowledged, one is put into the uncomfortable position of having to make an existential choice where the possibility of error is real and the consequences of error are of the utmost gravity. (more…)
WHENEVER I read of Westerners converting to Islam, I am not particularly surprised. These conversions are the result of proximity to Muslims, but also, I believe, of the fact that Muslims hold to one very important truth that is stubbornly rejected by many Western believers. Muslims believe, or at least act as if they believe, that only one religion is true. In this, they are absolutely correct. Either one religion is true — and all other religions are false — or no religion is true. Muslims believe the former proposition.
In Islam, some Western secularists sense the clear and refreshing air of a certain honesty. They know, without perhaps being able to articulate it, that the ecumenical, “interfaith” movement that has swept the modern West is nonsense. Astute non-believers understandably have contempt for this opiate of the masses. Different religions hold to different propositions, even if they agree on some points. Both sides of a contradiction cannot be true. This is obvious even to a child.
Those who believe that all religions are partly true are sloppy thinkers or dangerous liars. “Interfaith-ism” is far more damaging than atheism. Most people are not inclined to atheism. Most people, indeed all people, are inclined to wanting God on their own terms.
Many so-called Catholics believe, for instance, that other religions are partly true and that Catholicism is fully true. This cannot logically be so. Either Catholicism is the one true faith, and other faiths are entirely false [as religions], or Catholicism is wholly false. The Catholic Church states that salvation can only be attained through the Church. But Lutherans implicitly believe that salvation can only be attained through the Lutheran Church. They just don’t state it openly.
Here is a good analysis from the website Novus Ordo Watch. For non-Catholic readers, simply replace whatever their own religion is with the reference to Catholicism to arrive at the basic philosophical conclusion that only one religion is true or none are true: (more…)
