LAWRENCE AUSTER, traditionalist writer and culture critic, was buried by friends and family on Tuesday, April 2 in Pennsylvania.
His body was carried at 11:30 a.m. into the vestibule of the Holy Cross Catholic Church in Mount Airy in a simple oak coffin made by Trappist monks in Iowa, a fitting enclosure for a man who lived as austerely as a monk, without many of the basics of modern life, such as cell phone, car or cable television. The church was just two miles from the summer home of one of Mr. Auster’s fondest heroes, George Washington, a figure who always inspired him.
In the foyer, his remains were blessed for the first time. Accompanied by a quiet reverence — a decision was made to forgo music — the coffin was taken by his friends to the front of the stone Gothic church. Easter lilies decorated the main marble altar. Large baskets of snapdragons, white chrysanthemums and other flowers flanked the casket. Artificial illumination of the altar and the sunlight that filtered through the stained-glass windows evoked the significance of the great feast that gives the Church its meaning. The stone walls and wooden beams, dramatically carved with the faces of angels and their wings, enhanced the prayerful atmosphere.
“He is not here: for He is risen, as He said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay.” Matthew 28:6
The Resurrection leads us to an ever-present transcendence and perfect freedom. Earthly “freedom” is not what traditionalists and conservatives should be supporting. Freedom as the primary agenda inevitably morphs into license and narcissism.
What we must champion instead is ordered liberty, i.e., the pursuit of optimality. We live in the reality of an imperfect world, where there are always trade-offs, personal choices, responsibilities, and results. But just like Satan himself, leftists tempt the ignorant and naïve with delusions of pure autonomy. “Demand your rights” they insist, “and you shall be free.” Read More »
In anticipation of Easter, I sent this photo and text to Lawrence Auster earlier this month:
In the Easter spirit, here is a photo of the true Easter Lily, or Madonna Lily, Lilium candidum. This is not the “Easter Lily” of commerce (Lilium japonicum) that is sold in supermarkets at this time. It is a more refined and elegant plant altogether and ranges from the Holy Land to the Balkans. It is not rare in gardens but neither is it seen commonly. The fragrance is heavenly. This flower symbolizes purity for Roman Catholics.
Lawrence Auster, March 18, 2013, standing in front of my family's home
MY ENTRY on the death of Lawrence Auster can be found here at VFR. I am also posting it in its entirety below:
LAWRENCE AUSTER: JANUARY 26, 1949 – MARCH 29, 2013
Lawrence Auster died today at 3:56 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time, at a hospice in West Chester, Pennsylvania. His death came after more than a week of rapidly worsening distress and physical collapse caused by the pancreatic cancer he endured for almost three years.
On Monday evening, after arriving at the hospice in the late afternoon, Mr. Auster read and responded to a few emails. He then closed his battered and medicine-stained Lenovo laptop for the last time. “That’s enough for now,” he said, holding his hands over the computer as if sated by an unfinished meal.
He did not expect that to be the last. Read More »
I’ve been thinking about the story of King Solomon and the two women who brought a baby before him and were seeking judgment. While one woman thought it was perfectly fair to split the baby in two, the other would rather give the baby up entirely before she saw any harm done to it. I see a shocking parallel in America today. Read More »
The clock struck 10:01 A.M. on the clock that sits above the chair of the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday, and the Clerk intoned, “All rise,” and with those words the nine Justices of the Court filed into their respective seats that are bracketed by four Doric granite pillars. There was not an empty seat to be found in the Court, for this case had prompted widespread attention not only in the U.S., but from media outlets all over the world.
IN THE first of two articles at Tradition in Action, Dr. Carol Byrne takes an interesting look at Giorgio La Pira, the charismatic Italian politician, twice mayor of Florence, who is formally being considered for canonization by the Catholic Church. She writes:
Let us look at the teaching and example set by this “saint in politics” who is now being considered for formal canonization. Outwardly, La Pira presented himself as an extraordinarily pious Catholic. He attended Mass daily, read the Bible, lived for some years in a monastery cell and was often seen walking around Florence barefoot, having given his shoes, coat, umbrella and most of his salary to the poor. But his good works were accompanied by flamboyant and idiosyncratic gestures, (8) and inwardly he was not lacking in self-aggrandizing flights of fancy.
….
Here La Pira shows himself to be one of those millenarian impostors who throughout history have sought to mobilize the masses of the poor towards a communistic dream of a Golden Age where everyone would supposedly live together in harmony. When these utopian dreams are put into practice, however, they have always resulted in widespread mayhem and bloodshed.
A mentally confused man who has been medically altered to appear as a woman appeared before the New Jersey Senate, which is considering outlawing therapy for children and adolescents who want to overcome homosexual desires. As reported by Christopher Doyle at World Net Daily, the man lied about a therapy he never got. I’m so not surprised. What is shocking is that sane people would even pay attention to this disturbed individual.
The Daily Mail reports on the “enthronement” of the new Archbishop of Canterbury:
Amid a spectacular celebratory ceremony of African music and dance, former oil executive Justin Welby became the 105th Archbishop to preside over the world’s 77 million Anglicans. [JP: African music and dance has what to do with the Church of England? Is this the Church of Making Africans Happy now?]
AT Reclaiming Beauty, Thomas F. Bertonneau reflects on works by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst, two twentieth century composers who sought to preserve traditional English folk music. Alluding to this tradition, compositions such as Vaughan Williams’ famous score, The Lark Ascending, evoked the gentle splendor of the landscape of England:
… Vaughan Williams and Holst began to tramp the countryside in Somerset, Hampshire, Essex, East Anglia, and Norfolk, notebooks at ready, to collect and annotate the archaic song-tradition that they well knew was on the verge of extinction. These were the years from 1902 to 1905. In addition to their project of preserving the treasury of the traditional ballads, love songs, and lullabies, both men had the notion that English folksong could become the basis of a novel and truly English concert music. That music would be new because its basis would be more ancient than that of the Germanic conservatory-vocabulary employed by Stanford and his peers. Read More »
THE American media continue to provide scant news on the momentous developments in France, where opposition to the same-sex marriage law known as Taubira’s law has evolved into a mass resistance movement. OnSunday, the second “manif pour tous,” or march for all (a play on the slogan “mariage pour tous”), is scheduled to take place in Paris and, as Tiberge reports at Galliawatch, there is some possibility that the demonstrators will be banned from gathering on the Champs Elysées. According to Bloc Identitaire, the French nationalist group, the protesters will not give in. “Les Champs-Elysées appartiennent aux Français,” — the Champs Elysées belongs to the French.
The Catholic group Civitas has departed ways with the organizers and the tone of ‘la manif pour tous,” objecting to the showmanship and vulgarity of Frigide Barjot, the former comedienne who is the main organizer. Civitas is planning a separate march in April.
Protesters from Civitas
French Spring, a new website, supports the march and unflinching opposition to the redefinition of marriage. From the site, as translated by Tiberge:
What is at stake is our identity and the future of our freedoms, our traditions, the culture of our provinces and our country. France is a family of families. The land of our ancestors is the heritage of our children. We want to transmit to them, entirely, from father to son and from mother to daughter, as did all the generations that preceded us. We are all born of a father and a mother! It is written in history, it is natural!
This is terrific. Where else is the issue openly discussed in terms of national survival?
Also, nowhere else in the West have children’s interests been as eloquently and passionately defended as in France. In January, an interview with a 66-year-old lawyer, Jean-Dominique Bunel, appeared in Le Figaro and caused a sensation. Bunel was raised by lesbians. From English Manif’s translation of the interview:
I suffered from the indifference of adults to the intimate sufferings of children, starting with mine. In a world where their rights are each day rolled back, in truth, it is always the rights of adults that hold sway. I also suffered from the lack of a father, a daily presence, a character and a properly masculine example, some counterweight to the relationship of my mother to her lover. I was aware of it at a very early age. I lived that absence of a father, experienced it, as an amputation.”
“What I offer you is a testimonial. It is not equal in value to a poll.”
When one objects to him that many children live in such a state because of divorce, he rebuts: “Divorce does not deprive a child necessarily of its parents, who normally are given shared or alternate guardianship of the child. Especially, divorce does not replace the father with a second woman, exacerbating even more the affective imbalance, both emotional and structural, for the child. All psychiatrists ought to recognize that the latter does not depend on a woman the way it depends upon a man, and that the ideal for the child is that the two accompany each other in an equal, complementary way.
And to make things clear: “While I was a child and a teenager, I had absolutely no notion of all that and I naturally adored the two women who raised me alone and with courage. But I did not pose questions about the nature of their relationship,which I therefore did not figure out. My father, who had abandoned my mother when I was three, precisely due to the relation she was engaged in, was never around, notably when I needed him. Also I turned as much as possible to the men of my surroundings, who begged for an oversized and sometimes unhealthy place in my life.”
No comparable interview has received such prominent notice in the American press. This statement by Bunel is arresting:
“What I offer you is a testimonial. It is not equal in value to a poll.” [emphasis added]
Articles on same-sex “marriage” almost always report high numbers of people who support the idea in polls. But polls are as nothing compared to the lived experience of a single child.
ON THE occasion of her father’s illness, Lydia Sherman reflects on the value he and others of his generation have placed on privacy. She writes:
Privacy today is looked at as some kind of a flaw. The people born back in the 1920’s, as my parents were, kept certain things to themselves, and in my observation, it kept their children and those around them more polite and calm. Today, curiosity is considered bright and intelligent, which, to a point, it is, but it has to be used for the right things. Too much airing of personal things can create a very nervous society.
As I learn more about the heritage of these people, I realize why they were able to accomplish so much. Read More »
IN AN excellent essay titled, “The Futility of Liberalism and the Hope of Traditionalism,” at The Orthosphere, Alan Roebuck continues to elucidate the basic tenets of liberalism. He makes the important point that liberalism, properly understood, is the reigning state religion. He writes:
There is nothing improper in making this claim. Every society must have some sort of (at least unofficial) state religion because a religion is primarily a system of thought that describes reality, and leaders must always have a way of thinking to guide their decisions. Furthermore, the majority of the population needs to approve of the reasons the leaders give for their decisions, or at least to find those reasons tolerable. Therefore it is no insult to liberalism to call it a religion. On the contrary, this is to take it seriously. It is not its status as a religion that makes liberalism illegitimate; it is the specific doctrines of liberalism that make it a menace.
This Daily Mail article implies that today’s educated and competent woman has discovered how important it is to be a mother and stay home with the children. How arrogant to think that women today are the first to discover this truth.
AS HAS been widely reported, Pope Francis has rejected some of the traditional pomp of the papacy, including the red papal stole, the papal limousine and scarlet shoes, such as those worn by other popes for the last two centuries. Francis chose his well-worn black shoes instead for his first public appearance before journalists.
Pope Francis has made no statement on these choices, and we cannot know why he has made them.
I would like to comment, however, on the widely-held view that these gestures are deferential to the poor. It is a modern conceit that the poor are offended by majesty. Pomp and ceremony are not primarily for the rich. They are for the poor. Kings don’t need silk garments. They have everything. But the poor, who have nothing, benefit from outward displays of grandeur and magnificence, unless they are envious, in which case luxury reveals their own failings. Anyone can see a royal crown or a pair of papal shoes in a photo. The sight of such things costs nothing. They feed the craving for perfection. They satisfy the natural delight in beauty, constantly stymied in the flat and unvaried world of modern poverty.
For a person who has never seen anything beyond T-shirts, sneakers and denim, a pair of scarlet slippers may be a revelation, an invitation to a higher, invisible reality.
