ALAN writes:

On a night in November 1923, an ex-con pulled an armed robbery at a confectionary in north St. Louis. Or he tried to. But he encountered a little resistance. It made the front page of next day’s newspaper.

A married couple owned the store. The wife and her mother and two boys from the neighborhood were inside the store when the bandit walked in with his revolver and ordered the women to reach. “The boys, terrified, fled from the store,” a news account reported.

Then he began shooting. Provoked to anger, the wife pulled a revolver from beneath the counter and fired three shots. Her husband was in the back of the store. He heard everything, grabbed a revolver from a dresser, and waited quietly for the bandit to enter the room.  Then he opened fire at the ex-con and nailed him with three bullets. The bandit fled. The husband chased him up the street and gave him a merciless beating about the head and ears. Read More »

“MY brethren, there is no teacher, no preacher, no doctor, no apostle, so eloquent, so mighty, so convincing as death. What should we say of a man who had the gift, by a breath, or a word of his mouth, of driving away the mental delusions and follies of all the maniacs and lunatics in the world, or of giving sight to all the blind, or of flooding with knowledge and learning the minds of all the ignorant? Certainly we should say that he had a great gift. But the gift of death is greater.

… [M]any or great, blameable or innocent, fatal or excusable, of whatever kind or of whatever degree, all delusions will go then. The sinner who has so clung to the inventions of his passions or his interest that he has persuaded himself to live a bad life in the midst of the greatest light and the highest privileges, will doubt no more then.”

— Henry James Coleridge, The Return of the King: Discourses on the Latter Days, 1894

“THE American middle class has now been liquidated, except for a few remnants that are found here and there and are tolerated because they have no vestige of political power and will soon disappear anyway. A middle class can be based only on property — on the secure possession of real property of which a man can be divested only by his own folly. A middle class cannot be formed of comparatively well-paid proletarians who may have a theoretical equity in a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar house they are “buying” on a thirty-five year mortgage, and in a fifteen-thousand-dollar automobile for which they will not have paid before they “trade it in” on a more expensive and defective vehicle. Nor can it be formed of proletarians whose wives have to work — whether as “executives” or as charwomen — to “make ends meet.” With the exception of relicts who live on investments that have not yet been entirely confiscated by taxation, the economic revolution is as complete in the United States as in Soviet Russia: there are only proletarians, some of whom are hired to manage the rest. Managerial employees get more pay and ulcers than janitors and coal miners, but they are equally dependent on their wages and even more dependent on the favor of the employee above them. The nearest approximation to a middle class, both here and in Russia, is the bureaucracy, and it is their vested interest that the Birchers imagine they can destroy.”

— Revilo P. Oliver, 1981

“EVIL and sin in this world do that much of homage to conscience and to virtue, that they never proclaim themselves to be what they are, and always present themselves, as it were, under the colors of their adversaries. Every giant of wickedness here calls himself the advocate of right and justice, every monstrous deed of public and world-wide wrong is done under the name of some watchword of goodness or of truth.”

— Henry James Coleridge, The Return of the King: Discourses on the Latter Days, 1894; p. 209

“THE perfection of man consists in suffering all things well, as if they happened to him of his own choice.”

— Seneca

“NO bureaucrat talks of saving the taxpayers, and the reason is that the workers who provide the funds for government are not tax conscious. It takes time and thought to make a study of the cost of government. In America where commodities are sold freelv without ration tickets, the consumers may strike against high prices. In Britain the people have to take what they can get of the necessaries of life. But the Americans have not yet found out why prices are high and the purchasing power of the dollar is shrinking. It is now worth about 48¢. It is a baffling business for the rich and the poor, but there seems to be little hope that the taxpayers will set to work to learn for themselves why they are in distress.

“The modern man we hear so much about has no time to work these things out for himself. The movie, the radio, and television are on the way to destroy thought. Perhaps the real reason why the people of a hundred years ago were able to better themselves is because they were not pestered from morning till night with the distractions of the machine age. When the artisan in Oldham or in Fall River reached home for his dinner, he had a chance to think things over. He was not worried about the payment of the next installment on some gadget that did his thinking for him. He had advantages of meditation the modern man knows little or nothing about. Science was something for the intellectual, and he did not bother much about it. He never dreamed of letting broadcasters have a mortgage on his mind. As for motor cars, buses, or bicycles to give him a lift for a few miles, he would have scorned them. Perhaps he knew that walking was an aid to thinking, as poets and musicians discovered years ago.

“Before the gadget age, the average man used his eyes, and what he saw set his mind to work. His descendant, who travels in a fast-moving vehicle, has no chance to see what he saw. The scenery goes by so fast that he cannot get a proper view of anything of consequence, and this is a very serious matter. For observation is a necessary exercise for the eyes. There were few bespectacled people when men walked. Today nearly every other person over thirty must have sight aids, and the number of people whose ears are decorated with tone amplifiers is increasing steadily. John Hervey, the great racehorse expert, remarked that the gas-pushers are breeding a race that will not know how to walk. Read More »

“LAW is taking on a new aspect. For centuries concerned to maintain every man in his rights, it is mainly now employed to take them away.”

— C.H. Douglas, The Brief for the Prosecution, 1945

ROBERT MANNING writes:

It is remarkable that in Ireland, with a total population of only five million, 87,000 (roughly 1/2%) non-European migrants claimed asylum in 2022. 

The U.S. is experiencing larger, ever-increasing average monthly illegal southern border crossings over the past two years. The 2.76 million in 2022 approaches 1% (.08) of the current U.S. population. These are mind-boggling numbers. Giant NGO and criminal organizations (governments) are funneling the inhabitants of other continents in through the open wounds of the West.

 
MAY the greatest Mother who ever lived protect you forever. 

Pray for us, dear Mother of God.

Day Is Done, Thomas Faed, 1870

THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE

— William Ross Wallace

BLESSINGS on the hand of women!
Angels guard its strength and grace.
In the palace, cottage, hovel,
Oh, no matter where the place;
Would that never storms assailed it,
Rainbows ever gently curled,
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world. Read More »

Elizabeth Corbin (Mrs. Griffin Gatliff) & Daughter Elizabeth, Gilbert Stuart; 1798

IN HIS book The Nature, Dignity and Mission of Woman, Fr. Karl Stehlin writes about the deeper significance of the institution that we celebrate on Mother’s Day:

All motherhood comes from the Mother of all mothers. The Immaculate Mother of God is the model for every mother; her motherhood is the ideal, the basis, the heart, and the goal of all creaturely motherhood. Here in a surprising new way the nature of woman proves once again to be the expression and image of God on earth. The polarity and complementariness of man and woman…, which in the interdependence of their different and often opposite characteristics reflects the all-encompassing Oneness of God, appears here in the special relation of mother and child. This is probably the most intimate relationship that there can ever be between human beings. Read More »

Read More »

“THE coronation was an excruciating affair, and felt like the country was just going through the motions. The history of Charles and Camilla is so sordid that it was hard to witness them parading around in crowns like paragons of virtue. A broken monarchy for a broken nation.”

— Way of the World

FROM “The Great Sacrilege,” by Fr. James F. Wathen:

[W]e should call attention to the mere token deference given in the ‘New Mass’ to Mary, the Most Blessed Mother of God. It must be recognized that the few begrudging mentions of her represent nothing more than vestiges of the loving attentions paid her in the True Mass. The few references made to her in the “Novus Ordo” were kept only in order to placate the faithful, you may be sure. There is no more place in the “New Religion” for Our Lady than there is for Christ Our Lord. This is a point which needs further comment.

First however, I cannot emphasize strongly enough that the ultimate purpose of all the sacrileges, the trickery, the lawlessness, the discord, and the scandal in religion, as well as of the overthrow of governments, the terrorism, the cruelties, the imprisonments, the murders, and the ruin of souls in the social realm, which are the stock and trade of the Revolution– the ultimate purpose of them all, I say, is the everlasting blasphemy of the sweet Name of Jesus, the God-Man. For the doctrine which inspires in Revolutionaries the most unmitigated hatred and provokes all their audacious perversities is that of His sacred divinity. Once you become aware of this fact, you will be able to comprehend the (poorly) disguised intentions of the “New Mass,” and, to be sure, of the whole drive for “renewal” in the Church. Read More »

“THE very leaders who are entrusted to guard the deposit of Faith and to lead the Faithful to Heaven, have rebelled, becoming the enemy itself, and they are paving the path to Hell for their followers. The enemies are, as they have always been, priests and bishops of the Church. They, as has been the repeated case in history, create the heresies and lead the Faithful away from the Church. No heresy has ever been started by a lay person. The Faithful are seduced into a stupor or misguided false trust in their spiritual leaders and seem to be willing to follow them, even to Hell. The Faithful fall into these heresies without objection, become infected with the disease of spiritual blindness and immediately become the unfaithful. At first, a few fell to the heresies, then more and more, and today, most have fallen. The great difficulty now is that spiritual blindness is so deeply imbedded, that very few will ever see their error, or be willing to admit it. Therefore, many will perish and very few will be saved, just as Christ Himself has foretold. The current conditions are so depraved, that the majority of people in the world place their complete trust in the world alone and in its allurements. People are so removed from the Grace of the True Church of God that any one who attempts to explain the situation to them for their own benefit is looked upon with scorn and rejection. But of course, this was the experience of Christ Himself during His first coming. Conditions are now ripe, as He Himself had foretold they would be, for His second coming.”

— Dolores Rose Morris, 1990

TOO freshly sweet to seem excess,
Too animate to need a stress;
But wider over many heads
The starry voice ascending spreads,
Awakening, as it waxes thin,
The best in us to him akin;
And every face to watch him rais’d,
Puts on the light of children prais’d,
So rich our human pleasure ripes
When sweetness on sincereness pipes,
Though nought be promis’d from the seas,
But only a soft-ruffling breeze
Sweep glittering on a still content,
Serenity in ravishment.

— From “The Lark Ascending” by George Meredith