“EARLY in the morning of this day, Jesus sets out for Jerusalem, leaving Mary His Mother, and the two sisters Martha and Mary Magdalene, and Lazarus, at Bethania. The Mother of sorrows trembles at seeing her Son thus expose Himself to danger, for His enemies are bent upon His destruction; but it is not death, it is triumph, that Jesus is to receive today in Jerusalem. The Messias, before being nailed to the cross, is to be proclaimed King by the people of the great city; the little children are to make her streets echo with their Hosannas to the Son of David; and this in presence of the soldiers of Rome’s emperor, and of the high priests and pharisees: the first standing under the banner of their eagles; the second, dumb with rage.”

— Dom Prosper Guéranger, The Liturgical Year

The Betrayal of Christ, Ugolino di Nerio; 1324

THE Passion and death of Jesus Christ are the greatest events in world history.

The Passion is the greatest story ever told.

It is the greatest poem ever written, the greatest song ever sung, the greatest masterpiece ever painted, the most beautiful tree ever planted, its sweet blossoms continually falling to the earth. It is the cup of wine from the vineyard of Paradise. It is the furnace lit from the beginning of time. I am come to cast fire upon the earth; and what will I but that it should be kindled?

All museums and libraries could be reduced to rubble, and the seeds of a great civilization would still exist in the love and suffering of the Passion.

The “great awakening” has already happened. The greatest invention has occurred.

The deaf will not hear. The blind will not see. But they too are part of the tale. They are the fatal kiss that made this love possible.

With desire have I desired to eat this pasch with you.

[Reposted]

ERIC R. writes:

As we approach Holy Week, I offer a Lenten listening suggestion: Francis Poulenc’s Sept Repons de Teneabrea, for orchestra, soprano and choir. Composed in 1961 and first performed at Lincoln Center in New York in 1963, it is based on the Latin texts of the Responsories for Holy Week.

Born in Paris in 1899, Poulenc led a debauched life. And judging from my cursory internet research, there does not seem to be any change in his scandalous behavior, even up until his death. He was described by a critic as “part monk, part guttersnipe.” His father was devoutly Catholic and a highly successful businessman. His success allowed Poulenc the financial independence to compose. I find this interesting. Not only in that the strong faith of a father can instill a deep seated affection for religion, but that his wealth allowed for his son to compose for us! We need fathers to instill the faith in the family, because we need the faith. And we need the wealthy, because we need art and culture. Read More »

AT In the Spirit of Chartres, I talked last week with Judith Sharpe about why modern racial ideology is not Christian.

I just scratched the surface. There really is so much more to say. Read More »

DEFINITION:

Being a “far-right extremist” just means you don’t believe in a moral imperative to sit silently while your daughters are groomed, your towns are taken over, your freedoms are suffocated, your culture is debased, and your history is used to psychologically castrate you.”

— Andrew Joyce

ADOLF HITLER was not a defender of Europeans from the forces of “globalism.” For one, he was personally opposed to Christianity, despite statements in favor of Protestantism and “Positive Christianity,” and his ideas were heretical.

European nationalism does not need a defender like Hitler.

Nor does it need a Donald Trump or a Vladimir Putin.

Much can be said on this issue — for instance, did you know the Jewish Zionist press in Germany enthusiastically supported the Nuremberg Laws? —  but here is some quick food for thought from “Hitler and the Talmudic, Kabbalistic creation of World War II” by Josh:

Read More »

“ST. John Chrysostom says that the principal end Jesus had in his Passion was to discover to us his love, and thus to draw our hearts to himself by the remembrance of the pains that he has endured for us: “This was the principal cause of the Passion of our Lord; he wished it
to be known how great was the love of God for man, — of God, who would rather be loved than feared.'”

— St. Alphonsus de Liguori, The Passion and the Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ

“A PERSON who is wholly incapable of anger lacks something; he is in some way defective. As we have seen, there is such a thing as just and lawful anger. Were a person unable to resent evil, he would be deficient in the use of lawful anger.”

— St. Thomas Aquinas

COMMENTS from Thuletide:

There’s a lot of contention over nationalists around the world identifying with the term ‘White’ these days. It seems that many people foolishly believe that they can escape the worldwide anti-White persecution simply by identifying with their ethnic group and claiming that they are, in fact, “not White, but German” or Italian, or Irish, and so on. This short article is my off-the-cuff response to this nonsense.

“White” as a synonym for “racially European” has been used for hundreds of years by people from all over Europe, in both a biological and political context. I’ve even found some evidence of it being used as such during the late Middle Ages, and European pigmentation was described as “white” by various peoples during Classical Antiquity. It makes no sense for any White person to claim that they are “not White but European,” since the terms are synonymous. I understand why continental Europeans may prefer to use ‘European’ over ‘White,’ since the latter is now strongly associated with the Anglosphere, particularly the United States. However, this was historically not the case. The term was popular all over Europe.

‘White’ as an ethnic identity (rather than racial) has arisen in various European colonial states. In these states, ‘White’ ethnic identities carry the cultural characteristics of their founding stocks. For example, in America and Australia, ‘White’ culture is Anglo-Saxon in origin and nature. Other White ethnic groups — predominantly of Northwest European origin — have been assimilated into the White American or White Australian ethnic identities, but these identities are still culturally Anglo.

Also see “Race and Ethnicity in Greco-Roman Society.”

“KAREY Burke, president of Disney’s General Entertainment Content, said the company must do more to make its content more inclusive in a company-wide Zoom call Monday that was later posted to Twitter.

“‘I’m here as a mother of two queer children, actually,’ Burke said on the call. “One transgender child and one pansexual child, and also as a leader.”

“Burke said she supports featuring “many, many” characters who are LGBTQIA, which stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or questioning), intersex, and asexual (or allies).”

(New York Post)

SORROW is a useless thing.

You can’t dig with it. You can’t cook with it. You can’t wear it. You can’t impress friends with it.

You can’t play it like a guitar.

You can’t buy anything with it. You can’t decorate your house with it. As heavy as it is, you can’t use it for weight-lifting — your biceps will be the same. That’s why fitness instructors are always perky.

Sorrow won’t make you popular. It won’t make you professional. It won’t make you pretty or rich.

The only single thing sorrow is good for is repairing the entire world.

These drops pour over the lives of the forsaken, the ruined, the almost-doomed. They are mixed with the balm of Calvary.

His sisters sent to Him saying: Lord, behold, he whom Thou lovest is sick.–John xi. 3.Three things here call for thought.

“1. God’s friends are from time to time afflicted in the body. It is not, therefore, in any way a proof that a man is not a friend of God that he is from time to time sick and ailing. Eliphaz argued falsely against Job when he said, Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished being innocent? or when were the just destroyed? (Job iv. 7).

“The gospel corrects this when it says, Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick, and the Book of Proverbs, too, where we read, For whom the Lord loveth, He chastiseth: and as a father in the son He pleaseth himself (Prov. iii. 12).

“2. The sisters do not say, “Lord, come and heal him.” They merely explain that Lazarus is ill, they say, he is sick. This is to remind us that, when we are dealing with a friend, it is enough to make known our necessity, we do not need to add a request. For a friend, since he wills the welfare of his friend as he wills his own, is as anxious to ward off evil from his friend as he is to ward it off from himself. This is true most of all in the case of Him who, of all friends, loves most truly. The Lord keepeth all them that love him (Ps. cxliv. 20).

“3. These two sisters, who so greatly desire the cure of their sick brother, do not come to Christ personally, as did the centurion and the man sick of the palsy. From the special love and familiarity which Christ had shown them, they had a special confidence in Him. And, possibly, their grief kept them at home, as St. Chrysostom thinks. A friend if he continue steadfast, shall be to thee as thyself, and shall act with confidence among them of thy household (Ecclus. vi. 11).”

— Meditations for Lent by St. Thomas Aquinas

[See comments below. This video is satire. I sincerely apologize for misleading readers. Sad to say, it’s close to the truth. Now if only this Disney executive’s statement was satire!]

A TEACHER in Fort Worth, Texas comments at school board meeting. This man (or is he a woman?) needs a strait jacket, not a podium.

We are surrounded. More and more people are flagrantly insane. It’s not surprising.

This reminds me of a bright boy who had a beautiful smile.

One day when he was in college, not long after he “transitioned” to a woman, he drove to a state park and hung himself from a tree.

Pray for these people. They have nothing left. Read More »

THIS post is dedicated to my dear friend, Lawrence Auster, who died of pancreatic cancer nine years ago today. As fate (or as Mr. Auster would say, “synchronicity,”) would have it, I will be doing an interview later today that touches on some of his ideas. And so, sadly, I will have to postpone visiting his grave until tomorrow. But when I do, I take with me all the good intentions of those whom he touched in his years as a writer, laying some flowers (artificial so the deer won’t eat them) on his grave and praying for his eternal rest.

I choose these words on spring not just because Mr. Auster died on Good Friday in spring, but because he understood what this author is saying: we are not walking abstractions, souls with inconvenient bodies, but, like our magnificent Redeemer, we are incarnated in physical creation. And this creation, despite its imperfections, is good. The modern Manicheans would have us despise ourselves and become a disembodied, abstract “humanity.” Is a daffodil guilty for being a daffodil? Should it be a representative of all flowers instead? Mr. Auster detested the homogenizing ugliness of modern egalitarianism.

I also like this excerpt because it mentions gratitude for simple things. I feel grateful today for something so simple as a true friend. He who is a friend at death is a friend forever, his companionship an uplifting consolation through the years he will never see.

Anyway, this is from “Catholicism And The Modern Mind” (1928) by Michael Williams:

There was that morning in springtime when I suddenly stood still before a bush in a little suburban town through which I had been walking, as if an invisible hand had halted me, and an unheard voice was speaking, and my vision was enlarged, so that I could see beyond the reach of my eyes. I could see where the extremest point of the most tiny and fragile of the roots of that bush, down in the earth, amid the moist soil, drew from the earth those fructifying elements distilled by the mysterious chemistry of spring that its life required, together with those even more impalpable, yet not the less real, elements which the most delicate filaments of its top-most twig, so slender and fine that it melted away into the air around it, drew, as our lips draw down, the sunshine and the air. And where the lucent green of the tiny buds, with their little hearts pinker than the inside of a baby’s lips, touched the clear, rain-washed black of the bark a black as radiant with life as the green itself I, for one instant of an instant, glimpsed and almost (Ah, but the immeasurable gulf of that “almost”) understood the mystery of the transmutation of spirit into matter, and their union. But if I could not really understand, I could, however, do something even better: I could worship, I could praise, I could thank, I could love the God whose will was working its unending work of love in that dear bush, by the side of that mean [road.]

…

Nature, itself, is sacramental. On earth, in the limits of time, spirit operates in and through matter. This is the real reason why saints, made powerful through sanctity, are able to work what we, in our wonderment, call miracles. It is the reason why poets may penetrate, by flashes of genius, the obscure frontier between nature and supernature and thrill our souls with intimations second only to the revelations of God of the beauty within and above all that visible beauty which is one of the myriad minor street, on the lawn of somebody’s humble home.

The little house that Bill and Dot called home, in a section of St. Louis County that was once known as Luxemburg. It is now a “hair studio.”

ALAN writes:

Dear Bill,

I thought I should send you a letter in these waning days of Western Civilization. (Not that that would surprise you. More about this below.)

Nearly twenty years have gone by since you left us. You might not have left us then had it not been for outrageously incompetent hospital staff who hastened your departure.

Forty years have gone by since we last talked, in a brief telephone conversation. I did not realize it would be our last contact, and neither of us planned it that way. But modern life is full of diversions and detours.

It was 1969 when we met, owing partly to a mutual interest in the night sky. In the years afterward, we met and talked at many meetings, lectures, and skywatches involving other amateur astronomers.

You and your wife “Dot” were most kind to that foolish young man. Read More »

“THE Communists try to exploit these national, racial and religious differences in order to weaken, undermine and subjugate America to Moscow. Like a serpent, they use guile to seduce each group. At no time have the Communists even hinted or suggested to any group, other than the Negro, that their clannishness or tendency to colonize a given area creates a “Ghetto” or “Quarters.” Were they to do so, they would be jeered out of each section as crackpots.

“Evidently the reds had international propaganda in mind when they described Negro sections as “Ghettos” because the definition of the word Ghetto in no way applies to a Negro section any more than it does to a German, Irish, Jewish, Chinese or any other section in America.

“The Encyclopedia Britannica states:

Ghetto, formerly the street or quarter of a city in which Jews were compelled to live, enclosed by walls and gates which were locked each night. The term is now used loosely of any locality in a city or country where Jews congregate.

During the Middle Ages the Jews were forbidden to leave the ghetto after sunset when the gates were locked, and they were also imprisoned on Sundays and all Christian holy days.

“Negroes band together in sections like other races and national groups much for the same reasons. Like other racial and national groups, they can buy land, build communities, settle in any section of the country. Like other racial and national groups, they can make their sections as nice and attractive as possible. The maximum business, cultural, sanitary and social services are within their reach as with other groups.

“The Communists, through propaganda, have sold a number of Negro intellectuals the idea that the Negro section is a ghetto; that white Americans created it, set its geographical boundaries; that it is the product of race hate and the inhumanity of white Americans. Therefore, it is a struggle of Negro against “white oppressors” for emancipation.

“Naturally, those holding such views have no community pride, no interest in doing anything to improve its services because that would be aiding and abetting “segregation” and maintenance of the ‘ghetto.'”

— Color, Communism, and Common Sense, Manning Johnson (1958)