“APART from the happiness of the saints in heaven, I think there is no joy comparable to that of the souls in purgatory. An incessant communication with God renders their happiness daily more intense, and this union with God grows more and more intimate, according as the impediments to that union, which exist in the soul, are consumed. These obstacles are the rust and the remains, as it were, of sin; and the fire continues to consume them, and thus the soul gradually expands under the divine influence. Thus, according as the rust diminishes and the soul is laid bare to the divine rays, happiness is augmented. The one grows and the other wanes until the time of trial is elapsed. Yet the pain is not lessened, it is only the time of suffering which decreases. With regard to the will of these souls, they can never say that these pains are pains, so great is their contentment with the ordinance of God, with which their wills are united in perfect charity.”

— St. Catherine of Genoa, Treatise on Purgatory

Prayers for the Faithful Departed

ALAN writes:

Enough already!  Could we please talk about something weightier than pollytix and elections?

A friend of mine put up a sign in her back yard instructing the squirrels — in plain English, yet — that they should not eat from the feeder intended for the birds.  Alas, Mama Squirrel has disregarded the sign and helps herself to the daily offerings.  Not that we blame her.  We suspect that she is a distant cousin of Peanut and is in mourning.

AN AFRICAN gang reportedly beats an Irishman.

This is the kind of thing you find in this country too, but not in Harris/Walz neighborhoods.

What is the answer to this phenomenon? I will tell you what is not the answer — and that is race war or violent retaliation.

The answer is peaceful separation. Africans belong in Africa and Europeans belong in Europe. Racial harmony is possible, but not by throwing people together into an amorphous mass of workers and consumers. In the meantime, this type of crime should never disturb our good will toward the people we meet in this multicultural society. Read More »

“THE REAL takeaway from this ‘election’ is just how FAKE the ‘81 million Biden 2020 votes’ were. Trump got about 2 million FEWER votes this time than he did in 2020 & yet he ‘won big’ this time? Kamala got about 14 mil FEWER votes than Biden did in 2020? Are we expected to believe that Biden was THAT popular? Or is it now more than obvious that the fraud during 2020 was SO massive that it truly boggles the mind. Clearly when the Dems were being watched more carefully in 2024 they simply couldn’t pull off a fraud at that 2020 level. And when NOBODY goes to prison for what we now KNOW happened in 2020, it will be clear that both parties are in on the whole scam together. Tacking back and forth between red and blue as they sail us all to prison island under the guise of ‘voting.'”

Legalman

WHEN European settlers came to this continent in the 15th and 16th century, they found a vast and magnificent wilderness populated by barbarous people given to tribal warfare and demon gods.

Europeans conquered America and, despite the conflict among colonial powers, it was a righteous conquest.

Europe gained a new and much-needed territory to support its families and defend what still remained of Christian civilization from Islam and Asian apathy, from the darkness of Africa, from the rationalism and atheism afflicting the European continent.

We take it so for granted. But America could have been conquered by a much worse people. Left to itself, it would have been.

Beginning in the 16th century, Muslims, over the course of three centuries, would drag into slavery more than 1.25 million Europeans, snatching them from ships and off the coasts of the Mediterranean and even the North Atlantic. Major portions of the Italian coastline were abandoned, so fearful were people of Muslim raiders. Thousands of European boys were taken to surgery centers by Jewish slave dealers and castrated. They would serve as eunuchs for Muslim harems and Ottoman courts and, unless they were ransomed, would never see their families again. (See ‘Recommended Reading’ below for sources.) That’s how powerful Islam was — and the Europeans who first came to America were highly conscious of the threat. Read More »

I PREDICT that a candidate who violated the U.S. Constitution, committed treason, took part in devastating fraud and established the conditions for wild inflation — all in a first term in the White House — will be our next president.

I don’t know whether it will be Trump or Kamala yet.

Navigating between two evils

I HAVE no campaign staff or advertising budget. You won’t see my name on lawn signs or my annoying face in your mailbox. I have no big donors — or even small donors. I am bought and paid for by no one.

I have made you no promises and given you no plans. I haven’t offered you cheap prescription drugs like a petty salesman or flashed false smiles from any screen or stage. I’m a woman who doesn’t even believe in women presidents — that’s how bad my sales pitch is.

Still I am confident, despite these obvious handicaps, that this complete and utter nobody will win the presidential election on November 5th. I will wake up the next morning with the heady feeling of victory and new energy to get to work.

What will I gain? What will I win? My soul, that’s what I will win — and there’s nothing better than that. Yes, victory will be mine!

By voting for neither of these selected-and-bought candidates who have zero accountability and are both moral degenerates in a system that is now fundamentally unlawful and evil, I will survive this election season with my integrity intact. Victory will be mine in a world of disappointed losers who have taken the bait and bought into the scam. It is only a matter of time before they realize all they have lost.

This country’s biggest problems are moral. Every person who refuses to sell his soul to the scam of mass democracy is a stone in the foundation of a better building. I want to be one of those stones. I want our descendants to live in that building, imperfect though it will be.

I haven’t traveled through the stormy waters of Scylla and Charybdis this election season, tempted by the false songs of the “lesser of two evils.” Read More »

SHE apparently has no problem with the people whose lives and communities have been upended by mass immigration, but would probably like to see the person who sent her a teasing postcard in jail. Read More »

EVEN if democracy does not seem to have lived up to its promises, election day is still a national tradition worth celebrating. Here’s a recipe suggestion:

“Election Cake seems to be derived from ‘Muster Cake.’ In the late 1600s and throughout the 1700s, some men were expected to attend military musters for training and were supplied with cake and cider as a reward. In the late 1700s, Election Day was new and a day of celebration. Eligible men who made the trek out to vote were given cake, cider, and alcohol outside of the polls and at parties.

“This recipe is from American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, the second edition published in 1796. This book is known for being the first known American cookbook. The full recipe makes a lot of cake. It contains 30 cups of flour and 36 eggs! I cut the recipe by about 1/7! The recipe also assumes you’re cooking in the 1700s and that it will take 24 hours for your sponge to rise. It took me about 45 minutes in my 21st century oven. Likewise, if your house is heated in November, you won’t have to cream the butter for 30 minutes. When I make this again (even the family liked it) I’ll probably add a cup of crushed walnuts. ”

Source: World Turned Upside Down

Norham Castle, Sunrise c.1845 Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775-1851

“NO ONE … can be said to be without peace, who is perfectly content with his lot and extremely thankful for it, but the holy sufferers in Purgatory know that their present condition is the very one condition which suits them best, and is most for their good. They know that God has used towards them infinite mercy in not exacting from them a far greater amount of suffering, that they have deserved far more, and even Hell itself, and on this account they are overflowing with gratitude that their case is not harder than it is.

“Besides these elements of peace in the Holy Souls there are others which consist in or result from their condition in itself. We all know what are the dangers to peace in this life dangers so many and so great that it seems almost impossible to be at perfect peace as long as we are what we are. What a blessing we should account it to be free from all external temptation, from all molestation of the evil one, from all provocations to sin from objects external to ourselves, whether they attack us on the side of the irascible part of our nature, or whether their seductions are addressed to our concupiscence! But in the case of the Holy Souls there are no disturbances to their peace from the things which cause us pain or pleasure, which appeal to ambition, or pride, or anger, or envy, or jealousy. All the beauty in the world cannot be a danger to them, all the riches or honours of the world cannot even seem to them desirable, much less be the occasion of serious temptation. But there is a more interior cause of unrest in us in our present condition, without which the external allurement to sin would not have any power to molest us. This is the interior division in ourselves, the struggle of the spirit against the flesh, of reason and conscience against passion and concupiscence, of the lower part of our nature, as we call it, against the higher, the struggle which makes us feel that we have traitors in our own camp, and produces a sense of insecurity which is destructive of all perfect peace. It is in this internal conflict and division that our great danger to sin consists, and so our great cause for perpetual anxiety and watchfulness. But all this is at an end for the Holy Souls. They have no external temptation and no interior conflict, and their state may well be compared to that of the calm lake, which was, as it were, charmed into preternatural repose and absolute tranquillity by the words of our Lord when He commanded the winds and the waves, and they obeyed Him.”

— Henry James Coleridge, The Prisoner of the King: Thoughts on the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory (1889), p. 165

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon them.

May they rest in peace. Amen.

A consoling and beautiful relationship with the departed is possible. We are social creatures and it only makes sense that we be bound with them in an economy of salvation.

To those immersed in the things of the world, who believe most everyone has an automatic right to heaven and who have no time for their dead relatives or friends, these are offensive thoughts. How many of the dead resent them? How many of the dead wish they would listen to the great authorities on the subject rather than rely on their own instincts? Love and gratitude oblige us to the dead, especially today, All Souls’ Day, and throughout the month of November.

We believe that there is a place called purgatory, in which the souls who depart this life without being perfectly cleansed from all imperfections are detained and must suffer until they have fully satisfied the justice of God. This faith is founded upon Scripture, tradition, and reason. In the Old Testament we read: “It is a holy and a wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins.”–II. Mach. 12:46. St. Paul writes: “If any man’s works burn, he shall suffer loss, but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire.”–I. Cor. 3: 1 5. The Apostle here speaks of a state in the other world, in which souls are tried by fire for some time; or, in other words, he speaks of purgatory. Of the Fathers of the Church who give testimony to the existence of purgatory, I shall mention only one, St. Gregory of Nyssa, who says: ” If any one has departed this life knowing the difference between virtue and vice, he cannot approach the Deity, until a purifying fire has obliterated the stains with which the soul is contaminated.” Reason also teaches us that there is a purgatory. How many people die who have not been guilty of mortal sins, but are not free from lesser faults. Where will they go? To heaven? Impossible, because nothing defiled can enter. To hell? By no means. For it would be contrary to the mercy and justice of God to condemn man to hell for all eternity on account of a few small faults, counterbalanced by a living faith and numerous good works. Therefore, there must be a middle place where souls are detained until they have rendered that fall satisfaction to God which they neglected here, after which they are admitted into heaven.

— “The Cry of the Souls in Purgatory to Us,” Rev. John Evangelist Zollner, 1884

May the angels lead thee into Paradise; may the martyrs receive thee at thy coming, and bring thee into the holy city, Jerusalem. May the choir of angels receive thee, and with Lazarus, who once was poor, mayest thou have eternal rest.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon them.

May they rest in peace. Amen.

                                         The Slave Ship, J.M. Turner

“THE existence of fire in Purgatory is vouched for also by numerous apparitions and private revelations. They demonstrate to our very eyes this fire as a material one, thus indicating that the words ‘fire’ and ‘fiery torments’ used by Scripture are to be taken in a literal sense. St. Bridget, of whom the Church, in her official prayer, says, ‘O God, who through Thy Divine Son didst reveal to blessed Bridget heavenly mysteries,’ was permitted in one of her ecstacies to witness how a soul was sentenced to a three-fold punishment: to an external and internal fire, an intense cold, and to furious assaults of the devil. Mechtildis of Magdeburg saw a lake of fire mixed with brimstone, in which the Suffering Souls had to bathe in order to be cleansed. According to St. Frances of Rome Purgatory consists of three apartments, one above the other, all alive with a clear, sparkling fire, unlike that of hell, which is dark and sombre. Bautz … relates of the Venerable Mary Anna Lindmayer: ‘Her friend Mary Becher and her mother appeared to her, and left marks of fire on one of her feet, which she saw and felt for weeks. At one time she beheld Purgatory in the shape of a torrent of fiery water, at another, as a prison of fire. The souls themselves appeared to her as sparks of fire falling about her. The appearance of some souls caused her to shiver with frost caused by the cold proceeding from them.’

“With the sole exception of their duration, the torments of Purgatory are the very same as those of hell; the only difference is that the former are temporary, the latter everlasting. This is the doctrine of St. Thomas, who says:’The same fire punishes the damned in hell and the just in Purgatory, and the least pain in Purgatory exceeds the greatest we can suffer in this world.’ It is true, then, that our works have to undergo purification after this life. As gold and silver are refined in the crucible, so are they cleansed of the dross of earthly imperfections in the flames of divine wrath. Oh, what an indescribable sea of fire in which the Suffering Souls are immersed! Flames encircling them, flames penetrating them, flames unceasingly tormenting them!”

— John A. Nageleisen, Charity for the Suffering Souls: An Explanation of the Catholic Doctrine of Purgatory (1895)

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon them.

May they rest in peace. Amen.

From these reflections on All Saints Day:

The saints are friends of God. They are like the angels in heaven. We honor them, not as we honor God, but on account of the relation they bear to God. They are creatures of God, the work of His hands. When we honor them, we honor God; as when we praise a beautiful painting, we praise the artist.”

We do not believe that the saints can help us of themselves, but we ask them to “pray for us.” We believe that everything comes to us “through Our Lord Jesus Christ.” With these words all our prayers end. It is useful, salutary, and reasonable to pray to the saints and ask them to pray for us. No doubt all will admit the reasonableness of this practice if the saints can hear and help us.

That they hear and help us is evident from many passages of Scripture. Read More »

Psalter of Henry of Blois, c. 1150

FROM the first chapter of The Dogma of Hell, Illustrated by Facts Taken from Profane and Sacred History (1883), by Fr. F.X. Schouppe S.J.:

It has been reserved for modern and contemporaneous atheism, carried to the pitch of delirium, to outdo the impiety of all ages by denying the existence of hell.

There are, in our day, men who laugh at, question, or openly deny the reality of hell.

They laugh at hell; but the universal belief of nations should not be laughed at; a matter affecting the everlasting destiny of man is not laughable; there is no fun, when the question is of enduring for eternity the punishment of fire.

They question, or even deny the dogma of hell; but on a mater of religious dogma, they cannot decide without being competent; they cannot call in doubt, still less deny, a belief so solidly established, without bringing forward irrefutable reasons.

Now, are they who deny the dogma of hell competent in matters of religion? Are they not strangers to that branch of the sciences, which is called theology? Are they not oftenest ignorant of the very elements of religion, taught in the Catechism?

Whence, then, proceeds the mania, of grappling with a religious question which is not within their province? Why such warmth in combating the belief in hell? Ah! It is interest that prompts them; they are concerned about the non-existence of hell, knowing that if there is a hell, it shall be their portion; these unhappy men wish that there might not be one, and they try to persuade themselves that there is none. In fact, these efforts usually end in a sort of incredulity. At bottom, this disbelief is only a doubt, but a doubt which unbelievers formulate by a negation. Read More »

“Hallowe’en.” Postcard, ca. 1910. Missouri History Museum 

The giant Halloween toys that were nowhere to be seen when I was a boy have multiplied in recent years in proportion to the real horrors that generations of soft-headed Americans have permitted to overtake their children, their culture and their nation.

[Reposted from October, 2021]

ALAN writes:

When I was a boy, American grown-ups did not decorate their homes, lawns, and yards with extravagant Halloween toys and displays, as they do today.  Such people spend considerable time and expense on pretend-horrors: ghosts, goblins, witches, spooks, skeletons, spider webs, graveyards, and coffins. Such toys begin to appear on lawns in early September. Parents who imagine they are grown-up compete with each other to stage the most outlandish and bizarre spectacles of pretend-horror.

That should tell us something about the moral-philosophical frame of mind of such people. If my grandparents and great-aunts and great-uncles could see such ostentatious displays, they would conclude:  Americans have become a nation of infants.

People who do such things might argue that they are making Halloween more fun for their children than it was for them. Is that so? They may claim that children deserve more fun at a moment in American life as difficult and trying as this one.  How superior they must imagine themselves to parents a hundred years ago who could give their children “only” books of stories without pictures or who could “only” read stories aloud to their children. I suggest modern parents have it backward.

Childhood imagination is a source of rich wonder, curiosity, delight, possibility, beauty, and inspiration—if it is not pre-empted or short-circuited by grown-ups.

Up to approximately the years when Americans invented the “teenager” and allowed an entire subculture to arise around that weird species, it was common for grown-ups to expect children to depend on their imagination for entertainment and inspiration.  Halloween in those years was a much more modest affair than it is today.  It is not evident that children who grew up in that former setting suffered from impoverishment of imagination or too little fun.  On the contrary:  Many people who grew up in those years recall how much enjoyment they found in making up stories and adventures and characters out of their imagination.

How could children today do that when their parents flood them with yards-full of oversize Halloween toys? What is left for such children to imagine? Do such toys not constrict childhood imagination? Do they not reduce or destroy outright the magical allure to children of what cannot be seen but imagined?  I venture the guess that those are generally the same kinds of parents who see nothing wrong in planting their babies and children in front of TV screens. Thus is the potent but delicate structure of childhood imagination effectively annihilated by modern parents, encouraged of course by the toy manufacturing industry and the mass communications and entertainment industries.

The more thoughtful children in today’s world might wonder why grown-ups devote so much energy and expense to creating pretend-horrors like extravagant Halloween toys and displays and so little energy and determination to controlling real horrors like lawlessness, vandalism, crime, lowered standards of competence, lowered expectations, widespread contempt for rules and laws, degenerate schools, degenerate music and entertainment, the destruction of historic statues, medical racketeering, government tyranny, and the horrors that DIE agitators (Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity) have brought to previously-civilized towns and cities. Read More »

VIDEO link

FROM The Star-Spangled Heresy: Americanism by Solange Hertz (Tumblar House, 2012):

“It would be difficult to overrate the natural genius of this extraordinary man. In his Epitaph he calls himself a printer. And so he was, printing playing much the same role in his life that gold-making played in Alchemy. By its means he put together the first controlled press in America, his Pennsylvania Gazette soon heading a whole network of subsidiaries throughout the Colonies like the New York Journal, the Boston Gazette, and myriad lesser breed.

“These constituted a Masonic press, staunchly anti-Papist and preaching its own doctrine indefatigably in political dress. Franklin was a master propagandist. It is well known how he maintained European indignation at fever pitch against the British and loyalist Americans by atrocity stories which could not get by at home, but which he circulated via his fake newspaper the Boston Independent Chronicle, regular “reprints” of which were distributed abroad from Holland. Bernard Fay concludes it was such papers, in conjunction with taverns, the Lodges and the cooperation of certain preachers and merchants which actually fabricated the American Revolution. Read More »