KYLE writes:

On June 9, 1972, Elvis Presley held a press conference at the New York Hilton for an upcoming concert tour. During the conference a reporter tried to lure Presley into soliciting his personal views on war protesters and the Vietnam War, a subject which he wisely elected to decline, stating, “I’d just as soon keep those views to myself, I’m just an entertainer and I’d rather not say.” At the time of this press conference, Presley was one of, if not the most, popular entertainer in the world. He held fame and influence that no mortal person can handle, and because of that, he could’ve given his honest opinion and gotten away with it. He chose to stay in his own lane.

On January 28, 2018, the 60th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony featured over three-hours of “musical performers” denigrating Donald Trump, men and conservatives with some music mixed in.

In one bizarre segment, a parade of celebrities read excerpts from Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” hit piece. Hillary Clinton appeared on screen reading a snippet from the book that mocks Trump’s love for McDonald’s. U2 performed their newest immigration-themed single in front of a Statue of Liberty backdrop (their latest music video portrays the KKK marching outside the Oval Office window). Another segment featured a stage full of female vocalists clothed in white, “Kesha & the Resistance Revival Chorus” (note the ‘resistance’ moniker). Singer Janelle Monae marched to the microphone and proceeded to tongue-lash men in the typical leftist, passive aggressive tone: (more…)

THE Mass is the greatest event in the history of mankind, the one holy act that keeps the wrath of God from a sinful world. For it holds the Cross between heaven and earth. No wonder a priest remarked at the changes which slipped the Cross from its socket, that the earth tilted in its axis that day — a catastrophe which plunged us into the cold and darkness of year-round spiritual winter. (more…)

THIS IS an Italian family eating out in a restaurant in Rome last week. It appeared to be a mother with her three adolescent sons (one of them had walked away briefly) and her daughter. In between the primi and secundi courses for this midweek meal, they all communed with their cell phones. The mother is the one in the far left, tired, her elbow on the table, hunched over her phone. The Italian matriarch is not what she once was.

In a few years, these children will be gone from home. Is their time together, time together? It’s easy to blame cell phone technology here, but there is, I think, a deeper problem and cell phones can’t be entirely blamed.

To be fair, the formless family dinner, which is the norm today (the norm, that is, when families eat together), can lead to problems, especially when family members are exhausted. It’s not surprising that people would try to escape it. Bickering or irritableness or the hogging of conversation can make family dinner an unpleasant experience, especially with teenagers.

On the other hand, to be detached from each other in this way — no, there has to be a better way. (more…)

"THE Holocaust may yet turn out to be the greatest robbery in the history of mankind .... The Holocaust has proven to be an indispensable ideological weapon. Through its deployment, one of the world's most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a 'victim state' .... The most successful ethnic group in the United States has acquired victim status. Considerable benefits accrue to this specious victimhood, in particular, immunity to criticism, however justified." --- Jewish author Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry, 2000

“GRATEFUL READER” writes:

Your photographs of Roman doorways capture the character of the holy Christian city magnificently. Two recent book reviews came to mind from your following comment,

The grandeur of these doorways and their useless ornamentation are deeply attractive to those who find so much of the modern world visually cold, austere and brutally ugly.  

The book called Le Corbusier, the Dishonest Architect by Malcolm Millais has been reviewed by Nicholas Salingaros and Theodore Dalrymple.

Salingaros, a professor of mathematics and architecture, writes of the Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, and his cult following:

“Millais analyzes numerous structural faults with the iconic 1952 Unité d’Habitation apartment block in Marseilles, France [photos here]. Here is the original model for dark, dreary, double-loaded internal corridors, and apartments with one side in darkness and the other with impossible glare. Cult followers reproduce it as a perfect prototype, whereas Millais’s authoritative conclusion is damning. How could a building containing so many errors of design and construction—most due to untested ideas—have received a permit? The answer is that the Housing Minister waived all building regulations. Architectural culture deliberately ignores all these faults, while critics endlessly repeat self-serving lies that Le Corbusier himself invented to cover up his ignorance and mistakes.

“Le Corbusier’s unbuilt design for slaughterhouses for the French industrialist Max Du Bois was recycled to become the Unité d’Habitation. Later, Le Corbusier revisited this macabre theme in his idea for the Philips Pavilion, a building financed by the Dutch Electronics Company Philips for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Corbu describes his chilling idea: “It should appear as though you are about to enter a slaughterhouse. Then once inside, bang, a blow to the head and you’re gone.” So, Monty Python’s 1987 The Architects Sketch starring John Cleese was spot-on after all.”

 The following excerpt from The Architects Sketch indicates the comedians’s recognition of pathology in the modern architect’s intentions: (more…)

I WAS fortunate enough to receive a trip to Rome for my birthday this year. My husband and I got back yesterday. We spent six days in the city, visiting the sights of this spectacular metropolis where the ghosts of the past accompany you everywhere. January is a great time to go to Rome. Everything is less crowded and it’s not that cold, although this year because of especially warm weather (60 degrees Fahrenheit during the day), the streets in the main historic areas were mobbed for part of the time we were there. In addition, January is cheaper than the summer and fall months. Our plane fare on Norwegian Airlines was $350 each roundtrip from Newark, New Jersey. We stayed in a small, 24-room hotel which occupies the third floor of a building on Via Firenze near Piazza della Repubblica and the ancient Baths of Diocletian. Our room in this central location in a 19th-century building with an elegant facade and a courtyard with a rickety elevator cost about $80 per night.

Here is the exterior of the building which houses, among other things, the Hotel Oceania:

My favorite feature of the hotel was its interior courtyard, seen here from the third floor:

Last Sunday, to mention just one of the things we did during our stay (I hope to have more posts), we walked along the Via Giulia, a street close to the Tiber in the historic center, a thoroughfare that truly transports the pedestrian to a different time. A good description of it from The New York Times:

Commissioned by Pope Julius II (for whom the street is named), Via Giulia was built in the early 16th century, part of a plan to build a square of roads near the Vatican. The project was never completed. But to this day, Via Giulia is lined with an array of extraordinary churches and cultural buildings, as well as some of the fanciest homes in Rome.

Via Giulia offers a walk unusual in Rome for several reasons. It is wide enough that you are not dodging cars and scooters or inhaling their fumes; arrow straight, so you will not get lost; intimate and quiet enough to appreciate what you are seeing.

Via Giulia starts with an ivy-covered arch, designed by Michelangelo; it was part of another unrealized plan, this one to connect the Palazzo Farnese (now the French Embassy) with the Villa Farnese, on the other side of the Tiber. The connection was never made, so the arch instead functions as a sort of majestic entryway.

Despite the crowds on nearby streets, we were almost the only pedestrians along the way, as if we were walking in a village not a big city. Below are some photos of doorways I took along the way. I’m not a talented photographer and I have not annotated these photos, but they give you, I hope, a sense of what we encountered along our path. The grandeur of these doorways and their useless ornamentation are deeply attractive to those who find so much of the modern world visually cold, austere and brutally ugly. One cannot help but feel gratitude toward those who have the wealth to maintain them: (more…)

"Let's face it: Christianity and Islam are eternal enemies. Each makes uncompromising claims of exclusive truth. But this doesn't mean that the secularist-Zionist war on the Islamic world serves any Christian interest or deserves Christian support." --- Joseph Sobran

THE woman who supposedly was the model for the iconic World War II poster of “Rosie the Riveter” has died. The New York Times honors her contribution to the nation with an obituary. The Anti-New York Times responds here.

While Rosie is commonly portrayed as a symbol of women’s emancipation, she represents the opposite. She stands for the dawning of an era — after the initial postwar return to tradition — in which millions of women would be forced due to economic necessity to enter the paid workforce. Feminists romanticized their loss of status at home as “liberation.” The Rosie poster is a classic work of Soviet-style agitprop. The home stands between the people and the Omnipotent State.

(more…)

KYLE writes:

The excerpt below is from a pre-Vatican II Catholic prayer book by Father F.X. Lasance titled, My Prayer Book (1907). The piece is titled “What Mass Is,” and it’s a superb summation of the Mass from an anonymous author. These traditional prayer books are indispensable tools in arming ourselves with the Holy Spirit in the spiritual warfare we’re constantly engaged in.

What Mass Is

Non-Catholics who are present at mass, not understanding the ceremony, wonder why we should be so diligent in assisting at it. To them, the idea of church and public worship is associated with preaching and hymn singing. They are surprised at a function in which a clergy man takes no notice of the people and at which there often is no sermon.

What, then, is the Mass that so attracts Catholics and attendance at which is made obligatory on them, at least once a week, under pain of deadly sin? (more…)

LIFESITE NEWS reports on Trump’s live-streamed speech to the March for Life in Washington, D.C. last Friday, marking the 45th anniversary of Roe v. Wade on Jan. 22:

“Under my administration, we will always defend the very first right in the Declaration of Independence, and that is the right to life,” the president told cheering crowds of hundreds of thousands that packed Washington Mall Friday.

Dr. Thomas Droleskey at Christ or Chaos was less enthusiastic. :

][T]he truth remains that no one but no one, despite their good intentions, should be termed “pro-life” who believes [there] are certain supposedly “exceptional” circumstances in which babies may be vacuumed up, sliced and diced, and burned alive in their mother’s wombs. Good intentions do not redeem flawed premises.

For instance, Trump’s mention of the “Mexico City Policy” was very misleading … (more…)

IN his short story, “The Maypole of Merry Mount,” published in 1832, Nathanael Hawthorne described the conflict between Puritan settlers of New England and those settlers, established at Mount Wollaston, also known as Merry Mount, who retained the ways of old England with its festivals and feasts.

Unfortunately, the culture of the Puritans, who sent the Merry Mounters packing, would ultimately triumph in New England, leading to the grim political creeds we see today, at their core Puritanical even though they reject many of the traditional mores of the actual Puritans

From the story:

All the hereditary pastimes of Old England were transplanted hither [to Merry Mount.] The King of Christmas was duly crowned, and the Lord of Misrule bore potent sway. On the Eve of St. John, they felled whole acres of the forest to make bonfires, and danced by the blaze all night, crowned with garlands, and throwing flowers into the flame. At harvest time, though their crop was of the smallest, they made an image with the sheaves of Indian corn, and wreathed it with autumnal garlands, and bore it home triumphantly. But what chiefly characterized the colonists of Merry Mount was their veneration for the Maypole. It has made their true history a poet’s tale. Spring decked the hallowed emblem with young blossoms and fresh green boughs; Summer brought roses of the deepest blush, and the perfected foliage of the forest; Autumn enriched it with that red and yellow gorgeousness which converts each wildwood leaf into a painted flower; and Winter silvered it with sleet, and hung it round with icicles, till it flashed in the cold sunshine, itself a frozen sunbeam. Thus each alternate season did homage to the Maypole, and paid it a tribute of its own richest splendor. Its votaries danced round it, once, at least, in every month; sometimes they called it their religion, or their altar; but always, it was the banner staff of Merry Mount. (more…)

FROM an interview with Stephen Baskerville, author of The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of  Government Power:

Now, after decades of serving as the intellectual apologists for this crass culture, those same radical ideologues have found that they can further increase their influence and power from the chaos they helped create by turning the resulting unpleasantness into newfangled quasi-crimes that no one fully understands and which permit no defense. Having ridiculed not only the Christians themselves into silence but also their annoying, old-fashioned vocabulary of ‘sin,’ ‘immorality,’ ‘fornication,’ and ‘adultery,’ the radicals have substituted jargon that instead condemns ideological unorthodoxy (‘sexism,’ ‘misogyny’) and implies criminality: ‘sexual harassment,’ ‘sexual abuse,’ ‘sexual misconduct,’ ‘sexual assault,’ sexual this and sexual that.

Radicals and revolutionaries always promise us a new world of freedom where we do not have to obey the rules that mankind has had to accept in order to build a stable civilization.  (And the basic rules are universal, though how they are administered vary significantly, usually according to religion, which can make a huge difference in the nature of the civilization.)  But the rules they throw out the front door always re-enter through the back door, often in a grotesque form that is more authoritarian and terrifying.  We found this with Stalinism and Maoism, and now we see it with sexual radicalism. (more…)

Source

  THE supposedly spontaneous wedding ceremony conducted on a plane last week by "Pope" Francis appears to have been a publicity stunt prepared in advance. Was it an attempt to show how much Francis values marriage in the wake of Amoris Laetitia? His unorthodox action opens up many possibilities, writes Novus Ordo Bishop Rene Henry Gracida: Imagine if you lived in theatreland in London or New York and had priests competing with jugglers and street magicians, offering free marriages whilst people waited for tickets. Imagine the Marriage of Figaro with real Marriages! Imagine, Romeo and Juliet actually getting married! Imagine, a two for one offer at your local supermarket! Two couples at one go. Imagine the possibilities for an airport chaplain, you could marry people as they waited to check-in, or as they wait for luggage at the carousel. Imagine the mass weddings that could take place at the next Glastonbury Rock Festival. Imagine, in my diocese, a traffic jam on the M25 near Gatwick, a priest wandering up and down in cope and a high viz jacket offering weddings to all and sundry. None are more difficult to imagine than a non-Catholic acting as pope. Fake news, fake wedding, fake pope.

ANN CORCORAN at Refugee Resettlement Watch reports on the drop in refugee admissions under Trump. Federal contractors, however, have made this into a self-perpetuating business. She writes: Sorry to say it for the umpteenth time, but, at minimum, if these nine federal contractors (acting as community agitators and activists while living off taxpayer dollars) are not removed from the system there will not be a long term fix.

MEDIA coverage of civil unrest in Tunisia and Iran reveals a political agenda. See a report by Whitney Webb at Mint Press News.

  "THE chief concern of the American people, even above the bread-and-butter question, was politics. They were incessantly hag-ridden by political difficulties, both internal and external, of an inordinant complexity, and these occupied all the leisure they could steal from the sordid work of everyday. More, their new and troubled political ideas tended to absorb all the rancorous certainty of their fading religious ideas, so that devotion to a theory or candidate became translated into devotion to a revelation, and the game of politics turned itself into a holy war. The custom of connecting purely political doctrines with pietistic concepts of an inflammable nature, then firmly set up by skillful persuaders of the mob, has never quite died out in the United States. There has not been a presidential contest since Jackson’s day without its Armageddons, its marching of Christian soldiers, its crosses of gold, its crowns of thorns. The most successful American politicians, beginning with the antislavery agitators, have been those most adept at twisting the ancient gauds and shibboleths of Puritanism to partisan uses. Every campaign that we have seen for eighty years has been, on each side, a pursuit of bugaboos, a denunciation of heresies, a snouting up of immoralities... " [emphasis added] --- H.L. Mencken, "Puritanism as a Literary Force," A Book of Prefaces, 1917

LAURA R. writes: My country Panama is about to surrender to disgusting sexual ideologies this very year, just like Australia, Colombia, Uruguay, Argentina, and Mexico recently did. So far only China, Singapore, Japan, Russia, Romania and Greece have resisted. In the end, Japan and Singapore, I believe, will be the only countries in the world that will still retain a normal human society while the rest of the Western world will fall in the evil heterophobia and anti-biology ideologies!