FILE this under “Feminists Don’t Care:”

Czech Republic: Country’s first Black politician guilty of two rapes, one attempted rape.

Politico named Dominik Feri #8 on a list of 28 up-and-coming ‘European politicians’ in 2018.

Dominik was charged with raping a minor, raping a woman, and attempted rape of another woman.

(Source)

ALAN writes:

It has often been said that “You can’t go home again”.

Let me test that idea by considering some of the places that were home to my mother or that she visited over a span of eight decades.

1.  Her childhood home on Indiana Avenue in south St. Louis in the 1920s:  Now abandoned and boarded up.

2.  Places where she lived in the Dutchtown neighborhood in the 1950s-‘80s:  Now infested with crime, lawlessness, and lowered standards. Read More »

FROM Swiss Policy Research Group:

Since the founding of Hamas in 1987, Israeli, American and Palestinian officials have repeatedly acknowledged that Israel did indeed help create and fund the Islamist group.

The point made by many of these officials is not that Israel “allowed” the rise of Hamas or that Hamas emerged in response to Israeli “occupation” of Palestine. Rather, their point was and is that Israel’s intelligence agencies actively helped create and finance the Hamas group.

As the officials cited below make clear, the overall goal of supporting Hamas has been to thwart the creation of a Palestinian state and avert the implementation of a two-state solution to the Palestine question. From Israel’s perspective, a two-state solution would reduce Israel’s territory to the internationally recognized pre-1967 borders, prohibit any future territorial expansion, and prevent the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city.

More specifically, supporting the Islamist Hamas group has served several Israeli objectives at once: first, it undermined Yasser Arafat’s secular nationalist PLO; second, it helped prevent the implementation of the 1993 Oslo Accords; third, it undermined the Palestinian National Authority and isolated Gaza from the Westbank; fourth, it impeded Western support for the Palestinian cause; and fifth, it justified Israeli (counter-)attacks on Palestinian territory.

Read more

To the Virgin Immaculate

O Virgin Immaculate, Mother of God and my Mother, from thy sublime height turn upon me thine eyes of pity. Filled with confidence in thy goodness and knowing full well thy power, I beseech thee to extend to me thine assistance in the journey of life, which is so full of dangers for my soul. And in order that I may never be the slave of the devil through sin, but may ever live with my heart humble and pure, I entrust myself wholly to thee. I consecrate my heart to thee for ever, my only desire being to love thy divine Son Jesus. Mary, none of thy devout servants has ever perished; may I too be saved. Amen.

Indulgence of 500 days.

The Immaculate Conception, Fillippo Parodi; 1660s

FROM Dom Prosper Guéranger’s The Liturgical Year:

This truth of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, which was revealed to the Apostles by the divine Son of Mary, inherited by the Church, taught by the Holy Fathers, believed by each generation of the Christian people with an ever increasing explicitness, this truth, we say, was implied in the very notion of a Mother of God. To believe that Mary was Mother of God, was implicitly believing that she, on whom this sublime dignity was conferred, had never been defiled with the slightest stain of sin, and that God had bestowed upon her an absolute exemption from sin. But now, the Immaculate Conception of Mary rests on an explicit Definition dictated by the Holy Ghost. Peter has spoken by the mouth of Pope Pius; and when Peter has spoken, every Christian should believe; for the Son of God has said: I have prayed for thee, Peter, that thy faith fail not. (Luke 22:32) And again: The Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring all things to your mind, whatsoever I shall have said to you. (John 16:26) Read More »

Pope Pius IX

“OUR mouth overflows with joy and our lips with exultation. We give, and shall always give, the humblest and deepest thanks to Jesus Christ Our Lord because, through a singular grace, He has granted to us, unworthy though we be, to decree and offer this honor and glory and praise to His Blessed Mother.

“We repose all our hope in the most Blessed Virgin – in the all beautiful and immaculate one who has crushed the poisonous head of the most cruel serpent and brought salvation to the world. In her who is the glory of the prophets and apostles, the honor of the martyrs, the crown and joy of all the saints; in her who is the safest refuge and the most trustworthy helper of all who are in danger; in her who, with her only-begotten Son, is the most powerful Mediatrix and Conciliatrix in the whole world; in her who is the most excellent glory, ornament and impregnable stronghold of the holy Church; in her who has destroyed all heresies and snatched the faithful people and nations from all kinds of direst calamities; in her do we hope who has delivered us from so many threatening dangers.”

— Ineffabilis Deus, Pope Pius IX, December 8, 1854, the day he solemnly instituted the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin

See more beautiful reflections on the Immaculate Conception here and defense of Catholic devotion to Mary here.

The Rose which I am singing,
Whereof Isaiah said,
Is from its sweet root springing
In Mary, purest Maid;
Through God’s great love and might
The Blessed Babe she bare us
In a cold, cold winter’s night.

GERMAN judge, Anne Meier-Goering, ruled last week that eight men who gang-raped a 15-year-old girl in Hamburg should receive no jail time. She sentenced an additional rapist to two years in prison. At least four of the men were from the Middle East and the perpetrators recorded their acts, including beating the girl, on their phones. From The Blaze:

Among the so-called expert witnesses was psychiatrist Nahlah Saimeh. Saimeh intimated that the gang rape may have been a means to let off some of the “frustration” that supposedly comes with “migration experiences and socio-cultural homelessness.”

Saimeh said rapists “who live on the margins of society, completely uprooted culturally, linguistically and socially” might face a “mix of emotions of anger, sadness, powerlessness, depression, fantasies of grandeur as a compensation attempt to cope with one’s own misery, and drug use.”

“Disordered, unprepared migration experiences and socio-cultural homelessness increase the risk of addiction and psychosis,” said the so-called expert. Sex, she continued, could serve as a “means of releasing frustration and anger.”

The psychiatrist further suggested that gang rape fosters identity and strengthens group feeling.

Are feminists around the world up in arms about this ruling? Of course not. Being part of the Marxist, anti-white revolution, feminists only criticize white men and consider non-white men their allies in the struggle to defeat Western (read: Christian) hegemony and bring about a world of utopian peace, which in fact, as can be seen already in much of Europe, is a hell on earth for women.

FROM The Christmas Book by Francis Weiser (St. Augustine Academy Press, 1952), p. 152:

One of the most beloved of all the Saints long ago was St. Nicholas of Myra. In many parts of Europe children still believe St. Nicholas appears to them on the eve of his Feast (December sixth) laden with gifts. His role is that of a heavenly messenger, coming at the beginning of Advent and admonishing little children to prepare their hearts for properly welcoming the Christ Child at Christmas. He is usually impersonated by a man wearing a long white beard, dressed in the vestments of a bishop, with miter and crozier, a friendly and saintly figure, who comes down from heaven once a year to visit the children, whose patron saint he is. He examines them, questioning them on their Catechism and hearing their prayers. After entreating them to be good boys and girls and to get ready for a devout and holy Christmas, he distributes candy and fruit and departs with a loving farewell, leaving the little ones filled with holy awe and joy.”

In America, his image has, as Fisheaters put it, “been mixed up with a lot of traits and imagery from sources as disparate as the poetry of Clement Moore, pagan Norse mythology, and American advertising.”

A wealth of information about St. Nicholas, both legendary and real, can be found at the St. Nicholas Center:

Was St. Nicholas real?
Yes, he was a real 4th century Greek bishop who lived in Asia Minor, along the Mediterranean coast.

Was St. Nicholas a Turk?
No, Nicholas was Greek, living in a Greek province (Lycia, Asia Minor) that was part of the Roman Empire, centuries before Turks came. The region was Lycia, now in modern-day Turkey.

Was Santa/St. Nicholas a pagan god?
The Germanic god Thor may have influenced Santa’s characteristics somewhat, but Santa primarily developed from the real bishop St. Nicholas.

An ancient English hymn, a Bulgarian song and a popular American tune, all dedicated to the saint, are sung below. From Godes Druth, written by the English hermit St. Godric of Finchale in the 12th century:

Saint Nicholas, God’s beloved,
Build for us a fair bright house;
At the birth, at the bier,
Saint Nicholas, bring us safely there.

 Saint Nicholas, glorious Confessor of Christ, assist us in thy loving kindness.

(Indulgence 100 days)

Read More »

“THIS one of the heavenly bodies, which we tenant, was created to be as it were the garden, the Eden, of His Incarnation; and He adorned it in His love, before Adam, the first copy of Him, lived among its Asiatic shades. Perhaps it lay for ages in the glad sunshine, solitary, silent, in beautiful desolation, and He took complacence in the adorning of it. He loved perchance to see its beauty ripen, rather than to rise up at once complete. Continents sank slowly at His will, and new oceans rolled above their mountain tops, or elevated steppes. New lands rose out of the bosom of the deep. Floras of marvellous foliage waved in the sun, and the wisdom and the joy of the Babe of Bethlehem was in them. Faunas, strange, gigantic, terrible, possessed the waters and the land, of His fashioning, and for the delight of His glory. The central fires wrought beautifully and delicately the metals and the gems, which were for the altars of the Babe of Bethlehem, for the tiara of His Vicar, or the chasubles of His priests. The rocks and marbles ripened on the planet, as the fruits ripen on a tree and the Babe, the Wisdom of the Father, disported Himself in the vast operation, the pacific uniformity, and the magnificent slowness of His own laws. The grandeur of those huge-leaved trees, the unwieldy life of those extinct monsters, the loveliness of now sunken lands, were all for Him who has just now been born in Bethlehem, and were not only for Him, but were also His own doing.

“Bethlehem then was not His first home. We must seek Him in an eternal home if indeed He be older than the angels, the eldest-born of creatures. The dark cave within and the moonlit slope without are not like the scenery of His everlasting home. He is the Eternal Word. He is the first Word ever spoken, and He was spoken by God, and He is in all things equal to Him by whom He was spoken…”

— Fr. Frederick Faber, Bethlehem (Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1900), p. 7

“WHY, we ask, ever since men have been men — or rather since they became civilized — why have men in all times and places been irresistibly borne to differentiate and divide the functions of the two sexes? Do we not have here strict testimony to the recognition by all mankind of a truth and a law above man?

“To sum up, wherever women wear men’s dress, it is be considered a factor, over the long term, in disintegrating human order.” [bold added]

— “Notification Concerning Men’s Dress Worn by Women,” Giuseppe Cardinal Siri, 1960

“NON-Whites in our society are all in agreement that White ‘supremacism’ and White ‘racism’ are evils.

“This is because they see White people as tribal competitors and want to weaken us.

“It is not because they think ‘supremacism’ or ‘racism’ are bad things – quite the contrary.”

— Wyatt Stagg

Angelus ad virginem is a medieval carol that has been sung continuously for about 700 years. It was brought to Britain by French friars in the 13th or 14th century. The oldest surviving appearance of the carol is in a manuscript from 1360.

Based on the Hail Mary, this cheerful carol remains popular with choral ensembles today. To be fair, it truly deserves the title of popular music.

(I’m sorry, but I do not know who is performing this wonderful version.)

Translation from the Latin:

Angelus ad virginem

The angel came to the Virgin,
entering secretly into her room;
calming the Virgin’s fear, he said, “Hail!
Hail, queen of virgins:
you will conceive the Lord of heaven and earth
and bear him, still a virgin,
to be the salvation of mankind;
you will be made the gate of heaven,
the cure of sins. Read More »

TODAY is the feast day of St. Barbara. Like many Catholic women in history, this saint of the third century was no stranger to controversy:

Barbara — one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers — was the beautiful daughter of a rich and powerful pagan named Dioscuros. She grew up in Nikomedia (in modern Turkey). To keep her a virgin, her father locked her in a tower when he was away, a tower with only two windows. Upon his return from one journey, he found three windows in the tower instead of two. When he asked Barbara about this, she confessed that she’d become a Christian after being baptized by a priest disguised as a physician, and that she’d asked that a third window be made as a symbol of the Holy Trinity.

She was then denounced by her father, who was ordered by the local authorities to put her to death. She escaped from her tower, but her father caught and killed her. When he dealt the death blow, he was immediately struck by lightning. (Source)

St. Barbara is a patroness of the dying. For approved prayers for her intercession, go here.

St. Barbara, pray for us!

“MONIKA Schaefer, a Canadian citizen of German descent, spent 10 months in a German prison in 2018. Her crime? Making a six minute video that went viral and says things forbidden in Germany. Her brother, who lives in Germany spent 5 years in prison, much of it in solitary, also for the crime of saying what is forbidden. She has a big heart and big courage to keep speaking the truth in the face of a most pervasive and universally believed lie and this lie is very much tied to the events unfolding in the middle east right now.”

Link

“YOU know you are a defeated people when your conquerors say the way you have lived for hundreds of years is an evil political ideology.”

— Mr. S. (a reader of this site)

“WHEN the heart is sick because ‘truths are diminished among the children of men,’ and the weight of unintelligibly triumphant and abundant sin lies heavy on it, and the mind is dragged through thorny places till it bleeds, then the frightened soul flies back to that moment of the first love of Jesus, and rests there with the more full assurance and abiding calm, because it knows that that first act of love is not ended yet. It has stretched from that old midnight at Nazareth to this hour, and is not weakened by the stretch. It can bear the weight of millions of new creations. It will wear for untold centuries. Old as it is, it is still new. It is unending. Its arms are round the majesty of God, its kiss is on his feet, for evermore.”

— Fr. Frederick Faber, Bethlehem (Tan Books, p. 71)