READERS of this site, accustomed as they are to associating commercial pizza with propaganda of various kinds, were probably not surprised to find pizza at the center of a national conflict last week. During Holy Week, the most sacred and solemn week of the liturgical year, owners of a pizza shop in Indiana were baited into stating that they would not serve pizza at a “gay wedding.” Even at this advanced stage of pizzafication there was probably not a single “gay couple” in America who wanted pizza at their “wedding,” at least from this particular pizza shop. Nevertheless, the owners faced an hysterical mob on the Internet and had to shut down.

Not a single slice had been denied to anyone. That didn’t matter. The owners of the pizza shop had committed a thought crime, and that’s what mattered.

Please do not blame the virtual mob. These people have been brainwashed. They have been indoctrinated all their lives into believing that the freedom to think and do whatever one wants is the highest and most precious principle. All freedom is good, even the freedom to destroy oneself.

They should not be blamed for their ignorance. They are pursuing American secularism to its logical conclusions. They are acting upon what they have been taught in school and by every major organ of public opinion. (more…)

TOM writes:

Regarding the abomination going on around us, i.e., its source and the fate of those responsible, this is from “The Mystical City of God” by Venerable Mary of Agreda, wherein was revealed to her Satan’s first rant to his fellow fallen angels in hell, after their being condemned there: (more…)

FROM “The Dangers of Human Respect and How to Overcome it,” (1891) by Father Michael B. Buckley:

Those who are influenced by human respect have tongues that utter no sentiments but those which others may applaud; they have ears that watch to catch the floating opinion of the crowd, that their own may be found according to the vulgar standard; they have eyes that see not their own contemptible subserviency, and their own wretched degradation; they have feet that walk not in the ways of God, but follow in the wake of those that insult and deride Him. Shameful servitude! infinitely more degrading than any physical bondage to which poverty or even crime subjects the outcast of society or the victims of the law.

One case, in which human respect most commonly exercises its pernicious influence is, where a man has been in the pursuit of sin for years, and who is now sincerely desirous to return to God, but who is deterred from the work of conversion by the fear that his new conversion of life may excite the ridicule of those with whom he had been associated in his former career of vice. (more…)

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS wrote on Christ’s burial in the tomb:

The sepulchre is a figure by which is signified the contemplation of heavenly things. So, St.
Gregory, commenting on the words of Job (iii. 22), They rejoice exceedingly when they have found the grave says, “As in the grave the body is hidden away when dead, so in divine contemplation there lies concealed the soul, dead to the world. There, at rest from the world s clamour, it lies, in a three days burial through, as it were, its triple immersion in baptism. Thou shalt hide them in the secret of thy face from the disturbance of men (Ps. xxx. 21). Those in great trouble, tormented with the hates of men, enter in spirit the presence of God and they are at rest.”

Three things are required for this spiritual burial in God, namely, that the mind be perfected by the virtues, that the mind be all bright and shining with purity, and that it be wholly dead
to this world. All these things are shown figuratively in the burial of Christ. (more…)

IF YOU thought you’d seen every possible travesty of Catholic worship since Vatican II, you were wrong. Body in Prayer translates the Stations of the Cross into yoga exercises.  (more…)

IN The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton writes about Good Friday and its historic meaning:

Every attempt to amplify that story has diminished it. The task has been attempted by many men of real genius and eloquence as well as by only too many vulgar sentimentalists and self-conscious rhetoricians. The tale has been retold with patronizing pathos by elegant skeptics and with fluent enthusiasm by boisterous best-sellers. (more…)

AT The Orthosphere, Thomas F. Bertonneau writes that true higher education benefits from the erotic energy of the young and channels it. The Higher Ed Complex perverts it: Has it occurred to anyone that the codes that brutally suppress speech, or brand all sexual interest as predatory prior to any fact, or banish those things, like great art and literature, which might awaken passion in students – has it occurred to anyone, I ask, that these wretched devices are all manifestations of hatred, which is the opposite of love, and of impotency, which is the opposite of capacity, or that they are all first and foremost assaults on the soul?

FROM The Hidden Treasure of the Holy Mass by St. Leonard of Port Maurice:

Place together all the gifts and all the graces you have received from God ; so many gifts of nature and grace, — body, soul, senses, faculties, health, and life itself; add to all these the very life of His Son Jesus Christ, and the death that He suffered for love of us, and does not all this increase a thousandfold the debt you owe to God? But how shall we ever be able sufficiently to thank Him? If the law of gratitude is observed by the wild beasts, whose fierce nature is often changed into gentleness towards their benefactors, how much more ought it not to be observed by man gifted as he is with reason, and so nobly endowed by the Divine liberality? (more…)

WANDA SHERRATT writes:

This story is front page news in Canada right now.

Our new Consul General in Miami is a woman named Roxanne Dubé, and she has only been in the job two months.  Yesterday, her two teenage sons, who were both allegedly armed, took her BMW to go buy drugs, and the affair ended with the 17-year old dead, and the 15-year old charged with murder.  If you read the history of this woman’s life encapsulated in the story, you’ll see that she could be a poster girl for the modern woman, and an example of someone who could hardly have made worse decisions if she tried. (more…)

TWO years ago, an Atlanta hospital declined to put 15-year-old Anthony Stokes on its heart transplant list because he had a history of noncompliance with doctor's orders and criminal delinquency. Civil rights groups accused the hospital of racism. The hospital relented and Stokes was given a new heart, instead of someone else on the list. He died on Tuesday after carjacking a vehicle, bursting into a home and shooting at a woman inside who was watching TV, fleeing in the stolen car, hitting a pedestrian, and crashing into a pole.

DON VINCENZO writes:

Much of this morning’s news was dominated by a story in which a man, arrested and charged with several bank robberies, who had escaped police custody and was being sought by the law enforcement members of Fairfax County Virginia, where I live. There were radio updates upon updates, informing the public to be on the lookout for a certain car, which had been hijacked, and not to approach the “accused” felon, who was considered armed and dangerous. But something did not fit: how had this man, identified as Wossen Assaye, who appears (from his photo) not particularly big or bulky, “overpowered” two policemen, taken the gun of one, and fled. It didn’t sound kosher, and, of course, it wasn’t. (more…)

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

A featureless and ugly museum has opened in Boston, next door to John Kennedy’s featureless and ugly presidential library.  It is the brain-child of the late President Kennedy’s late baby brother, Senator-for-life Edward Moore Kennedy, known to Americans with varying degrees of affection as Teddy Kennedy.  The museum, The Edward M. Kennedy Institute, is supposed to be about the U.S. Senate but is really a center for Leftist hagiography of Teddy, just as the library next door is a center for Leftist hagiography of Jack. (more…)

TODAY marks the tenth anniversary of the court-ordered starvation and dehydration of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who suffered massive brain damage after she collapsed in cardiac arrest at the age of 26. At Christ or Chaos, Thomas Droleskey discusses the famous case and presents a first-hand account of Schiavo’s last days by the priest who was by her side when she died. There were police in the room also. They were there to prevent anyone, even the parents who loved her and brought her into the world, from giving Schiavo food or water. The Rev. Frank Pavone wrote:

There was a little night table in the room.  I could put my hand on the table and on Terri’s head all within arm’s reach.  And on that table was a vase of flowers filled with water.  And I looked at the flowers.  They were beautiful.  There were roses and other types of flowers and there was another vase at the foot of the bed.  I saw two beautiful bouquets of flowers filled with water — fully nourished, living, beautiful.  And I said to myself, this is absurd, totally absurd.  These flowers are being treated better than this woman.  She has not had a drop of water for almost two weeks.  Why are those flowers there?  What type of hypocrisy is this?  The flowers were watered.  Terri wasn’t.  And had I dipped my hand in that water and put it on her tongue, the [police] officer would have led me out, probably under arrest.  Something is wrong here.

As the media reported, those who killed Terri were quite angry that I said so. The night before she died, I said to the media that her estranged husband Michael, his attorney Mr. Felos, and Judge Greer were murderers. I also pointed out, that night and the next morning, that contrary to Felos’ description, Terri’s death was not at all peaceful and beautiful. It was, on the contrary, quite horrifying. In all my years as a priest, I never saw anything like it before. (more…)

"THE entire history of mankind is a story of love. It's a story of how man was made for God and how man became estranged from God. But in the end, after many struggles and sorrows, man has come back to God to have a happiness in the end." --- From this sermon on Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane

DON VINCENZO writes:

A READER writes:

I was thinking of Lawrence Auster this weekend when I took my boys out to lunch near my new apartment, which is in the Clarendon neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia. I admit this East Coast stuff is new to me, having recently moved here from overseas, but the scene I witnessed in this restaurant at 1 p.m. on a Sunday was really something to behold. (more…)