STEVE from the Gold Coast of Australia writes:

May I start by thanking you for providing, through your website, what is really quite a wonderful and very rare resource to thoughtful people  as we observe, ponder, try to make sense of and live with the many quite toxic forces that are at work today in the West.

By “the West”, I mean Europe, broadly, but western Europe in particular, along with those societies founded, built up and still largely maintained by the descendants of Europeans, including but not limited to such traditionally English-speaking nations as the U.S., Canada, New Zealand and my native Australia. (more…)

FROM Thomas Droleskey at Christ or Chaos:

Who has recommend to [women] short skirts, sleeveless dresses, pants, shorts, and clownish pants suits, and so on?

Not only did women and girls buy and buy and buy the clothing that through the years became gradually shorter and skimpier and tighter and ever more unladylike, thus making the whole program of gradual nakedness a huge success, but something else happened at the same time; the sense of modesty and propriety, which God has instilled into their souls, became gradually more blurred and dim and fuzzy, until in so many it became totally blacked out and dead. They did not, and do not, know what happened to them. By blindly and stupidly following the satanic program of gradual abbreviation of attire, they destroyed in themselves a precious God-given gift–the sense of modesty–so that they have now made themselves incapable of distinguishing between modesty and immodesty, nor do so many of them care to know.

And not only have women destroyed in themselves God’s gift of modesty, but they have destroyed it in their children from their earliest years, so that a whole generation has been brought up without any real understanding of modesty without any desire to possess its beauty.

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  SAGE McLaughlin writes: It was said elsewhere on your blog (I cannot find the reference) that Bergolio's vision of the Church is essentially Soviet-- a global party ruled by "councils" of ideological conformists.  Such systems tend to bestow honor and professional advancement on those whose dominant personal traits are servility and ruthlessness. So it should not be surprising that Papa Bergolio, like his vile henchman Card. Kasper, is also a liar without shame.

  A gunman has taken over a cafe in downtown Sydney. Your first thought when you heard the news was, "Oh no, another Catholic fundamentalist." But it seems that's not the case. The New York Times does not initially identify the hostage-taker as a Muslim, but as an armed person with a black flag. The headline is: Black Flag Is Hoisted as an Armed Person Takes Hostages in a Sydney Cafe  This is Newspeak at its finest. The black flag features Arabic script and a Muslim declaration of faith. Prime Minister Tony Abbott does not want to rush to any conclusions. He is amazed that anyone would wish the peace-loving, tolerant Australians harm: “We don’t yet know the motivation of the perpetrator — we don’t know whether this is politically motivated — although obviously there are some indications that it could be,” Mr. Abbott said at a short briefing in Canberra, Australia’s capital. “There are people, even in a society such as ours, who would wish to do us harm.” “The whole point of politically motivated violence is to scare people out of being themselves,” he said. “Australia is a peaceful, open and generous society and nothing should ever change that, and that is why I would urge all Australians today to go about their business as usual.” [emphasis added] Jihadis don't want to scare Australians out of being their peace-loving selves. They want to scare them into being more of themselves. Whenever Muslims…

  "Nothing indicates better the nature of self-love, or should make it more hateful to us, than the idea that it is the rival of the love of God. Homines sunt voluntates, Men are their wills, says St. Augustine. We can bestow our whole love on but one only of two objects: God or self. If we put God first and refer all things to Him, then His love will make us good and pleasing in His sight, imparting a supernatural value to all our actions, and perfecting us as we grow in purity and simplicity.  If, on the other hand, we refer everything to ourselves, our self-love will upset God’s order in us, rendering us most displeasing to Him, vitiating actions otherwise holy, and lowering us in proportion to the sway it exercises in our hearts…. Such is the enemy we have to fight, with the help of grace: an enemy born with us, and in some way part of our very self.  Age, passions, habits, thoughts-- all, even our good qualities and occasionally our virtues, contribute to strengthen its hold upon us, and drive it deeper. It is so involved with ourselves that it seems almost impossible to distinguish it, and to attempt to destroy it is to jeopardize our very existence… We may assume as a fact, without fear of contradiction, that we are blind on many points concerning our perfection, and perhaps our salvation.  We should pray…

I HOPE this hymn, reportedly dating from the 14th century and recorded here by the Pro Arte Singers, will rinse from your mind some of the canned Christmas cacophony you hear everywhere in stores.

Here are the words in Latin and English.

Ecce quod natura mutat sua jura: virgo parit pura dei filium.

Ecce, novum gaudium, ecce novum mirum: virgo parit filium,
que non novit virum; que non novit virum, sed ut pirus pirum, gleba fert sphirum, rosa lilium.

Mundum dus flebilem videns in ruina, florem delectabilem produxit de spina; produxit de spina virgo que regina, mundi medicina, salus gencium.

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MRS. T. writes:

You write often about generic, tasteless pizza and everything it stands for.

Yesterday my husband and more than 100 of his workplace peers were told they would be receiving a very large paycut starting next week.

To ease the blow, his employer served them …. pizza. Little Caesar’s Hot N’ Ready. Much to my admiration, my husband informed them he would not be eating their pity pizza and returned to work.

Merry Christmas.

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THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU at The Brussels Journal writes again on the French thinker René Girard’s conception of the isolated ego of modernity. Girard’s ideas help explain the fever pitch of high-tech connectedness and consumerism. Dr. Bertonneau writes:

The entire modern scheme of “getting and spending” depends on the industrial manipulation of what Girard calls internal mediation. All “consumers” are nowadays Emma Bovary or Dostoyevsky’s “Underground Man.”

Cell phones and basketball shoes exemplify the mimetic trend. Both items have occasioned violence all the way to homicide, basketball shoes most conspicuously, but also cell phones. Given the intensity of advertising for these two commodities, such violence must surprise no one. It is the same violence, moreover, that arose from Cain’s jealousy when God’s admiration for Brother Abel’s animal offering appeared, from Cain’s perspective, to have made Abel the monopolist of charisma. Who can bear to stand next to the monopolist of charisma? The cell phone differs from the pair of basketball shoes only in being itself a medium of mediation, responding constantly to the user’s worry about what to desire, and inundating her with seductive images and verbal provocations thereto.

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KARL D. writes:

There is something new in the language today. It is the response of “No worries” to a “Thank you” instead of the traditional “You’re welcome.” I don’t know why, but I find this highly annoying. I could even get behind the casual “No problem” in some circumstances because at least it insinuates that a “Thank you” was unnecessary as the service provided did not even warrant one. It’s almost akin to saying, “My Pleasure.” Yet “No Worries” implies to me that I was “worried” about the situation or the service provided. It’s almost like saying, “I forgive you.” Why would I be worried or need forgiveness? I am far from an English teacher or professor, but that’s my take on it.

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DON VINCENZO writes:

The Washington Post epitomizes what is so utterly reprehensible of many major dailies in their coverage of news events. For example, recently this other “paper of record”  held an orgy of sycophantic coverage of the death of former Mayor Marion Barry, “Washington’s Mayor for life.” The fact that this very flawed man, caught on tape smoking crack cocaine, who went to prison for six months, and was a persistent tax evader who should have been in prison once again, is now the focus of The Post’s unbridled adulation, tells you something about this daily. But if The Post’s quotidian reporting is awful, then their reporting of its Style Section is egregious. Case in point: the National Museum of Women in the Arts (how many know that such an entity exists?) exhibit of “Picturing Mary, the Madonna as Woman, Mother and Idea.”

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  STEVE H. writes: You must watch this brief video showing a virtual flash mob coming together. The catch is that it is the United States Air Force Band at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. They [play Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" and] sing "Joy To The World." It brought tears to my eyes.

THE University of Virginia gang rape story published by Rolling Stone has proved to be, if not a hoax, so suspicious that even the Washington Post and the New York Times have taken notice and a public apology of sorts was issued by the junky journal. However, the story fit so well into the script of privileged, white villains and innocent, deflowered maidens (characters who do exist in real life but whose numbers are exaggerated for political purposes) that we can still treat it as true.

The Times says the story, exaggerated as it is, is still basically true.

Whatever happened or did not happen to Jackie, campus sexual violence remains all too real, and false reports are rare.

Karen Straughan writes by e-mail:

The UVA circus will end as it always does—once all the dust has settled, the school will release a statement saying the incident was a hoax, it will reaffirm its commitment to keep [female] students safe from sexual assault, and will enact more mandatory “consent training” for male students, and more regulations and procedures that allay the panic people feel when they ask themselves, “Okay, but what if it HAD happened? What if it WAS real?”

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SHEFALI writes from India:

A friend put up a picture of Venus and Serena Williams in sarees on Facebook. Poor woman, seemingly unaware of the PC police she commented how brawny and ugly they looked in the garment, far from feminine. A torrent of abuses was hurled at her from all quarters, from equating beauty with skin colour to bringing down women of colour. She even got blocked from Facebook temporarily because of complaints.

My friend told me tearfully that her criticism was not targeted at skin colour or external beauty but womanly grace and femininity that made these two steroid sisters stick our like sore thumbs in the sari. As women are becoming masculine, lack of refined femininity is something we are expected to ignore and criminal to observe.

Since when did it become okay for women to look like eunuchs?

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  AN entrepreneur hopes to produce and market this elegant bedding. If you pledge $75 to her project, you will receive a Cheese and Pepperoni Duvet cover and two standard crust pillows. It is not for me, dear reader, to tell you that there may be better ways to spend your precious resources.

  WILLIAM KIRKPATRICK has an interesting piece at Crisis magazine about G.K. Chesterton's 1914 novel The Flying Inn and its depiction of an Islamicized England. Kirkpatrick writes: Chesterton’s prophetic novel hits uncomfortably close to home. One thing he didn’t anticipate, however, is that the final Islamization of England could be accomplished without importing a foreign army. Since modern England has already imported enough Muslim immigrants to engineer a significant cultural shift, an occupying army won’t be needed. Otherwise, Chesterton was right on target. He foresaw that an Islamic takeover would be facilitated by cultural elites eager to show their tolerance for new ideas and fashions and their corresponding disdain for traditional culture. In Chesterton’s day, the cultural elites were referred to as the smart set; today they are the multicultural and media elites. And, as in Chesterton’s story, they are quite willing to believe that Muslims discovered or invented just about everything under the sun.

PAUL T. writes:

The most scathing article I’ve run across on the case of Wyatt (“Nicole”) Maines is by (I presume) a homosexual, writing from a non-Christian perspective; even so, the author makes some strong points and raises some unpleasant facts we’re not too likely to hear amid all the triumphalist hoopla over this case.

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    ST. BARBARA, whose feast is observed today, was just another weak, mindless woman before the Age of Feminism. Her story is partly based on legend and on many hundreds of years of veneration: Barbara was the daughter of a rich heathen named Dioscorus. She was carefully guarded by her father who kept her shut up in a tower in order to preserve her from the outside world. An offer of marriage which was received through him she rejected. Before going on a journey her father commanded that a bath-house be erected for her use near her dwelling, and during his absence Barbara had three windows put in it, as a symbol of the Holy Trinity, instead of the two originally intended. When her father returned she acknowledged herself to be a Christian; upon this she was ill-treated by him and dragged before the prefect of the province, Martinianus, who had her cruelly tortured and finally condemned her to death by beheading. The father himself carried out the death-sentence, but in punishment for this he was struck by lightning on the way home and his body consumed. Another Christian named Juliana suffered the death of a martyr along with Barbara. A pious man called Valentinus buried the bodies of the saints; at this grave the sick were healed and the pilgrims who came to pray received aid and consolation. The emperor in whose reign the martyrdom is placed is sometimes…