THE CASE of Nancy Verhelst is one more horror story that is all too true.

First Belgian doctors consented to Verhelst’s delusional desire to be a man. They treated her with synthetic hormones; cut off her breasts and constructed phony male genitalia. Verhelst, 44, apparently realized she was the creature of a  Frankenstein-like hoax. A Belgian doctor then consented to her desire to end her life and killed her by lethal injection in a hospital.

It’s all legal in Belgium, where someone who attests to psychological suffering can be put to death by doctors.

Now after all this, journalists reporting on Verhelst’s case refer to her as “Nathan,” her chosen male name. Even when she is dead, the world plays along with this woman’s disastrous confusion and defiance of nature. She was surrounded by lies, in life and in death. First she was told she had no immutable nature. Then she was told she had no immutable soul.

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“Proselytism is solemn nonsense, it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us. Sometimes after a meeting I want to arrange another one because new ideas are born and I discover new needs. This is important: to get to know people, listen, expand the circle of ideas. The world is crisscrossed by roads that come closer together and move apart, but the important thing is that they lead towards the Good.”

— Pope Francis, in an interview with avowed atheist Eugenio Scalfari, La Repubblica, Oct. 1, 2013

Below are astute Catholic commentators poised to respond to the interview. They will say he didn’t really say what he said.

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STEVEN B. writes:

I’d like to run something by you if I may.

I’ve been thinking heavily about interracial marriage. I found myself not opposed to it because I couldn’t find what I considered an objective reason to preserve one’s race (in my case, the white race). But then I thought, “What ‘objective reason’ is there to protect one’s family?” All of mankind agrees that one’s family is to be protected, but yet I couldn’t think of a ‘rational’ reason for it. (more…)

  TRUTH, beauty and goodness are intimately connected. A culture that upholds lies about existence cannot be beautiful. At her website, Reclaiming Beauty, Kidist Paulos Asrat explains some of her ideas on the subject.

B.E. writes:

Well, well, well, is it that time of year already? Here we are in the middle of “Hispanic Heritage Month,” so it’s time to celebrate America’s Hispanic heritage!

We have to go back to the beginning, of course, and remember the Hispanic voyagers on the Mayflower, of whom there were … oh. Zero.

Well, then, let’s commemorate those brave Hispanics who fought, and sometimes died, for the fledgling United States, good men like … oh, wait. There weren’t any Hispanic heroes of the Revolution, no Hispanic Founding Fathers. (more…)

THE  fashion designer Rick Owens recruited black American college students who are members of step teams to exhibit some of his 2014 collection in Paris. According to Robin Givhan of New York magazine, Owens’s aesthetic is “rooted in nontraditional beauty, confidence, and power.” Gee, that’s strange. It looks to me more like homicidal rage than “confidence;” more like primitive and Satanic ugliness than “nontraditional beauty,” but then I’m not marinated in chic hideousness and revolutionary nihilism every day of the week as Givhan is.

Even in the world of haute couture, blacks are incited to hatred. Givhan, who is black, mindlessly praises the “energy” of the show. And who would dare to correct her? Givhan writes:

From the first models who strode out to thumping drumbeats, the Rick Owens spring 2014 presentation projected an energy not typical on a Paris runway, or any other in recent memory. Standing mostly in silhouette on high scaffolding with a pair of unadorned staircases, the models pounded their chests with a synchronized audacity, then descended the stairs and moved into the vast open performance space en masse, with scowling expressions of determination and ferocity. They twisted and rocked to the beat, throwing their heads back, their arms moving in sharp, angular gestures and their legs rising up in back kicks, side kicks, and deep forward lunges.

Owens says the purpose of the show was to say (something not very nice and unprintable) to conventional beauty. The idea that this is somehow an original stance would be laughable if Owens was just one more black-clad, grungy, tattooed art student. But he is a top designer.

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DIANA writes:

In September 2012, Jerry Brown vetoed the bill (introduced by homosexual legislator Mark Leno) to legalize the status of more than two parents per child. Governor Brown didn’t do that because he was opposed to it. He vetoed the bill because its passage came in the middle of an especially fraught period, in which the Defense of Marriage Act was being considered. He didn’t want to rock the boat by saying to people, in effect, “Listen up, here are the consequences of same-sex “marriage.” This is the next step in the road to perdition.” Smart move on his part.

Prediction: in two years or less, the bill will come up, it will pass, and children in California will be able to enjoy the benefits of three, four and who knows how many “moms” and “dads.” And parts of the rest of the country will follow. Other parts will not, they will be demonized as “bigots,” and yadda yadda. It’s all so familiar by now. (more…)

    IN AN essay at The Orthosphere, "What is the America that traditionalists love?" Alan Roebuck writes that it is reasonable and good to love America despite her decline: If America is ours, if we belong to her, then we must love her regardless of whether or not she is great. Love is not the same as approval; we are not obliged to approve of all that America is and does. But if we really are connected to America then there is no doubt about our duty to love our own people. And conversely, if America is not ours, if the situation has grown so bad that we really are no longer of America, then we owe her no more than the common courtesy we owe all people made in God’s image. So do we still belong to America? Or has she become a different nation, one to whom we do not belong? This question cannot be answered by airtight logic and a knock-down-drag-out argument. What we speak of here is real, but it is not known by mathematical or scientific reasoning. It is a spiritual and transcendent reality, and therefore it is known primarily by intuition rather than by syllogistic reasoning. But note that intuition—the mind’s ability to know a truth by immediately grasping it rather than by a process of logical deduction—always forms in response to what we observe. These observations are the evidence that induces intuitive knowledge under the right conditions. And logic can play…

FROM Reuters:

Wealthy Chinese are hiring American women to serve as surrogates for their children, creating a small but growing business in $120,000 “designer” American babies for China’s elite.

Surrogacy agencies in China and the United States are catering to wealthy Chinese who want a baby outside the country’s restrictive family planning policies, who are unable to conceive themselves, or who are seeking U.S. citizenship for their children.

Emigration as a family is another draw – U.S. citizens may apply for Green Cards for their parents when they turn 21. (more…)

MEN Having Babies, an organization that helps its “gay clientele” rent wombs and buy babies, is having its Ninth Annual Men Having Babies Surrogacy Conference in ten days. As Pope Francis says, enter into the “moral darkness” around you. But don’t become obsessed with it. There are more important things to think about. Check it out. This is a pedophile’s dream come true. All of this is perfectly legal in good ol’ America, where anything can be bought and anything can be sold.

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“You cannot know Jesus without having problems. And I dare say, ‘But if you want to have a problem, go to the street to know Jesus – you’ll end up having not one, but many!’ But that is the way to get to know Jesus! You cannot know Jesus in first class! One gets to know Jesus in going out [into] every day [life]. You cannot get to know Jesus in peace and quiet, nor even in the library: Know Jesus.”

 — Pope Francis, Vatican Mass, September 26, 2013

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IN the entry “Jorge Bergoglio and the Vacant Throne,” Sage McLaughlin writes:

Whether or not Bergolio is formally guilty of heresy, it appears that he is in a state of objective apostasy.  Practically every word he utters is crafted so as to add confusion and muddy the waters of Church teaching, always behind the cloak of words such as “nuance.”  Those who strain and squint in an effort to find the rock-ribbed orthodoxy ingeniously hidden beneath all the layers of liberal Jesuit-speak are simply deluding themselves, because they cannot admit the terrible truth.  (I marvel daily at the scale and scope of the effort by conservatives throughout the Western world to deny the seriousness of our situation, but particularly in matters of faith and morals, and particularly among Catholics who cannot face the awful realities confronting us.)

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DON VINCENZO writes:

To lighten the apparent stress on you and your readers created by the Pope’s recent interview, may I offer a bit of welcome relief in the form of a recent declaration by the CEO of the Italian pasta maker, Barilla, with the eponymous name of Guido Barilla?

Recently, the CEO of Barilla Pasta, the Emilia-Romagna (Central Italy) company that is the largest pasta producing company in the world, with manufacturing outlets in, amongst other countries, the U.S., declared on a radio program that his company would not use homosexual families or couples in their ads. That announcement, which sent the European homosexual lobby in paroxysms of rage, was: “I would never do an advert with a homosexual family…if the gays don’t like it they can go an eat another brand.” (more…)

MUCH has been made of Pope Francis’s references to abortion and homosexuality in his “Big Heart” interview that appeared in America magazine and little about the disturbingly open-ended comment he made regarding divorce and remarriage. As with so much of the interview, it is the suggestion of approval that is alarming. (more…)

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

For the umpteenth time, conservatives, repeat after me: Never Trust A Bush!

It has only become more clear over the years that the Bush Clan is and has always been a cabal of social and political liberals masquerading as conservative to preserve its political base in the Republican Party – both because the Clan’s original power base was the Connecticut GOP and because, despite strenuous efforts to re-package themselves as Hispanic, the Bushes are just too WASPy and ‘whitebread’ to be national contenders in today’s diversity-obsessed and anti-white Democratic Party.

Now the Bush Clan paterfamilias has made it even more obvious, for those who still don’t get it, that Bushite liberalism does not begin with the generation of W and Jeb. (more…)

ONE OF the common arguments against school uniforms is that they do not allow children to express their individuality. I remember a mother at a school my older son attended stating that she strongly believed her six- and eight-year-old daughters would be stifled in their creativity and self-awareness if they were ever to wear uniforms. As Marian T. Horvat points out in this article today at Tradition in Action, this is a quite laughable argument given the extreme uniformity and herd-like fashion schoolchildren exhibit in their choice of clothes. Fashion is fascist in its dictates to the young. A girl’s entire identity hinges on adequately displaying not her creativity but her conformity. Dr. Horvat writes:

[I] was quite irritated when I picked up the Los Angeles Times one morning recently and found a law professor taking a strong stand against school uniforms in an editorial titled “Dressing down school dress codes.” (September 5, 2013). Her dressing down of uniforms centers basically on the same old worn-out arguments that uniforms stifle individuality and are anti-democratic. (more…)

IN THE previous entry on Pope Francis, a reader recommended this article by George Nuemayr at The American Spectator.  Nuemayr is not among those Catholic commentators dismissing the seriousness of the un-orthodox views recently expressed by the Pope. However, he believes there is hope in the possibility that he will undergo correction. He writes:

Even if given the most charitable reading, Pope Francis’s recent interview with Jesuit publications was alarming in its spirit-of-Vatican II liberalism. Catholicism is not a personality cult and so Catholics, following the example of St. Paul, don’t need to ooh and aah over unsound, non-infallible remarks, which were made incidentally to publications like America known principally for their heterodoxy. (more…)

STEVEN T. writes:

I discovered this website today, and I just had to inform you of it. “The Dahesh Museum of Art is the only institution in the United States devoted to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting works by Europe’s academically trained artists of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Dahesh serves a diverse audience by placing these artists in the broader context of 19th-century visual culture, and by offering a fresh appraisal of the role academies played in reinvigorating the classical ideals of beauty, humanism, and skill.”

I believe that you would enjoy this immensely, as will I.

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