DON VINCENZO writes:

As a direct result of the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church is in a shambles. It’s a walking self-wrecking machine, and one of the unintended – or was it? – consequences of that disaster is the continuing diminished power and prestige of the papacy.

The pope’s visit to St. Mary’s College, Oscott, once the premiere Catholic seminary in England, tells you all you need to know. Oscott has refused a request for the Latin Mass by seminarians, despite the pope’s 2007 apostolic letter, Summorum Pontificum, which requires that any faithful group’s request for the Extraordinary Form be accommodated.

The rot within the Church is profound; yet, it never fails to astound me just how deep it runs.

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AT Galliawatch, Tiberge writes:

On Sunday January 13 all Frenchmen interested in stopping the bill on gay marriage from becoming law are mobilizing with determination and zeal for the march in Paris. They are coming from all over France, by bus, by train, by car. Some reports are predicting over half a million demonstrators. (more…)

DAVID C. writes:

TWO EPISCOPAL ministers in Maryland “married” last week. They are interviewed here by an excited Fox News reporter who laments the fact that one of the women does not have the same immigration rights as a heterosexual spouse.

Sarah Lamming, who apparently has never read the New Testament despite her degree from Yale Divinity School (or perhaps because of her degree from Yale Divinity), says of her “marriage” to Dianna Carroll, “I acknowledge it is difficult for some people, but I am gay and I was created that way by God.” Translation: “God made me disdain men and prefer masturbation. God made me reject motherhood altogether.”

Now, if a hardened burglar came to Rev. Sarah or Rev. Dianna and said he liked being a burglar, what grounds does she have for objecting to his way of life? He could say, “I acknowledge my thefts are difficult for some people, but I am a thief and I was created that way by God.”

The argument that homosexuality is right whenever it feels natural presumes that whatever feels natural is right.

AT The Orthosphere, Kristor is organizing a prayer vigil to take place next Sunday, January 13th, on behalf of the writer Lawrence Auster, who has advanced pancreatic cancer. The vigil does not require that you go anywhere or do anything other than offer prayers from your home or wherever you happen to be. While individual prayer is always good and always beneficial, collective prayer, which is easy to organize in the age of the Internet, is even better. Kristor writes:

Massed intercessory prayer has been the occasion of some truly remarkable events – not all of them physiological, by any means (and, for that matter, not all in the intended beneficiary of the prayer). Some background information may be found here.

I hope you will join with me in praying for Mr. Auster, who has done so much to defend and clarify the traditionalist worldview.

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THE latest issue of Praesidium features an essay by Thomas F. Bertonneau on René Guenon, the French reactionary who died in 1951. Mr. Bertonneau’s article provides an excellent overview of the writings of a man who attacked “the stultifying massiveness of modern society, with its conformism on an unprecedented scale.” In the Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Guenon saw the glorification of quantity over quality as fundamental to the modern obsession with equality. Mr. Bertonneau writes:

The “Reign of Quantity” requires that its constituency live unconnected with any past in a kind of perpetual present, on the multiplying distractions of which the untutored mind remains stupidly fixed.  Guénon remarks how industry fills life with things, objects and devices, which monopolize attention, and which assimilate individuals to the pattern of the consumer.  In our own time the variety and fascination – and the idiocy – of these things have only increased.  (more…)

IN A 2008 discussion at VFR, the commenter Thucydides wrote:

Why is the idea of armed self defense so repugnant to liberals? It crosses their core assumptions in several ways.

First, the need for it suggests that human evil is a normal, expectable state of affairs, not something aberrant that is produced by some imperfection in collective social arrangements. The core liberal assumption is the sentimental faith that humans are essentially good and reasonable; violence is explained away as the regrettable result of anger proceeding from some form of injustice, real or imagined. The problem then is not the violence, and not human nature, but some social condition. (Small comfort to the victims!) (more…)

FIVE  years ago, at VFR, I proposed a plan for preventing school massacres. I called it “Three Teachers, Three Guns,” and suggested arming a minimum of three teachers in every school building (more in sprawling buildings). A sign could be placed on a school identifying its participation.

Today, despite all the talk of draconian gun control, something like this plan is actually being envisioned in some states. A Tennessee lawmaker is the latest to propose a bill for arming and training a small number of teachers. Legislators in a few other states– Oklahoma, Missouri, Minnesota, South Dakota and Oregon —  have discussed laws permitting teachers to carry concealed weapons in recent weeks. (more…)

  DANIEL S. writes: Here is how the Muslim world celebrated Christmas: In Pakistan, a Muslim mob armed with weapons attacked Christian worshipers in the capital city leaving Christmas services. In Egypt, the army foiled a plot for a Christmas day attack on a Coptic church. A similar plot by Chechen Muslim terrorists directed against Christmas services was disrupted in southern Russia by security forces. To top it off, Muslim terrorists in Mosul, Iraq slit the throat of a female Christian teacher.

WHEELER MACPHERSON writes:

I am encouraged by some of the comments, here and here, regarding cremation, funerals, and burial. I say “encouraged” because my heart rejoices at any glimmer of people weaning themselves from the control and ordinances of illegitimate authority. I believe the funeral industry is such an authority.

Some years ago, I read several books on death, dying, and funerals, including Lisa Carlson’s excellent “Caring for the Dead: Your Final Act of Love.” I used this book as a jumping-off point for a Sunday School class on “A Christian View of Death, Dying, and Funeral Preparation.”

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IN The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton wrote of the Magi, the Eastern philosopher kings who traveled to Bethlehem under the guidance of a star. While the shepherds were drawn out of simplicity to the baby in the manger, the Oriental kings, carrying expensive gifts, were drawn by a longing for truth and wisdom.

The mere sight of the newborn satisfied their deepest intellectual yearnings.

Chesterton wrote in his chapter, “The God in the Cave”:

It is still a strange story, though an old one, how they came out of orient lands, crowned with the majesty of kings and clothed with something of the mystery of magicians. That truth that is tradition has wisely remembered them almost as unknown quantities, as mysterious as their mysterious and melodious names; Melchior, Caspar, Balthazar. (more…)

I WAS away for a week during the Christmas season, taking care of a sick aunt in Florida, so I did not get a chance to watch the Vienna Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s Day concert, which takes place in the magnificent Golden Hall of the Vienna Musikverein. Fortunately, the concert, conducted this year by Franz Welser-Möst, can be seen in its entirety, complete with the famous Strauss waltzes, online at PBS until Jan. 16.

See my previous post on the Vienna Philharmonic, which has resisted feminization and multiculturalism in an era when most Western orchestras have been dramatically transformed by the entry of large numbers of women and Asians. As I wrote before:

The Philharmonic did not allow women to become full members until 1997. Between 1997 and 2010, a period during which many other orchestras became heavily female, it hired only three women. Paul Fürst, a violist, once stated in a documentary on women conductors:

There is no ban on women musicians playing here but the Vienna Philharmonic is by tradition an all-male orchestra. Our profession makes family life extremely difficult, so for a woman it’s almost impossible. There are so many orchestras with women members so why shouldn’t there be – for how long I don’t know – an orchestra with no women in it … A woman shouldn’t play like a man but like a woman, but an all-male orchestra is bound to have a special tone.

In America, the first violin sections of major orchestras do not look like this anymore:

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  THE DANISH painter Viggo Johansen painted several wonderful pictures of friends gathered around a table conversing in lamplight, their faces animated by deep conversation and intense rapport. They include this 1886 painting, Aftenpassiar, or Evening Talk. In each of the paintings, his conversing men and women appear in suits and elegant dress, as if intellectual communion is a formal event.

IN THIS interview with Jennifer Granholm, Tricia Rose, a professor from Brown University, expresses disbelief that the Violence Against Women Act was not reauthorized by the 112th Congress. But here’s the astounding part. The Ivy League professor maintains that Republicans did not want to move the bill because they did not want to protect Native American women who are “violated” by white men on tribal lands.

Granholm, without flinching before this fat lie, says Republicans believe Native American women are not “human enough.” And Rose, who looks ridiculously un-professorial in a silky purple blouse, reminds us that whites stole Indian lands.

These two well-dressed bullies are utterly at home with lies. For them, the ends justify the means. A domestic violence bill that presumes every man is a potential wife-beater is so inherently and undeniably good that any falsification of the truth, even the patently false claim that white men are routinely “violating” Indian women, is justified.

Rose is a professor of Africana studies and receives generous grants from major foundations for her virulently anti-white activism and mind-blowing ignorance. Her entire career is proof of the power women and nonwhites possess. Both Rose and Granholm are shocked that the whole world is not up in arms that VAWA has not been reauthorized and they blame it on a conspiracy to deprive young women of the enlightened truths of feminism.

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  SEE Carolyn's moving comments in the thread about cremation. She describes how her family and friends have made burial a more personal --- and also less expensive -- affair. When her grandson died as a baby, her husband made the casket himself.

DANIEL S. writes:

The cultural Marxist\feminist group FEMEN is back, this time “protesting” (i.e. stripping naked in public) from Sweden the recently drafted shariah-based constitution of Egypt. Taking the lead among these “protesters” is an Egyptian immigrant named Alia al-Mahdi. (more…)