ST. JOSEPH, the greatest of saints whose feast day is today, is depicted in many artworks as a gray-haired, bearded man of advanced age. Though these works often convey the wisdom, dignity, affectionate nature and profound sanctity of the man, they are most probably not realistic as to his age. There is good reason to believe Joseph was in the prime of life — about forty years old — at the time of his betrothal to Mary and had a physical appearance of noticeable manly beauty.

His relative youthfulness, compared to the common view, meant that he was fully able to fulfill his role as father, guardian and protector and be an appropriate spouse and companion in the eyes of the world to Mary. Marriages between old men and young women have always in all times suggested coercion, material motives or ambition, not mutual attraction. Though Mary and Joseph took vows of virginity, they were still husband and wife, filled with tenderness and deepest affection for each other.

More on this from The Life and Glories of St. Joseph by Edwin Healey Thompson (1888):

WE must pause here awhile to give a few words of consideration to the disputed question as to the age of Joseph at the time of his espousals with Mary. Three opinions have been held, one of which would make our saint far advanced in years. This opinion was accepted by some of the Fathers and ancient ecclesiastical writers, chiefly Greek; and in support of it has been urged the custom prevailing among painters of representing St. Joseph as an aged man, sometimes as almost decrepit. This view has, however, been strongly opposed, not only because it had no other ground to rest upon than the statements of Pseudo-Gospels which were current in the third and fourth centuries, and were coupled with the assertion that Joseph was a widower with many children, an assertion forcibly condemned by St. Jerome and a host of other Fathers and theological writers down to the present time, but also as in itself presenting insuperable difficulties. As we have already observed, these apocryphal writings, while probably recording some true traditionary facts, are entirely devoid of authority, and contain, moreover, much that we naturally reject as both improbable and unbefitting. (more…)

“I WANTED to know the truth–to see Jesus of Nazareth as He walked and talked in His native haunts. And then to give back to the millions of my fellow-Christians this real conception of the Founder of the Faith. If I spent ten years in the Holy Land, treading in the very footsteps of the Saviour, it was only that I myself might better realize all that He was, all that He did, before I give it to the world. Day by day, hour by hour, the facts grew dearer to me. I was moved by the consciousness that I was looking at the same rocks, the same trees that had been reflected in the eyes of the Saviour, and as I walked along those paths in which He must have trod, I could not always restrain the tears.

“I had studied the Gospels until I knew them by heart, and had located as nearly as I might every act of that Divine One who came on earth to save mankind. It was necessary for me to restore the Temple of Jerusalem in order that I might place the Child Jesus there. To do this properly, (more…)

“OUR actions have a tongue of their own; they have an eloquence of their own, even when the tongue is silent. For deeds prove the lover more than words.”

— St. Cyril of Jerusalem

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WHY do so many people who do not themselves engage in “homosexuality” approve of it?

We know one thing: It’s not about love. It’s not about loving the people who are caught up in this sin and who are scandalously applauded by the world as heroes and sacred victims. We know it’s not about love because this “lifestyle” is demonstrably the cause of such profound unhappiness in the long run and is demonstrably damaging to any society approving it. The record on that score is overwhelming, as anyone who is not detached from reality and who cares to look beyond sentimental fictions will see.

It really is more about confirming their own choices in life, than it is about any kind of true charity for others.

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Peccantem me quotidie by Carlo Gesualdo

I who sin every day
and am not penitent
the fear of death troubles me:

Responsum
For in hell there is no redemption.
Have mercy upon me, O God, and save me.

Versus
God, in your name save me,
and in your virtue set me free.

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“TO righteousness it belongs to be ready to distribute according to desert, and to preserve ancestral customs and traditions and the established laws, and to tell the truth when interest is at stake, and to keep agreements. First among the claims of righteousness are our duties to the gods, then our duties to the spirits, then those to country and parents, then those to the departed; and among these claims is piety, which is either a part of righteousness or a concomitant of it. Righteousness is also accompanied by holiness and truth and loyalty and hatred of wickedness”.

— Aristotle, Virtues and Vices, Loeb Edition

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St. Patrick’s Day

All praise to Saint Patrick, who brought to our mountains
The gift of God’s faith, the sweet light of His love!
All praise to the shepherd who showed us the fountains
That rise in the heart of the Saviour above!
For hundreds of years, in smiles and in tears,
Our Saint has been with us, our shield and our stay;
All else may have gone, Saint Patrick alone,
He hath been to us light when earth’s lights were all set,
For the glories of Faith they can never decay;
And the best of our glories is bright with us yet,
In the faith and the feast of Saint Patrick’s Day.

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St. Patrick’s Confessio

“MY NAME IS PATRICK. I am a sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all believers. I am looked down upon by many. My father was Calpornius. He was a deacon; his father was Potitus, a [pagan] priest, who lived at Bannavem Taburniae. His home was near there, and that is where I was taken prisoner. I was about sixteen at the time. At that time, I did not know the true God. I was taken into captivity in Ireland, along with thousands of others. We deserved this, because we had gone away from God, and did not keep his commandments. We would not listen to our priests, who advised us about how we could be saved. The Lord brought his strong anger upon us, and scattered us among many nations even to the ends of the earth. It was among foreigners that it was seen how little I was.

“It was there that the Lord opened up my awareness of my lack of faith. Even though it came about late, I recognised my failings. So I turned with all my heart to the Lord my God, and he looked down on my lowliness and had mercy on my youthful ignorance. He guarded me before I knew him, and before I came to wisdom and could distinguish between good and evil. He protected me and consoled me as a father does for his son.

“That is why I cannot be silent – nor would it be good to do so – about such great blessings and such a gift that the Lord so kindly bestowed in the land of my captivity. This is how we can repay such blessings, when our lives change and we come to know God, to praise and bear witness to his great wonders before every nation under heaven. (more…)

ST. Patrick’s Day means not much more than green beer and drunken reveling for many today, but in late-19th century America it was — believe it or not — a day to honor moderation and total abstinence from alcohol.

In the Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day parade of 1875, some 10,000 people marched and “the majority parading walked with the thirty-nine marching units of the [Catholic] Total Abstinence Brotherhood, an organization with strong religious backing and a missionary zeal for temperance crusading.,” according to Dennis Clark.

 It was after the Civil War that parades of all kinds became a sort of national craze. Veterans of the conflict turned out and, in Philadelphia, General St. Clair Mulholland and other heroes of the war stepped smartly along on St. Patrick’s Day each year. Temperance organizations became a big component of the March 17th parades from 1870 through the turn of the century.

Father Matthew of County Tyrone (above) was the popular founder in Ireland of organized temperance earlier in the century. It spread to this country with the creation of state groups and then the national Brotherhood in 1871. On July 4, 1876, the Catholic Total Abstinence Centennial Fountain was dedicated in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, featuring a marble statue of of Fr. Matthew.

From the May 1887 edition of Catholic World: (more…)

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FROM Apostasy in America by Solange Hertz:

Like the Civil War a century later, the Revolutionary War never enjoyed popular support, but was engineered by the proverbial active, well organized minority intent on its peculiar agenda, who “while men were asleep” or otherwise occupied in earning a living, “oversowed cockle among the wheat” (Matt. 13:25). On January 30, 1648, when Charles I of England was “put to death by the severing of his head from his body” as ordained by the Death Warrant issued by Oliver Cromwell and his Republicans, the assembled multitude:

…far from accepting the executioner’s invitation to ‘rejoice at the death of a traitor,’ uttered a dismal universal groan such as one hearer had never heard before nor desired to hear again. She was only twenty when she heard it, and she never forgot the sound.”[15]

A similar reaction on the part of the people would occur at the execution of Louis XVI of France in 1789, so firmly is monarchy rooted in natural law and so ingrained in Catholic hearts is love for their anointed kings.

Had Maryland’s political elite kept the Faith in its integrity, one cannot help wondering whether they might not have been able to check, or even withstand the onslaught of the Revolution as did the French Catholics of Canada, who so indignantly refused the seditious overtures of Benjamin Franklin and the future Bishop John Carroll. Had Maryland followed their example, an effective counter-revolutionary base for royalist sentiment – which actually predominated throughout the Colonies before large numbers of loyalists took flight for Canadian Ontario – might have taken shape in what became the United States. (more…)

FROM Morgan at Substack:

When you look at Tel Aviv’s urban renewal agenda, including the districts already marked for demolition and redevelopment under Pinui Binui style planning, and then compare that with the zones now being presented as having been struck by Iran, the story stops adding up.

No one seems to want to ask the obvious question: why would Iran advance Israel’s own redevelopment priorities?

Read “Lights, Cameras, Action: The Winners and Losers in a Prepackaged War.”

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TOO freshly sweet to seem excess,
Too animate to need a stress;
But wider over many heads
The starry voice ascending spreads,
Awakening, as it waxes thin,
The best in us to him akin;
And every face to watch him rais’d,
Puts on the light of children prais’d,
So rich our human pleasure ripes
When sweetness on sincereness pipes,
Though nought be promis’d from the seas,
But only a soft-ruffling breeze
Sweep glittering on a still content,
Serenity in ravishment.

— From “The Lark Ascending” by George Meredith

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I repost this essay every once in a while because, as a housewife, dust is my vocation. I wish more people were interested in the subject.

DUST is pervasive. Wherever you are, dust is silently gathering, a fleck of everything, fragments of nothing, the particulate manifestation of the truth that all things are disintegrating.

Ordinary household dust is rarely considered a subject worthy of consideration. We live in a superficial world. Perhaps we’re secretly dumbfounded by some of the most commonplace things. We just don’t know what to make of them. We’re holding out for explanations that never appear.

One of the most interesting things about dust is its imperviousness to scientific progress. The scientist in his lab may have the illusion of progress. The duster knows that nature only progresses so much. The world is never cured of dust and no human habitat is without it.

The earliest materialist philosophers may have been sent on their first chain of speculations by the visible clouds of tiny particles they observed while sitting in a room. From there, they may have leapt with intuitive brilliance – before there were any microscopes to confirm their suspicions – to the conclusion that all things are particulate.

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“THERE is but one evil, and that is sin. This evil has many different paths by which it approaches us. These paths are called temptations. It is true that of themselves temptations can not injure us. On the contrary, Holy Writ says: ‘Blessed is the man that endureth, for when he hath been proved he shall receive the crown of life, which God hath promised to them that love Him.’ All depends upon our withstanding them, and to be able to do this we must heed the admonition of Christ, we must watch and especially guard ourselves against those temptations through which Satan most frequently approaches man.”

— Fr. Francis Xavier Weninger, 1896; Source

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“IF THE Lord should give you the power to raise the dead, He would be giving you much less than He does when He bestows suffering. By miracles you would make yourself a debtor to Him, while by suffering He may become debtor to you. And even if sufferings had no other reward than being able to bear something for that God who loves you, is not this a great reward and sufficient remuneration? Whoever loves understands what I say.”

— St. John Chrysostom

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Out of the depths I have cried to Thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice. Let Thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication. If thou, O Lord, wilt mark iniquities: Lord, who shall abide it. For with Thee there is merciful forgiveness: and because of Thy law, I have waited for Thee, O Lord. My soul hath waited on His word: my soul hath hoped in the Lord. From the morning watch even until night, let Israel hope in the Lord. For with the Lord there is mercy: and with Him plenteous redemption. And He shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities.

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NICK FUENTES roots for the United States to lose in Iran. Calling on your own country to lose in a war is the definition of treason.

I’ve seen other commentators on the right say the same thing.

Iran’s every bit as much part of the club. I don’t know what is going on there, but I don’t hate my country or government so much as to wish that it would see defeat.

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