Sentimentality is the over-use of the heart, and heartlessness is its under-use. We live in a world awash in a sentimentality that disguises heartlessness. It is a brilliant seduction, the heartlessness clothed in talk of love. Love is cheapened and misrepresented. Warmth can be coldness and animosity when forgetful of the soul.

These are human imperfections, in which we all in some way have participated. Today, the Feast of the Sacred Heart, is a day to meditate on the perfection of divine love, on the ineffable, mysterious and indulgent qualities of the heart of God.

The Heart of Jesus is both wounded and perfect; wounded with compassion and perfect in love; divine and human. No heart is capable of greater sorrow because no heart loves so intensely, so completely.

Behold this heart which has loved men so much that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming itself, to testify to them its love…

These words were spoken to a pious nun in a vision in the 17th century, when Christ opened up this new source of grace in the souls of men, another manifestation of the profound change in the relationship between man and God that occurred with the Incarnation.

Hence it is before the Incarnation of the Word, however great the prodigies God performed in favor of his people, He was always feared more than loved by them; but finally God made Himself perceptible, so to speak, by becoming man, and this Man-God has done things that go beyond anything that we can imagine to induce men to love Him. [Fr. John Croiset, The Devotion to the Sacred Heart; TAN Books, p. 71]

He can never be entirely eradicated from the human heart, even from the most unmoved human being. He speaks to us from within, as the great French clergyman, Cardinal Pie, explained in the 19th century: Read More »

ONLY IN SLEEP

Only in sleep I see their faces,
Children I played with when I was a child,
Louise comes back with her brown hair braided,
Annie with ringlets warm and wild.

Only in sleep Time is forgotten –
What may have come to them, who can know?
Yet we played last night as long ago,
And the doll-house stood at the turn of the stair.

The years had not sharpened their smooth round faces,
I met their eyes and found them mild –
Do they, too, dream of me, I wonder,
And for them am I too a child?

— Sara Teasdale
Music composed by Ēriks Ešenvalds

THE WOODS are his concert hall. High up in the trees, flute-like music resounds from his little breast. He says farewell to the summer day.

Farewell to the feeding and rushing. Goodbye to the verdant profusion of life. “Enough for now.”

But what a day it was! The tree limbs touched the sky.

The song of the wood thrush is the breath of his being. It “is calm, unhurried, peaceful, and unequaled in both power and beauty by any other woodland songster of New England,” wrote an observer in 1929. It can be heard today in deciduous woods and backyards throughout eastern North America. “It is usually composed of a series of triplets, each beginning with a high note, then a low one, then a trill, often highest of all, but the different phrases varying in pitch.” (Source)

We once knew a thrush who preferred jazz. He was a pianist in a romantic hotel bar and he knew we applauded him.

The thrush’s practiced melodies are a message of territory, but destined for human ears. They announce the tranquility of a summer night. They are a requiem for a June day in all its glory. A softness pervades the woods as he sings, and an assurance that all will be well in the end. Nature will come to a close in this way, with a chorus of such profound love.

Our hearts are full. We have room for no more.

FROM H.L. Mencken’s In Defense of Women, written in 1918, in the final years of that bleak, primitive, unimaginably hellish age before women had the vote:

Men, as every one knows, are disposed to question this superior intelligence of women; their egoism demands the denial, and they are seldom reflective enough to dispose of it by logical and evidential analysis. Moreover, as we shall see a bit later on, there is a certain specious appearance of soundness in their position; they have forced upon women an artificial character which well conceals their real character, and women have found it profitable to encourage the deception. But though every normal man thus cherishes the soothing unction that he is the intellectual superior of all women, and particularly of his wife, he constantly gives the lie to his pretension by consulting and deferring to what he calls her intuition. That is to say, he knows by experience that her judgment in many matters of capital concern is more subtle and searching than his own, and, being disinclined to accredit this greater sagacity to a more competent intelligence, he takes refuge behind the doctrine that it is due to some impenetrable and intangible talent for guessing correctly, some half mystical super sense, some vague (and, in essence, infra-human) instinct. Read More »

“THE creature cannot serve the Creator except with a service of love. Love is the soul of worship, the foundation of reverence, the life of good works, the remission of sins, the increase of holiness, and the security of final perseverance. Love meets the first of our requirements; for of all the services it is the easiest. Its facility has passed into a proverb. It is also the noblest and happiest of services, the noblest because it is the least mercenary, the happiest because it is the most voluntary. It is the only one which calls out and occupies the whole man; and it is naturally a creature’s obvious service; for it is the only service which he would care to have rendered to himself. Love alone fulfills all the commandments at once, and is the perfection of all our duties.”

— Fr. Frederick William Faber, The Creator and the Creature, or the Wonders of Divine Love

FROM THULETIDE:

So-called “conspiracy theorists” are often accused of fabricating the concept of the New World Order. They need a Big Bad Guy to scapegoat for all of the world’s problems because they cannot cope with the intricate complexities of reality, or so the story goes. I’m sure you’ve heard this a thousand times: You explain that wealthy and powerful people conspire beyond borders to attain more wealth and power, only to be met with a fluoride stare and an “uhhhhh… the world is actually way more complicated than that… there’s… umm… tons other factors at play here…” (these factors are rarely elaborated upon).

This mindset is perfectly understandable. Of course the modern political landscape would seem quasi-mystical to the masses when it is strategically designed to be as incomprehensible as possible. Basic truths — like social hierarchy or the existence of race and human sexual dimorphism — are obfuscated by an endless torrent of lies, psyops, and disinformation. Fortunately, with access to the right information, the mystical veil falls and the perceived complexities of politics fade away. The origin of the New World Order concept is a perfect case study.

Read more.

“SACRIFICE may not be offered but to the one true God, for it is the effective acknowledgment of the Creator’s sovereign dominion, and of that glory which belongs to him, and which he will not make over to another. It is essential to religion, be the state that of innocence or of fall; for religion, the queen of moral virtues, whose object is the worship due to God, necessarily demands Sacrifice, as its own adequate exercise and expression. Eden would have witnessed this Sacrifice offered by unfallen man; it would have been one of adoration and thanksgiving; its material portion would have been that garden’s richest fruits, those symbols of the divine fruit promised by the tree of life; sin would not have put its own sad stamp on such Sacrifice, and blood would not have been required. But man fell; and then, Sacrifice became the only means of propitiation, and the necessary center of religion in this land of exile. Until Luther’s time, all the nations of the earth held and lived up to this truth; and when the so-called Reformers excluded Sacrifice from religion, they took away its very basis. Nor is the duty of Sacrifice limited to man’s earthly existence; no, the creature when in heaven, and in the state of glory, must still offer Sacrifice to his Creator; for he has as much, and even more, obligation when he is in the brightness of the Vision, as when he lived amid the shadows of Faith, to offer to the God who has crowned him, the homage of those gifts received.

“It is by sacrifice. that God attains the end He had in view by creation, that is, His own glory. (Prov. xvi.4.)

— Dom Prosper Guéranger, “Sunday within the Octave of Corpus Christi,” The Liturgical Year

FROM The Creator And The Creature; Or The Wonders Of Divine Love (1857) by Fr. Frederick William Faber:

The world is no better than a complication of awkward riddles, or a gloomy storehouse of disquieting mysteries, unless we look at it by the light of this simple truth, that the eternal God is blessedly the last and only end of every soul of man. Life as it runs out is daily letting us down into His Bosom; and thus each day and hour is a step homeward, a danger over, a good secured.

Hence it is, because God alone is our last end, that He alone never fails us. All else fails us but He. Alas! How often is life but a succession of worn-out friendships? Read More »

ALAN writes:

I am here only because of the Big Band Era. If such music had not become popular in ballrooms and dance halls in American cities in the 1930s-‘40s, I might never have been.

One place where people could enjoy such music was the Casa-Loma Ballroom in south St. Louis. Young men and young women went there to meet each other. That is how and where my parents met.

My father preferred the music of the “sweet” bands over that of the “swing” bands.  That kind of music and that ballroom would hold a place in his memory for the rest of his life.

My father’s grandfather was born in Bavaria in 1837. When I was from four to six years old, my father would take me for walks on Saturday afternoons. We often walked past a building in south St. Louis called the Bavarian Inn. He knew all about it, but at my age I couldn’t make any sense out of it.  It was a restaurant and bar with a large fireplace, stained glass windows, and outdoor beer garden. It was “a landmark of gemutlichkeit” where customers enjoyed oom-pah-pah music and the Ducky Dance.

We also walked past a shop that made awnings and tents.  Across the alley from there was a vacant lot next to a house. It was there on that lot that we played a game of imagination wherein we would take turns naming good things to eat, and each of us would try to outdo the other.

My father in south St. Louis, about 1918

In the middle of another block was a small confectionary. My father would buy a soft drink for each of us, and I was permitted to reach down into a large cooler filled with ice and pull out a frosty glass bottle of grape or orange soda.

As did my mother, my father lived by a scale of moral values that is wholly unknown to generations born after the revolutionary 1960s. Read More »

Gideon’s Call, 1860; Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld

“THE universe is the work of God. He reigns over it and every happening is according to the plans of His Providence. When we believe that desertion is going to be general, we forget that a little Faith is enough to give Faith to the family of Jesus–like a little leaven makes all the dough rise. These extraordinary events where the mob wields the axe to undermine the work of God, serve marvelously to show His Omnipotence. In every country will be seen what the people of God saw. When the Lord was wanted by Gideon to show His power against the Midianites, He had him send back most of his army. Only three hundred men remained, and those without arms, in order that it could be seen that the victory was God’s. This small number of Gideon’s soldiers is the number of the Faithful elect of that century. You have seen with the saddest astonishment, my children, that out of all those called, since all of France was Christian, the greater part, like in Gideon’s army, remained weak, timid and fearing to lose their temporal interests. God sends them back, for use in His justice. God only wants those who give themselves to Him entirely. Do not be surprised at the great number who quit. Truth wins, no matter how small the number of those who love and remain attached to Him. For my part I have only one wish, the desire of St. Paul. As a child of the Church, as a soldier of Christ, I wish to die under His standard.”

—– Father Demaris, Professor of Theology, Missionary of St. Joseph (Translated from French by A. Drover) writing to Catholic without many of the sacraments due to the French Revolution.

FEMINISTS claim that women are more fulfilled and happy when they are free to wear almost nothing.

The whole Western world has accepted their premises. You will be hard-pressed to find any woman on a beach today covered up to the extent that these women — such ridiculous figures, huh? — were in 1906.

Are women better off?

The truth is, these ridiculous figures on the beach were much more likely to have a stable home life. They were more likely to have children. They were less likely to face the existential crises women face today. They lived in a more stable society with less crime. Political power and wealth were not so dangerously concentrated in the few. The federal income tax didn’t even exist! Our economic system was not yet crushed by debt, reducing most of us to insidious and hidden financial enslavement.

It’s no secret that powerful people want women unclothed and actively promote it. Civilization demands clothes. Tyranny demands nudity.

Immodesty undermines femininity. A woman’s greatest influence and dignity are not physical, but in her personality and soul.

Immodesty is a form of aggression. Men are — by nature — sensitive to visual stimuli, much more than women, and cannot, except by emasculating themselves at some deep level, easily eradicate their responses to the female form. (And why would women want them to eradicate their masculinity?) Most women are not conscious of this. The fashion industry pressures them to dress in a certain way and to believe that the sexes are exactly the same (while at the same time dressing as if they are not), but immodesty in women is a power trip over men in the same way physical aggression by men may be a power trip over women.

For much of history, in many cultures, the world was wiser than it is today. Societies that wanted to survive held the physical power of women as sacred and potentially dangerous.

The Greeks and Romans had separate bathing houses for swimming for men and women. Colleen Hammond writes in her book Dressing with Dignity: Read More »

PLEASE don’t call it a “pandemic.” It was a great robbery, the Greatest of All Robberies.

Anthony Migchels does a good job of explaining the economics of the Great Reset in these two videos, here and here. He explains why the “pandemic” happened exactly when it did.

They locked us down to prevent social unrest as they bailed out the banks.

And it isn’t over. A comment from “Remnant Posting” on Telegram:

The mass hysteria is no longer being pumped as aggressively by the media, but this doesn’t undo the massive dysfunction that’s been created across the entire economy and the day-to-day function of society.

I cannot even get a plumber to give me a firm answer on when they can come by to deal with an issue for me, and this is with dozens of different plumbing companies in the area. They all say they’re short-staffed.

How is this relevant to COVID? 

Well, when you print a third of all USD in circulation within a two-year time frame, that kind of destroys the value of your currency. And then people kind of develop new expectations for how much they should be paid, since the wages that were once adequate are no longer adequate. And then business owners who budgeted for certain wage growth expectations can’t afford to meet those demands, because they too are suffering from the devaluation of the currency. So they can’t retain employees, because no one will work for nothing.

There is only one solution to theft on this level, says Migchels, and that is interest-free currency.

Gabriel Garcia Moreno

GABRIEL Garcia Moreno was elected three times to the presidency of Ecuador, the last time in 1875. When Moreno formally consecrated that small nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1873, he acted in keeping with the famous revelations of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, a French nun of the 17th century who said that Christ appeared to her and instructed kings and nations, as well as individuals, to adore His divine heart. Christ promised an outpouring of graces in return.

In this consecration, Moreno was also acting against the current of the entire modern world with its idols of rationalism and secularism. The president sealed his fate. For with that event, it is believed, Freemasons resolved once and for all to assassinate him.

Devotees of the Sacred Heart traditionally went to Mass and received Communion on the First Friday of the month. On the first Friday of August, 1875, after Mass, work on his inauguration address, and a final visit to the Blessed Sacrament, Moreno walked to the Presidential Palace. According to Marian Horvat’s account:

At the steps of the Presidential Palace he greeted several persons, including Faustino Rayo, who would shortly strike the first brutal machete blow. Rayo, who held a grudge against Moreno for dismissing him from a lucrative office because of his dishonest practices, had taken up leatherwork. He pretended, however, to be on friendly terms with the President, who had recently contracted him to make a saddle for his young son (his only living child), Gabriel García del Alcázar. Read More »

FROM The Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus by Fr. John Croiset:

“OUR other enemies we weaken and overcome by the practice of virtue; whereas, it is in the very practice of virtue itself, that this enemy finds its strength. Our very victories are weapons which the devil makes use of, to vanquish us, by taking occasion from them to inspire us with pride. We may say, that of all vices, there is none that has kept so many souls back in the path of piety, or that has plunged so many from the highest perfection into tepidity, and even into sin. From this spirit of vanity proceed the inordinate desire that we have to be seen, and the excessive eagerness we feel to succeed in all that we undertake.

“In vain do we torment ourselves, to assure ourselves that in all this we are seeking nothing but the glory of God. We have but to listen to our conscience, to be convinced that we seek nothing but our own glory. That excessive uneasiness which the fear of not succeeding causes in us; that sadness and discouragement we experience after a failure; that joy and satisfaction we feel at the sight of the honours and praises we receive, are clear proofs of the spirit of vanity that urges us to act.

“This same spirit also mixes itself up with the practice of the highest virtues: we wish to he highly mortified, to he obliging, courteous, civil, charitable, and we may add, to give great edification to our neighbour, by appearing so. From the same source spring almost all our defects. We fill our minds insensibly with the idea of a pretended merit, which we do not possess, and which this idea alone would make us lose, did we really possess it. We love to recount our adventures. We have always some circumstance of our life ready, as an example of the subject on which we are speaking. One would say, that it is no longer any failing to praise ourselves continually, when we already bear a good reputation. We wish to possess the esteem and the hearts of all. Hence it is that we prefer to omit our obligations, rather than disoblige another; and what is still more extraordinary, we try to cover this ambition and vanity by the specious pretext of civility, charity, and condescension. We falsely persuade ourselves that we must act thus, in order to make virtue less difficult to others. We wish to please both God and men. By this means, we very often fail to please men, and we always displease God. Read More »

FROM The Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus by Fr. John Croiset:

MANY think they are truly humble, as soon as they have a low opinion of themselves. But they deceive themselves, if they are not at the same time well pleased, that others should entertain the same opinion of them. It is not enough that we acknowledge ourselves to possess no virtue or merit. We must believe it. We must be pleased that others believe it. The first step to be taken in gaining this virtue, is to beg it earnestly of God. The next is firmly to convince ourselves, by means of serious and frequent reflection on ourselves, of our poverty and our own imperfections. The remembrance of what we have been, and the thought of what we may be, serve greatly to humble us. The truly virtuous think little of others, and occupy themselves solely with their own imperfections. The truly humble are scandalized at nothing, because they know their own weakness so well. They see themselves so near the precipice, and they are so much afraid of falling, that they are not surprised if others fall. The less we speak of ourselves, the more closely we conform ourselves to true humility. Those affected discourses, by which we wish to make it appear that we have little esteem for ourselves, have no effect usually but to gain us praise. The most certain mark of sincere humility is to have a special love for those who despise us: never to avoid any humiliations that present themselves to us; not to take pleasure in vain thoughts and vain projects for the future, which only serve to nourish a secret pride within us; never to speak to our own advantage; never to complain and not to allow others to complain of anything Almighty God allows to happen to us; to excuse the failings of our neighbour; never to be troubled at our own relapses; to defer to others in all things; never to undertake anything but with diffidence in ourselves, and to have little esteem for what we do. Finally, to pray much, and to speak little. Read More »

“THE SIGHT of Jesus Christ makes me love the Cross so much that I do not think I could be happy without it. I look with respect on those whom God visits with humiliations and adversity, of whatever nature they may be; these are, doubtless, His favorites. In order to humiliate myself, I had only to compare my lot with theirs when I am enjoying prosperity.

“The following words never come to mind, but light, peace, liberty, consolation, and love seem to enter along with them; they are: simplicity, confidence, humility, entire abandonment, nothing kept back, the will of God, my rules.”

–Blessed Claude de la Colombière, as quoted in The Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus by Fr. John Croiset