Girard @ 4Ms

If you hadn't noticed, my brother-in-arms, Aramis, has posted a few truly good offerings by the great man, René Girard, over at the Four Mass'keteers. Scroll down. Recommended reading.

Scimitar Attack in NY ... Yes or No

Does it disturb you that yesterday's massacre in New York was an retaliatory attack by the Taliban on American soil? Or was it? Is it legitimate to take credit for an act of violence when the actor did not do so as a member of said group that uses sacred violence?

Matthew Archbold includes a few other things that the Taliban has taken credit for.

Walter Hoye - Valor and Truth

How can praise adequately be raised for the likes of the Rev. Walter Hoye? After rejecting a deal from a judge to keep 100 yards from an abortuary - abortion "clinic" - he was sentenced to 30 days jail. From jail, he writes:

"Here my thoughts turn towards my brothers, men of the cloth, men who are called and sanctified by God the Father. Men who are preserved as the bondservants of Jesus Christ. Men who serve as the holy burden bearers of God's word. Men who are the watchmen on the wall. It is now in the spirit of the prophet Ezekiel, I write to my fellow watchmen on the wall."

Noting the statistics on abortion of African Americans, Rev. Hoye writes: "Brothers, in Black America alone every seventy-two seconds a black baby is murdered in the womb of his or her mother. This holocaust is genocidal to the point that today a black child has less than a fifty-percent chance of being born. According to the 2006 U.S. Census, Black Americans are below the replacement level.

"In other words, death in Black America outpaces life. Abortion alone accounts for three times more deaths in our community than HIV/AIDS, Violent Crimes, Accidents, Cancer, and Heart Disease combined. There is no question pre-natal murder, abortion, is the number one issue in not only Black America, but in all of America today."

Encouraging his brother pastors to keep the scourge of abortion prevalent in the minds of their congregations, Rev. Hoye urges them to "speak regularly and boldly from our Sunday morning pulpits, from our mid-week Bible studies and from our small group meetings on the weekend against abortion."

"We must inform, educate and activate God's people to take public stands against the sin of legalized murder in America today..."

Read more here.

Nazareth U.

In case one needs to be disabused of a misperception, the words "Arab" and "Christian" truly do belong together, as in the case of this.

Unborn Baby as Rapist

Why a pregnant woman is victimized by being ‘internally occupied by another creature against her will’: her unborn baby. I give you, gentle reader, the warped legal thinking of Sherry F. Colb - romantic Gnosticism run amok.

Unlike the modern snits who worship their own wills and instincts during the brevity of a self-centered lifetime, there is indeed a bright, shining Alternative which will never be quenched.

StAR Ink Desk

A web blog to accompany one of my essential hard copy periodicals is Ink Desk of the Saint Austin Review – Reclaiming Culture.

Here is a sample offering by editor and author, Joseph Pearce:

Last month I returned "home" to England for a short time and found myself more of an exile than ever. It seems that every time I return to my native land I feel more distant from it, and more at peace with my decision, seven years ago, to move to the United States. On this last visit "home", I was reminded of Chesterton's words that when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing but in anything. Here is an account of the shocking ignorance and superstitious nonsense that confronted and affronted me during my mercifully brief stay in London.

Finding myself in a pub in London's East End, I struck up conversation with an aging pop star who seems to have been offended by the crucifix lapel badge that I was wearing. In a bizarre inversion of one of those old Dracula films, he pulled a pentangle pendent from around his neck and waved it in front of me, as though to ward off the power of my Christian presence. He informed me that the pentangle was not a symbol of the occult or of black magic but was a pagan symbol. I did not have the patience to explain to him how true pagans, such as Homer or Aristole, would have been horrified by his bizarre and tacky new age dabblings and diabolings. In any event, he went on to explain to me that he kept three "sacred" books by his bed, each of which contained important aspects of the truth. One was the Bible, the other Zen Buddhism, and the third Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler ...

Read all here.

Youth for Western Civ

I am heartened to see even a handful of a younger generation doing this against cat-calls of "racism" or other multiculturalist slurs.

While "western civilization" may seem to some not worth saving per se, it is only a few short steps into the arms of Mother Church.

Belloc - Ekklesia as Home

Tomorrow my students - and the candidate for the Sacrament of Confirmation whom I am sponsoring - will participate in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. And if any skeptic needs more proof of a loving, redeeming God than the illative fact of his or her own existence (and awareness of himself or herself as a being of sinew, bone, organ, and mind - mind!), I give you one of a very few master writers of the 20th century, Hiliare Belloc.

The Faith, the Catholic Church (the two were inseparable for him - and me), is discovered, is reconised, triumphantly enters reality like a landfall at sea which at first was thought a cloud. The nearer it is seen, the more is it real, the less imaginary: the more direct and external its voice, the more indubitable its representative character, its 'person', its voice. The metaphor is not that men fall in love with it: the metaphor is that they discover home. 'This was what I sought. This was my need.' It is the very mould of the mind, the matrix to which corresponds in every outline the outcast and unprotected contour of the soul. It is Verlaine's 'Oh! Rome - oh! Mère!' And that not only to those who had it in childhood and have returned, but much more - and what a proof! - to those who come upon it from over the hills of life and say to themselves 'Here is the town.' The true is proved by analysis and demonstration where there are to hand - where they are not, by direct vision: as is our proof of daily things and their reality. When vision again is lacking, how can it be proved? By its other aspect in the triune definition: by Beauty and by Goodness.

The Faith has Beauty and nothing has it so fixedly, permanently, pointingly. It is a Beauty ambassadorial and determinant, a proving Beauty. And it has Goodness, in this time of ours more marked than ever by contrast. It shines with, produces, supports, promises and reveals Goodness. I say again, it is a person to be discovered and not to be merely loved: a plenitude of excellent experience. Not only satisfaction, but conscious satisfaction. Satisfaction reasonable and final. You know the phrase 'Sero cognovi?' It expresses it all. And that other phrase the little teacher wrote me years ago which was a revelation to me and which I have quoted too often: 'Secure within the Walls of the City of God'.

Won't Take This Lion Down

Few things awe me as cooperation between species with no wires, gimmicks, or computer animation involved. This is so cool.

Fightin' Leprechaun or Pan the Piper

Patrick J. Buchanan @ Taki's asks, Is Notre Dame Still Catholic?

Towering Aspirations

I am in the mood to ascend a fire tower, like Father Smith in Walker Percy's Thanatos Syndrome. " ... my soul waits for the LORD

more than watchmen for the morning,
more than watchmen for the morning.

BXVI is correct

For the record, the WaPo says current empirical evidence supports Benedict XVI in the condom controversy.

The Catholic cavemen comment on it.

Waterhouse - PRB

Dante and Beatrice (1915) - J. W. Waterhouse

I Think It's a Great Idea

Godless 'congregations' planned for humanists. There were many, many times when I wondered why the heck the people who came to potlucks, Scout meetings, Vacation Bible Schools, committee meetings, and Sunday Schools came in the first place. They sure didn't like each other much.

So if the humanists can do it better without all the church growth/market research stupidity, worship-as-entertainment nonsense, or grousing, maybe they can teach us something!

Knox on Atheism

I am keenly appreciative of the British converts to the Catholic faith. The epitome of these is Ronald Knox (1888-1957). Son and grandson of evangelical Anglican bishops, Knox was a shooting star and scholar at both Eton and Oxford. C. S. Lewis and Knox held one another in high regard.

I will be featuring Father Knox's in a great many quotables in the future. For now, let's begin with what he said about atheism and atheists:

We are threatened by forces not less highly organized than in the days of the first persecutions; not less ruthless than the barbarians of the Dark Ages, not less fanatical than the storm-troops of the Reformation. The world at large is still indifferent to religion, as it was yesterday and the day before, and now stands stupefied at the appearance of a new philosophy which believes that religion matters, matters so intensely that it has got to be wiped out.

We shall not begin to understand the attitude of the modern unbeliever towards the Church until we realize that he thinks of us as a conspiracy: a conspiracy to set up an unholy Roman Empire over the consciences of an enslaved race.

Converts Call for Prayers

Rome (AsiaNews) – For this Lent we are inviting our readers to devote a special prayer for Pope Benedict XVI. The idea came to us from a number of Muslim converts to Christianity who wrote to AsiaNews launching a novena for the Pontiff. They see in Benedict XVI as a “defender of the weak” and “a sign of Jesus’ love” in a world that is trying to attack him every which way. As new converts they too are among the weak, forced to hide their conversion even from their family. Moreover, the Pope himself had asked for a special prayer.

Read the article here.

Smile and the whole world smiles with you

The Notre Dame commencement speech by the president has now the air of inevitability. Fait accompli. One can feel that the air has been let out of the initial outrage of juxtaposing the national symbol of Catholic higher education, the University of Notre Dame, (sorry CUA) with the most pro-abortion president in United States history. And his cool, scholarly mien that goes no further negative than a sad look of resignation will soon break into the bright, optimistic, broad smile once again ...

... because he has led the nation - and Catholicism - out of medievalism and out into the bright, clear light of progressive sunshine, regardless of what the old men in Rome want to believe (wrongly).

Everyone assumes evil will look evil, not charming and winning. Alas.

Here is evidence that he and others have given great thought to the "problem" of Catholicism.