Out You Go

A good reason to engage in legitimate defense, to protect our bishops, priests, and religious, and have able-bodied men ready for the bums rush and old heave-ho here.

The neo-pagan, like its primitive sacred predecessor, looks for new victims while feeling exceedingly self righteous in doing so. This Pentecost Sunday plot is nothing other than an endeavor to destroy the faith, reason, and morals of the revealed truth vouchsafed in the Catholic Church by fallen, depraved, and satanically-influenced humans gone to seed.

Show 'em the door and don't be gentle about it.

Women of Mystery Women of Hope

h/t: The Anchoress

Oderberg - MSM Fail

For the record: Mercatornet's David S. Oderberg's Appearance and reality: what Plato can teach journalists and the media - Did the Greek philosopher foresee the demise of the mainstream media?

Awaiting Jesus

From the absurd (below post) to the true, good, and beautiful. Benedict XVI left these words with his flock in Portugal:

The "indispensable mission of every ecclesial community" is "to receive from God and to offer to the world the Risen Christ, so that every situation of weakness and of death may be transformed, through the Holy Spirit, into an opportunity for growth and life," the Pontiff said.

"And everyone, in the end, asks this of us, even those who seem not to," he affirmed. "From personal and communal experience, we know well that it is Jesus whom everyone awaits."

"We impose nothing, yet we propose ceaselessly," the Holy Father stated.

He said: "To this end, in every Eucharistic celebration, we will listen more attentively to the word of Christ and devoutly taste the bread of his presence.

"This will make us witnesses, and, even more, bearers of the Risen Jesus in the world, bringing him to the various sectors of society and to all those who live and work there, spreading that life in abundance which he has won for us by his cross and resurrection, and which satisfies the most authentic yearnings of the human heart."

Benedict XVI pointed out that "the most profound expectations of the world and the great certainties of the Gospel meet in the ineluctable mission which is ours."

Thus, he said, "we must overcome the temptation to restrict ourselves to what we already have, or think we have, safely in our possession: It would be sure death in terms of the Church's presence in the world."

"In recent years," the Pope observed, "the anthropological, cultural, social and religious framework of humanity has changed."

"Today," he continued, "the Church is called to face new challenges and is ready to dialogue with different cultures and religions, in the search for ways of building, along with all people of good will, the peaceful coexistence of peoples."

Read the full text of "It is Jesus Whom Everyone Awaits."

Insincerity

Now let's get this straight (no pun intended): the MSM hounds of hell unremitting attacks on the Catholic Church and the Holy Father for allowing predatory priests to sate their carnal appetites on minors see nothing wrong with the promulgation of intergenerational sexuality when it comes under social justice headings and/or the knocking down of the few remaining standards of traditional morality.

It was just this kind of insincerity that drove Chesterton to begin looking in earnest at the Christian faith's consistency of reason, faith, and morals.

Worse Than Golden Compass?

Steven D. Greydanus of Decent Films says it plainly: Don't go see Robin Hood. Ridley Scott is still in the Middle Ages revisionist mode.

Instead, get cozy with your favorite beverage and a copy of Those Terrible Middle Ages! by the renown French historian, Régine Pernoud, who debunks the slanders about realities of Christendom.

Ascension

The Ascension (1408) - Andrei Rublev

What the Church Gets Paid to do

George Weigel writes on the attitude of contempt toward the Catholic Church held by the "ruling classes" of 21st century Europe here.

Taking an even broader tack, Gil Bailie often quips that attacking the Church is "what the world gets paid to do."

Reading with great appreciation Regine Pernoud's fine little book from Ignatius Press, >Those Terrible Middle Ages! I came across words from her that are especially pertinent in light of the above:

Without taking anything away from the admiration aroused by the Parthenon and the Venus de Milo, what is surprising today is that such a narrowness of view could have been the law for some four centuries. Yet so it was: the classical vision imposed almost uniformly on the West admitted no other design, no other criterion than classical antiquity. Once again, the principle had been set down that perfect Beauty had been attained during the century of Pericles and that, consequently, the closer one came to the works of that time, the better one would attain Perfection ... What is strange is its exclusive and absolute character, producing as a consequence an anathema on the Middle Ages. All that was not in conformity with Greek or Latin modelling was mercilessly rejected ... [27-8].

Pernoud limns the kind of analogous narrowness, to use her word, that is being equally imposed today by secularists and the "ruling classes" - to use Weigel's phrase - today against all-things-ecclesial in general and Catholic in particular.

If the so-called Renaissance strictures against the Gothic lasted for four centuries, we had best be ready to hunker down and take the slings and arrows of secularist attacks for some time to come. (If the New York Times non-stop slander and mud-slinging is any indicator, that is.)

I might approach this from a mimetic theory point of view, but it is unnecessary when the Magisterium of the Church understands it quite well in its own nomenclature from Our Lord Himself:

The Advocate, the holy Spirit that the Father will send in my name -- he will teach you everything and remind you of all that (I) told you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid. You heard me tell you, 'I am going away and I will come back to you.' If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father; for the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you this before it happens, so that when it happens you may believe. I will no longer speak much with you, for the ruler of the world 14 is coming. He has no power over me, but the world must know that I love the Father and that I do just as the Father has commanded me. Get up, let us go. - Jn 14,26b-31

Poussin

Summer (Boaz and Ruth) (1660-64) - Nicolas Poussin

Eberstadt, Doino, Hendrix

Mary Eberstadt has a great piece in The Weekly Standard on the The Convert Conundrum - The long parade of worldly believers. [h/t: Francis Beckwith]

By the way, William Doino, Jr. currently reviews my book, A Little Guide for Your Last Days there, too, in Exit Strategy.

Religion Abhors a Vacuum

City Journal's Benjamin A. Plotsinsky examines the increasing phenomenon of the leftist progressives' proclivity for falling into what is called, in Girard's mimetic theory terminology, worship and adoration of an "internal mediator:"

(T)he Obama campaign’s ubiquitous logo—the letter O framing a rising sun—would not have surprised the scholar Eric Voegelin. In The Political Religions (1938), Voegelin traced rulers who employed the image of the sun—a symbol of “the radiation of power along a hierarchy of rulers and offices that ranges from God at the top down to the subject at the bottom”—from the pharaoh Akhenaton to Louis XIV and eventually to Hitler.

Read more of The Varieties of Liberal Enthusiasm here.

Looks are Deceptive (I hope)

How it sometimes looks without the rose coloured glasses, if you know what I mean. [h/t: Amy Welborn]

Making all their nowhere plans

Fouad Ajama, professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, writing in the Wall Street Journal, paints a lucid portrait of Islam's Nowhere Men.

Mr. Ajama does not write the WSJ article to chide, deride, or sneer. One might as well write a similar article about the bar-hoppers of Dupont Circle or Clarendon. What he does so well is bring into high relief the Scimitar Nowhere Men's malaise with the secularity of the modern world and their thirst for transcendence.

Since they are not in the sphere of the influence of the Gospel, they must settle for that of the false transcendence of the Scimitar. And that is not only sad. It is tragic.

A Study in Contrasts

For the record: from The Iconoclast's Jerry Gordon, The Scimitar Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry.

For any who are interested in René Girard's mimetic theory, what you read in Gordon's must-read article is the difference between the Gospel influenced Western culture (tainted though it is with pagan remnants and/or recrudescence) and a conventional culture - the Scimitar - with little or no Gospel influence. That is, the latter is a near-pristine cultural expression of Girard's "primitive sacred."

Stealing Beauty

Learning from the Masters at the National Gallery of Art.

Tea Parties, Mimetic Rivals, and Hope

From a mimetic theory point of view, it was predictable that the tea party phenomenon occur. With the election to the presidency of the United States of the most leftist, progressivist, pro-abortion, socialist-like, and oligarchical candidate imaginable, there was an inevitability to the rise of the tea party movement.

Some, wrongly, want to accuse the tea party folk of having surreptitious racist motives. This is nearly as Procrustean an accusation as, say, the New Atheists' accusation that anyone who does not view reality like them solely through the empirical method criteria are "dim".

Mimetic theory posits the "problem of the doubles" in all conventional cultural structures. One might assume that a Democrat president in the Oval Office would find his "model/rival" across the aisle in Congress in the form of Republicans. The problem with this assumption is that there is an increasing awareness that in actuality there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans. Hence, the inevitability of the tea party phenomenon: a structurally authentic "double" had to arise in the mimetic swirl, and it has.

Is this a good sign? Not really. I place no hopes in the tea party uprisings, at least no hope for it to help bring about a renewed and vital Christendom. At best, it may like Pentheus in Euripides' play The Bacchae, put the clamps on the skid into the sacrificial vortex for a while. The neo-pagan resurgence coupled with the Scimitar's demographic victory in the West seem all too preponderant in force and scope for the largely middle to older-aged tea party folk.

That does not mean, however, there is no hope. Rather, it means that unless you want to have your hopes dashed once again, you had best place hope - and faith and charity - on sources of true transcendence still availing us, even in these darkening ages.