Or Else

The WaPo puts forth on its front page an article no larger than a man's hand regarding the poor sufferers of "Islamophobia" in Kenya of all places. I certainly woke up this morning concerned about elections in Kenya. Didn't you?

When, o when, will the self-arrogating arbiters of topics of public discourse ever look at the actual level of "tolerance" practiced by those poor victims of "Islamophobia" and compare it with their own self-designated level of "tolerance" promulgated by the designated by the humanist drivel known as "multiculturalism"?

But that really is not the issue, is it? Ultimately, it goes back to appeasement of our petro-overlords. Always follow the Mammon. And always - always - give them what they want.

And Where Did That Get Them

At least someone is comparing with history in mind. This is a far cry from the usual back-pedaling as soon as one realizes one is getting close to the brink of allowing truth to break in upon one's consciousness: Roman Infanticide, Modern Abortion

Jos. Bottum - Signpost at the Crossroads

You head down the road of public life in America, and you run up against religion. From the conversations in the barber shops and the coffee klatches, through the aldermen’s offices and the town halls, the school boards and the zoning commissions, the campaigns and the columnists, and eventually to the state houses and even, perhaps, to that white-domed Capitol building, far off in Washington—somewhere along the line you come to the crossroads where religion cuts across your path.

You travel the long road of religion in America, and you find the Bible chapels, scattered along the prairie like tumbleweeds that have somehow grown white vinyl siding. You drive past the green-lawn suburban churches with cutesy messages on the brick-framed signs placed out near the street. You pass the exhaust-stained marble fronts of the old city congregations, the yellow taxis inching angrily by. You visit the grand cathedrals and synagogues, announcing their people’s success in America, this newfoundland, and you see the pulpits and the choir lofts and the pews and the Sunday schools—the church basement halls, with their dented aluminum coffeemakers and styrofoam cups, their book tables, their after-service conversations burbling away. And somewhere down that highway you come, again, to the crossroads where the public life of the nation confronts you.

There is a marker at that place, naming its many promises and dangers for travelers, with the word abortion at the top. Even now, abortion remains what it has been for more than thirty years: the signpost at the intersection of religion and American public life.

Of course, there are those who think this shouldn’t be so. Personally, I cannot see how abortion could not rank first. We eliminate 1.3 million unborn children in this country every year, a number that dwarfs, by far, the impact of every other activity with which the moral teachings of the churches might be concerned. For that matter, the story of abortion is a tale of blood and sex and power and law—I do not know what more anyone could need for public significance. The people who say they are uninterested in the issue of abortion have always seemed, to me, to be trying to suppress the imagination that most makes us human.

Nonetheless, even in the churches some do not see things this way, and they want the whole issue simply to go away. But the fact that they wish abortion didn’t matter shows that abortion does, in fact, matter. It’s proof that the social observation remains true, for good or for ill. Whether one approves or not, the issue of abortion is here in America—the signpost at the crossroads.

Read all of The Signpost at the Crossroads here.

Newman - Pilgrim Queen (1849)

The Pilgrim Queen (A Song.)

THERE sat a Lady

all on the ground,

Rays of the morning

circled her round,

Save thee, and hail to thee,

Gracious and Fair,

In the chill twilight

what wouldst thou there?

"Here I sit desolate,"

sweetly said she,

"Though I'm a queen,

and my name is Marie:

Robbers have rifled

my garden and store,

Foes they have stolen

my heir from my bower.

"They said they could keep Him

far better than I,

In a palace all His,

planted deep and raised high.

'Twas a palace of ice,

hard and cold as were they,

And when summer came,

it all melted away.

"Next would they barter Him,

Him the Supreme,

For the spice of the desert,

and gold of the stream;

And me they bid wander

in weeds and alone,

In this green merry land

which once was my own."

I look'd on that Lady,

and out from her eyes

Came the deep glowing blue

of Italy's skies;

And she raised up her head

and she smiled, as a Queen

On the day of her crowning,

so bland and serene.

"A moment," she said,

"and the dead shall revive;

The giants are failing,

the Saints are alive;

I am coming to rescue

my home and my reign,

And Peter and Philip

are close in my train."

The Oratory.

1849.

Reader - Are You Like Douglas Hyde?

THE ONE-TIME LEADER in British Communism, Douglas Hyde, astonished his twentieth century colleagues by seeing his name across national newspapers as having resigned his job as news editor of the Daily Worker and the Communist Party. He was becoming a Catholic.

Shortly before, he and his wife "outed" to one another and discovered that the Holy Spirit had been leading them in parallel direction. Joseph Pearce relates the events in his nonpareil must-read/own book, Literary Converts:

Hyde: "Are you becoming a Catholic or something?"

"I wish I were," she replied.

Hyde's heart leapt: "And I wish to God I could do the same."

For the first time in months they came clean with each other. Hyde told her exactly how far he had travelled. How he believed that the culture of the Middle Ages had not died with feudalism but was still alive in the modern world, 'a living Catholic culture' (243ff).

+ + +

If you are tired to death of the sham party politics of America, the present 'pharoah' who knows not Joseph (or Biblical faith and values from his progressivist place of power, only from afar); if you are like Douglas Hyde (though not so officially), exhausted by the mere human projects that keep ending, like those of the dark twentieth/twenty-first centuries, in Gulags, gas chambers, killing fields, Caliph-justified vitriolic violence, and Gulf water disasters ...

"The culture of the Middle Ages (has) not died, but (is) still alive in the modern world, a living Catholic culture."

The July/August issue of The Saint Austin Review (StAR), July/August is entitled, The Middle Ages. I recommend strongly that you pick up a copy, or, better yet, subscribe to this journal that clear-sightedly views global events and culture from a stance faithful to the Magisterium of the Church.

What you yearn for and want most deeply may - just may - still be quite alive and flourishing in a world that you see, quite rightly, that has gone mad. "Well, that's your opinion," you say? I paraphrase Evelyn Waugh:

... the Church is not, except by accident, a little club with its own specialised vocabulary, but the normal state of man from which men disastrously exiled themselves.