Blessed Letters

O blessed Letters, that combine in one

All ages past, and make one live with all:
By you we doe conferre with who are gone,
And the dead-living unto councell call:
By you th' unborne shall have communion
Of what we feele, and what doth us befall.

- Samuel Daniel,
Musophilus, 1599

Glaciers Growing - Chilly Reception

An inconvenient inconvenience at least to M. Gore and Co. [ht: Maggie's Farm]

A Better Culture - A Better Foundation

I am in full agreement with Robert Spencer on this one: far from being merely an anti-Islamic provocateur, Geert Wilders is a champion of Western values on a continent that has lost confidence in them.

If in doubt, watch a portion of Spencer's interviews with Wilders, linked in the article.

Smiling Faces

President-elect Barack Obama / Melody Barnes

Washington DC, Nov 26, 2008 / 11:30 pm (CNA).- President-elect Obama has selected as Director of the Domestic Policy Council Melody C. Barnes, a New York lawyer with an “unyielding” record of abortion rights advocacy.

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Prayer Request

A prayer request: please pray for my 89-year old father who it seems had a heart attack on Thanksgiving Day morning, drove over an hour to visit my brother's family, drove home under his own power, and was only today talked into seeing a doctor. He is now in an intensive care unit and stabilized.

They will decide on Monday how to proceed with treatment.

I've stood as a pastor at many a bedside with heart attack victims who are "stabilized" - only to die quickly and unexpectedly. So, prayers would be appreciated for Athos's old gaffer, Cecil. Many thanks.

Persevere

There is no doubt in my mind that the incoming administration is cock sure that it is about to begin - in their mind - a bold, new direction for the United States that will be unprecedented in its 232-year old history. It will be unfettered by the now-marginalized forces that once encumbered and, indeed, attempted to enslave it. Like, for example, the faith and morals of the Catholic Church.

Already we see the United States Conference of (Catholic) Bishops scurrying to try to keep a place at the table with a “news release” from its Office of Med Relations. Oooooh.

News release, shnews release. Who's listening?

Pop culture and its denizens ensured that the Big O would enter the White House. Do you really expect the shallowest, most vacuous block of the voting public - honed as they are on the whetstone of Madison Avenue advertising, sound byte thinking, sensory titillation, and instant gratification - to consider such matters as abortion and infanticide as anything more than chips of refuse in the road before their pop culturally correct Prius? iPods do not normally have downloaded addresses by Catholic bishops.

Meanwhile, wolves circle, extremely conscious of the opportunity afforded this election's results. The sheep are vulnerable and easy prey in the West. Few have held hands with past generations and the revealed wisdom carried and vouchsafed in the Church's Magisterium. The Christianities (as Msgr Ronald Knox called them) downstream of Catholicism are watered-down entities run by corporate wannabies and focus-group feel-good gurus. Pastors who love the gospel are caught by the short hairs in keeping up the Sunday collection figure and all-important "average worship attendance" statistics. Pity them, do not disdain.

The Catholic Church is pretty much on our own now. Big O and his ilk don't even have the mind to gloat. It seems they have carte blanche with near-unlimited resources (think of the publicity they spent on bumper stickers and yard signs alone).

These will be difficult times for truth, goodness, and beauty. Neo-paganism and the Scimitar will appear to bring Western civilization to its knees.

Best be ready to teach the young the meaning of the Church Year. Begin with Advent. Decorate and light the tree. Watch for signs. Pray the Scriptures with the Church. Be fed at the Sacrifice of the Mass. Defend and protect our priests. Serve Our Lord in the poor, the least, last, and lost. Be chivalrous and kind to all if possible.

These are darkening days. Cling to Peter's Barque and look to the virtues, infused by the Holy Spirit to persevere. I'll be praying for you.

Last One's On Me

Roger Scruton brings us a brief review of Kingsley Amis' opus on everyday drinking. But it might better be called a requiem for the British pub.

Leighton - PRB

The Music Lesson (1877) - Lord Frederick Leighton

Pagan Atrocities and Scapegoats

To begin, our prayers go out for the victims of the vicious attacks and murders in Mumbai, particularly for the friends and family of Chabad-Lubavitch emissary Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka who were murdered by Muslim terrorists.

This makes sense of this, for starters.

But if you really want to understand the Scimitar and the darkening world around us, you will need to read these on what René Girard calls the "primitive sacred" and I simply call paganism (structurally speaking): Part I Part II Part III.

Jews are the Chosen People and the elder brothers of Christians. They have ever been and continue to be the prime scapegoats in our satanic cosmos (and Christians are becoming more so, by extension). May the Lord bless and keep us in his glory - Chabad.

Fire or Ice

More global warming, global cooling falderal here. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Giving Thanks

The Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life. The other sacraments, and indeed all ecclesiastical ministries and works of the apostolate, are bound up with the Eucharist and are oriented toward it. For in the blessed Eucharist is contained the whole spiritual good of the Church, namely Christ himself, our Pasch.

The Eucharist is the efficacious sign and sublime cause of that communion in the divine life and that unity of the People of God by which the Church is kept in being. It is the culmination both of God's action sanctifying the world in Christ and of the worship men offer to Christ and through him to the Father in the Holy Spirit.

Finally, by the Eucharistic celebration we already unite ourselves with the heavenly liturgy and anticipate eternal life, when God will be all in all.

- Catechism of the Catholic Church (1324-26)

Know Your Enemies

In light of the apparent well-planned attacks and loss of lives in Mumbai, it is a good notion to remove one's ostrich-head from the sand now and then. Watch The 3rd Jihad documentary here.

BXVI on Truth, Beauty, Goodness

VATICAN CITY, NOV. 25, 2008 (Zenit.org).- The search for beauty without truth and goodness can drive young people to fly toward artificial paradises that simply hide interior emptiness, says Benedict XVI.

The Pope affirmed this in a message sent to the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, and directed to the members of the pontifical academies who are participating in a conference on "The Universality of Beauty: a Comparison Between Aesthetics and Ethics." (Read about this conference here.)

There is currently a "dramatic" separation between the "search for beauty, though understood in a reductive way as an exterior form, as an appearance to be sought at all costs, and the [search] for truth and the goodness of actions," he wrote.

This separation, the Holy Father cautioned, transforms beauty into "mere aestheticism, and above all for youth, into a path that leads to the ephemeral, into banal and superficial appearances, or even a flight toward artificial paradises, which disguise and hide interior emptiness and inconsistencies."

Faced with this, the Pontiff affirmed that Christians are called to "give reason for" not only the truth of the faith, but also its beauty, by way of "works that are at the same time beautiful and good," which point to "another beauty, truth and goodness that only in God have their perfection and their ultimate source."

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Vigilent Worship

Leave it to Daniel Mitsui. I can't think of a better place to give thanks.

Rockwell

Freedom From Want (1943) - Rockwell