It Never Left

It is tempting to think we are past this sort of thing. But we aren't. We have "one holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church" comprised of well over a billion people (and growing) that proclaims the truth and reality of the doctrine of Original Sin. So, when we take one last sip of coffee, fold the paper, turn the lock, and head off to work, we don't worry about the statuary at the parish. Or our priest(s). Or how well the ushers might handle the breaking-in of disruptors during either a major feast celebration or even a Saturday evening "There's-that-guy-in-his-bermuda-shorts" Vigil Mass.

What we forget in our daily functional atheism are the anthropological realities that our Lord's Church defines so well in the Catechism; specifically, the symptomology of paganism of all those outside the sphere and protection of our Lord's sacramental "containment system" (if you will allow such a crass way of describing it).

Read through Paganism, parts 1-3. Girard and Satinover give the Church's Magisterium two excellent tools for understanding what we still face; indeed, at a growing rate.

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

Singer - Neuter and Party On, Wayne

Just when I thought C. S. Lewis's provocative and prescient book, That Hideous Strength, couldn't possibly become more prophetic, Princeton "ethicist" and "philosopher", Peter Singer gives grist for the mill of satanic delight: ‘Why Not Sterilize the Human Race and Party into Extinction?’

Entering the New Dark Ages

This sums things up pretty well for me regarding the "Cordoba House" mosque at Ground Zero.

If you disagree, you probably are in the camp of those who think that Israel is evil.

Functional Dhimmitude, etc.

Did you happen to see this in this news this evening?

How well was it covered? Why (choose one):

1) News crews stuck in traffic.

2) Bigger stories going on.

3) Don't ask. Don't tell.

4) Would like gasoline for our cars next month.

5) A sheik might stop paying BP to keep Gulk leak flowing.

UPDATE: Patrick Archbold keeps the hilarity afloat with I Want a Peace Boat to Mecca.

Barron - 'Agora'

Fr Robert Barron comments on the new film, "Agora". Note well that Fr Barron portends that the wave of anti-Christian sentiments has, as evidenced in this film filled with misinformation, now moved into popular culture and may, in fact, bring on active persecution of Christians.

His normative? "Stand fast" and "set the record straight."

UPDATE: David Bentley Hart chimes in.

Primitive Sacred and Oil on the Water

Mark Steyn lets fly with King Barack the Verbose.

One of the most salient and fascinating features of René Girard's mimetic theory is that it dispels the common - and wrong - notions that we humans (a) think for ourselves and (b) left behind all the mumbo-jumbo of our primitive ancestors who did things like ritual sacrifice of first-born children. Wrong on both counts, says mimetic theory.

We are hugely influenced by the desires of others and, therefore, at the whim of those who know this about ourselves and take advantage of it. Think Madison Avenue. Think all those sales flyers that fall out of your Sunday newspaper. Think about going to work, or to a class reunion, or to a dinner party wearing what is hanging in the never-touched recesses of your closet. Why is that? Not because you care what people think, surely.

The Gospel has indeed been hard at work in history freeing us from many of the superstitions of what Girard calls "the primitive sacred." But as the Gospel in general and the teachings of the Catholic Church in particular are abandoned and rejected, the pagan rises again. And one of the most prominent elements of the primitive sacred is the king/priest/shaman figure; i.e., one vested with the aura of the sacred. How that figure accrues this aura and power is important, but for now just realized that the vacuum created by the secular West's rejection of the Christian faith has opened the realm of this sacred human figure once again.

Enter Barack Obama. The adulation and "leg-tingling" of Chris Matthew, the Obots on street corners before the election, the fawning free-ride by the MSM (now showing a few signs of waking up and smelling the coffee grounds) all smack of the mystification of the primitive sacred's legendary divine figure come alive again.

Enter the Gulf of Mexico oil-spill disaster. Nothing seemingly can stop it. Not technology. Not bureaucrats' posturing and grand-standing. And NOT the king/priest/shaman of the Last Self-Help Administration.

His divine status, it would seem, cannot cap this catastrophic act of nature, and, while he is clearly not to blame for it, he clearly cannot do anything to stop it. His post-modern version of the primitive sacred leader - the only alternative to the Church's more realistic understanding of fallen, fallible human nature (even the Pope goes to Confession) - is beginning to look oil-soaked and - hmm - less than divine.

If ever there was a wake-up call from Heaven, in my opinion, this Gulf of Mexico fiasco is one. What shall it be? A modern recrudescence of the primitive sacred? Or a return to sanity in Catholic truth?

Is anyone else asking - or answering - this question?

NOT

ABC News reports that a Dutch "Adult Shop" is going to be giving away Pope Condoms. Brilliant.

I mean really. It is truly a proportionate response to the insurmountable and incessant barrage of propaganda coming from the Vatican. You change channels on your television and all you hear is what the Pope and the Vatican has to say about sex and morals (to steal friend and mentor Gil Bailie's schtick).

It is striking a blow for human freedom and dignity. And it makes me proud to be a member of the human race.

Enemies and Friends of the Church

The sum is greater than the parts in the on-going battle of neo-paganism against the Catholic Church. It goes like this. The NYT keeps up its full frontal attacks and insinuations. The "progressivist" secularists' other lap-dog media organ, the WaPo, shines a light on potential targets (read: victims and their training facilities). The vanguard berzerkers begin their first attempts to rout the normal worshipers, the latter having no full appreciation of the lust for the primitive sacred that carries the former into hallowed spaces of our Eucharistic Lord.

The overlords of this scheme, meanwhile, watch from their oligarchical nests, smug in the knowledge that they set the agenda and continue to do so, apparently far removed from the melee.

Understand that this work against God's Church is not unlike that carried out during Lord Cecil's English "reformation" (sic.) and the Mexican Cristiada. The enemies of the Catholic Church want to decimate Her and strike fear and doubt into the hearts of all those whom She wants to help bring to salvation in this life and Eternal Life in the next. Her enemies would have us all join them in their naive utopian pipe dreams and nihilistic relativism. Now is decidedly not the time to buckle.

It is a subtle and well-planned effort. We must be "wise as serpents and as innocent as doves," as Our Lord admonishes us (Mtt 10,16ff). We are in for difficult days; but perseverance will bring its eternal reward. Find strength in numbers of the faithful; pray constantly; receive the sacramental strength and grace of the Holy Eucharist.

Be one in the Lord in Marian chivalry.

Further Cuts Will Follow

Mark Steyn connects the dots in ways that, say, Attorney General Holder juuust doesn't want to. Why is that, do you think?

Looks are Deceptive (I hope)

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

Friday Follies

Daniel's Answer to the King (1890) - Briton Rivière

Caroline Glick of The Jerusalem Post warns that it is Time to Plan for War.

Chuck Colson quotes Soren Kierkegaard: “Suppose,” Kierkegaard wrote, “someone invented…a convenient little talking tube which could be heard over the whole land. I wonder if the police would not forbid it, fearing that the whole country would become mentally deranged.” I would argue it is past the national stage; it is now global derangement.

I applaud Franklin Graham and James Dobson who see the danger of those who are using institutional authority to expunge the Christian faith from the public forum.

Andrew Breitbart: 'The Left is, in essence, the Media.'

On the Barrelhead

Endorsed by Geert Wilders, Mark Steyn, Brad Thor, The Jerusalem Post, yes. But you might want to use cash to buy this.

Hell in a Handbasket

I know and you know the Holy Father wants to help the dwindling faithful in England by visiting. But at some point it becomes apparent that the number of faithful may be dwarfed by those human embodiments of screeching demons who will welcome his visit when hell freezes over.

Perhaps it is time to let old England go to that untoward place for reprobates in the proverbial hand-basket.

Otherwise, let those sitting on their hands in England speak up for what is left of truth, goodness, and beauty in a world destined to become a wasteland of relativism so sought-after and so well-deserved by secularist fools and village atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins.

Developed Here Means Bonkers

This should say reams to anyone with any anthropological sensibilities. As Gil Bailie recently noted, that western society tries to reconstruct itself with twenty years of sexual experimentation while rejecting five-ten thousand years of collective wisdom about being human should tell you what and who is truly "developed".

The drunk driver has the right of way

When it comes right down to it, we will find that the direction the Last Self-Help Administration has taken the United States of America so far has been determined by monstrous ego. Health Care Reform, so-called, regardless of whether or not one subscribes to the Doctrine of Original Sin, is not only new and untried, but as anyone with a lick of sense knows, not foolproof.

While a small federal program might have covered the +/- 30,000,000 Americans not covered previously by health insurance, a new, untried, and hardly foolproof program will now begin its new wheels a-turning that purports to cover ALL Americans. That means, gentle reader, that everyone will be liable to its creakings and groanings and mistakes and botches and misfittings and errors and (fill in blank).

Only a leadership that does not care a whit for all Americans would do this new, untried, and hardly foolproof thing to ALL its citizens ... just because. It is the difference between belief in ideological collectivization on the one hand, and a humility that is clearly lacking in this hubris-filled, power-drunk Adminstration.

And the drunken driver at the wheel of this juggernaut, as we - and he - know, has the right of way.

Off Their High Horses

What happened to the kinds of editorials once so common in American newspapers? You know the sort: "It's high time So-and-so realize s/he isn't above judgment. S/he had better start realizing it before s/he gets knocked of her/his high-horse. After all, every one of will have to face a time of reckoning, if not in this world then in the Next."

This goes, in particular, for elected representatives of our government on both sides of the aisle. I am not asking for "citizens' arrests" of some kind or another. Rather, I am speaking about the kind of common sense that once not only prevailed in American society, but was, in a sense, its hallmark; a trait we see in a diffuse, unfocused way in the rather unfortunate phenomenon known as "Tea Parties" these days.

The trouble with Tea Parties is that politicians have become too sophisticated in the ways of media exploitation and manipulation, quickly (and all too easily) branding them "racist" or other accusations that turn sympathy away from them and toward their (supposed) "victim". The trouble with this cool, snarky bit of sophistry is that it lends itself to that kind of hubris we now see in our present-day politicians in office.

I would simply like to see newspaper editorials once again appeal to a moral authority beyond that of focus groups or the set of values of any - ANY - group right or left, Democrat or Republican, etc.

I had better not hold my breath.

Goldman - This is Not a Drill

For the record: David P. Goldman - Spengler's This is Not a Drill — This is the Real Thing. NB: his last two paragraphs.

Wise as Serpents, Innocent as Doves

We must have our eyes wide open. As Our Lord admonished us, we must be "wise as serpents and as innocent as doves" (Mt 10,16). The same few men who now occupy the Oval Office, who have strived so hard to obtain so much power and control over the fate not only of this once-great nation but also others so indelibly influenced by the true biblical spirit, are now - if one were to follow the minute yet certain threads of power and control - are now trying their best to tear down and destroy both the credibility and the influence of the sacramental presence of Christ in our world; namely, the Catholic Church.

Like Elizabeth and Lord Cecil (Burghley) in the reign of Tudor terror in England, there is very little these power-mongers will not do, strings they will not pull, to try their utmost to undo the epistemological, anthropological, and theological allegiance of millions of Catholics in this and any other country that happens to be within earshot or readership of their onslaught against Christ's "one holy catholic and apostolic Church."

Read Evelyn Waugh's Edmund Campion. Watch Michael Wood's In Search of Shakespeare. Understand that "Bloody Mary" was a blip on the continuum of religious persecution compared with the model for the modern police state that was conducted behind the skirts of Queen Elizabeth, while hanging, having one's "privy parts" cut off and entrails roasted before your still living eyes, then being quartered was the norm of those sentenced to death at Tyburn Tree.

But our modern Lord Cecil and associates want nothing other than complete and monolithic power. "Whatever it takes" is the pragmatic motto of these officer-class ubermensch leaders. And they are confident they can do it.

Our response must be that recommended by T. S. Eliot in The Four Quartets: "prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action" and in that order. Or, as Gil Bailie quotes John Paul II as having quipped: "We ha(ve) two choices: a practical one and a hopelessly naive mystical one. The practical one (is) to fall on our knees and pray for the interecession of Our Lady of Czestochowa. The hopelessly naive one (is) to organize a meeting of politicians and bureaucrats."

You know me: engage in Marian chivalry. And never let go of your faith, hope, and charity - even toward these power-mongers who are forgetful that they must stand before Our Lord on the Day of Judgment. They, too, are forgetful that the Devil tends to break and throw away his "tools" when he finishes with them.

Fight the good fight! Pray! Love! And be Pope's men - and women - all.

An Email from the Heartland

From an email sent to me from my sister:

In

1952

President Truman

established one day a year as a

"National Day of Prayer."

In

1988

President Reagan

designated the

First Thursday in May of each year as

the National Day of Prayer.

In June

2007

(then)

Presidential

Candidate Barack Obama

declared that the USA Was no longer a

Christian nation.

This year

President Obama,

canceled the

21st annual National Day

of Prayer ceremony

at the White

House under the rouse

Of "not wanting to offend anyone"

On September 25, 2009

from 4 am until 7 pm,

a National Day of Prayer

for the Muslim religion was Held on Capitol Hill,

beside the White House.

There were over 50,000 Muslims that

Day in DC.

I guess it doesn't matter

if "Christians"

Are offended by this event -

We obviously

Don't count as

"anyone" anymore.

The direction

This country is headed

Should strike fear in the heart of every Christian.

Especially knowing that the

Muslim religion believes that if Christians cannot be

Converted they should be Annihilated

Go to the website

To confirm this info:

http://www.islamoncapitolhill.com/

Pay particular attention to the very bottom of the page:

"OUR TIME HAS COME"

I hope that this Information will stir your spirit.

The words of 2 Chronicles 7:14 -

"If my people, Who are called by my Name,

Will humble themselves And pray,

And seek my face, and Turn from their Wicked ways,

Then will I hear from Heaven

And will forgive their Sin and will heal Their land."

We must pray for our nation, our communities,

our families, and especially our children.

They are the ones that are going to suffer the most

If we don't PRAY!

May God have Mercy...

IN GOD WE TRUST.