Byrd, Tallis, and Today

Here is an excellent documentary on the age of Henry VIII, the ruination of Catholicism in England, the dissolution of the monasteries (+/-20 a month), and the Catholic musicians, Thomas Tallis and William Byrd.

As I have said, a close and careful study of the (so-called) English "reformation" is important indeed for Catholics today.

Powers and principalities will always seek to do away with the Church and misunderstand Her Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Tallis and Byrd, composers, give us reason for Faith, Hope, and Charity.

Belloc - Bare Ruined Choirs

Tintern Abbey ( 1794) - J. M. W. Turner

Within four years of the breach with Rome (that is the denial of Papal authority), every monastery and nunnery in England had gone ...

England did not lose the Faith in 1550-1620 because she was protestant then. Rather, she is protestant now because she then lost the Faith ...

The grand effect of the Reformation was the isolation of the soul ...

- Hilaire Belloc

Royal Viewpoint

Very interesting, acute, and incisive analysis about England from an insider if ever there was one here.

Confounding His Critics

At First Things, William Doino, Jr. - who, incidentally, wrote this review of A Little Guide for Your Last Days - writes about a glimpse of the truth, goodness, and beauty of Pope Benedict XVI's visit to England given to, of all people, a BBC reporter in The 83-Year-Old Pontiff has Confounded His Critics!

UPDATE: Reduced to utter irrelevance

As Benedict Prepares to Visit

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang

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.

Let's Cuff Him

This is what passes for British jurisprudence?

Meanwhile, amidst the knee-jerk accusations, a rabbi recommends the biblical ethos of charity.

P. Hitchens - The Lost Archbishop

For the record: the only Hitchens brother worth reading on Our nice, furry Archbishop... lost in a barbarous world.

Angliophobic

One wonders why this is happening. It's simple. Apparently I Wun disdains all things that come from the patrimony of the old Christian West.

Sad But True

Joanna Bogle at Mercatornet writes:

... the fashionable emphasis on “genderless parenting” means that a simple truth has been ignored: children need both mothers and fathers, who relate to them in different ways. A family should not have to be politically-correct, and nor should its means of communication or discipline have to follow fashion. Families need to have a confidence in being what they are, and parents should be allowed and encouraged to make use of their best instincts and their common sense.

None of this seems to have reached government circles of thought. Do politicians and bureaucrats live on a different planet from the rest of us? Britain’s “Children’s Minister” announced, in response to the recent survey, that the new system of “happiness” classes at school and compulsory “personal, social, health and economic education” would resolve the problems, along with promotion of healthy eating habits.

It makes one despair. A child needs a secure home, and the knowledge that there is a moral code and a meaning to life. You cannot teach “happiness” in a classroom, and it is bizarre that a government is attempting to do so. Structure and discipline should form a framework in which a child can flourish, a sort of secure flower-pot in which the young plant thrives before it is put out into the larger flower-bed to bloom in the garden.

The angry, frightening young men and women who shriek and vomit and lurch about drunkenly in the streets of Britain’s towns and suburbs on summer nights are evidence that we are getting something terribly wrong. It is very weird when a nation is afraid of its own young.

It is possible to change, and to start making the right decisions and restoring wisdom and truth to the task of child-rearing. If we don’t, the future looks bleak.

- Why British Children are Sad.

'To Secure Western Civilization'

LTC Allen West is running for Congress. Diana West reports.

UPDATE: The Iconoclast reports on what LTC West is trying to avoid in the United States.

'A Virus has attacked the world'

Who said these "inflammatory" words:

"England is a cesspit. England is the breeding ground of fundamentalist Muslims. Its social logic is to allow all religions to preach openly. But this is illogic, because none of the other religions preach apocalyptic violence. And yet England allows it. Remember, that country was the breeding ground for communism, too. Karl Marx did all his work in libraries there."

(a) Bill O'Reilly (b) Geert Wilders (c) Glenn Beck (d) Robert Spencer (e) None of the above

The answer is here.

There Was a Time

A beautiful, if wistful, look back at London filmed in color in the 1920s. (ht: Baron Bodissey)

England - Ouroboros

You've seen it elsewhere, no doubt. This should be all the evidence you need to understand what happens when a country - in this case the Dowry of Mary - abandoned faith and reason in the sixteenth century.

When once a people, a culture, a society lets loose of the sole source of ontological and epistemological certainty, namely, the Magisterium of the Catholic Church which safeguards the deposit of faith, the inevitable downward spiral begins till the words of dear old Will Shakespeare come true:

... untune that string,
And hark what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters
Would lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength would be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son would strike his father dead:
Force would be right; or rather, right and wrong
(Between whose endless jar Justice resides)
Would lose their names, and so would Justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite (an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power)
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last, eat up himself.

What the Church proclaims about legitimate defense (echoing St Thomas Aquinas) is forgotten; what the Church definitely states about property and dignity and family is denounced by law.

Sad, poor old England, land of King Harry, Saint Augustine of Canterbury, Saint Thomas Becket, Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, J. R. R. Tolkien, and more. It is become ouroboros.

British Lion Reawakening?

The Iconoclast posts on Geert Wilders’ Press Conference in London.

And, did anything happen in Manchester on October 10th?

There Goes the Hotel

If you are Christian and live in the United Kingdom, beware of discussing - let alone defending - your faith with a member of the Scimitar. When it comes to who is believed, comforted, aided, and abetted in a court of law, you don’t have a chance.

Poor Old England IV

Can the Christian faith in Britain be saved? Britain is no longer a Christian nation and the Church of England could die out within a generation, an Anglican bishop has warned.

Or, perhaps the more accurate question: Can a national church be saved? Some would say its seeds of destruction were sown a long time ago.

A. N. Wilson - Return to Faith

(O)nly hard evidence will satisfy the secularists, but over time and after repeated readings of the story, I've been convinced without it.

And in contrast to those ephemeral pundits of today, I have as my companions in belief such Christians as Dostoevsky, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Johnson and all the saints, known and unknown, throughout the ages.

When that great saint Thomas More, Chancellor of England, was on trial for his life for daring to defy Henry VIII, one of his prosecutors asked him if it did not worry him that he was standing out against all the bishops of England.

He replied: 'My lord, for one bishop of your opinion, I have a hundred saints of mine.'

Now, I think of that exchange and of his bravery in proclaiming his faith. Our bishops and theologians, frightened as they have been by the pounding of secularist guns, need that kind of bravery more than ever.

Sadly, they have all but accepted that only stupid people actually believe in Christianity, and that the few intelligent people left in the churches are there only for the music or believe it all in some symbolic or contorted way which, when examined, turns out not to be belief after all.

As a matter of fact, I am sure the opposite is the case and that materialist atheism is not merely an arid creed, but totally irrational.

Materialist atheism says we are just a collection of chemicals. It has no answer whatsoever to the question of how we should be capable of love or heroism or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat.

The Resurrection, which proclaims that matter and spirit are mysteriously conjoined, is the ultimate key to who we are. It confronts us with an extraordinarily haunting story.

J. S. Bach believed the story, and set it to music. Most of the greatest writers and thinkers of the past 1,500 years have believed it.

But an even stronger argument is the way that Christian faith transforms individual lives - the lives of the men and women with whom you mingle on a daily basis, the man, woman or child next to you in church ...

Read all of Wilson's Religion of hatred: Why we should no longer be cowed by the chattering classes ruling Britain who sneer at Christianity.

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.

Henry VIII's Folly

And speaking of cutting oneself off from the True Vine (below), MercatorNet's Joana Bogle gives us a sad reminder of the people and events surrounding the cutting off of England, 'the dowry of Mary,' from Mother Church.

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the coronation of Henry VIII. His reign marked the greatest single upheaval that Britain has known – because it was a spiritual and cultural upheaval as well as a social and political one. No other single event, not even the industrial revolution of the 19th century, or the two World Wars of the 20th, has had quite the profound impact of the Reformation. We see its effects everywhere – in the way we view history, in the rural landscape with its (often very beautiful!) ruined abbeys, in the way we take for granted the notion of churches of different denominations in our towns and cities.

Certainly, however, the events in England cannot be seen in isolation. In 1534 and 1535 when the king’s “great matter” – his planned annulment of his marriage to Catherine and his marriage to Anne Boleyn – were being played out, it was against a backdrop of ferocious religious ferment in Europe. Martin Luther had been hauled into court in 1518 to defend his arguments on indulgences. In 1521 he wrote his letter to the Pope, von der Freiheit des Christenmenchen, and events were set in train for his excommunication which happened later that year. Despite its title, his famous document was not concerned with freedom as we today would understand it –it no prototype for a United Nations declaration on religious liberty. On the contrary, it is a set of affirmations on what the Church ought to say and believe. It rests on a whole range of ideas – still at that stage being worked out – concerning man, his free will, God’s plans, salvation, punishment, how we obtain God’s mercy, and much more.

But what really resonated with people was not really Luther’s doctrinal ideas – which then and later were confused and not particularly popular. What resonated was a general sense that the Church needed some cleansing. There was corruption and greed. There was an indefinable inability to engage with a changing world.

It is ironic – and a tragedy – that among those who would die as martyrs for the Catholic cause in Britain were leading supporters of authentic reform within the Church. Thomas More, the Chancellor of England, and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, both saw an urgent need for change. Long before he clashed with the king over the latter’s demands for support in abandoning his wife and marrying his mistress, Fisher was pioneering reforms in the education of clergy – he effectively established the Library at the University of Cambridge in a modern form – and in their pastoral training. There are touching accounts of him visiting the sick and dying, showing his priests by practical example how they should minister. Thomas More, as a leading layman, denounced clerical greed and ignorance. Both men died on the scaffold at the Tower of London for opposing the King’s break with Rome ...

Read all here.