Zmirak - Taking Back Our Mass

Oh my. Two "For the Records" in a row. Mea culpa. However, it is too important not to note: John Zmirak's All Your Church Are Belong to Us. A must-read for us converts who didn't enter full communion with Mother Church as Trad Rads and sometimes wonder what's the fuss.

Under Whose Standard Do You March

For the record: Father Angelo's entrance piece for the beginning of this holy season: Getting something done this Lent.

Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday - Carl Spitzweg - the end of Carnival.

From the Shrine of the Holy Whapping archives, Matthew Alderman ruminates on Ash Wednesday:

Chesterton once imagined a long procession of mysterious priests with their strangely-shaped mitres, hooked croziers, their incense and bells, and their sacred books--what possesses us to leap upon them, disregarding everything else, and seize the Bible from their hands, crying out for sola scriptura, when they, with all their antique ways of mind and worship, were the first to call it sacred? There's always a deeper logic there, if we dig, or if we simply choose to trust in the vast and occasionally cobwebby mansion that is both Tradition and tradition. Public penitence--whether flamboyantly physical or merely simply passing on the cheesecake--is part of the Catholic landscape, and the Catholic imagination. (And I won't pretend that can't get disturbing sometimes, but there it is, no apologies--though the Church has always stressed moderation). We're no angels. We're not supposed to be. While the best thing is a chastened soul, sometimes the only way to get there is via the body. No dessert menus, thanks. Check, please?

More here.

NYT - Tea Parties

The NYT take on the Tea Party movement here.

Pipes - The Strong Horse

Daniel Pipes reviews Lee Smith's new book, The Strong Horse:

Smith takes as his prooftext Osama bin Laden's comment in 2001, "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse." What Smith calls the strong-horse principle contains two banal elements: Seize power and then maintain it. This principle predominates because Arab public life has "no mechanism for peaceful transitions of authority or power sharing, and therefore [it] sees political conflict as a fight to the death between strong horses." Violence, Smith observes is "central to the politics, society, and culture of the Arabic-speaking Middle East." It also, more subtly, implies keeping a wary eye on the next strong horse, triangulating, and hedging bets.

Smith argues that the strong horse principle, not Western imperialism or Zionism, "has determined the fundamental character of the Arabic-speaking Middle East." The Islamic religion itself both fits into the ancient pattern of strong-horse assertiveness and then promulgates it. Muhammad, the Islamic prophet, was a strongman as well as a religious figure. Sunni Muslims have ruled over the centuries "by violence, repression, and coercion." Ibn Khaldun's famous theory of history amounts to a cycle of violence in which strong horses replace weak ones. The humiliation of dhimmis daily reminds non-Muslims who rules..More>>

Courtesy and Firmness

And right across the Channel, young French Catholics responded with “courtesy and firmness” to the latest effort to desecrate the Notre Dame de Paris, crying, "Habemus Papam!"

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.

Chivalry and the Benedictine Rule

Scott Farrell's website, Chivalry Today, is a good effort at - aptly enough - applicability of chivalry from various perspectives in our age and times. A fine podcast there offers Prof. Craig Galbraith's Chivalry and the Benedictine Rule. Give a listen.

And, if you weren't aware of it, I recommend looking into the highly historical figure and model for the Arthurian torso’s Sir Galahad, the Cistercians' very own Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.

'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.

Scruton - Music and Morality

"David with his harp" Paris Psalter,
c. 960, Constantinople

Roger Scruton, philosopher and modern defender of truth, goodness, beauty, extols the virtues of the same in music:

Faced with youth culture we are encouraged to be nonjudgmental. But to be nonjudgmental is already to make a kind of judgment: it is to suggest that it really doesn’t matter what you listen to or dance to, and that there is no moral distinction between the various listening habits that have emerged in our time. That is a morally charged position, and one that flies in the face of common sense. To suggest that people who live with a metric pulse as a constant background to their thoughts and movements are living in the same way, with the same kind of attention and the same pattern of challenges and rewards, as others who know music only from sitting down to listen to it, clearing their minds, meanwhile, of all other thoughts—such a suggestion is surely implausible.

Read more of Music and Morality here.

Quinquagesima Sunday

Saint Peter weeping before the Blessed Virgin on the first Holy Saturday (1647)
- Guercino (Image from Vultus Christi)

On this Quinquagesima Sunday, Father Mark explains holy compunction.

Idiot Drivers

I grew up in north Indiana: lake-effect snow amounts. Our school buses had strobe lights on top of them as a precaution in case they got stuck in snowbanks. Schools didn't close all the time for snowstorms.

In northern Virginia, I will grant you, this past week has reached lake-effect amounts of snow of over thirty inches as you have either read about or experienced yourself. And whoever Monica Hesse is, she, too, discovered the truth about persons without driving experience driving in ice and snow.

God is in the Pain

Cardinal Angelo Comastri stares down suffering, pain, and death. We do not fly from nothingness to nothingness. God is in the pain.

For more resources on dealing with the oft ignored realities of mortality, visit the ever-growing number of entries at Meanings of Suffering and A Holy Death.

Lady Jane Grey

As hard a pill as it may be for those who cling to shreds of truth about the so-called "reformation" (this is especially the case for Angliophiles), Leanda de Lisle writes, Debunking the Myth of Lady Jane Grey.

NBCC

For the record: in honor of Black History Month, here is the site of the National Black Catholic Conference.