Don't apologize for things you didn't do, to people who don't believe in forgiveness or redemption.
SundayOne of the worst mistakes American Catholicism ever made was the scrapping in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s of the subculture that had served it well up to that time. That was the era of the great flight from what Catholic intellectuals snobbishly called the “Catholic ghetto.”Critics like Arturo might point out you can’t manufacture it overnight, and I see the point he’d make about Shaw’s Novus neoconnish moralising, as if the church in America were supposed to be a branch of the Protestant right and modern Republican Party, the subculture it seems Shaw wants to create (I’d rather watch Puerto Rican reggaetón videos), but yes. Who else has thought it ironic that the libs who rabbited on about ‘community’ destroyed real community? Because that community was Catholic and they’re not.
The trust started with millionaire conservative Joseph N. Pew Jr., who was to the Republican Party as white is to rice.Back when Republican meant Bob Taft and the younger Barry Goldwater.
And he hated FDR something fierce, because Roosevelt was all about bigger government and Pew was all about educating the public about the evils of bureaucracy, to the point where he said the following about the New Deal:... a gigantic scheme to raze U.S. businesses to a dead level and debase the citizenry into a mass of ballot-casting serfs.In other words, a conspiracy. He thought the New Deal was a governmentwide conspiracy to destroy capitalism and turn the American masses into a servant class. And the government itself was “the wickedest racket the world has ever seen.”
Rendering a decade of U.S. policy irrelevant, the people of the Middle East are transforming the region themselves.By Andrew Bacevich.
The military: My first step will be to discard strategic imbecility as national policy, thus unemploying a great many strategic imbeciles. Henceforth the armed forces will concern themselves with defending the United States — not Korea, Japan, Afghani-freaking-stan for god’s sake, nor Europe nor the back side of the moon nor the nether reaches of the Crab Nebula. Just America. You know, that place between Canada and Mexico.From RR.
The Russian Church has accepted the authenticity of Roman Catholic sacraments per se (not by economia) since at least the early 17th century (Council of Moscow 1667). In other words Roman Catholics receive the true Body and Blood of Christ from the hands of their priests and the Pope of Rome is a true bishop. Moscow accepts the 15th-century Council of the Four Patriarchs (1484) on this matter and Russians canon law forbids the baptism of Catholics. This has not been annulled and it applies today. I can, if you like, post substantiating writings on this point by Archpriest Alexander Lebedeff of the Church Abroad. As the Church Abroad enters into ever deeper communion and unity with Moscow it may need to rethink the positions it has adopted on some issues such as this over the last few decades.Like what I believe: sacramentally they’re the same church with only one real difference, the scope of the Pope, an inch wide but miles deep.
The vast number of US military bases all over the world are intended to insure US military, political, and economic domination. That’s why there is a huge naval base, for the US 5th Fleet, in the monster-kingdom of Bahrain. Will the Navy intervene on the side of the dictator if he is threatened? There is much covert CIA support for our king-dictators in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the UAE. Last week Admiral Mullins toured all these client states to reassure them, said a Pentagon press release. Does that mean direct US intervention?Michael Rozeff:
Lew, yes, the U.S. will intervene, and it is likely that Great Britain, France, and, with lower likelihood, NATO will intervene. Their goal will be to install new governments that do not threaten their perceived interests, as they are attempting in Iraq and Afghanistan. From their perspective, this is mainly about control of oil and oil revenues and about preventing Iran from gaining regional hegemony and oil control. Somewhere along the way, I expect American naval and other forces to put in an appearance, and the story will be that they are there to ensure stability, protect interests, and ensure oil supplies.
The risk of war with Iran is rising, although presently not visible. Bahrain is shaping up something like Serbia before WWI. Iran has claimed Bahrain for a very long time. Most of its population is poorer and Shiite, and ruled by wealthier Sunnis. Iran’s sending of ships through Suez is a bid to get the new Egyptian regime, temporary or not, to make a concession to Iran. Britain’s Prime Minister Cameron already has visited Egypt, a form of intervention, and didn’t talk or acknowledge the Muslim Brotherhood. For now, the intervention will be carrots, aid, food aid, loans, and the leverage of recognition and support. It will be all about getting pro-western governments installed and getting business back to usual, with a couple of bones thrown to the protesting masses. Israel is a wild card and can upset the applecart unless handled very firmly. The uprisings are so pervasive and so spirited and so strong and have already succeeded so far that they can be expected to continue eliminating the old governments and opening up new political situations in many lands. This all becomes an enormously complicated challenge for Obama and the U.S. government to manage and handle, much like the Hungarian uprising was for the Soviets.
In December 2010 Verizon continued moderating its network by removing access to some IRC servers related to Wikileaks “Operation Payback”.
Are we really respectful and following of the Lord’s will as expressed in the order of creation and redemption? I fear that we are not. We have fallen into a carefully devised trap of the enemy’s making, because we trusted not in the Lord, and in his providence, accepting the gifts he gave us, using them for his glory, but rather have been motivated by fear of them. Fear is indeed the chief weapon of our enemy; we are in bondage to it. Had we accepted the gifts, had we been grateful for them, and allowed ourselves to be led by the Lord in his will for each of us as to how to use them, well none of this would have happened. But because we were afraid, we have rejected and despised his gifts, especially the gifts he has given us as males, and the result has been literally hellish.Even if like me you’re more like the egghead/Fr Mulcahy stereotype and less like Fr Joe coaching CYO basketball, true.
In the case of our civilization, the shadow of Jansenism is long, and the lying ideology we call by that name but which long predates Jansen has been a demon in the churches for too long a time. It has left us unable to face ourselves as God created us, left us prey to the unresolved conflicts we wrought upon ourselves, and led some to abuse the weakest, especially the boys upon whom as men the churches will need to depend for our future.
Prophets of doom do not make themselves popular, but if they are ministers of God, they must tell the truth. Now some people say that such ministers should not concern themselves with politics or economics. But supposing politics have become a substitute religion, necessarily a false religion, as they put man in the place of God? And supposing economics (or finance) are about to make many people go hungry? Are ministers of God not allowed to ask, with Aristotle, how people are going to lead a virtuous life if they will be lacking in the basic necessities of life? Is the virtuous life not the business of such ministers?
Therefore I make no apology for quoting a remarkable paragraph from a reporter of the prestigious Wall Street Journal who relates how in the summer of 2006 he was rebuked by a senior adviser of then-President Bush for having written an article critical of a former communications director in the White House. He says that at the time he did not fully comprehend what the adviser was saying to him, but afterwards he saw it as getting to the very heart of the Bush presidency. Here are the adviser’s own words, as quoted by the reporter:People like the reporter, the adviser said to him, are “in what we call the reality-based community, meaning people who believe like you that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” The reporter should forget about yesterday’s principles of respecting reality. “That’s not the way the world works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality – judiciously, as you will – then we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”(See www.321 gold, Feb. 2, “We are Victims of a Financial Coup d’Etat”, by Catherine Fitts.)
This is not me moralizing about how the modern world runs on fantasy. This is a Washington insider of insiders, positively boasting of how the modern world is run on fantasy. Do not his words correspond exactly to the fabrications, for instance, of 9/11 and Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”, “created” to justify policies otherwise impossible to justify? The arrogance of such a scorn for reality, and for people respecting reality, is breath-taking.
The classical Greeks were pagans with no knowledge of the revealed God, but they had a clear grasp of that reality which is the moral framework of his universe, governed, as they saw it, by the gods. Any man, even hero, who defied that framework, like the Bush adviser, was guilty of “hubris”, or of rearing up above his proper human station, and he would be crushed accordingly by the gods. Catholics, if you think that grace does away with nature, you had best re-learn from the pagans of olden times those lessons of nature which are more than ever needed today. Study Xerxes in Aeschylus’ Persæ, Creon in Sophocles’ Antigone, Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchæ. Pray the Holy Rosary for sure, but also read the famous classics, plant potatoes and pay down debt, say I!
Kyrie eleison.
Blind-sided by security officers who pounced upon him, Ray McGovern remarked, as he was hauled out the door, “So this is America?” Mr. McGovern is covered with bruises, lacerations and contusions inflicted in the assault.More.
Why people are gaga for GagaFor some 60 years, there has been a deep fissure in what is called the American Right. There are those who believe in liberty. And there are those who believe in the American imperial state. They are not the same. Indeed, they are in opposition. The events in Egypt underscore the serious difference...
The Democratic-run Senate has stronger abortion-rights views than does the House, making it unlikely the House proposal will survive.The left encourages irresponsible behaviour, which leaves you more dependent on the state; power for them or another version of ‘my God, how the money rolls in’. (Slavery marketed as women’s empowerment. Clever.) So here the so-cons are the real empowerers and not the woman-haters the left wants to you think.
Thousands worried about how the government’s mounting debt stands to change the American landscape and lifestyle are being duped by the media and political opportunists to support establishment Republicans and the status quo.An attractive woman unqualified to hold office doesn’t speak for me.
There have been points in American history when political parties have made 180-degree turns. Certain principles or planks are abandoned by both major parties, leaving an opportunity, if the support for the principle or plank is great enough, for either to take it on and take control. 150 years ago the Democratic Party championed reserved rights of states. 100 years later, it was a Republican issue, which Democrats opposed. Along with following the Tenth Amendment, neither party in the last fifty years has proposed reining in the American military.From LRC.
There is the opportunity for the Republican Party, by following Ron Paul, and leaving Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rudolph Giuliani and other neocons behind, to capture a new moderate center, opposed to war and worried about the government’s ever-growing measures to control and corral its subjects. By offering credible solutions to the debt crisis, the Republican Party could become a dynasty rivaling and undoing the damage of the Democratic dynasty of the 1930s and 40s.
If this should happen there will be little mention of the Tea Party.
Nothing can penetrate the walls of the Pentagon, certainly not the news that the budget deficit is growing and Congress is looking for ways to save money. That is the lesson... as it was revealed that the Pentagon is poised to unveil a new $553-billion budget.I’m not anti-military but this must stop.
$553 billion, not including the inevitable “emergency funding” bill that will come later in the year, is already the largest budget in the entire history of the US military and, by extension, the entire history of the planet.
Jesus loves you, or you’ve got to have heartThe devotion to the Sacred Heart, which in its symbolical meaning and as representing the love and tenderness of the Saviour towards His children, had found its way into the hymns and prayers of almost every private form of devotion, and commends itself to the more enthusiastic of every communion, as the most touching of all those exercises of piety which cluster around the suffering life of Jesus ... The Heart of Christ, whether to Puritan devotee, to the member of the High Church in England, or to those who had outwardly separated themselves from the communion of both, was the temple of a common worship – the home of common love.– From The Devotion of the Sacred Heart, the Religious Tract Society, London, probably printed around 1876, pp. 8-9
To be clear: the Saint Petroc usage (the Saint Colman Prayer Book) includes three forms of liturgy: a Sarum use (not the full cathedral Sarum rite but a Sarum use for missions), an English liturgy (primarily Sarum with a handful of items from the Non-Juror liturgy, Gothic, York... or following the wording of the 1549 BCP in a few instances), and the Gregorian rite (which is the Christminster/Mount Royal liturgy). The offices are Sarum based upon the Clewer translation. There is also a recension of the Lorrha-Stowe Missal which is to be included in the supplementary book (though I do not know if/when it will be approved to serve)...I like the Antiochian way better: Tridentine Mass (often in Knott Missal English but it can be in Latin) and American Missal (US 1928 BCP meets the Tridentine Mass), only don’t give them Byzantine Rite-sounding names (Divine Liturgies of St Gregory – that’s like the proper name for Byzantine Presanctified – and of St Tikhon). (I often call it Mass whatever the rite but that’s not made up; still, thou shalt not mix rites in church.)
Actually somebody in character while filming a historical drama about Northern Ireland in WWII. Note the resemblance to the Spectator cartoon. 
It’s Not About Latin™. Fr Z: much of the older, traditional form of the Latin Church’s rite of baptism can be done in English. Ronnie Knox did it in Latin because the devil understands it and the baby doesn’t understand English yet.
“What we need now,” one hears more and more among the Pope’s in-house critics, “is a genuine Italian pope, like John XXIII.” A real Italian, they argue, would know how to handle the present crisis of Catholicism, because of the Italian ability to make adjustments when a battle appears to be lost.Natural traditionalism vs Paul VI’s French-influenced egghead approach that backfired and what Arturo describes as JP2’s Napoleonic approach, not trad at all but mistaken for it. I don’t know enough to know what Arturo has against the Maritains: they were part of that French approach and undermined the church before V2? Of course Archbishop Lefebvre was very French but arguably his approach to the problem was very different from the Italian one J23 might have taken had he lived long enough.
