Religion and Geopolitics Review: May 13, 2017

by Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch

WEEKLY BRIEF

Today is May 13, 2017. It is 100 years since the girls in Portugal saw the Lady at Fatima. Her message was about prayer and a turning of hearts in consonance with the hearts of Our Lady and Our Lord. Let us calibrate our hearts and order our loves. She has promised the conversion of Russia. Let us approach that miracle with Russian Christians with the hearts of two lost Christian brothers who need one another to confess our sins and face our common demonic enemy. When we approach the world as brothers we will see more clearly. We know at the heart of reality is an ordered hierarchical love relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Bowing to the Sacred Hearts is ordering our loves to include all mankind. Mankind is a symphony of nations and Our Lady has assured us that Russia can be converted. We cannot leave this national moment to atheists. We are being distracted from fraternity by hysteria. Let us be silent and pray. Why the deep hatred now for Russia as she recovers the soul of her own Christian nation after a century of armed atheistic science?

In our own land many people fell away. They were not physically oppressed but spiritually bored. We ask God, however,  to look not upon our sins but the faith of the Church. Many simple people prayed the Hail Marys after every Mass. They petitioned in a thousand chapels of adoration. They kept  Mass and Confession on First Fridays and First Saturdays. Let us hope God hears His little ones. The message of the loving hearts and Christocentric love is not to be home-bound. Let us bring the message of love and fraternity among the nations and within our own nation. Let us ask forgiveness for our sins as a nation that we have celebrated the abominations. Let us chastise the criminal and embrace the immigrant. Let us save our hatred for the Serpent, and love our brother nations with the heart of the Anointed One drawing all the nations under his Kingship. Our Lady spoke with children but she wants men of authority to heed her words and adopt the way of her heart. Let us build a brotherhood in Christ of holy priests and righteous nations  and so honor our Immaculate Virgin and Merciful Mother.  

I. POPE FRANCIS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

HOMOSEXUALS IN CATHOLIC MALE RELIGIOUS ORDERS: Bishop John Stowe argues for more mercy and less talk of disordered sexuality in his talk to male religious superiors. He follows with a public friendly encounter with New Ways Ministry -- a group trying to change church teaching on homosexuality. For forty years most US male religious orders and a plurality of seminaries have been extremely "gay friendly" to priest applicants. It is Catholics, not Unitarians, who have huge same-sex institutions particularly susceptible to the demoralizing effects of tolerating an abomination. Homosexuality in male religious orders is like incest in a family: it destroys the group bonds based on non-erotic forms of love. The problem with Catholic practice is not that we have failed to welcome   homosexuals in the priesthood. Quite the opposite. The problem is that we have a general teaching defining homosexuality as intrinsically disordered and a clerical practice of welcoming intense erotic male bonds. We are living a lie. It is actually a step toward reform the more homosexual priests and bishops become emboldened. They are deeply meshed in the episcopacy, chanceries, seminaries and religious orders. All the insiders know this. Now Catholics in the pews, as well as fellow Christians and fellow Americans  will get to see the real reason that Catholic politicians are so confused about publicly ordered sex roles.  Pope Francis has said when evil presents itself as a good (an angel of light), it is often best to allow it room rather than initial opposition. These kind of lies are best exposed in as much light as possible.

ANTHONY ESOLEN, THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC POET PROFESSOR: Moves from Providence College in Rhode Island to St. Thomas More in New Hampshire. His own Benedict Option. He explains.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IS NOT AN INDIVIDUALISTIC CLAIM BUT ROOTED IN MAN'S OBLIGATION TO WORSHIP GOD: Gunnar Gunderson explains why religious liberty is not a license for Satanism.

GOOD NEWS VS FAKE NEWS: A CHRISTIAN SOLDIER WITHDRAWS AS SECRETARY OF THE ARMY -- ANY STORY HERE? The withdrawal of Tennessee senator Mark Green to be considered for the Secretary of the Army after the nonchalant approval by the Senate of homosexual Eric Fanning by President Obama shows Christians are losing the battle about the properly ordered loves of a nation under God. The fear of top military officials to back Mr. Green and the negative comments of Sen. John McCain (currying favor with the media and sexual Left) did not bode well for the ex-soldier. The sexual confusion in our military after three baby-boomer administrations have tried to destroy the masculine nature of our fighting force will not be fixed from within. There is no more politically correct social environment than official military institutions where any sign of "sexism, homophobia or a commitment to the gender binary" is considered evidence of an inability to lead the "new sexually diverse" military.  "We are all soldiers. We are all professionals. We have a technological job to do. No men here. No women here. It is a job. It is a profession which has nothing to do with the traditional gender role of male social protection." This is exactly the Catch-22 logic that filled Catholic seminaries in the 1970's and 80's as homosexuals and feminists tried to break down that ancient all-male gender code. Masculine seminarians who resisted were deemed unfit to lead the new non-patriarchal non-fraternal church that the gay priests and feminist nuns promised was right around the corner. The protector males were told to leave (see Goodbye, Good Men). We all know what came next.

Defending public male protective roles is a major part of the movement to make America great again by bringing her back to common sense and biblical morality. This is a battle not for President Trump or his military leaders right now. First, the Christians must take back the moral high ground and wage this battle as Christians.

The Good News is that God is sovereign and our nation's covenant under God is built on a public brotherhood of men and monogamous marriage covenants between man and woman. The fake news is that freedom of speech and religion means we ban the Our Father in public settings and we allow profanity, obscenity, and blasphemy to drown our public life. The Good News is that all men are brothers in Christ and a Christian nation extends that brotherhood to men of every color, religion, and social class inside our territorial boundaries to form the sacred covenant of the nation. The fake news is that all-male civic groups should be banned and male couples should be honored. The Good News is that motherhood has been sanctified by Jesus being born of a virgin-mother. The fake news is that the domestic violence of abortion is maternal health care that should be subsidized. Good News vs fake news from the Christian front.

The tip of the spear in this struggle is not opposition to the twin abominations of sodomy and abortion, but a positive reassertion of Christian brotherhood and manly civic friendship as the proper love between fathers, sons, and brothers whose covenant forms the American nation. We cannot allow the US military to undergo the sexual brainwashing that corrupted so many Catholic seminaries in the 1970's and 1980's.

II. ISLAM AND THE MIDDLE EAST

ON JORDAN: An excellent summary of the growing split between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Hashemite Kingdom.

TRUMP MEETING THE SAUDIS: An excellent short historical review of American-Saudi relations by Bruce Riedel, a very well-informed commentator who never fails to show Americans another way to ally with the Saudis. He is always worth reading. But...

THE SAUDI PLAN TO TAKE A PORT IN YEMEN TO CUT OFF FOOD: Starving Shiites is one way to strike at the Iranians. Should the US really be part of this?

ON ISRAELI POLICY IN MIDEAST: This is an article at American Conservative by an ex-CIA man, Philip Giraldi. It is about changing alliances and goals in Syria with special emphasis on the goals of Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. The article is particularly good at outlining two important lines of thinking in Israeli strategy -- the Yinon Plan of 1982 and the American neoconservative 1996 paper called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." Between these two documents was a fundamental realization among Israeli national security thinkers that the existential threat to Israel was not the Palestinian fight, but strong regional states who might strike them with nuclear weapons or population-killing technology. For Israel the states of  Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran were all much more serious threats than Palestinians. They are much more manageable when fighting in balkanized civil wars. Giraldi, like most men of his generation in the military and CIA, does not take the virulent Salafist character of the Saudis enough into account. But the nature of Israeli policy and the Saudi commitment to an anti-Assad campaign is well outlined.

III. THE NATIONS

ON FRANCE: The rural periphery, the metropolitan Parisians, the nations, and Brussels. A nation faces the perils of globalism where Christopher Caldwell reviews a French geographer's explanation of the French elections. Terrific work at the City Journal. The French election was 66% for Macron and 33% for Le Pen showing there is a good base for a better representative of the French nation. In many ways Ms. Le Pen is much more like Hillary Clinton of an old party than the Donald Trump of a new national movement. Three reasons why she was not really the Donald Trump of France. Donald Trump said he would protect Christians here and abroad. Le Pen is militantly atheist. She is as much against the public cross as the veil of Muslims (so much for Christianity which is the soul of both France and America). Donald Trump loves his father. Ms. Le Pen betrayed her dad (so much for patriarchy and filial piety). Mr. Trump fought his way to the top. Ms. Le Pen inherited a party from her father and got hold of it by siding with opportunists of her own generation willing to sacrifice the old man without ceremony (so much for true leadership). A non-inspiring female driven by personal ambition made her way up the party hierarchy by way of familial ties -- whose profile is that?

CHINA, AFRICA, AND FISHING: There is surely another side to this story but this reminder about the basic world food economy and the role of fisheries in supplying protein is important. Man doth not live on bread or rice alone.

PRESIDENT FORD ASKED DEMOCRATS TO HELP REFUGEES FLEEING FROM COMMUNISTS IN VIETNAM -- IT WAS 1975: He wrote in his memoirs about the problem of the Vietnamese refugees: "More than 120,000 of them had managed to escape, but they had nowhere to go. Thailand didn't want them. Neither did Malaysia, Indonesia nor the Philippines. The United States, I felt, had a special obligation to them, and on April 30 I asked Congress to approve a bill that would provide $507 million for their transportation and care. The House rejected my request on May 1st. Unbelievable!"
What twisted hatred could take such a position? The refugees were not potential terrorists but soldier-allies and their families who needed safe harbor. Those who shut the door were not jingoist hard-hearted conservatives, but self-righteous liberal Democrats who washed their hands clean of the Vietnam War by leaving the boat people in the muddy bloody waters of the Mekong Delta.

SOLZHENITSYN ON NATIONS: "Literature transmits condensed and irrefutable experiences from generation to generation. Language and literature preserve and protect a nation's soul. Nations are the wealth of humanity: its generalized personalities. The least of them has its own special colors and harbors within itself a special aspect of God's design... Nations are like individuals -- they can sin and they must repent."

JOE KLEIN ON PAT BUCHANAN AT NY TIMES - A PENETRATING REVIEW: Nixon's Wars.

IV. CULTURE OF LIFE, CULTURE OF PROTECTION

BARRY, WE BARELY KNEW YE: From a new biography, Obama told his former girlfriend that he considered and then decided against going gay. He reasoned that "a same-sex relationship would be less challenging and demanding than developing one with the opposite sex." That's one way to think about it. As we delve further into the mind of Barack Obama and as his life post-presidency reveals itself, we will see he is best understood as the son of a white feminist anthropologist. It turns out a white feminist anthropologist of his own generation was a major love influence as well. Both his mother and former girlfriend can be proud. He carried out their project better than anyone could have dreamed. He built the public sisterhood everywhere he could from the chief of White House ushers to the head of a US military regional command center. It is another reason Hillary had trouble  motivating the sexual left -- there really was no more sexual confusion to spread. The son of Stanley Ann Dunham got there first.

JOHN HORVAT ON THE NEED FOR CAPTAINS -- AQUINAS ON AUTHORITY: "This is largely because people do not have a proper notion of what captains are. They think authority consists only in ordering people to do things. They do not realize it also involves unifying, reassuring, and harmonizing. Saint Thomas Aquinas defines authority as an animating and ordering intelligence, the vis regitiva that overcomes the resistance of the individual tendencies in men, organically directing and coordinating many wills toward the common good. Thus, captains respect order and do not violate the rules, however difficult or absurd such rules might appear. Captains do not pander to those under them to please them. They do not make grand promises yet fail to mention the sacrifices needed to get the job done. Captains recognize that people need direction, and act accordingly."

WOMEN IN VEILS -- A CHRISTIAN TRADITION: It is hard to imagine a movement that would do more to restore a holy order to public life than for women to wear hats and veils in America. Especially veils in Church.

HOW BLOGGERS RUINED 'ESPN' CULTURE OF MALE RISK. SCARED EXECUTIVES SUBMIT TO THE POLITICALLY CORRECT: Ever hear of Deadspin?