By Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch
I. POPE FRANCIS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
JESUS CHRIST IS RISEN TODAY - THE POPE'S MESSAGE: His message in the homily is about the "surprise" of the good news. Outside of the liturgy, he delivered the yearly papal message to the nations in Urbi et Orbi. (To the City and to the World).
POPE JOHN XXIII ON DIVINE PROVIDENCE; HEGEL ON NEW FORMS OF THE WORLD SPIRIT; THE UNIVERSAL CHURCH AND THE TERRITORIAL NATIONS AS THOSE FORMS: "In the present order of things, Divine Providence is leading us to a new order of human relations which... are directed toward the fulfillment of God's superior and inscrutable designs. And everything, even human differences, leads to the greater good of the Church."
Pope John XXIII opening Vatican II (1962).
“We stand at the gates of an important epoch, a time of ferment, when spirit moves forward in a leap, transcends its previous shape and takes on a new one.”
Georg Wilhelm Frederick Hegel (1770-1831)
The Church is a patriarchal fraternity. So are the nations from Russia to China to Japan. The fraternal form of national brotherhoods and a universal Church built on a male priesthood is the sign of the Cross in which Christ conquers in obedience to His Father. Out of the bloody racial and scientific empire ideologies of the 20th century the Church and the nations emerged as the enduring communal forms of prayer, protection, and production.
IN EUROPE, IS CHRISTIANITY AWAKENING? A different take.
CATHOLIC CAMPUS GROUP FOCUS: An article on their funders is a little breathless about "conservative big money" but informative.
NEW YORK TIMES CATHOLIC "CONSERVATIVE" ROSS DOUTHAT ON POPE FRANCIS: Michael Sean Winters for the nays.
II. CULTURE OF LIFE, A CULTURE OF PROTECTION
CATHOLIC SOLDIER PATRIOT IN FRANCE: These are the men who will reunite the Europe of Christian nations.
FEMINISM - FROM MAIDEN TO MATRON TO CRONE: A beautiful descriptive essay from a woman who left the world of Wicca-Unitarianism to enter the deeper reality of Christianity.
NORMAN BORLAUG: He saved more lives than any man of the 20th century. Do you know his story?
BISHOP-CARDINAL BLASE CUPICH ACTS WITH UNPRECEDENTED AUTHORITY AGAINST HOMOSEXUAL CHICAGO PRIESTS: Pro-immigrant Hispanic priest with ties to Democrats in high places is removed. Traditionalist hero Fr. Phillips removed for consensual adult male sexual relations. Kick the Bums Out: An AOA response.
FR Z AND HIS BIZARRE DEFENSE OF THE TRADITIONALIST PRIEST REMOVED FROM MINISTRY BY CARDINAL CUPICH IN CHICAGO: "However, Fr. Phillips has been removed as pastor of the parish and Superior of the Canons. He also had to leave the parish. An interim superior has been chosen from among the group itself. Given that Phillips seems not to have broken any civil laws the move against him seems pretty sudden and draconian, but I guess that’s what they do around there." [The Cardinal is accusing Fr. Phillips of an improper sexual relationship with an adult male. The priest denies it and Fr Z does not believe the charges.]
Fr Z apparently thinks it is "draconian" to prevent a priest from desecrating the Eucharist as he participates in abominations. The excuse apparently to the online blogger priest is that the abomination against nature and church law "hasn't broken civil laws." What makes this so understandably difficult for many faithful Catholics is that many have worshiped at this church in a reverent and beautiful manner. The purpose of Fr. Phillips' order and parish was TO RESTORE THE SACRED. What is very hard to understand is the possibility that the best way to restore the sacred may be to remove the priest who did so much good in bringing one kind of reverence back to the Mass.
TO PUNISH THE GUILTY IS TO NAME THEM AND SHAME THEM: The real culprits in the sin of abortion are not Democrats or politicians who do not vote according to pro-life requirements. The agents of evil are the mothers who abort their children and doctors who desacralize their profession by playing the role of executioner. Let us get focused and get real.
The real culprit in the desacralization of the Eucharist is not the Democratic party politician who goes to Communion or the one in hundred divorced and remarried ladies who sneak into Mass so her kids can get religion. It is the active homosexual and careerist priests who have polluted the sacral priesthood for their own ends. They have desacralized the Eucharist from the priest side of the altar. Maybe we should cast out some of those clerical log beams first and work on the parishioner splinters later. Let us get focused and get real.
The real culprits in terms of foreign governments causing chaos in American political life are agents like Christopher Steele of British intelligence. Even if the guy is white and speaks English, he is working to promote the interests and policies of his nation not ours. The globalist English speaking "Five Eyes" intelligence community (Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, US) are enemies of a US Russian alliance. They are not in any way operatives of Hillary Clinton--they are quite capable of acting on their own initiative and saw her as non threatening and malleable to their world view.
The other faction of foreign governments trying to bend US policy toward their interests are the Likkud party of Israel and the Saudi royal family of Saudi Arabia. They are both against a US policy that would focus on eradicating the Wahhabi Sunni jihadists who planned and executed the 9/11 attack. They (for different reasons) want the US to focus on the nation of Iran and the Shiites of Lebanon (Hezbollah) as the principal sources of terror in the Mideast. These are the foreigners who further their well thought out national policies by manipulating the status hungry careerists who pursue their own shallow aspirations amidst the US foreign policy and think tank swamps. These different foreign governments want to prevent a US alliance with Russia which would redraw the Christian world map. They want us to go to war with Iran. These foreign goals are not our own. Let us get focused and get real.
The real culprits in dividing the American people from each other are those who work to prevent a multi-racial, cross-class brotherhood emerge as a fruit of our Christian heritage and national patriotism. Patriarchy (the rule of God the Father) and fraternity (the territorial brotherhood of American men) are forms of love and union. The sexual revolution, the racist excess of black power movements, and the new careers in the diversity industry are the real enemies of love and community. Let us get focused and get real.
THE DIURNAL CYCLE IS FUNDAMENTAL: The sleep of the beloved.
C.S. LEWIS NOT A TAME LION: Jerry Salyer takes on the cosmopolitan right and pro-life feminists in his invigorating defense of C.S. Lewis' "right wing provincial views" on the sexes and patriotism.
ROBERT NISBET - THE QUEST FOR COMMUNITY: An early critic of the tendency of modern liberal democracy to break the bonds of community. Here is an excellent review of his seminal work. Some selected quotes from the review:
..the history of the Western world since at least the Renaissance has been dominated by an unceasing battle between traditionalism and modernism; the former is most often associated with such values as “community, moral authority, hierarchy, and the sacred” and the latter with “individualism, equality, moral release, and rationalist techniques of organization and power”;Robert Nisbet would appreciate the more recent attacks on expressive individualism as the dominant ideology of the Modern West. (See AOA review of Deneen on Liberalism) It is not clear how he would treat the rise of nationalism as a communitarian response to the globalism/individualism nexus. We would argue that just as a huge, billion-member Catholic Church can be lived out in a face-to-face parish, so the territorial American nation state is expressed by asserting that original military bond of warriors under a leader as the essential political bond. The local policing function of the city or town as well as the protective institutions of the states are the local forms where the national protective pact is lived out. That bond runs wide and deep precisely because it has been lived out is so many State and local forms.
...he sees the desiccation of community, the decline of authority, the devaluation of hierarchy, and the avoidance of the sacred by the overemphasis, and the often distorted emphasis, on the victorious values of modernism “By community,” Nisbet writes, “I mean something that goes far beyond mere local community. The word . . . encompasses all forms of relationship which are characterized by a high degree of personal intimacy, emotional depth, moral commitment, social cohesion, and continuity in time.” Community involves the whole man. It endures. It “achieves its fulfillment in a submergence of individual will that is not possible in unions of mere convenience or rational assent.” It is at the opposite pole from the ad hoc committee.
Tonnies(a sociologist) typology of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft there is the characterization of Gemeinschaft as the closely knit, organic, custom-oriented form of communal living that “roughly corresponds” to traditional society, and the characterization of Gesellschaft as “a special type of human relationship: one characterized by a high degree of individualism, impersonality, contractualism, and proceeding from volition or sheer interest rather than from the complex of affective states, habits, and traditions that underlies Gemeinschaft” that approximates modern society. Tonnies wonders over the fact that so few see the connection between the advance of democracy and progress, led by natural law and the universalization of rights, and the decay of the family and of other traditional associations of life.
Nisbet describes the strong concern of still another major figure in sociology with the influence and the possibilities of community. In Emille Durkheim, the community is prior to the individual in that it is the communal that shapes the individual’s reason. Thus the community inevitably has a powerful influence, and truly an unbreakable hold, on the individual. This influence is most convincingly demonstrated by Durkheim in his famous study of suicide. Periods of social decay and atomization bring on increased suicides, according to Durkheim. The chief forms of suicide encouraged by communal disintegration Durkheim calls “egoistic suicide” and “anomic suicide.” The first form is associated with the decline of communal life to the point that it no longer gives the individual ego sufficient support. Closely related to egoistic suicide in its connection with social disintegration is “anomic suicide” which is “caused by the sudden dislocation of normative systems, the breakdown of values by which one may have lived for a lifetime, or the conflict between ends desired and abilities to achieve them.”
The Renaissance faith in man, the Protestant spirit in religion, the Rationalist trust in reason, unmitigated by the influences of authority, community, and tradition, had largely destroyed the sense of security and belonging the individual once had had. And, as Nisbet recalls, “in almost all of Dostoevsky’s novels we learn that the greatest of all vices is to claim spiritual and moral autonomy and to cast off the ties that bind man to his fellows.”
The emergence of the territorial nation state has replaced other deeper forms of community. However ...the origins of the State in the early relationships of warrior-chiefs and their followers in France, England. This has developed from a primarily military arrangement to its current gigantic condition through its progressively taking over more and more functions once carried out on the local level by individuals and small agencies. “The conflict,” he writes, “between central political government and the authorities of guild, village, community, class, and religious body has been, of all the conflicts in history, the most fateful.”
III. THE NATIONS R&G ROUND UP
GLOSSY MAGAZINE ON THE SAVIOR KING HITS US NEWSSTANDS: Just in time for MbS visit. Pumping up the 32-year old Saudi Prince in a hurry.
ITALY, THEIR ELECTION AND CATHOLIC IDENTITY: Good analysis from First Things.
WHO IS HUMA ABEDIN? Maybe she is a more important lady than Stormy Daniels. Did the Saudis have a special relationship with the Clintons? The Muslim World League and Abedin family business are close. No problem, the Saudis are our allies.
LESSON FROM IRAQ: Matt Purple of American Conservative - a short useful reflection.
COMMUNISM: ..is a Germanic western idea that overwhelmed Russia and China in the name of scientific modernity promising to replace their "ancient and failed traditions" of Orthodox Christianity and Confucianism. When a Russian official with the Putin government was asked if they would stop trying to influence foreign elections, he replied, "Will the West promise not to send anymore German philosophers to influence our form of government?"
WORLD WAR TWO: ..was a war in which "Germany was largely defeated by Russia and Japan by China". Both lost millions of citizens and fought against their invaders while organizing their armies and government under the new ideology of scientific materialism. After the war the United States rebuilt Germany and Japan. We went to war against the new Communist States. Both Russia and China have repudiated the materialist ideology of Marxism. The Chinese have retained the Communist Party as its administrative and governing apparatus. The United States is organizing alliances against both nations as dominant regional powers. We do this in the name of a real politique trying to prevent regional hegemony. There is a Christian tradition in American foreign policy seeking a global order based on the common Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Men. We once waved such a banner when we turned against our former allies and fought them as atheist Communists.
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