The Rebel

There is a wall of which the stones
Are lies and bribes and dead men’s bones.
And wrongfully this evil wall
Denies what all men made for all,
And shamelessly this wall surrounds
Our homesteads and our native grounds.

But I will gather and I will ride,
And I will summon a countryside,
And many a man shall hear my halloa
Who never had thought the horn to follow;
And many a man shall ride with me
Who never had thought on earth to see
High Justice in her armoury.

When we find them where they stand,
A mile of men on either hand,
I mean to charge from right away
And force the flanks of their array,
And press them inward from the plains,
And drive them clamouring down the lanes,
And gallop and harry and have them down,
And carry the gates and hold the town.
Then shall I rest me from my ride
With my great anger satisfied.

Only, before I eat and drink,
When I have killed them all, I think
That I will batter their carven names,
And slit the pictures in their frames,
And burn for scent their cedar door,
And melt the gold their women wore,
And hack their horses at the knees,
And hew to death their timber trees,
And plough their gardens deep and through—
And all these things I mean to do
For fear perhaps my little son
Should break his hands, as I have done.

- Hilaire Belloc

 

Edwardian Pride

I have often wondered why the SNP should trouble themselves to promote such a thing as ‘Gay Marriage’ in Scotland. I find it hard to believe that Alex Salmond is doing it for idealistic reasons. Scotland’s image generally is of a particularly virile country. If the novelty were resisted for a decade or so I think a certain amount of patriotic feeling would soon attach itself to the fact, securing the position of marriage north of the border for the long term. I fear Salmond may have simply calculated that if he were to allow Cameron to take this step but not do so himself, then ‘Gay Marriage’ would become an issue in the referendum and the Homosexual lobby would be more effective in opposing Scottish Independence because it was lacking, than the Natural Law vote would be in supporting it for the same reason. Perhaps this is a sad reflection on the strength of reason and revelation in Scotland. (Although the cases are not alike. Remaining in the Union would not affect the chances of ‘Gay Marriage’ either way, while leaving before it was legalised would probably reduce them).

It is a shame that everyone seems to forget that the ‘proud Edward’ in Flower of Scotland, whose armies were sent homeward to think again, was Edward II not Edward I. I have mused from time to time that this blog ought to grant an ‘Edwardian Pride’ award to that figure who has done most that year to import the ‘Gay agenda’ into Scotland and perhaps a ‘Send Them Homewards’ award for whoever has done most to resist. Until it was revealed that he had rather let the side down, the first ‘Send Them Homewards’ award would probably have had to go to the former Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh. That leaves Bishop Joseph Divine and Bishop Hugh Gilbert. While I feel my Lord of Aberdeen’s comments were more effective the award might fit his brother of Motherwell’s temperament rather better. Nominations remain open. I think it would be uncharitable to place the former archbishop in the running for the Edwardian Pride trophy. He did work vigorously to uphold the Church’s teaching after he took the oath prepared for him by the then Cardinal Ratzinger in 2003. That being the case there is no real challenger, Salmond himself ought undoubtedly to be the first recipient of the ‘Edwardian Pride’ trophy.

 

Lila Rose

????

I saw Miss Rose challenged in an interview once about the deception involved in her undercover work against the Culture of Death. She said that the FBI ought to be doing what she was doing,  protecting the unborn citizens of the USA, but, until they did so, she was compelled to do their work for them. I cannot see how what she does is legitimate but I see the intelligence of her answer which is essentially ‘go away and decide if you want to campaign against state counter-espionage and undercover law enforcement and when you have decided you will do that come back and challenge me. Until then step aside.’  I can’t see how to justify Special Branch and MI5 but I am not sure I am confident enough to espouse their abolition. Too few Catholics have Miss Rose’s zeal and determination. If we are to conquer again in the temporal order (before the end comes) we need laity who combine the characteristics of Lenin, Mohammed and St Francis. Lay women modelling themselves on St Joan and St Therese are a good start.

 

Clarity

“It’s a no-brainer that (homosexual activists) should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. …(F)ighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there — because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie.”

 

Emotivism

?????

The fellow defending marriage here is of course wrong. Everyone should not be able to live and love as they please. Destructive vices such as homosexuality should not enjoy the favour of the law and homosexual acts ought in principle to be punished by the criminal law. Nevertheless, his arguments are logical and sound as far as they go. They are reasonably and calmly expounded. The ‘chairman’ is absurdly partial and tendentious. His counter- arguments and those of his guest consist exclusively of insults, claims that more and more people are coming to agree with him, and emotive rhetoric. I suppose they make only two real points (and the second only implicitly), that marriage is not about procreation and that the withholding of the word marriage implies social disapproval of the use of the generative organs in an inherently sterile way. The second point is true. Because of his position that all should be able to ‘live and love as they please’ Mr Anderson is unable to answer the second point. His answer to the first is interesting as it is essentially to say that marriage is a remedy for concupiscence. So long as the married couple unable to beget offspring are sexually satisfied by each other they will not be begetting illegitimate offspring elsewhere and thus depriving those children of the right to their biological parents. This is quite true but very unfashionable. Once again it shows that without the full resources of the Church’s tradition it is not possible to present a watertight case. At one point Mr Morgan says something along the lines of ”I find your views increasingly offensive in this day and age”. Here is the voice of the future. A very short time indeed will elapse between the legalization of homosexual ‘marriage’ and the criminalization of opposition to it. This is logical. If it were reasonable to legalize ‘gay marriage’ opposition to it would be something akin to incitement to racial hatred.

 

Another disappointing statement from Cardinal Schönborn

At a speech at the National Gallery in London Cardinal Schönborn is reported to have endorsed same-sex civil partnerships. The story comes from the Tablet who had someone at the event. Others who were there apparently think his words were not precisely as the Tablet reports them. Unfortunately, if they were they would be consistent with other recent statements and actions of the Viennese Archbishop. Whatever the truth of the matter in this case the teaching of the Church is clear as the CDF stated in 2003,

“Laws in favour of homosexual unions are contrary to right reason because they confer legal guarantees, analogous to those granted to marriage, to unions between persons of the same sex. Given the values at stake in this question, the State could not grant legal standing to such unions without failing in its duty to promote and defend marriage as an institution essential to the common good.”

One of the many great merits of this document is that it addresses the question correctly from a position of principle. Unless we insist first on the grave depravity and destructive social consequences of homosexual activity the Church’s teaching cannot be defended. It would be quite correct to pursue the line being taken by the world in this regard. Religious liberty does not work as a defence. If a realised inclination to sodomy was really analogous to being black or female then the state would be right to overrule a particular group’s desire to unfairly stigmatise and exclude ‘homosexuals’. We cannot retreat from the substantive point that sodomy is gravely immoral and injurious to society. Furthermore, any retreat from this position even an unwillingness to express oneself forcefully (or at all) on the matter implies a repudiation of the Church’s tradition and a Modernist conception of the Magisterium. As the CDF document also points out,

“Sacred Scripture condemns homosexual acts ‘as a serious depravity… (cf. Rom 1:24-27; 1 Cor6:10; 1 Tim 1:10). This judgment of Scripture does not of course permit us to conclude that all those who suffer from this anomaly are personally responsible for it, but it does attest to the fact that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered’ This same moral judgment is found in many Christian writers of the first centuries and is unanimously accepted by Catholic Tradition.”

To accept Same-Sex Civil Partnerships is thus to repudiate the claim that the Church has always guaranteed to the faithful the “objective possibility of professing the true faith without error” (CCC890). Accordingly it is logically a rejection of the possibility of public revelation and saving faith.

 

a battery farm for the cretins of the future…

On the one hand we have this gender neutral nightmare on the other hand this terrifying caricature of femininity. I seem to remember some feminists are hostile to ‘trans’ personages as the very concept implies objective gender roles. I suppose these awful ‘Lego Friends’ represent extreme Platonic gender realism or something. On the one hand we have the gender nominalists where everything is a social construct and then on the other we have separated subsisting genders in which the transitory shadow-beings of earth fleetingly participate. Time for gender Thomism.

 

Don Reto Nay

Don Reto Nay is a priest of the Swiss Diocese of Chur. I heard of his reputation for preaching the faith with wit and wisdom but without fear or favour long before I met him. He is a scholar and a polyglot of considerable stature but it is as a faithful priest that he is renowned. I first heard of him as the chaplain to the Legion of Mary in Rome from a friend who had assisted in their mission of evangelisation at that time and who was full of inspiring stories about the zeal that had overtaken its members and the moving conversions of many ordinary people to whom they had preached the gospel in the Piazza Navona and elsewhere in Rome. Later (not having remembered the name of this priest) I unknowingly got to know him in person and witness his inspiring work with students and the pro-life movement in Austria. As is inevitably the case when someone preaches the gospel without compromise he has aroused powerful opposition on various occasions. For the last years he has worked as a Parish Priest in Switzerland and pursued his missionary work through the medium of Gloria.tv. on which he regularly posts powerful sermons (which have been re-posted here on a number of occasions).

All the powers of Hell have once more raised themselves up against Fr Nay, this time because of gloria.tv news’ attacks on the German Bishops for their endorsement of the morning-after pill. It is alleged that these bishops have done no wrong because they only endorse the pill in case of rape when it is not abortifacient. There is no non-abortifacient morning after pill and the necessary professional ultra-sounds and blood tests to ensure it would not harm an already conceived child are most unlikely to occur and may not be entirely reliable. None of these precisions (which anyway are probably fatal to their position) have been made by the German Bishops.

Gloria.tv news has been robust in its criticism superimposing swastikas on images of the prelates. As St Thomas says (IIaIIae, 33, 4 ad 2) “It must be observed, however, that if the faith were endangered, a subject ought to rebuke his prelate even publicly” and the staff of Gloria.tv are not subjects of the German bishops anyway. The parish council (a body with inappropriately sweeping powers in Switzerland) of Don Reto’s parish have de-selected him as their Parish Priest and the diocesan Bishop has confirmed this. I would ask the readers of this blog (as Sancrucensis has) to pray for this loyal and worthy priest that, while he endures the (inevitable) hatred of the world, he may not be impeded from pursuing his charism of evangelisation.

 

Two assaults on the family

The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.

- Bunreacht na hÉireann : Article 41.1.1

One can almost hear the screams of outrage and pain from the seven heads of Leviathan at these words. As John Paul II said “In the light of the New Testament it is possible to discern how the primordial model of the family is to be sought in God himself, in the Trinitarian mystery of his life. The divine ‘We’ is the eternal pattern of the human ‘we’, especially of that ‘we’ formed by the man and the woman created in the divine image and likeness.” The most explicit Trinitarian theophany in the Old Testament is the appearance of the three angels to Abraham at the Oak of Mamre. Immediately following this episode two of the three angels go forth while one remains with Abraham foreshadowing the missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit. And what do the two angels do? They bring a remnant out of Sodom and then God destroys it utterly.

The proposed 31st amendment to the Irish Constitution is an attempt to sabotage even further the original text by weakening the doctrine that the family is antecedent and superior to human positive law and to facilitate gay adoption. Though it was passed it is still in Limbo because of a legal challenge seeking to overthrow the result on the grounds that the Irish government used public money to propagandise in favour of a ‘yes’ vote. Please pray for the success of this challenge. The Bunreacht na hÉireann is one of the last citadels of authentic jurisprudence on the family.

Meanwhile on the other side of the atlantic the Obama administration is seeking to prevent families whose inalienable right to educate their children has been violated in their home countries from obtaining asylum in the U.S.A. The purpose of this is to establish that there is no right to home school for U.S. citizens so that the state may invade the jurisdiction of the family in the U.S.A. as well at some later date. Please pray for the victory of home schooling families and asylum seekers in the U.S. lest a major bulwark of residual rights and the Common Law state be swept away.

 

Three-person IVF moves closer in UK

The UK has moved closer to becoming the first country to allow the creation of
babies from three people. BBC News