The Holy Innocents

A fine and very informative post from Redneck Reflections on the persecution of Christians by Muslims.

Boże Narodzenie Po Polsku - Polish Christmas

On television, live, a crowd of thousands in Kraków is at an open-air concert of carols.

The rock group which is playing is composed entirely of Franciscan Friars, in their habits.

Go Down Fighting!

Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre,
Mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað.

From the old English poem The Battle of Maldon, uttered when the English realise that the Danes will win. Translates as:

Courage must be firmer, heart the keener,
Mind the greater, as our strength grows less.

A good motto, I think, for oppression, feelings of helplessness, old age, and sickness.

Go down fighting.

Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam.....

Tennyson's description of the wind in Morte d'Arthur:

And in the moon athwart the place of tombs,
Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men,
Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang
Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down
By zigzag paths, and juts of pointed rock,
Came on the shining levels of the lake.

would also describe some of the invective from the anti Catholic, pro-abortion, or pro-homosexualist coteries, slavering with hate like rabid chihuahas.

Just a thought.

Seems they're at it again, them doggone "Catholic Voices"!

Yes, those lovable guys and gals at "Catholic Voices" seem to be at it again, if it's true as SPUC reports.

Shrill they ain't!

The Dignity of Labour

A Polish Coal-Miner in Ceremonial Uniform

Those are real ostrich feathers.

Miners wear their uniforms for parades, special occasions, like this fair in Frombork, and when they go to Church in an official group.

Chimney-sweeps wear a top hat and a black suit, and police and firemen, too, have splendid ceremonial uniforms.

I'm all for the dignity of labour.

I'm thinking of designing a uniform for international bankers - something shapeless and made of sackcloth, printed with vomit and blood stains.

Intending Organ-Donors Beware!

LifeNews carries a horrifying report on a young man who awoke from a coma just as his organs were about to be "harvested" (horrible expression - ugh!).

There's a popular rear-window car-sticker in Poland (and perhaps in the UK too) which reads:

Go on! Overtake! The transplant unit is waiting for your kidneys.

I have not bequeathed my organs, mainly for fear of being killed so as to prolong the life of someone whose existence on Earth I deplore. No names, but you can probably guess some of the people I have in mind.

Wishing You a very Happy Christmas, with three of my favourite Carols

First, the Czech carol "We will rock You", which my choir at the Liceum sang beautifully this year, and nearly reduced me to tears. Here it is sung, too artfully in my view, by the choir of New College, Oxford. It needs the simple touch. Wither's Rocking Hymn , as set by Vaughan Williams, and lastly, a Polish carol sung by a child, with male chorus, Oj Maluśki. It is concerned with clothing the little Jesus, and worrying that he is not with His Daddy in Heaven. Three students sang it to me last year, and by the end, there wasn't a dry eye between us.

Oj Maluśki is in Old Polish, and Old Highland (Górale) Polish at that, and Google Translate got nowhere with it. I am working on it.

Dinner in Hell

The lords of Pandemonium, when at dinner
Have choice of every kind of deadly sinner.
Who knows what most delights their debased palate,
The bloody tyrant, or perverted prelate?

Said Satan seated at the nightly feast,
"I'll have the Bishop, Beelzy, you the Priest."
Beelzebub replied with face downcast,
"You get the heretic, I the pederast."

From Belial, "Think how Bodily Ressurection
"Will so enhance our great House of Correction.
The shrieking soul, with cringing flesh complete,
Basted, crisped, quivering on a piping plate."

Polish Walruses

On a totally different tack, I went swimming with the local Walrus club in the Baltic at Stegnie yesterday morning, and still got to Mass. If you really want to know, I'm the crouching character in the left foreground with the black woolly cap.

Air temperature 4 c., sea temperature 3 c., so only 15 minutes in the water.



A nasty draught around the shirt-tails

Perhaps you know the feeling. At a meeting, you are defending what you understand to be an official line, when someone demonstrates that the official line is something quite different and you have got it all wrong.

It's bad enough when the issue at stake is merely business or politics, but disastrous when we are talking about Catholic teaching.

How can parents bring up chidren in a Catholic ethos when Catholic schools 'nuance', disparage, sidestep, or subvert Catholic morality as it relates to sex and marriage; when the Hierarchy apparently accepts (or certainly does not vigorously attack and demolish) wicked government-sponsored sex-education  training programmes which are being used in Catholic schools?

I would like to know what Austen Ivereigh's apparent innuendo on Twitter is all about. Can anyone, please, help?

The following exchange is verbatim from Twitter,

A. Ivereigh, a "Catholic Voice", tweeted today "if only those little old ladies duped into believing SPUC is Catholic knew what their money is being spent on ...."

When I tweeted back, asking for an explanation,   "@austeni @blondpidge @PeterDCXW What does SPUC spend their money on?"
 Blondpidge replied,  "very good question. As they are a lobby group & not a charity we'll never know."

I replied, "If we'll never know, why the innuendo about how old ladies' money spent? Seeking clarification as someone who workes (my typo. Should be worked) with SPUC."


Blondpidge: "Well how does pursuing campaign against archbishops & catholic voices further pro-life cause? Please tell me?"

I replied, "If ++s in question were soft on abortion, or immoral sex-ed, campaign would help."

I would like to know what Austen Ivereigh's apparent innuendo is all about. Can anyone, please, help?

Fame at Last! My Verse Filmed! (Well, almost.)

My verses on St Nicholas the plagologist have prompted The Maysdays Blog to make a short film which you can watch here.

The film is much more fun than the verse.

Saint Nicholas was my kind of Saint,

Shamelessly reblogged, because I still like it.



Saint Nicholas was my kind of Saint,
If sometimes short of temper.
Though pacifism was not his bent;
He was fidelis semper.

When Arius denied his Lord's
Divinity, Nick felt sore;
Decided acts speak more than words,
Felled Arius to the floor.

His kind of knock-down plagologue*
Is now not to our taste.
We value courteous dialogue
Above such wordless haste.


And yet there is a time, one feels
To strike and not to speak.
When Reason with Unreason deals,
It's reason which is weak.

For who can mould a brain of mud
With philosophic lore?
Better to thump the stupid crud.
His place is on the floor.




Note: Plagologue = arguing or reasoning with blows. This word does not appear in any dictionary. It is my own coinage, being derived from Latin 'plagus' = a blow, 'plagosus' = full of blows, violent, cognate with Greek 'plegein = to beat, and logos = reason

Please read before you dismiss this - I thought I was pro-life, but perhaps I'm not.

As I have noted before, I hate labels. They are inaccurate and their use is often mere laziness. Call someone a Catholic, a fascist, a liberal, or a socialist, and you are saying a lot or very little, and only if others are familiar with you and your opinions will they know what you mean.

In spite of my abhorrence, I have been using 'pro-life' and 'pro-choice' with the glib abandon of a woolly-minded idiot, until someone brought me up short with the perfectly understandable (although I disagree with it) statement that:

"If the Church is to be PRO-LIFE, it must be so for all, not just the unborn, but also those who may deserve to forfeit their lives."

I am not opposed to killing in self-defence, or in the defence of the weak, or harmless, or innocent. If it were not for the horrible certainty of miscarriages of justice, I would support the death penalty for murder, rape, and for arson and drunk driving if they resulted in death.

But I am totally opposed to abortion and euthanasia under any circumstances.

So how should I describe myself and those like me? Not, I think, as pro-life. Perhaps -

Anti-abortion?
Anti-euthanasia?
Pro-innocent life?

Mislabel yourself, and you may find you are in the wrong camp.

Muddlecombe Fair

Tom Pearce, Tom Pearce, lend me your gray mare
Us likes nuancing, not black and white, where we'm from;
For us wants to go to Muddlecombe Fair
With Tina Beattie, Ma Pepsi,
Jon Cruddas, Cliff Longley,
Cherie Blair, Greg Pope,
Old Uncle Vince Wobbly and all,
Old Uncle Vince Wobbly and all.

It's Always the Details That Worry Me

Perhaps I ask too many questions. St Anselm said that theology is faith seeking understanding and, while I am no theologian, I do want to understand.

So, thinking about Heaven, as I do a lot as I get older, I wonder about the perfect happiness which reigns there, and have questions.

If the people whom we (presumption of going to Heaven) loved and left behind on earth are going through appalling suffering, or are destined by their behaviour for Hell, do we

1. not care, because heaven is a great party where nothing interrupts the general bliss, and earth, the material world, Hell, and Purgatory will have been brought to an end by the time that we get to Heaven, so there will be no discordant grief or suffering?
2. pray for them, and rejoice that (a) we have done all we can, and that (b) Divine Justice, in all its perfection, will be done, and therefore rejoice in their well-deserved damnation?
3. not care overmuch, because everyone will end up in Heaven, and in the context of eternal happiness, cancer, torture, abject misery, and purgatory are no worse that an unpleasant visit to the dentist?
4. suffer constant anxiety and grief over those we love as we do on Earth?

Hitching the Barque of Peter to the Liberal Handcart - His Holiness & the Death Penalty

Before the XX century, and even now in Muslim countries, religion was to a great extent what informed the public conscience. Together, Christianity and the public conscience informed British legislation of a social kind, such as Catholic Emancipation, the abolition of slavery, and the Factory Acts.

The process is now largely reversed. Laws passed have changed the public conscience about matters like the death penalty, abortion, and sexual deviation. After a decent period of reflection (or weathercock-gazing) religious leaders, Catholic Bishops amngst them, also change their consciences.

Last Wednesday, Pope Benedict, catching up with secular fashions in morality, asked that countries work towards abolition of the death penalty where it still persists.

His rather more robust predecessors in the Papal States maintained the death penalty until Pius IX, one of my favourite Popes, unfortunately abolished it in 1869, and retired the last executioner Battista Bugatti on a pension. Among the methods in use up to the 1860s were hanging, beheading, and the mazatello , a long-handled pole-axe with which the condemned was first stunned before having his throat cut. Charles Dickens witnessed and disapprovingly described an execution by Bugatti.

There is an appealing moral symmetry about the death penalty when applied to murderers. Kill and be killed. Its use prevents further murderous activity by the party executed, and to an extent repairs or restores the injured honour of both those closest to the person murdered and society at large. It also enrages post-freudian twerps who cannot distinguish between cruelty and sadism.

Opposition to capital punishment in principle is founded upon either religious, but not Catholic, morality, or upon mere squeamishness. A society which accepts abortion but cringes from execution is not prepared to kill the guilty who are visible, but quite sanguine over killing the invisible innocent child in the womb. Sentimental hypocrisy.

Opposition on practical grounds - the risk of wrongful conviction - is another matter, but not one that Benedict seems to have mentioned. He seems less concerned about more than a thousand years of practical Catholic wisdom, than conforming the Church to the fickle spirit of the age: hitching the Barque of Peter to the liberal handcart.

And when clergy, be they never so high, adopt secular morality, dissent may well be a duty, and one which I heartily embrace.

Or have I missed something?




 

Pinkquisition

Countercultural Father has a sad story about the legality of prayers before meeting of Bideford Town Council. The matter is being taken to the High court by the nATIONAL sECULAR sOCIETY, whose chief executive and president (both men) are in a civil partnership.

Common Sense Morality: Paper I

Question 1.


The abolition of the death penalty, far from being a step towards a more compassionate society, displays a disturbing lack of horror and outrage at the unjust taking of human life. Discuss.