Fr. Perrone: a foreboding of the world falling into darkness under some impending, overpowering evil

Fr. Eduard Perrone, "A Pastor's Descant" (Assumption Grotto News, February 17, 2019)

You may wonder from time to time, as I do, where we may be in the line of human history. Are we in its last days? Or are we nearing a time of great tribulation like that which preceded the outbreak of the two great World Wars, when the forces of evil were gathering strength but awareness of them was slight and th strength to resist them wanting? I think about this (as I mused in a recent sermon) with reference to Germany just before its takeover by the Nazi party. There's a feeling of apprehension in the air that some overpowering evil is about to descend upon us -- the USA and the Catholic Church. There have been times of mounting tension in society and in the Church where things somehow worked themselves out without the worst happening. I'm trying to understand if ours is but a passing moment testing our endurance or the prelude to some great catastrophe.

Along comes my reading of the Divine Office -- the prayerbook every priest is obliged to say everyday -- where the following passage is given for this Wednesday past, a portion of Saint Paul's Second Epistle to Timothy. It reads like a prepared script characterizing people of our time in surprisingly accurate detail. "In the last days, dangerous times will come. Men will be lovers of self, covetous, haughty, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, criminal, heartless, faithless, slanderers, incontinent, merciless, unkind, treacherous, stubborn, puffed up with pride, loving pleasure more than God, having a semblance of piety." One would be hard put to amass a better compilation of adjectives to describe people at this time. In another letter, the Apostle writes, "There shall come a time when men will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their onw desire they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears, and will indeed turn away from hearing the truth, but will turn to fables." Translation: people hearing only what they want to hear.

I get tired of the endless regression of things, from bad to worse. No matter where I turn, in education, politics, jurisprudence, the Vatican, and just about anywhere else, good initiatives are shot down, those of good will are stymied or punished, and the wicked go from success to success. Priests doing the things they're supposed to do are being squeezed in on two fronts -- opposed by their parishioners from below and chastised by their superiors from above. "Catholic" politicians promote child killing and sodomy with impunity by the Church and are reelected to office. Abortions can't be stopped. Innocent children are being hopelessly trapped in addictions to electronic media, porn, and in gender uncertainty. Most people seem oblivious to the dissolution of civilized society and to the crisis in the Church. All bad news. The single exception to the barrage of distressing reports is the economy which is doing very well, I'm told. But might this not also be a veiled misfortune signifying that our love of money (Mammon) prevails over every other concern?

I know this is a confused mixture of secular and ecclesiastical woes. And that's the point. They're coming together as in a strange coalition (dare I say, collusion?) such that one wonders whether some nefarious Mastermind is so arranging events in the world and in the Church to conspire in a huge eruption of wickedness incapable of abatement. In that case, "last days" would not be a far-fetched estimation of our present moment. In any case, the times are out of joint. My recourse to this unrelenting assault of evil is to implore God's intervention through more focused and frequent prayers of reparation.

Maybe this alarming message, whatever its intrinsic value, is a good inroad to Septuagesima, the pre-Lenten season which opens today for Latin Mass goers but which can be useful to everyone as the season of penance approaches. Speaking for myself, I'm going to give thought to how my Lenten practices might manage to sway our Lord to bring relief from the evils plaguing us. You also should get mentally ready for Lent now so as to greet its arrival eagerly, like true soldiers ready to do battle for the cause of Christ. Like it or not, you may find yourselves embroiled in the conflict.

Fr. Perrone

P.S. Before I take leave of you, don't forget Dr. Blosser's philosophy class today (Sunday) in the lounge after the noon Mass. Feed your mind!

Multiculturalism's cheap rationalizations of non-Western pathologies

Fr. George Rutler (Weekly Column, July 8, 2018):

There is no limit to the excuses ideologues will make to promote theory over fact. Consider attempts to justify Aztec human sacrifice in the interest of “multiculturalism.” Archeological discoveries of massive numbers of victims are being explained away as not really significant. The estimable scholar, Victor Davis Hanson, has written: “For the useful idiot, multiculturalism is supposedly aimed at ecumenicalism and hopes to diminish difference by inclusiveness and non-judgmentalism. But mostly it is a narcissistic fit, in which the multiculturalist offers a cheap rationalization of non-Western pathologies . . .”

Like hyperbole about the Spanish Inquisition, refuted by the latest scholarship, the “Black Legend” would have us believe that the Spaniards destroyed a benign and creative civilization in Mesoamerica. The Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, a missionary and pioneer anthropologist who translated the Gospel into the Aztec Nahuatl language, represents the best of a not unblemished Hispanic cultural imperative that led to the abolition of human sacrifice, though at a cost, for many Spaniards were cannibalized by the Acolhuas, Aztec allies. Similarly, it was the influence of Christian missionaries like William Carey that banned the Hindu practice of “sati,” the cremation of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres in the Indian principalities. Between 1815 and 1818, 839 widows were burnt alive in Bengal province alone. A general ban was enforced by Queen Victoria in 1861, the year her own husband died, but sati was still practiced in Nepal until 1920.

One estimate has 80,400 Aztec captives sacrificed in 1487 at the re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlán. Although the actual figure may have been lower, the cutting out of hearts from victims still alive is an intolerable barbarity, graphically depicted in the film Apocalypto, which shows such rites among the earlier Mayan people. A mixed-race descendant of Cortez, Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl, calculated that 20% of the infants and children in the general “Mexica” area were sacrificed annually to appease rain deities, along with men and women sacrificed in honor of the serpentine god Quetzalcóatl, the jaguar god Tezcatlipoca and the aquiline warrior god Huitzilopochtli.

In the sixteenth century, Montaigne, anticipating Dryden’s “noble savage,” sought to cut the primitive cultures a little slack because he saw barbaric acts among his own European peoples. Those who were scandalized by his analogy then are like those today who commit atrocities under the veneer of progressivism. In 1992, a writer in the leftist Die Zeit of Hamburg rhetorically bent over backwards to deny that the Mesoamericans had committed human sacrifice. We know what happened in his own country among the National Socialist eugenicists.

Sacrifices on the altars of ancient temples cannot match the millions of infants aborted today in sterile clinics. Pope Francis has said, “Last century, the whole world was scandalized by what the Nazis did to purify the race. Today, we do the same thing but with white gloves.” Perhaps five centuries from now, revisionists will deny that abortion was ever legal.

The problem with "American Exceptionalism"

Jack Kerwick, in "'American Exceptionalism' Reconsidered ... And Rejected," argues that this has become a central dogma of neoconservatism, that it is an ahistorical fiction, a rationalization for globalist imperialism, and at odds with patriotism and Christianity.

[Hat tip to L.S.]

Need inspiration?

[Source]

Steve Sailer reviews film, Detroit

Steve Sailer, "Riot Acting" (Taki's Magazine, August 2, 2017).

Did you know that Milton defended the regicide of Charles I, advocated divorce, and rejected the divinity of Christ and immortality of the soul?

So much for the 'Puritan' Milton. Why do we never hear of such facts in the Protestant textbook traditions?

Some off-hand thoughts on the movie, Silence

I read the novel Silence by the Japanese Catholic author, Shusaku Endo, years ago when I lived in Japan. He's called the "Japanese Graham Greene." With good reason. Like Greene, he's a darn good novelist. Also like Greene, his Catholicism in his writings is ambiguous. I don't hold that against him as a novelist. Some of my favorite Catholic novelists are also ambiguous about the Catholic faith in their writings, even though they are clearly and intentionally Catholic, like Walker Percy or Evelyn Waugh.

I read many, many reviews of Martin Scorsese's film based on Endo's novel, also called "Silence." One of the best on the critical side, I thought, was Monica Migliorino Miller's "Scorsese's Silence: Many Martyrs -- Little Redemption" (Crisis, January 9, 2017). But there were others that were also good on the appreciative side.

Personally, I liked the movie Silence. I think it was very well done. Whatever Endo's and Scorsese's motives, I think they both dealt powerfully with two things: (1) the exquisitely horrific tortures underwent by Catholics in Japan before the Meiji Restoration, and (2) the diabolically insidious temptations to apostasy that can make infidelity to Christ itself look like fidelity and virtue.

The latter theme of the movie, which I think most Christian audiences thought most significant, I think were (mis-?)understood in two ways: (a) by the 'liberals' as proclaiming a gospel of merciful accommodation indifferent to doctrine, and (b) by 'conservatives' as a message of doctrinal compromise intended by both Endo's novel and Scorsese's film.

I'm not at all certain that the latter is true. Whether it is or not, I think that not only the temptations but the consequences of apostasy were shown by both novel and film in a faithful light: the temptations were beyond ingenious, with the voice of Jesus seeming to come from His image on the fumie itself ("Step on me.") as if Christ Himself were counseling the mercy of apostasy as the path to redemption; and both apostate priests ended their lives by faded into oblivion, morphing into gollum-like shadows of themselves; and the Japanese Catholics (not all, but many) who witnessed their apostasy were significantly demoralized by it.

Remarkably, however, when Catholic priests returned to Japan after the Meiji Restoration of the mid-nineteenth century, they encountered Kakure Kurishitan (hidden Christians) who came out of hiding once again to present rosaries and crucifixes and statues of Maria Kanon that doubled as secret images of the Madonna, showing that the Faith had not been entirely wiped out. The price of persecution as well as apostasy was high. Only something like one tenth of 1% of Japanese people are Christians, and of these, half (about 509,000) are Catholic.

Some of you may remember the movie, The Last Samurai, starring Tom Cruise and Ken Watanabe. One of the young samurai actors in the film was Shin Koyamada, who only discovered during the making of that film that his ancestors were among the Kakure Kurishitan. So moved was he by the narrative of persecution and Catholic resistance during the Shimabara Rebellion, that he ventured to make film about those events in which he played the father of Shiro Amakusa, the leader of that rebellion (see my review here with a trailer of the film, "Good Soil").


Another recent discovery is the book, A Christian Samurai: The Trials of Baba Bunko, William J. Farge, SJ., which contradicts the generally held belief among Western historians that the Catholic mission in Japan ended in failure. Farge relates how Christian moral teachings not only survived the long period of persecution but influenced Japanese society throughout the Tokugawa period. Baba Bunko was a Japanese Catholic essayist and satirist whose biting criticism of the authorities of his time eventually led to his execution; but he was brazenly bold in asserting his views, declaring, for example, that a representation of the Eucharist would be a more fitting symbol for Japan than the coat of arms of the emperor and insignia of the shogun.

Gotta run.

Making a virtue of apostasy: the "Step on me" Jesus of Endo's Silence

Monica Migliorino Miller, "Scorsese's Silence: Many Martyrs -- Little Redemption" (Crisis, January 9, 2017). An insightful review by an astute Catholic professor and critic. Excerpt:

In the film’s climatic scene Japanese Christians are horrifically tortured and Rodrigues is forced to watch. If he would only step on the fumi-e placed on the ground before him the torture would end. Ferreira is there urging him, as Rodrigues himself had urged others, to step on the face of Jesus. And of course the apostasy, as in all other instances, is connected to bringing an end to human suffering. It is this scene that makes the Scorsese film a theological failure. Ferreira is the Judas character—but it is very unclear whether this Judas functions negatively or positively. Is this a Judas who works against Christ—or is this a Judas, ala the Gnostic text, The Gospel of Judas who actually aids Jesus to accomplish his mission? Ferreira tells Rodrigues: “If Christ were here he would apostatize for their sake” and “To give up your faith is the most painful act of love.” (Spoiler alert.) Then the voice of Jesus himself is heard coming from the fumi-e image lying on the ground. It is a bronze plaque of the crucified Christ who Himself urges Rodriquez: “Step on me. I carried this cross for your pain.” With the permission of Christ, Rodrigues denies his Lord. Apostasy, this time his own, stops the suffering of others, and the Christians are not martyred.

This is the most troubling aspect of Silence. Jesus gives permission to betray him, gives Christians permission to fail in their witness. It makes all the difference whether the film intends this to be the voice of Christ to Rodrigues or whether the voice is just something Rodrigues imagines in his own head. In this reviewer’s opinion, Scorsese intends this to be Christ’s voice that clears the path to failure. First of all, technically speaking, it is sound outside of Rodrigues, emanating from the image to him. The voice is not presented as something coming from the interior of Rodrigues’ consciousness.

Why would Scorsese, based on Endo, give us a Christ who provides his followers permission to fail? What end does the “Step on me” Jesus serve? Since Rodrigues recommends apostasy only to avoid suffering, one could conclude that suffering trumps faith—that for the good of avoiding horrible pain, denial of Christ is justified as it is Jesus alone who “carries this cross for your pain.” Of course this consequentialist ethic is contrary to Christian faith and morals—namely to do evil for the sake of good.

One could also just as well conclude that the “Step on me” Jesus is a theology that only Christ’s suffering has any value. Human beings, due to their inherent sinful nature will inevitably fail, despite all high-minded goals and personal expectations and in the end all that matters is the abiding silent presence of God to those that suffer. However, this is an insufficient Christian message—especially when one considers that in God’s eyes human suffering does have salvific value as Saint Paul himself stated: “Even now I find my joy in the suffering I endure for you. In my own flesh I fill up the sufferings of Christ for the sake of his body the Church.”

Or when Rodrigues steps on Jesus this is meant to be indeed the “most painful act of love” as he surrenders his own ideal for the sake of saving others. However, this interpretation is seriously weaken by the fact that he is miserable afterwards and for decades to come will continue to step on the face of Christ in repeated acts of apostasy when no one needs to be delivered from torture.

If however, the voice is just Rodrigues’ own justification to deny Christ—then indeed he is a true apostate and the movie works as a tale of God’s abiding presence to all those who suffer—the suffering of the martyrs as well as the suffering of those like Rodrigues and Kichijiro who are tormented by remorse and guilt for their failure. Jesus is there silently in the suffering of all—as the “voice” from the image says: “I carried this cross for your pain.” And this works well when one considers that Kichijiro commits apostasy over and over again, and is even a Judas who betrays Rodrigues to the authorities. Yet he always seeks out the priest to confess his sins and receive absolution. And indeed mercy is there for those who fail. Silence poignantly illustrates this point. Rodrigues indeed follows Ferreira—who ironically has wound up mentoring him into the life of an apostate priest. But long after Rodrigues quits the priesthood Kichijiro finds him and begs him to hear his confession and Rodrigues again provides him the absolution for which he craves.

Except for Christ telling Rodrigues to “Step on me” this forgiveness scene would be the climax of the film, and thus Silence would be about the silent abiding presence of God to all, even to those who fail. But this possible climax is overwhelmed by the very troubling permission of Christ to fail. The first climactic scene plunges the Scorsese film into a most problematic and erroneous soteriology. The end of the film attempts to show a certain level of redemption for Rodrigues who apparently remained a Christian privately, but is not powerful enough to overcome a depiction of Christ who leads his faithful servant to deny him.

This movie seriously examines Christian themes and ideas. But should a film that, to its credit, does such an examination necessarily be called a Christian film? I think not. A Christian film cannot simply explore—it must conclude and it must conclude in a way that is consistent with the gospel message—however unconventionally, provocatively, or innovatively presented. There must be the Christ of the Gospels who, rather than commanding his faithful followers to step on him, and twists this negativity, this denial of the Light, into “the most painful act of love,” calls them to follow him to the Cross—the Christ who rather ensures his faithful: “From the cup I drink from you shall drink; the bath I am immersed in you shall share.”

Believers hoping for a film that explores Christian ideas from an authentic Christian context—should skip this one. Silence should also not be seen by the young, or those whose faith is not strong as the theology in this movie is complex, clever and seductive. However, if you are a mature Christian looking for a finely crafted, well-acted, disturbing film that provokes thinking and debates—then Silence is for you. Let the debates begin.

Trump, Republicanism, conservatism, & populism: Larry R. Arnn speculates

Trump does not always speak in complete sentences. His language is sometimes coarse. He is not a smooth-talking politician. He knows, however, how to play a crowd. He sizes up personalities and situations instinctively. He is impulsive rather than reflective. He comes from a business background where he is used to making deals autocratically and intuitively, not by consensus. These characteristics lead many of us to worry about demagoguery.

Is this, however, all there is to Trump? Is Trump simply an unprincipled opportunist and demagogue? Larry R. Arnn, who comes from circles very much involved in thinking about political principles and constitutional law doesn't seem to believe so. Are his ideas about Trump's instinctive conservatism anything more than wishful thinking? One would like to believe not. Time will tell. In any case, Arnn suggests there is a great deal we can learn from this election and from President-elect Trump about political conservatism, liberalism, and populism if we reflect on them in a principled way.

Larry P. Arnn, President, Hillsdale College, "A More American Conservatism" (Imprimis, Vol. 45, No. 12, December, 2016):

The astonishing political campaign of 2016 involved much debate about whether Donald Trump is a conservative. He was not always facile with the lingo of conservatism, and he pointed out once that he was seeking the nomination of the Republican, not the conservative party. Yet there is a lot we can learn from him about conservatism.

What is conservatism? It is a derivative term: it refers to something outside itself. We cannot conserve the present or the future, and the past being full of contradiction, we cannot conserve it entire. In the past one finds heroism and villainy; justice and injustice; freedom and slavery. Things in the past are like things in the present: they must be judged. Conservative people know this if they have any sense.

What then makes them conservative? It is the additional knowledge that things that have had a good reputation for a long time are more trustworthy than new things. This is especially true of original things. The very term principle refers to something that comes first; to change the principle of a thing is to change it into something else. Without the principle, the thing is lost.

If American conservatism means anything, then, it means the things found at the beginning of America, when it became a nation. The classics teach us that forming political bonds is natural to people, written in their nature, stemming from the divine gift they have of speech and reason. This means in turn that the Declaration of Independence, where the final causes of our nation are stated, and the Constitution of the United States, where the form of government is established, are the original things. These documents were written by people who were friends and who understood the documents to pursue the same ends. Taken together they are the longest surviving things of their kind, and under their domain our country spread across a continent and became the strongest nation on earth, the bastion of freedom. These documents do not appeal to all conservatives, but I argue that they should, both for their age and for their worthiness.

It follows then that if Donald Trump helps to conserve these things, he is a conservative in the sense that matters most to the republic of the Americans. Will he?

Two good stories ... Read them to the end. You'll know what I mean.

Two good stories

STORY NUMBER ONE

Many Years ago, Al Capone virtually owned Chicago.  Capone wasn't famous for anything heroic.  He was notorious for enmeshing the windy city in everything from bootlegged booze and prostitution to murder.

 Capone had a lawyer nicknamed "Easy Eddie."  He was Capone's lawyer for a good reason.  Eddie was very good!  In fact, Eddie's skill at legal maneuvering kept Big Al out of jail for a long time.

To show his appreciation, Capone paid him very well.. Not only was the money big, but Eddie got special dividends, as well.  For instance, he and his family occupied a fenced-in mansion with live-in help and all of the conveniences of the day.  The estate was so large that it filled an entire Chicago City block.

Eddie lived the high life of the Chicago mob and gave little consideration to the atrocity that went on around him.

Eddie did have one soft spot, however.  He had a son that he loved dearly.  Eddie saw to it that his young son had clothes, cars, and a good education.  Nothing was withheld.  Price was no object.

And, despite his involvement with organized crime, Eddie even tried to teach him right from wrong.  Eddie wanted his son to be a better man than he was.

Yet, with all his wealth and influence, there were two things he couldn't give his son; he couldn't pass on a good name or a good example.

One day, Easy Eddie reached a difficult decision.  Easy Eddie wanted to rectify wrongs he had done.

He decided he would go to the authorities and tell the truth about Al "Scarface" Capone, clean up his tarnished name, and offer his son some resemblance of integrity.  To do this, he would have to testify against The Mob, and he knew that the cost would be great.  So, he testified.

Within the year, Easy Eddie's life ended in a blaze of gunfire on a lonely Chicago Street.  But in his eyes, he had given his son the greatest gift he had to offer, at the greatest price he could ever pay..  Police removed from his pockets a rosary, a crucifix, a religious medallion, and a poem clipped from a magazine.

The poem read:

"The clock of life is wound but once, and no man has the power to tell just when the hands will stop, at late or early hour.  Now is the only time you own.  Live, love, toil with a will.  Place no faith in time.  For the clock may soon be still."

STORY NUMBER TWO

World War II produced many heroes. One such man was Lieutenant Commander Butch O'Hare.
 

He was a fighter pilot assigned to the aircraft carrier Lexington in the South Pacific.

One day his entire squadron was sent on a mission.  After he was airborne, he looked at his fuel gauge and realized that someone had forgotten to top off his fuel tank

He would not have enough fuel to complete his mission and get back to his ship.

His flight leader told him to return to the carrier.  Reluctantly, he dropped out of formation and headed back to the fleet.

As he was returning to the mother ship, he saw something that turned his blood cold; a squadron of Japanese aircraft was speeding its way toward the American-fleet.

The American fighters were gone on a sortie, and the fleet was all but defenseless.  He couldn't reach his squadron and bring them back in time to save the fleet.  Nor could he warn the fleet of the approaching danger.  There was only one thing to do.  He must somehow divert them from the fleet.

Laying aside all thoughts of personal safety, he dove into the formation of Japanese planes.  Wing-mounted 50 caliber's blazed as he charged in, attacking one surprised enemy plane and then another.  Butch wove in and out of the now broken formation and fired at as many planes as possible until all his ammunition was finally spent.

Undaunted, he continued the assault.  He dove at the planes, trying to clip a wing or tail in hopes of damaging as many enemy planes as possible, rendering them unfit to fly.

Finally, the exasperated Japanese squadron took off in another direction.

Deeply relieved, Butch O'Hare and his tattered fighter limped back to the carrier..

Upon arrival, he reported in and related the event surrounding his return..  The film from the gun-camera mounted on his plane told the tale.  It showed the extent of Butch's daring attempt to protect his fleet.  He had, in fact, destroyed five enemy aircraft.  This took place on February 20, 1942, and for that action Butch became the Navy's first Ace of W.W.II, and the first Naval Aviator to win the Medal of Honor.

A Year later Butch was killed in aerial combat at the age of 29.  His hometown would not allow the memory of this WW II hero to fade, and today, O'Hare airport in Chicago is named in tribute to the courage of this great man.

So, the next time you find yourself at O'Hare International, give some thought to visiting Butch's memorial displaying his statue and his Medal of Honor.  It's located between Terminals 1 and 2.

SO WHAT DO THESE TWO STORIES HAVE TO DO WITH EACH OTHER?

Butch O'Hare was "Easy Eddie's" son.

 (Pretty cool, eh!)

Snopes.com

So the American dream is dead but some just haven't noticed yet?

I've never quite believed in American exceptionalism the way some people do. But I do believe there was something mighty special about America for a while. Read Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Praire. Read any number of heroic stories from WWII, like Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken. Or drive across America on her impressive system of Interstate highways. Or listen to Jeff Daniels' terrific speech (if you can get past the 'f-bombs') in this opening segment of the series, Newsroom.

Some scenarios about the present and future are pretty grim. I admit to being pretty grim myself sometimes, though I'm basically pretty upbeat as you'd know if you talked to me. Yet there's something in the grim picture that has a ring of truth, at least on Tuesdays and Thursdays, if you know what I mean.

Take this email I received referencing a speech by Franklin Graham, for instance. It starts with a third party introducing Graham's words like this:

Time is like a river. You cannot touch the water twice, because the flow that has passed will never pass again.Franklin Graham was speaking at the First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, when he said America will not come back. He wrote:

The American dream ended on November 6th, 2012 in Ohio. The second term of Barack Obama has been the final nail in the coffin for the legacy of the white Christian males who discovered, explored, pioneered, settled and developed the greatest republic in the history of mankind.

A coalition of blacks, Latinos, feminists, gays, government workers, union members, environmental extremists, the media, Hollywood, uninformed young people, the "forever needy," the chronically unemployed, illegal aliens and other "fellow travelers" have ended Norman Rockwell's America.

You will never again out-vote these people. It will take individual acts of defiance and massive displays of civil disobedience to get back the rights we have allowed them to take away. It will take zealots, not moderates and shy, reach-across-the-aisle RINOs to right this ship and restore our beloved country to its former status.

People like me are completely politically irrelevant, and I will probably never again be able to legally comment on or concern myself with the aforementioned coalition which has surrendered our culture, our heritage and our traditions without a shot being fired.

The Cocker spaniel is off the front porch, the pit bull is in the back yard. The American Constitution has been replaced with Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" and the likes of Chicago shyster David Axelrod along with international socialist George Soros have been pulling the strings on their beige puppet have brought us Act 2 of the New World Order.

The curtain will come down but the damage has been done, the story has been told.

Those who come after us will once again have to risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to bring back the Republic that this generation has timidly frittered away due to white guilt and political correctness...

At the same time, I realize that the vast majority of foreign refugees and would-be immigrants clamouring to get into our country are still motivated by the icon of hope that is America. At least most of them are flying from oppressive regimes in countries where the daily possibility is life or death; and they come to America because there is promise of relative security, food, shelter, clothing, and opportunities to live and prosper here. That fact alone tells us that the glass is still half full, that the water hasn't been entirely drained yet. That's positive. Even if it isn't much.

Thomas Jefferson vs the Muslim Pirates

Back in the Spring of 2007, Christopher Hitchens published an interesting reflection entitled "Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates" in CJ - 'From the Magazine', which I believe stands for a magazine called "Conservative Judaism" (though check to be sure). More recently, Tom Henegham, an "international intelligence expert," posted a related piece entitled "History Lesson: Thomas Jefferson vs the Muslim World," which apparently came from an article entitled "History of the USA and Muslims" (NESARA - Republic Now, an 'awareness' blog, Marcy 10, 2016). I'm not sure of the ultimate source. But Snopes reports the contents are 'true' so those, at least, are apparently not controversial.

Here's the story:

When Jefferson saw there was no negotiating with Muslims, he formed what is the now the Marines (sea going soldiers). These Marines were attached to U. S. Merchant vessels. When the Muslims attacked U.S. merchant vessels, they were repulsed by armed soldiers, but there is more.

The Marines followed the Muslims back to their villages and killed every man, woman, and child in the village [This claim has no documentation, so it's accuracy may be questioned.] It didn't take long for the Muslims to leave U.S. Merchant vessels alone. English and French merchant vessels started running up our flag when entering the Mediterranean to secure safe travel.

Why the Marine Hymn Contains the Verse "… to the shores of Tripoli." This is very interesting and a must read piece of our history. It points out where we may be heading. Most Americans are unaware of the fact that over two hundred years ago, the United States had declared war on Islam and Thomas Jefferson led the charge!

At the height of the 18th century, Muslim pirates (the "Barbary Pirates") were the terror of the Mediterranean and a large area of the North Atlantic. They attacked every ship in sight and held the crews for exorbitant ransoms. Those taken hostage were subjected to barbaric treatment and wrote heart-breaking letters home, begging their government and family members to pay whatever their Mohammedan captors demanded.

These extortionists of the high seas represented the North African Islamic nations of Tripoli, Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers - collectively referred to as the Barbary Coast - and presented a dangerous and unprovoked threat to the new American Republic ..

Before the Revolutionary War, U.S. merchant ships had been under the protection of Great Britain. When the U.S. declared its independence and entered into war, the ships of the United States were protected by France. However, once the war was won, America had to protect its own fleets.

Thus, the birth of the U.S. Navy. Beginning in 1784, 17 years before he would become president, Thomas Jefferson became America's Minister to France. That same year, the U.S. Congress sought to appease its Muslim adversaries by following in the footsteps of European nations who paid bribes to the Barbary States rather than engaging them in war.

In July of 1785, Algerian pirates captured American ships, and the Dye of Algiers demanded an unheard-of ransom of $60,000. It was a plain and simple case of extortion, and Thomas Jefferson was vehemently opposed to any further payments. Instead, he proposed to Congress the formation of a coalition of allied nations who together could force the Islamic states into peace. A disinterested Congress decided to pay the ransom.

In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met with Tripoli's ambassador to Great Britain to ask by what right his nation attacked American ships and enslaved American citizens, and why Muslims held so much hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts.

The two future presidents reported that Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja had answered that Islam "was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Quran that all nations who would not acknowledge their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise."

Despite this stunning admission of premeditated violence on non-Muslim nations, as well as the objections of many notable American leaders, including George Washington, who warned that caving in was both wrong and would only further embolden the enemy, for the following fifteen years the American government paid the Muslims millions of dollars for the safe passage of American ships or the return of American hostages. The payments in ransom and tribute amounted to over 20 percent of the United States government annual revenues in 1800.

Jefferson was disgusted. Shortly after his being sworn in as the third President of the United States in 1801, the Pasha of Tripoli sent him a note demanding the immediate payment of $225,000 plus $25,000 a year for every year forthcoming. That changed everything.

Jefferson let the Pasha know, in no uncertain terms, what he could do with his demand. The Pasha responded by cutting down the flagpole at the American consulate and declared war on the United States. Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers immediately followed suit. Jefferson, until now, had been against America raising a naval force for anything beyond coastal defense, but, having watched his nation be cowed by Islamic thuggery for long enough, decided that it was finally time to meet force with force.

He dispatched a squadron of frigates to the Mediterranean and taught the Muslim nations of the Barbary Coast a lesson he hoped they would never forget. Congress authorized Jefferson to empower U.S. ships to seize all vessels and goods of the Pasha of Tripoli and to "cause to be done all other acts of precaution or hostility as the state of war would justify".


When Algiers and Tunis, who were both accustomed to American cowardice and acquiescence, saw the newly independent United States had both the will and the right to strike back, they quickly abandoned their allegiance to Tripoli. The war with Tripoli lasted for four more years and raged up again in 1815. The bravery of the U.S. Marine Corps in these wars led to the line"...to the shores of Tripoli" in the Marine Hymn, and they would forever be known as "leathernecks" for the leather collars of their uniforms, designed to prevent their heads from being cut off by the Muslim scimitars when boarding enemy ships.

Islam, and what its Barbary followers justified doing in the name of their prophet and their god, disturbed Jefferson quite deeply. America had a tradition of religious tolerance. In fact Jefferson, himself, had co-authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, but fundamentalist Islam was like no other religion the world had ever seen. A religion based on supremacy, whose holy book not only condoned but mandated violence against unbelievers, was unacceptable to him. His greatest fear was that someday this brand of Islam would return and pose an even greater threat to the United States....

[Hat tip to J. Shepherd]

Florence Foster Jenkins (movie)

Guy Noir contacted me with some remarks about this article by Megan Basham, "Florence Foster Jenkins" (World, September 3, 2016). Noir remarked:

I have not seen the movie, "FFJ."

I still can not bring myself to risk any Meryl Streep project after sitting through the effrontery that was "Mamma Mia!", and deciding she might be as self-indulgent as Streisand.

But even if this new movie is somehow affecting, as one singer-friend told me it is, this review offers a window into the modern (post-modern, or whatever you want to call it) mindset. "They're happy, so what's the conundrum." That in a nutshell is the worldview that pervades the culture in which we find ourselves.

Granted, "Mamma Mia!" was pretty appalling, despite what the greying Woodstock generation regards as good nostalgic music. Yet Streep is a terrific actress, nonetheless; just as Hugh Grant may be, to whom (in his earlier career) my own reaction is as viscerally negative as Noir's is to Streep here.

The Basham article in World magazine says that this historical 'dramedy' offers an inescapable sense of sadness. Indeed.

Attention Catholic teachers and home schoolers: announcing new ancient history textbook

The eminently capable Phillip Campbell, who teaches history at St. Augustine's in Ann Arbor, with its highly-regarded classical curriculim, has just published the first volume in a series of 5th-7th grade-level history textbooks (publisher: TAN Books). The First volume is entitled The Ancient World: The Story of Civilization. Available with the textbook is a Test Book, Teacher's Manual, Activity Book, Timeline, Drama CDs, and Streaming Lecture Series.

If anyone is looking for a 5th-7th grade-level ancient history text written from a faithful and richly-informed Catholic perspective, look no further. This is what you want.

Tridentine Community News - Rail Car Chapels; Juventútem Michigan Leaders to Wed; TLM Mass schedule

"I will go in unto the Altar of God
To God, Who giveth joy to my youth"
Tridentine Community News by Alex Begin (August 21, 2016):

August 21, 2016 – Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Rail Car Chapels Private rail cars have long been the province of politicians and the wealthy, but did you know that some have been outfitted to serve as Catholic chapels, hosting the Tridentine Mass? The Catholic Extension Society built at least three such cars. The St. Anthony Chapel Car is an early example, dating from 1908 and made out of wood.



A later example from the Extension Society is the St. Paul Chapel Car, made out of steel. The below diagram indicates that it contained a Communion Rail, organ, and behind the altar, priests’ living quarters. Even in regions such as Europe where rail travel is still a principal mode of long-distance transportation, it’s difficult to imagine that such a conveyance would be built today. Despite the cramped surroundings, it was still possible to hold an organ-accompanied High Mass in a dignified architectural setting. What a testament to the faith of the Catholics of that era.



Juventútem Michigan Leaders to Wed

Juventútem Michigan board members Michelle Harrison and Paul Schultz will marry each other at St. Thomas the Apostle, Ann Arbor, at 2:30 PM on Sunday, September 4. Everyone is invited to attend this Mass and to pray for their happy marriage. Fr. Zach Mabee will celebrate the Solemn High Mass for the Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost. Wassim Sarweh and singers from Windsor’s St. Benedict Choir will assist the Mass with Palestrina’s Missa Papæ Marcélli.

Tridentine Masses This Coming Week

• Mon. 08/22 7:00 PM: High Mass at Our Lady of the Scapular (Immaculate Heart of Mary) – Wassim Sarweh will provide the music
• Mon. 08/22 7:00 PM: Low Mass at St. Josaphat (Immaculate Heart of Mary)
• Tue. 08/23 7:00 PM: Low Mass at Holy Name of Mary (St. Philip Benizi, Confessor)
• Sat. 08/27 8:30 AM: Low Mass at Miles Christi (St. Joseph Calasance, Confessor)
• Sun. 08/28 9:45 AM: Pontifical Missa Cantata at OCLMA/Academy of the Sacred Heart (Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost) – Celebrant: Bishop Donald Hanchon

[Comments? Please e-mail tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org. Previous columns are available at http://www.detroitlatinmass.org. This edition of Tridentine Community News, with minor editions, is from the St. Albertus (Detroit), Academy of the Sacred Heart (Bloomfield Hills), and St. Alphonsus and Holy Name of Mary Churches (Windsor) bulletin inserts for August 21, 2016. Hat tip to Alex Begin, author of the column.]

Brexit and the Decline of the West

The White Cliffs of Dover, England, as seen from Cap Gris Nez, France
Roberto de Mattei, "Brexit and the Decline of the West" (Corrispondenza Romana, June 29, 2016, via Rorate Caeli, June 30, 2016): 

The British referendum of June 23rd (Brexit) has sanctioned the definitive collapse of a myth: the dream of “a “Europe without frontiers”, built on the ruins of its national States.

The Europeanist project, launched by the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, had in itself the seeds of its own self-destruction. It was completely illusory to expect the implementation of an economic, monetary union before a political union; or, even worse, to envisage using monetary integration in order to establish political unification. The plan, though, to reach political unity by extirpating those spiritual roots that bind men together was even more illusory. The Charter of Fundamental Human Rights of the European Union approved by the European Council in Nice in December 2000, not only expunges any reference to Europe’s religious roots, but has in itself a visceral negation of the natural and Christian order. Article 21, by introducing the prohibition of any discrimination related to “sexual tendencies”, contains, in nuce, the legalization of the crime of homophobia and pseudo-homosexual marriage.

The “Constitution” project worked on by the Convention on the Future of Europe between 2002 and 2005, was rejected by two popular referendums, in France on May 29th 2005 and in Holland on June 1st of the same year. Nevertheless, the Eurocrats never gave up. After two years of “reflection”, the Lisbon Treaty, which should have been ratified exclusively through parliament, was approved by the EU Heads of State and Government on December 13th 2007. The only country called upon to voice their opinion on the referendum, Ireland, rejected the Treaty on June 13th 2008, but unanimity being necessary from the signatory States, a new referendum was imposed on the Irish, which thanks to very strong economic and media pressure, finally gave the positive result.

During its short life, the European Union, incapable of defining foreign policies and ordinary security measures, has turned itself into an ideological tribune, which churns out resolutions and directives, pushing national Governments to free themselves of traditional family values. Inside the EU, Great Britain, pressed on the brakes to slow down the Franco-German plan for a European “Super-State”, but instead, pressed-down on the accelerator by diffusing, on a European scale, it own “civic conquests” from abortion to euthanasia, from adoptions by homosexuals to genetic engineering. This moral deviation was accompanied in England by [a sort of] multicultural drunkenness, culminating in the election of the first Muslim Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan in May 2016.

However, even in 2009, the then conservative Mayor, Boris Johnson, invited all Londoners to participate, at least for a day, in the Ramadan fast and then attend the Mosque at sunset. More recently, the Prime Minister, David Cameron, contending the American presidential candidate, Donald Trump, said he was: «proud of representing a country which is one of the most successful multi-racial, multi-faith, multi-ethnic countries in the world» (Huffpost Politics, 15th May 2016).

Brexit certainly signifies a surge of pride for a nation that has a long history of antique tradition. Nevertheless, the identity and freedom of a nation are founded on respect for the Divine and natural Law and no political action can restore the freedom a country has lost on account of its own moral decadence. The ‘no’ to the European Union was a protest against the arrogance of an oligarchy which claims to decide - without the people and against the people - the interests of the people.

Even so, the strong powers which impose Brussels’ bureaucratic rules are the same ones that are undoing the West’s moral rules. Those who accept the LGTB dictatorship lose the right to claim their own Independence Day, as they have already renounced their own identity. Those who renounce defending the moral boundaries of a nation, lose the right to defend its borders, as they have already accepted the “fluid” conception of a global society. Under this aspect, Great Britain’s’ self-dissolution itinerary follows a dynamic that Brexit cannot arrest and which, rather, may be part of another stage.

Scotland is already threatening a new referendum to leave the United Kingdom, followed by Northern Ireland. Further, when the Queen, who is 90 years old, leaves the throne, it is not excluded that some countries of the Commonwealth will declare their independence. Someone said that Queen Elizabeth had been crowned the Empress of the British Empire and will die as the head of ‘a Little England’. This itinerary of political disunion though, has as its final outcome the republicanising of England.

In 2017 the three hundredth centenary of the founding of London’s Great Lodge, the mother of modern Freemasonry, will be commemorated. Yet, Freemasonry, which in the XVIII and XIX centuries used Protestant and Deist England to diffuse its revolutionary programme throughout the world, today seems determined to ditch the English Monarchy, in which it sees one of the last symbols still surviving from the Medieval order. After Brexit, scenarios of disintegration may open up in Greece as a result of the explosion of the economic and social crisis; in France, where the urban peripheries are menaced by a Jihadist civil war; in Italy as a result of the unstoppable migratory invasion; in east Europe, where Putin is ready to profit from the weakness of European institutions to take control of eastern Ukraine and exercise military pressure on the Baltic States.

The British General, Alexander Richard Shirreff, former Vice-Commander of NATO from 2011 to 2014, foresaw in the form of a novel, (2017 War with Russia. An Urgent Warning From Senior Military Command, Coronet, London 2016), the break-out of a nuclear war between Russia and the West in May 2017, a date which reminds Catholics of something. How to forget, on this first centenary of Fatima, Our Lady’s words, that many nations will be annihilated and Russia will be the instrument God will use to punish impenitent mankind?

Faced with these prospectives the conservative parties themselves are split. If Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in Holland and Matteo Salvini in Italy are asking for their Countries’ exit from the European Union and are placing their hopes in Putin, the positions of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban and the Polish leader Jaroslaw are very different; they see in the European Union and NATO a barrier to the Russian expansion.

The Decline of the West ((Der Untergang des Abendlandes) by Oswald Spengler appeared in 1917. One hundred years later, the German writer’s prophecy seems about to be fulfilled. “The West” , before being a geographic space, is the name of a civilization. This civilization is Christian Civilization, heir to the classical Greco-Roman culture which from Europe spread to the Americas and its faraway offshoots in Asia and Africa. It had its baptism the night of St. Paul’s dream, when God gave the Apostle the order to turn his back on Asia and “go through Macedonia” to proclaim the good news (Acts, XVI, 6-18). Rome was the place of St. Peter and Paul’s martyrdom and the centre of the civilization that was emerging. Spengler, convinced of the inexorable decline of the West, recalls a sentence from Seneca: Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt (Destiny guides those who want to be guided and drags those who don’t want to be [guided]”.

We however, counter Spengler’s relativist and determinist vision with that of St. Augustine, who, while the barbarians were attacking Hippone, announced the victory in history of the City of God, continuously guided by Divine Providence. Man is the artifice of his own destiny and with the help of God the twilight of civilization can be transformed into the dawn of a resurrection. Nations are mortal, but God never dies and the Church never wanes.

[Translation: contributor, Francesca Romana] 

As one our readers observes: "Last two paragraphs are the missing pieces In the current Catholic Church's claims for its own existence. Without stressing them she has no business doling out morals. But her leaders now, overawed by multiculturalism, don't seem to get it."

[Hat tip to JM]

The Big Lie: Protestant & Secular Texbook Traditions About The Irish Rebellion of 1641

Anne Barbeau Gardiner, "The Big Lie: Ireland, 1641" (New Oxford Review, May 2016) - a book review of The Shadow of a Year: The 1641 Rebellion in Irish History and Memory, by John Gibney (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013): 

If to rob a man of his good name for a lifetime is to rob him of his most precious possession, what is it then to rob an entire people of their good name for centuries? The Big Lie about the 1641 rebellion was just such a robbery of the Irish people. It stands at the root of Irish suffering for centuries, even casting a shadow across the Irish Famine of the 1840s. John Gibney’s scholarly book The Shadow of a Year offers an illuminating account of this grave injustice.

Gibney begins by giving the Protestant version of the rebellion. In Ulster, the Irish had recently been dispossessed of their land by English and Scottish settlers, and on October 23, 1641, a mob broke out against these settlers. In the official Protestant account, religion was the reason for the uprising, and it was immediately depicted as a sectarian genocide organized by Irish Catholics. Henry Jones, Anglican dean of Kilmore, said the rebellion had been caused by the “innate bigotry and brutality” of the Irish and ordered by the Pope and Jesuits. Jones headed a commission that collected thousands of depositions about what happened — but these depositions were only from Protestants. In March 1642 he presented lurid extracts from these depositions to the English Parliament, published as A Remonstrance. Thus, says Gibney, the “atrocity propaganda” was first printed in England “for an English audience.”

The Protestant account was used to justify the Cromwellian confiscations of Irish lands from 1649 to 1653, which amounted, Gibney says, to “perhaps half of the available land in Ireland.” In 1649 Cromwell justified the atrocities his New Model Army committed against Catholics in Drogheda and Wexford as a “righteous judgment” for the rebellion of 1641. When the Catholic bishops of Ireland protested that the army seemed bent on “exterminating” the Irish, Cromwell replied that “the massacres of 1641 had yet to be avenged.”

Thus, much depended on the truth of what had taken place. Despite Catholic denials, the Protestant version of 1641 would henceforth be used to deprive Catholics of their lands and also — for the next 150 years — of religious liberty. The 1652 Act for the Settling of Ireland exempted from pardon all Catholic priests on the ground that they had abetted the “murders or massacres” of Protestants in 1641.

Only a tiny fraction of the depositions taken by Henry Jones were about atrocities, yet Sir John Temple, in his book The Irish Rebellion (1646), presented these tales as representative of the whole. Temple’s account was still being described in 1887 as “an almost infallible witness against Catholicism,” even though it was composed, Gibney says, chiefly “to bolster the case for a prospective reconquest of Ireland under the auspices of the English parliament.”

From the first, Protestant historians gave a wildly implausible death toll of those murdered by Catholics in 1641. In March 1643 the Irish Lord Justices put it at 154,000, a figure taken from the “unsubstantiated assertion of Robert Maxwell, an Armagh clergyman of Scottish extraction.” They used this number to block Parliament from coming to terms with Irish Catholics, since that might have saved their lands. Many gave a death toll of 300,000 based on Temple’s Irish Rebellion, but what Temple wrote was that 300,000 English Protestants had been murdered, died of other causes, or been “expelled out of their habitations.” There is a big difference between being forced out of your home and being murdered. Catholics denied that there had even been 100,000 Protestants in Ireland at the time. Meanwhile, in 1649 the Puritan poet John Milton — a rabid enemy of Catholics — put the number of those massacred in 1641 at 600,000.

This Big Lie became the foundational myth of colonial Ireland: It was on the basis of the 1641 rebellion that the 1662 Act of Settlement upheld the Cromwellian confiscations. Also in 1662 the Irish Parliament passed an act ordering the Anglican Church of Ireland to commemorate 1641 with an annual sermon on October 23. The state church added new prayers about 1641, incorporating them into the Irish Book of Common Prayer in 1666, where they remained until 1859, giving religious sanction to an egregious slander against the Irish people.

What can be said of a Christian worship turned into a self-righteous justification for oppression? Where was the Christian charity? In addition to a church service, the annual commemoration included public drinking, bell ringing, a gun salute, a bonfire, and a parade. By the end of the 17th century, a new colonial order prevailed in Ireland, with 800,000 Irish Catholics dispossessed and disenfranchised by 200,000 English and 100,000 Scottish Protestants — and government troops to enforce it.

Rationalists embraced the Big Lie: David Hume harped on the atrocities of 1641, and Voltaire wouldn’t listen to any arguments against the “reality” of the 1641 massacres, linking them to the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. For Hume and Voltaire, Gibney says, 1641 was a “genocidal sadism prompted by little more than hatred based on superstition.” When religious liberty for Catholics was debated in Ireland’s House of Lords in 1793, the Anglican bishop of Cashel rose up to defend the persecution of Catholics by reading aloud a “lurid extract about 1641 from David Hume.”

On the other side, the Catholic version of 1641 remained virtually the same from the 17th to the 19th century. Catholics said that the atrocities attributed to them were “inventions” used to justify their dispossession, that the death toll for Protestants was wildly exaggerated, and that in 1641 Protestants had been the first to inflict terrible brutalities on Irish Catholics across the land.

In 1662 a certain “R.S.” published a Collection of Some of the Murthers and Massacres Committed on the Irish in Ireland Since the 23rd of October 1641. Since Catholics had no freedom of the press, this tract was quickly suppressed and publicly burned in Ireland. Yet it gives, Gibney says, “a reasonably sober account of various brutalities visited on Catholics by Protestants and, later, by parliamentary forces.” R.S. ridicules the inflated death toll given for Protestants “on the reasonable grounds that the figures commonly given far exceeded the Protestant population in Ireland.” Moreover, he recounts how in one night English and Scottish soldiers massacred all the residents of Islandmagee — 3,000 men, women, and children — though no one in County Antrim was in rebellion. R.S. follows this with reports of similar massacres conducted by government troops, county by county.

In 1668 Catholic Bishop Nicholas French said that in 1641 “four hundred English could not be found murdered in Ireland.” In 1684 the Earl of Castlehaven wrote that the rebellion of 1641 arose from legitimate grievances and that the Lord Justices were the ones intent on “exterminating” all the Irish “who would not conform to the established church.” In Ireland’s Case Briefly Stated (1695), Hugh Reily argues that the Lord Justices needed a pretext to confiscate Irish land, so they authorized the massacres at Santry, Contarf, Bullock, Islandmagee, and Carrickfergus to provoke a rebellion. While the death toll given for Protestants was “absolutely impossible,” Catholics died in “much greater numbers.”

The major spokesman for the Irish in the 18th century was John Curry, who asked in his Brief Account (1746) why 1641 was “trumped up” with so many “unjust” exaggerations against his people. He declares that they had not committed a murder in 1641 that had not been “returned upon them at least four fold,” and that the official version was a slander “deliberately and cynically adopted to blacken the name of the Catholic Irish amid the formulation of the land settlement of the 1660s, and thereby used to dispossess them.” Edmund Burke sympathized with Curry, but to save his career in England he left his most important work on the topic unpublished: His “Tracts Relating to the Popery Law” (1765) declares that the Catholic rebellions in Ireland were not “produced by toleration but by persecution” and “arose not from just and mild government but from the most unparalleled oppression.”

In 1819 Matthew Carey published Vindiciae Hibernicae in America, with later editions carrying the commendations of Presidents John Adams and James Madison. By then the Big Lie about 1641 had been spread in this country by John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. Carey laments that the slander is, in his day, “almost as thoroughly believed as the best established fact in the annals of the world.” He asserts that there was no massacre in 1641 except for what the Dublin administration “perpetrated against the Irish” to confiscate their land, and he rightly calls the “penal laws” that deprived the Irish of religious freedom for 150 years “tyranny…covered by as base a cloak of hypocrisy as the annals of the world can produce.” He also neatly dissects the various death tolls given for Protestants and shows them to be based, Gibney says, on “forgery and perjury.”

A Catholic account of 1641 was produced by Daniel O’Connell in Memoir on Ireland Native and Saxon (1843), in which he argues that all the suffering of the Irish after 1641 stemmed “largely from calculated and gross Protestant misrepresentations of Catholic conduct during the rebellion.” He sees the lies surrounding 1641 as “the demoniacal means by which Protestantism and English power achieved their ascendancy in Ireland.”

Toward the end of The Shadow of a Year, Gibney discusses the late-19th-century debate between historians James Anthony Froude and W.E.H. Lecky. In The English in Ireland (1872-1874) Froude characterizes the Irish as “a savage, turbulent, and violent people” who needed civilizing by the English. Predictably, he takes the depositions compiled by Jones at face value, gives “uncritical acceptance” to the official version of 1641, and points to the “solemn annual commemoration” in the state church. Lecky responds in his History of Ireland (1892) by saying that the fantastic stories about Catholic atrocities were due to “Protestant designs on Catholic estates” and to the fear that the Irish might otherwise save their lands by “coming to terms” with the English government. He concedes that a rebellious mob in Ulster had committed awful crimes, but these had been “grossly, absurdly, and mendaciously exaggerated…almost beyond any other tragedy on record.” He discredits Sir John Temple as the one who “bore more responsibility than any other for propagating the notion of a massacre” and calls the depositions collected by Jones “untrustworthy.”

The Big Lie continued to propagate in the 20th century. Ernest Hamilton, in Soul of Ulster (1917), a work Gibney describes as “racist and sectarian,” suggests that the death toll for Protestants in 1641 could have been over a million and that “the soul of the native Irish has not at the present day changed by the width of a hair” from that time. Maude Glasgow, in The Scotch-Irish in North America (1936), repeats Milton’s assertion “without qualification” that 600,000 Protestants had been massacred.

At a 1998 conference at the University of Notre Dame commemorating the Tyrone Rebellion of 1798, I happened to see a new book by Ian McBride among the many on display. I skimmed it and discovered that he too reasserted the Big Lie about 1641. When I pointed this out to several people who were attending the conference, I was met with weary shrugs and the response, “What else is to be expected from McBride?”

Recently, the one-sided and mendacious depositions compiled by Henry Jones have been digitized. Gibney (and Ian Paisley) thinks this is a great idea, but I’m not convinced. In Alice Curtayne’s The Trial of Oliver Plunkett (1953), we read that the same Jones, who joined Cromwell’s army in 1649 and was promoted to Anglican bishop of Meath in 1661, was busy collecting new perjurers in 1680 to testify against St. Oliver Plunkett (who was found guilty of high treason for a fictitious plot to bring in the French army and restore the Catholic Church by force of arms). The Protestant duke of Ormonde, viceroy of Ireland, referred to Jones in a letter to his son as “not only a spiteful but a false informer.” Yes, Ormonde called him a liar. It seems that Jones’s Big Lie about 1641 is like a vampire that keeps resuscitating itself every century. We can hope and pray that Gibney’s book has thrust a stake through its beastly heart.

Anne Barbeau Gardiner, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She has published on Dryden, Milton, and Swift, as well as on Catholics of the seventeenth century.

The foregoing article, "The Big Lie: Ireland, 1641," was originally published in the May 2016 issue of the New Oxford Review and is reproduced here by kind permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706. 

While guilt narrative & white slavery denial

Jim Goad, "White Slavery Denial" (Taki's Magazine, May 16, 2016):

The currently approved conceptual framework for American race relations dictates that whites—all of them, simply by dint of being white—are oppressors. Any deviation from this rigid script, no matter how deeply rooted in fact, must be immediately annihilated like a blood-engorged tick.

We are taught that black academic and financial underperformance—as well as black over-performance in crime—are the direct result of slavery’s horrid legacy. There are to be no other possible explanations. To note the hugely embarrassing fact that American blacks live far longer and under vastly superior economic conditions in America than they do in any majority-black nation on Earth may be factual, but it is RACIST because it undermines the ironclad Guilt Narrative that must never be questioned.

Here are some facts that The Script demands you ignore:

1. Even at the peak of American slavery, only a tiny percentage of American whites—about 1.5%—owned slaves.
   
   
2. Leading up to the Civil War, a vastly higher quotient of whites had worked as indentured servants and convict laborers than had ever owned slaves. Most historians, regardless of their political orientation, agree that anywhere from half to two-thirds of whites who came to the American colonies arrived in bondage. The fact that the vast majority of whites existed in a state closer to slavery than to slave ownership is something resolutely ignored in the modern retelling of history.
   
   
3. Documents from the era show that so-called white “indentured servants” were often referred to as “slaves” rather than “servants.”
   
   
4. These “servants” did not always enter into voluntary contracts. There is overwhelming evidence that many of them were kidnapped by organized criminal rings and sent to work on American plantations. It is possible that as many, if not more, whites than blacks were brought involuntarily to the colonies.
   
   
5. The middle-passage death rates for these “servants” were comparable to that of blacks on slave ships from Africa to the New World.
   
   
6. Indentured servants were whipped and beaten, sometimes to death. When they escaped, ads were placed for their capture.
   
   
7. They lived under conditions so brutal that an estimated half of them died before their seven-year term of indenture expired.

Read more >> ... including the author's well-documented response to know-nothing attempts to 'rebut' these facts.

[Hat tip to L.S.]

Fr. Z's calculation of the world's creation off by approx. 123 million years

In a recent post, entitled "Happy Birthday Universe!" (Fr. Z's Blog, April 27, 2016), Fr. Z writes:

On this day in 4977 B.C., the universe [was] created, according to German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler ....

He goes on to relate a great many fascinating details about the life and times of Kepler, including the fact that he is sometimes considered the founder of modern science. In his concluding sentence, however, Fr. Z writes:

As for Kepler’s calculation about the universe’s birthday, scientists in the 20th century developed the Big Bang theory, which showed that his calculations were off by about 13.7 billion years.

Now please forgive me, but I take a fiendish delight in responding to such statistics by pointing out glaring errors when I find them. In his case, as any astro-physicist worth his salt knows, the figure cited above is off by a little over 100 million years. The exact figure can be inferred from the epiriometrics of the brilliant research scientist, A.D. Sokal, in his landmark essay, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" (1995), from which we can conclusively show that Fr. Z's figure is off by 123,857,487 years. The critical calculation is:


In light of which we are compelled to conclude that the Big Bang (and, omnia sint paribus, the creation of the world) occurred approximately 13.8 billion years ago, not 13.7 billion -- or, to be exact, 13,823,857,487 years ago at precisely 3:26 in the afternoon, Eastern Standard Time (anachronistically assuming Greenwich Mean Time existed then). I believe it was raining that afternoon.

In the interests of fair disclosure, my 'fiendish delight' in pointing out such errors stems from my studied skepticism regarding the philosophical conclusions inferred by scientists from their empiriometric and empirioschematic calculations, which are often presumptively taken for reality itself, as amply demonstrated by the physicist Anthony Rizzi in his book, The Science Before Science: A Guide to Thinking in the 21st Century, and by the Gifford Lecturer and Templeton Prize winning physicist, Stanley Jaki, in Means to Message: A Treatise on Truth. My skepticism also extends to the metaphysical claims either stated or implied in "The Grand Evolutionary Story" reiterated ad nauseam by contemporary textbooks of biology, parts of which Alvin Plantinga famously called "pure arrogant bluster."

So thank you, Fr. Z, for allowing me at your expense to skewer a bit of contemporary 'scientific bluster' with a bit of playful bluster of my own. I suppose you could claim that you covered yourself by the insertion of the cautionary term 'about' since 13.8 billion is 'about' 13.7 billion; and that might be true. Then again, would we really have any conclusive way of knowing whether we weren't off by 6-11 billion years, give or take a few hundred million? Or we could just take Stephen Hawking's word for it that it all happened "about 15 billion years ago."

How was the 16th Amendment 'ratified'? "103 consecutive years of legalised theft because what LOLA wants LOLA Gets"

Brought to you from the ever-endaring Amateur Brain Surgeon at www.letmecarveonyou.com (February 3, 2016), featuring, of course, LOLA (Legalised Oligarchy's Larcenous Aeaeae):


Or, as ABS but it in single breath:

The establishment wanted to take your money and spend it on their projects because they have always known how to spend it more wisely than you because y'all are acerebral limaceous lackeys who are not concerned with international business and international corporations and international banking but are selfishly focused of your faith and your family and y'all are easily denuded of your possessions by men who speak of national exceptionalism and so today we celebrate our One Hundred and Third consecutive year of being picked clean by the usurious establishment via the magic of a non-existent amendment.

Whew! He's breathing again now! (I think.) Read more >>

[Hat tip to ABS Ministries]