Of Bombs, Budget and Bombast
*Our prayers go out for all the victims and, yes, the perpetrators of yesterday’s attacks in Belgium. We are up against a determined enemy, willing to kill, and to die, for their disordered cause. Nothing so motivates a man as religious zeal, but we must recall that that does not make religion evil. Corruptio optimi pessima, the corruption of the best is the worst: It is only because religion is so good, that it can be so evil.
*As I have written before, everyone has a ‘religion’, that one thing which is ‘master of his affections’ as Saint Thomas puts it. Many in our world, it seems, have a fickle religion, their own pleasure, the fleeting desires of the moment, an effervescent chasing after new experiences. This is a puerile stuff, compared to which the Islam of the ‘Islamic State’ is cold, hard steel, through which it has and will continue to cut a swath of destruction, as they have already promised to do in Britain and America.
*Yet we continue to attenuate and eviscerate the very forces that might stand up to such a threat. It is curious that on the very day of the attacks it was announced in America that the Marines, in many ways the world’s premier fighting force, will now be forced to undergo ‘sensitivity sessions’ to integrate women into their front-line forces. They have already been forced to integrate homosexuals under the Clintonian regime. One of the aspects in the new ‘sensitivity training’ will be to teach the men, and now the women, how to organize their sleeping arrangements out in the field without getting, shall we say, frisky or untoward. Hmm. I would posit they might figure that out for themselves, not always for the good of those involved.
*Most front-line Marines, reports and common sense tell us, are against this ill-advised integration, and rightly so. Women should not be in front line combat, for a whole host of reasons.
*I am not sure of the stance of Donald Trump on this question, but, at least at a superficial level on other topics, he seems to cut through the miasma of similar vapid and irrational political correctness (but, alas, often with his own vapid and miasmic comments).
* Would that we had a leader of true moral, intellectual and spiritual integrity! To paraphrase Saint Augustine, however, we get the leaders we deserve, and I fear we may only regain sanity in our culture through a great deal of suffering that brings us back to our senses, and to our knees.
*And speaking of insanity, Trudeau’s recent ‘budget’, and I put that word in scare quotes since not much is ‘budgeted’, is a pure paradigm of Keynesian and socialist principles, ‘directing a fire hose of cash at pet Liberal causes’, as one commentator put it. Whatever their misguided intentions (will an extra 8.4 billion dollars really help ‘Native causes’?), Canada seems headed for a looming default on its unmanageable debt, far bigger and far less fixable than the crisis in Greece. Add another 30-odd billion. What does it matter? We are on our way to becoming a bankrupt third-world country.
*We may have to hit the wall in more ways than one for us to ‘get it’. Of course, one could adopt the wisdom of the Church’s social teaching, applied in a rational manner to the concrete circumstances in which one finds oneself, and things would be much better. But, alas, no. We have to learn the hard way, through the destructive policies of Trudeau and his fawning ministers, given all the air time they want on the meretricious bought-and-paid-for CBC.
*And, on a final note for today’s musings, I was surprised to learn that George Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, was firmly and unavowedly against contraception, and in fact predicted that it would not only destroy true love and affection, but would become a nefarious tool used by a totalitarian State to enslave its populace (such a State vividly brought to life by his bleak dystopia 1984). The article is well worth a read in First Things, but I will leave you with a sobering thought from the great author, which applies just as much to our times as to his own, which sums up my own far better than I could express:
It is in fact in moments of moral and spiritual struggle . . . that men and women come nearest to being real. If you do away with this struggle, and maintain that by tolerance, benevolence, inoffensiveness and a redistribution or increase of purchasing power, combined with a devotion, on the part of the elite, to Art, the world will be as good as anyone could require, then you must expect human beings to become more and more vapourous.
*So stay real, and stay true, for vaporous becomes us not. A blessed Triduum to all!
Carney’s Amoral Majority
After five defections – euphemistically described as ‘crossing the floor’ – and three by-elections, Mark Carney and his Liberals how have their coveted majority. One wonders what bowls of pottage were offered in back-room deals. In the archaic monarchical system that is the Dominion of Canada, this majority allows the newly-minted Prime Minister to rule[…]Continue reading→
Saint Kateri , Canada’s Protectress
This was the title given to Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, by Pope Benedict XVI, when he canonized her on October 28th, 2012, along with six others, in Saint Peter’ Square (she had been beatified by Pope John Paul II back in 1980). With Saint Joseph as our protector, along with the Canadian martyrs, we seem to[…]Continue reading→
A Tale of Two Benedicts
A grace-filled Holy Week to all our readers! As we await and prepare for the Resurrection about to dawn upon us, we might keep in mind two Benedicts: Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, requiescat in pace, elected on this day in 2005; and today’s commemoration of the mystic pilgrim, Benedict Joseph Labre, who died on this[…]Continue reading→
My Name is Bernadette
April 16th is a propitious day, for besides the anniversary of Father de Valk’s death, who founded Catholic Insight in its print form decades ago, and the commemoration of the ‘two Benedicts’, mentioned in accompanying posts, today we also recall Saint Bernadette Soubirous, the young visionary to whom the Virgin Mary appeared numerous times at[…]Continue reading→
Saint Lydwina of Schiedam and Suffering Joyfully
Saint Lydwina of Schiedam (1380 – 1433) was one of the countless and glorious ‘victim souls’ in the history of the Church, those whose lives are filled with suffering, often of an unimaginable intensity, but who suffer joyfully. She was a fifteen-year old Dutch girl, out skating one day, when she fell and broke one[…]Continue reading→
The Glorious Martyrdoms of Martin and Maximus
As we enter into Eastertide, we recall on this 13th of April Pope Saint Martin I (+655), one of the noblest, if most tragic, of the successors of Saint Peter. Born in Umbria, Italy, he was of noble lineage, with great intelligence combined with charity and love of the poor and the Church. While still[…]Continue reading→
Saint Stanislaus of Szczepanów
We celebrate Saint Stanislaus today (+ April 11, 1079), in light of this Easter Octave, a bishop and martyr who accepted the episcopacy only at the direct order of Pope Alexander II. He proved a wise and courageous leader of his flock, put to death by his own king, Boleslaus, for rebuking the monarch’s ‘immoral[…]Continue reading→
Saint Gemma Galgani
On this April 11th, in 1903 – the same year that the Italian Guiseppe Sarto was elected Pope later that summer as Pius X – a lovely, young Italian woman died, by the name of Gemma Galgani. She lived a brief life of 24 years, as did a number of other young saints, including Pier[…]Continue reading→
An Ideological and Improper Translation
I noticed something odd with the psalm reading at Mass the other day. Our bishops’ conference here in Canada has decreed that the Mass in English – Novus Ordo – use the ‘NRSV’, the ‘New Revised Standard Version’, an ‘updated’ translation of the original RSV, first published in 1952. This ‘new translation’ has the tendency[…]Continue reading→
Saint Jean-Baptiste de la Salle: A Teacher for Teachers
Jean-Baptiste de la Salle (1651 – 1719), a French nobleman, ordained a priest, founded the first order in the Church’s history entirely without priests, and this came about almost by accident. I say ‘almost’, for, of course, there are no accidents with God. Destined for ordination from an early age, Jean-Baptiste never looked back, even[…]Continue reading→