Magnificat

 

Never, ever forget the power of the Western Rite. Yes, it's more austere than its Eastern equivalent, perhaps less emotional, but cold and without feeling? No, it has all the power of the Crusades, of Charlemagne, of the Western Empire converted.

Of course you may well prefer a praise band, and that's OK too, if you must, but here's our music, the music of Western Christendom, playing out in Oxford, Solemn Vespers (Evening Prayer, all you Anglicans):

Europe, said Belloc, is the Faith. Both are under attack right now, egregiously. Rise up and reclaim your homeland as you, with the Immaculate Mother of God magnify the Lord.

LSP

A Lament

 

Like all true patriots I was going to post memes of Harambe tonight, along with not so subtle references to the UK's NHS screening men for pregnancy, Two-Tier Kier locking people up for mean tweets, and the bizarre apotheosis of Kackling Kamala. Or "La," as she's now known on Joy to the World Leftist agitprop media like the View. Yes, that's what I was going to do, but we're in the Octave of the Assumption so here's something altogether more serious, a Lament:

In the wrackes of Walsingam
Whom should I chuse
But the Queene of Walsingam
To be guide to my muse?

Then, thou Prince of Walsingam
Graunt me to frame
Bitter plaintes to rewe thy wronge
Bitter wo for thy name.

Bitter was it, oh to see
The sely sheepe
Murdred by the raveninge wolves
While the sheepharde did sleep.

Bitter was it, oh, to viewe
The sacred vyne
Whiles the gardiners plaied all close
Rooted up by the swine.

Bitter, bitter oh to behoulde
The grasse to growe
Where the walles of Walsingam
So stately did shewe.

Such were the worth of Walsingam
While she did stand
Such are the wrackes as now do shewe
Of that so holy lande.

Levell, levell with the ground
The Towres doe lye
Which with their golden, glitt'ring tops
Pearsed oute to the skye.

Where weare gates noe gates are nowe,
The waies unknowen,
Where the presse of freares did passe
While her fame far was blowen.

Oules do scrike where the sweetest himnes
Lately wear songe,
Toades and serpents hold their dennes
Where the palmers did throng.

Weep, weep O Walsingam,
Whose dayes are nightes,
Blessings turned to blasphemies,
Holy deedes to dispites.

Sinne is where our Ladye sate,
Heaven turned is to helle;
Sathan sitte where our Lord did swaye,
Walsingam, oh, farewell!

 

What pain in those lines. The purity and innocency of the Faith, exemplified by Our Lady; think Piers Plowman and Urban, the first Crusade, and the Lament itself, this had been trampled underfoot by evil men. 

You see, what had happened was that a syphilitic despot needed money, he was short of cash, both for himself and to pay off and create an aristocracy loyal to him. Problem. Solution? Sack the church, not least the holy shrine of Walsingham, England's Nazareth, and rake in the loot. Which is exactly what he did, and make no mistake, there was plenty to loot, over half a millennium of continuous giving and associated endowments. Rich pickings.

So, well done, Henry, you got your Field of the Cloth of Gold and created a whole new class of millionaire who waxed fat off of Church lands and went on in the next generation to cut of Charles' head. Bad enough, to say nothing of the catastrophic effect on England's piety. 

England's piety, consider that. A country which had been known as Mary's Dowry, the most Marian realm in Europe, became a place where even the Rosary was illegal. Imagine, a land whose people had the greatest devotion to Mary, the Mother of God, Theotokos, were banned from asking, publicly, for her intercession. As in, how dare you, traitor. Now we're going to draw out your entrails, and burn them as you hang. Traitor to the State.

Yes indeed, Sathan sitte where our Lord did swaye.

Fast forward. We're reaping the rewards of Henrician blasphemy now, Godless despotism and Satanic degeneracy masquerading as tolerance and love; endless deceit barely covering bestial profiteering, see Ukraine and everywhere else. But surely, LSP, you go too far, how can Walsingham's ruin count as our own?

In every way. One of the civilized, Catholic provinces of the Western Empire gave itself over to ruining the Church for profit, and from there to giving its weight to a Reformation which without her would've been still-born, a confusion of Eastern Germans. With her, it became a powerhouse as England expanded on her late Medieval genius and went on to rule the world.

Industrial Revolution, anyone? And with that, what Vigo Demant called "the greatest disaster ever to befall the world," (I remember him intoning the Angelus at the end of Mass at S. Mary Mag's, Oxford) exported her disbelief around the globe. And you will note that the same country whose Puritan army smashed the monasteries, convents, iconography, altars and windows of its churches, which banned devotion to the Mother of God, doesn't believe in Him anymore. The whole Reformation experiment, powered by the great Catholic Medieval Power, England, poisoned Christendom with disbelief and every kind of vice. And all, at root, for cash.

We're suffering from it here, when you think for half a second on it. Problem. Solution? Pray for the powerful intercession of the Immaculate, Ever Virgin Mother of God. Her seed, you'll recall, will crush the serpent's head.

END.

LSP

Kaiser Hymn

 

Behold, Otto von Hapsburg is laid to rest. A friend was there, ordained by JPII no less, and loved it. Apparently people turned up in Death's Head Hussar uniforms. Respect. Regardless, here's the Kaisar Hymn:

If you scorn the above you're an utter fool. That said, can we wind the clock back to a better, more gilded and glorious age? I'd argue, no, we cannot. On topic if a bit oblique, Chesterton and Belloc argued and argued well for "swords about the Cross." 

Well said, Church Militant, and then the world turned and WWI crashed in with some 60,000 British men dying in the first day of the Somme offensive alone. All of a sudden Chester/Belloc didn't look so good.  The War, you see, caught them left-footed, military metaphor didn't look so bright and we lost faith in our culture. 

Fail. But not so fast, punters, what's wrong with being proud of your country and its tradition, what's wrong with celebrating Christian leadership, not least the Hapsburgs. Nothing at all, especially when we consider its opposite, the Godless, Satanic, kill-it-in-the womb fangs of our omnipresent Aggressor; hiding, of course, behind euphemisms and lies, like "Woman's Healthcare."

Their ruler is the Father of Lies and a murderer from the beginning. His kingdom has been broken, definitively, by the Cross. Here endeth the Lesson.

Walk in the light,

LSP

The New Feudalism?

Hilaire Belloc wrote this, in Europe and the Faith (1920) about the fall of the Roman Empire. 

All that happened was that Roman civilization having grown very old, failed to maintain that vigorous and universal method of local government subordinated to the capital, which it had for four or five hundred years supported. The machinery of taxation gradually weakened; the whole of central bureaucratic action weakened; the greater men in each locality began to acquire a sort of independence, and sundry soldiers benefited by the slow (and enormous) change, occupied the local "palaces" as they were called, of Roman administration, secured such revenues as the remains of Roman taxation could give them, and, conversely, had thrust upon them so much of the duty of government as the decline of civilization could still maintain. That is what happened, and that is all that happened.

All that happened? Belloc was known for hyperbole and he was busy refuting a false view of history in the wake of World War I. Still, his insight into the murky transition of the Western Roman Empire into the Dark Ages and medievalism is well worth the read, to my mind at least. 

Check it out if you have the time. But what's always grabbed my attention is this, The machinery of taxation gradually weakened; the whole of central bureaucratic action weakened; the greater men in each locality began to acquire a sort of independence.

His point being that power began to coalesce into the hands of increasingly wealthy landowners at the expense of central government. Landowners who were effectively exempt from taxation and at the command, he argues, of military force. A small step from that to feudalism, and so to today.

According to Zerohedge and Forbes, Bill Gates in his wisdom has acquired over 200,000 acres of farmland in the US. Likewise, media mogul John Malone owns 2.2 million acres and CNN founder Ted Turner 2 million.

That's a lot of land, which by the way isn't being made anymore, and it doesn't take a vast amount of insight to draw the Roman parallel. Where will it end? Most obviously, to people being villains, serfs and tenant farmers on their billionaire socialist rulers' land. Also to devolution and Balkanization. History evidently rhymes.

Ad maiorem Dei gloriam,

LSP

Parisians Sing As Notre Dame Burns

Europe, and by extension the West, is the Faith, a Faith which is increasingly, vehemently under attack. The burning of Notre Dame serves as an apt symbol.

Here's Z's take via WRSA:

As news spread of the fire consuming the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the first reaction of most people was shock and sadness. You don’t have to be Catholic or French to feel as if some part of you has been lost. That was not just an old building or a historically important place. It was a symbol of Western civilization. Stand inside a great church and you feel the awe and power that inspired the builders. That cathedral was the primal roar of a people celebrating their creator and the essence of who they were as a people.

Of course, it did not take long for people to notice that its burning was a metaphor for the current crisis in the West. As Europe is swamped by Muslims, promising to replace Europeans in their own lands, it is only a matter of time before the great churches are turned into mosques or destroyed. Despite the endless propaganda from our rulers, most people here and there, are well aware of what’s happening. They don’t know how to articulate it or react to it, but they know. Watching the fire, they knew what it meant.

An aggressive take on a tragedy? Perhaps, but one which took place in the midst of a wave of attacks on French churches this year, though you'd hardly know it from our media. 

Notre Dame still stands, thank God; does the Faith it represents? It does, though badly eroded in the West, but if it were to go and with it the soul of our culture, what would take its place, what will fill the vacuum?

Serious question,

LSP

Counter Revolution

Via Forward in Christ magazine:

Who will save Christian civilization with all its values and freedoms from the revolutionaries who want to destroy it?

The answer, of course, is the Church. As Belloc famously wrote, Europe is the Faith. The Faith, catholic Christianity, is at the foundation and heart of Western culture, it defines us and provides the necessary value to fight back against the anti-value of the destroyers.

“They build and we destroy,” says the Satanist Manasseh in Williams’ War in Heaven. Manasseh, in the grip of his hatred wasn’t wrong; the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, militant on earth, builds up with all the creative power of God Himself.

You can read the whole thing here if you like and while you're at it...

Out, Demons, Out,

LSP 

Palm Sunday Wisdom

Tomorrow's Palm Sunday and it always seems, liturgically, to be a bit of a double cross. We welcome Christ as King, Hosanna in the highest, and the next minute it's Crucify Him. But it's in the Passion that Christ's kingship is revealed.

The late Fr. Crouse puts it well:

"Are you a king then?" asks Pilate. Yes, he is a king. "Thou sayest it." Yes, he is a king. But kingship is not what Pilate thinks it is; not what the world thinks it is. Yes, he is a king: "But now is my kingdom not from hence, if it were, then would my servants fight...but now is my kingdom not from hence." The ways of God's Kingdom are not the world's ways, and the glory of its kingship is altogether different. Its kingship is the kingship of a servant, its liberty is the liberty of free obedience; its virtue is humility. "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus." That is the essential message of this day.

Its virtue is humility or blessed are the poor in spirit. Theirs, we learn, is the kingdom of heaven. By the grace of God.

Defeat the Turk,

LSP

Belloc - Modern Attack

Belloc -- the Anti-Crowley

From time to time I like to read to read Belloc, one of the more aggressive catholic apologists of the last century and a sort of 'bad cop' to Chesterton's good one. Here's what he had to say about modernism and the nascent secular state:

"The Faith is now in the presence not of a particular heresy as in the past - the Arian, the Manichean, the Albigensian, the Mohammedan, nor is it in the presence of a sort of generalized heresy as it was when it had to meet the Protestant revolution from three to four hundred years ago.

The enemy which the Faith now has to meet, and which may be called "The Modern Attack," is a wholesale assault upon the fundamentals of the Faith, upon the very existence of the Faith. And the enemy now advancing against us is increasingly conscious of the fact that there can be no question of neutrality. The forces now opposed to the Faith design to destroy. The battle is henceforward engaged upon a definite line of cleavage, involving the survival or destruction of the Catholic Church. And all, not a portion, of its philosophy."

You can read the whole thing here, from chapter seven of The Great Heresies (pub. 1938).

I think his analysis is pretty much on target, whether his conclusions follow remains to be seen.

In the meanwhile, horse training proceeds apace, with Jeanne Belle (Thoroughbred mare) making excellent progress -- lunges well, gaits are becoming smoother, there's increased collection and all 'round improvement in manners. Still, a long way to go for the pair of us; I'll post some photos when the camera decides to work again/is replaced.

Cheers,

LSP

Churches I Like

I haven't celebrated Mass there for years but I love the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, in Norfolk. I believe the place has deep sanctity.

The Shrine was a great center of pilgrimmage during the Middle Ages until its destruction at the Reformation. The 16th Century Arundel Ballad laments the loss:

Oules do scrike where the sweetest himnes

Lately wear songe,

Toades and serpents hold their dennes

Where the palmers did throng.

Weep, weep O Walsingam,
Whose dayes are nightes,
Blessings turned to blasphemies,
Holy deedes to dispites.

Sinne is where our Ladye sate,
Heaven turned is to helle;
Sathan sitte where our Lord did swaye,
Walsingam, oh, farewell!

But the tragedy of Walsingam's despoilation was reversed when Fr. Hope-Patten refounded the Shrine in the 1920s-30s and it continues as a popular place of pilgrimmage and devotion today.

Go there if you can and take time out to enjoy the pubs, if they haven't been banned, but be warned - conversation waxes theological.

God bless & Good Shooting,

LSP

PS. For an interesting take on the Reformation, and the new breed of millionaire it produced, check out Mr. Belloc's "What was the Reformation?"

Slavers

Grand Mufti with Top Saudi Clerics

In a characteristically irenic gesture towards peace in the Middle East, leading Saudi government cleric, Sheikh Saad Al-Buraik, told Palestinians how to act towards Jewish women, "Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours. Why don't you enslave their women?" Why not indeed. According to high-level Saudi jurist, Sheikh Saleh Al-Fawzan, “Slavery is a part of Islam. Slavery is part of jihad, and jihad will remain as long there is Islam.” And for a fact, slavery is alive and well in several Islamist countries, such as the Sudan, Somalia, Niger, Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, to name several.

But perhaps we needn't go so far afield to find the kind of human subjagation endorsed by the Koran, here in the West we've been at something like it for several generations. Belloc had this to say:

"The more the State steps in to enforce conditions of security and sufficiency; the more it regulates wages, provides compulsory insurance, doctoring, education, and in general takes over the lives of the wage-earners, for the benefit of the companies and men employing the wage-earners, the more is this condition of semi-slavery accentuated. And if it be continued for, say, three generations, it will become so thoroughly established as a social habit and frame of mind that there may be no escape from it in the countries where State Socialism of this kind has been forged and riveted on the body politic.

In Europe, England in particular (but many other countries in a lesser degree) has bound itself to this system. Below a certain level of income a man is guaranteed a bare subsistence should he be out of employment. It is doled out to him by public officials at the expense of losing human dignity. Every circumstance of his family is examined; he is even more in the hands of these officials when out of employment than in the hands of his employer when employed. The thing is still in transition; the mass of men do not yet see to what goal they are tending; but the neglect of human dignity, the potential, if not actual, denial of the doctrine of free will, have led by a natural consequence to what are already semi-servile institutions. These will become fully servile institutions as time goes on." Belloc, An Essay Against Communism

I think Belloc was right; the "servile state" that he prophecied so accurately is surely a natural consequence of our ongoing retreat from the Incarnational Faith which endows mankind with inalienable worth. With that foundation abandoned, freedom becomes an exercise in dictatorship and the triumph of the strongest will.

Perhaps, then, it's no accident that we see the Socialist Worker's Party marching in step with Jihadi terrorists, for both deny in their separate ways the real value of the human person and are slavers, united in their attack on what was once christendom. The question is, do we have the conviction to fight back the assault?

Just a thought!

LSP