Marine Le Pen On Fire

 

Listen up, all ye heathen, Marine Le Pen's on fire:

Ask yourselves, since when did being a patriot, and a country having borders equate with Fascism? 

Follow the money to the root of the issue, our beloved, transnational, elite, insatiable great replacement rulers. Hint, dear readers, who benefits from massive immigration? Labor, or its private island owning boss. Ponder that, reflect on it, rainbow unicorn style.

In related news, Germany's donated 20,000 HE artillery shells to the Ukraine out of its stock of, ahem, 20,000 shells, but at least they have 15 nukes. Does this mean European defense policy is equivalent to some guy walking around unarmed with a dynamite vest? You get the issue.

Regardless, and as always, your call,

LSP

Listen Up Heathen

 

Yesterday was the Feast of St. Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist. Here's the late great Canadian, Fr. Crouse:

The mission of the Church is to call us out of darkness; by word and sacrament to set before our eyes the vision of God's glory in the face of Jesus Christ. That is at the heart of liturgy, and all the Christian arts; the light of pure, transcendent glory must shine through, and that is essential to all our intellectual and moral and ascetical disciplines, too. Without that vision, all else so easily falls into deceit and craftiness; or perhaps, at best, narrowness of spirit, or just pedestrian nonsense. But even pedestrian nonsense, you know, if that's all there is, is a pretty nasty form of hell (my emph, LSP).

May we, along with Matthew - rejoicing in his fellowship, and aided by his prayers - be granted grace, that in this liturgy, and in all the images of earthly life, we may glimpse the face of Jesus Christ; and then, beyond all earthly images, "beheld with open face" that everlasting glory. That is, after all, our calling.

I cannot add to that,

LSP

Listen Up Heathen

 

Via Adrienne:

After a speech, pro-life activist Penny Lea was approached by an old man. Weeping, he told her the following story:

"I lived in Germany during the Nazi holocaust. I considered myself a Christian. I attended church since I was a small boy. We had heard the stories of what was happening to the Jews, but like most people today in this country, we tried to distance ourselves from the reality of what was really taking place. What could anyone do to stop it?

A railroad track ran behind our small church, and each Sunday morning we would hear the whistle from a distance and then the clacking of the wheels moving over the track. We became disturbed when one Sunday we noticed cries coming from the train as it passed by. We grimly realized that the train was carrying Jews. They were like cattle in those cars!

Week after week that train whistle would blow. We would dread to hear the sound of those old wheels because we knew that the Jews would begin to cry out to us as they passed our church. It was so terribly disturbing! We could do nothing to help these poor miserable people, yet their screams tormented us. We knew exactly at what time that whistle would blow, and we decided the only way to keep from being so disturbed by the cries was to start singing our hymns. By the time that train came rumbling past the church yard, we were singing at the top of our voices. If some of the screams reached our ears, we'd just sing a little louder until we could hear them no more. Years have passed and no one talks about it much anymore, but I still hear that train whistle in my sleep. I can still hear them crying out for help. God forgive all of us who called ourselves Christians, yet did nothing to intervene."

"Their screams tormented us... If some of their screams reached our ears we'd just sing a little louder." 

Read the whole thing here.

Your Pal,

LSP 

 

Listen Up Heathen

Presented without comment except to say all hail B16 and this. England wasn't known as Mary's Dowry for nothing; let's get that back, eh? And stop skulking in low-level, stripped pine, plate-on-the-wall kitchens.

While we're at it, reclaim the Faith from the enemy who's infested the Holy Church of God.

Ut Unum Sint,

LSP

Epiphany

We celebrate the great Feast of the Epiphany today and with it look to the Magi, the Wise Men, who in turn point to Christ and reveal his nature in their gifts. Gold for Kingship, frankincense for divinity and myrrh for embalming and death. The Christ child is our divine king whose throne is the cross. But what of the Magi themselves?

They were astronomers who followed a star, and some argue this was a supernova, a conjunction of planets or something else again, a miraculous event. Perhaps it was all of these, but the Wise Men were more than  astral calculators, they were "wise," they looked for the truth and they found it, Incarnate, lying in a manger.

I was struck by this, from Pope Benedict XVI:

They were "wise." They represent the inner dynamic of religion toward self-transcendence, which involves a search for truth, a search for the true God and hence "philosophy" in the original sense of the word. Wisdom, then, serves to purify the message of "science": the rationality of that message does not remain at the level of intellectual knowledge, but seeks understanding in its fullness, and so raises reason to its loftiest possibilities.

Loftiest possibilities? Heaven itself and the throne of glory, all to be found in the baby lying under a star in a manger.

God bless you all,

LSP

Ascension Reflection

On Thursday we celebrated the Feast of the Ascension and, here in the Missions, carried the theme on to Sunday. Christ rises to heaven, Victim and Victor, taking his resurrected body up to glory, the glory that is the life of God himself. 

But how can anything corporal be assimilated by God who is pure Spirit (John 4:24)? Surely there's an unfathomable divide between the two. Perhaps this is helpful, by Romano Guardini:

...by comparison with the Holy Spirit, body and soul, matter and spirit, person and thing are all “carnal.” Between all these and the Living God lies not only the distance between Creator and creature; not only the distance which divides life in grace from life in nature; but also the infinite gulf between saint and sinner which only God’s love can bridge. Before this bottomless ravine, the difference between earthly body and soul shrinks into insignificance.

That God pardons the sinner and accepts the creature into his holy presence – this is the new and overwhelming message of Christ. Once we have assimilated this truth, the additional incomprehensibility of God’s accepting not only created spirit, but also created flesh, no longer seems great. His salutary love is directed not exclusively towards the “soul” but towards man in his entirety. The new, saved man is founded on the divine humanity of Jesus, and this humanity, begun in the Annunciation, was fulfilled in the Ascension. Not until Christ has entered into the intimacy of the Father, is he the perfect God-man.

What a scandal to our blinded and earthly sense, but what a cause for awestruck joy that humanity in Christ should be elevated above the angels to the life of God himself.

Here endeth the lesson,

LSP

The Feast of St. Matthew The Apostle

Listen up, Heathen.

It's the Feast of St. Matthew the Apostle, so throw your grimoire in the trash, bin chalice, wand and sword, burn that dog-eared Tarot and say your prayers. Here's one, from the 1928 BCP:

O ALMIGHTY God, who by thy blessed Son didst call Matthew from the recipt of custom to be an Apostle and Evangelist; Grant us grace to forsake all covetous desires, and inordinate love of riches, and to follow the same thy Son Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

Saint Matthew, pray for us.

LSP

Listen Up, Heathen, It's The Trinity

If, like Mohammad, you decided to make up a religion for profit, power and gain, you wouldn't come up with the Trinity. Three Persons, one God isn't the kind a thing a huckster would pitch to his mug punters, it's too difficult. And therein lies one of the arguments for the revealed truth of Christianity. That said, how can we make sense of it? Frank Sheed, in Theology and Sanity, explains Thomas Aquinas' reasoning with clarity.

Starting from the infinite knowledge of God, Sheed makes the point that such knowledge must have a commensurate object that is also infinite. God's knowledge must therefore be self-knowledge and this concept or idea is the Son or Word. He advises the "beginner" to study the following "minutely":

An idea is, so far as we can make it so, the mental double or image of the object we are contemplating; it expresses as much of that object as we can manage to get into it. Because of the limitation of our powers, the idea we form is never the perfect double or image, never totally expresses the object, in plain words is never totally adequate. But if God does, as we know from Himself that He does, generate an idea of Himself, this idea must be totally adequate, in no way less than the Being of which it is the Idea, lacking nothing that that Being has. 

The Idea must contain all the perfection of the Being of which it is the Idea. There can be nothing in the Thinker that is not in His Thought of Himself, otherwise the Thinker would be thinking of Himself inadequately, which is impossible for the Infinite.

Thus the Idea, the Word that God generates, is Infinite, Eternal, Living, a Person, equal in all things to Him Who generates It. Someone as He is, conscious of Himself as He is, God as He is.

So we see the Son, begotten from the infinite knowledge of the Father and as with knowledge, likewise with love. Father and Son combine in an infinite act of love which produces a perfect state of "Lovingness" which has all that they have.

To a point the two "processions" are parallel. The First Person knows Himself; His act of knowing Himself produces an Idea, a Word; and this Idea, this Word, the perfect Image of Himself, is the Second Person. The First Person and the Second combine in an act of love of one another, love of the glory of the Godhead which is their own; and just as the act of knowing produces an Idea within the Divine Nature, the act of loving produces a state of Lovingness within the Divine Nature.

Into this Lovingness, Father and Son pour all that They have and all that They are, with no diminution, nothing held back. Thus this Lovingness within the Godhead is utterly equal to the Father and the Son, for They have poured Their all into it. There is nothing They have which Their Lovingness does not have. Thus Their Lovingness too is Infinite, Eternal, Living, Someone, a Person, God. 

Observe that here again we are still within the Divine Nature. For love is wholly within the nature of the lover.

But this love wholly contains the divine Nature, because God puts the whole of Himself into love.

Complicated? No, it's not so much that as so simple it's not easy, but whoever said life would be? Thank you, Frank Sheed, for explaining the Angelic Doctor so clearly. 

You can read the whole thing here.

God bless,

LSP

The Genius of Scripture

Inspired by a Sunday Sermonette, I feel compelled to share this passage of Scripture, it's from the Book of Kings:

And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tear forty and two children of them. (2 Kings 23-24)

Make of that what you will.

God bless,

LSP