Saturday, November 2, 2024

All Souls

 



No sooner has the dust settled from All Saints than we arrive at All Souls. For me, the former's exuberant, the latter somber as we recall the souls of the faithful departed who have left this life, leaving a gap in our lives. But where have they gone?

To paradise and the beatific vision, albeit for the most part by way of purgatory, and that's a beautiful thing worth striving for by the grace of God. In light of that, here's this, inspired by LL, Dia de los Muertes:




May they rest in peace and rise in glory,

LSP

Friday, November 1, 2024

All Saints

 



Here we are on the Feast of All Saints, celebrating those great heroes of the Faith whose lives have been transformed and transfigured by the grace of God. Living proof, if you like, of the truth of our faith, of the business of the Christian religion.

So we honor and celebrate the Saints, these outstanding examples of holiness. But never forget we're called to sanctity too, holiness and the vision of God is our true end or τέλος. So how do we get there? Benedict XVI offers us this:


But how can we become holy, friends of God? We can first give a negative answer to this question: to be a Saint requires neither extraordinary actions or works nor the possession of exceptional charisms. Then comes the positive reply: it is necessary first of all to listen to Jesus and then to follow him without losing heart when faced by difficulties. "If anyone serves me", he warns us, "he must follow me; and where I am, there shall my servant be also; if any one serves me, the Father will honour him" (Jn 12: 26).

Like the grain of wheat buried in the earth, those who trust him and love him sincerely accept dying to themselves. Indeed, he knows that whoever seeks to keep his life for himself loses it, and whoever gives himself, loses himself, and in this very way finds life (cf. Jn 12: 24-25).

The Church's experience shows that every form of holiness, even if it follows different paths, always passes through the Way of the Cross, the way of self-denial. The Saints' biographies describe men and women who, docile to the divine plan, sometimes faced unspeakable trials and suffering, persecution and martyrdom. They persevered in their commitment: "they... have come out of the great tribulation", one reads in Revelation, "they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb" (Rv 7: 14). Their names are written in the book of life (cf. Rv 20: 12) and Heaven is their eternal dwelling-place...

Holiness demands a constant effort, but it is possible for everyone because, rather than a human effort, it is first and foremost a gift of God, thrice Holy (cf. Is 6: 3). In the second reading, the Apostle John remarks: "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are" (I Jn 3: 1).

It is God, therefore, who loved us first and made us his adoptive sons in Jesus. Everything in our lives is a gift of his love: how can we be indifferent before such a great mystery? How can we not respond to the Heavenly Father's love by living as grateful children? In Christ, he gave us the gift of his entire self and calls us to a personal and profound relationship with him.

Consequently, the more we imitate Jesus and remain united to him the more we enter into the mystery of his divine holiness. We discover that he loves us infinitely, and this prompts us in turn to love our brethren. Loving always entails an act of self-denial, "losing ourselves", and it is precisely this that makes us happy.

 

How can we be indifferent before such a great mystery? How can we not respond to the Heavenly Father's love by living as grateful children? And doing so by following Christ, even to the Cross, which is the gateway to everlasting life and the Beatific Vision itself.

Persevere, my friends.

Salve,

LSP

Thursday, October 31, 2024

Halloween Scary

 



I'd imagine many of you think Halloween is Satan's birthday, but you'd be wrong in thinking that. No, Halloween is the Eve of All Saints, a Feast which marks the victory of God, of light over darkness in the sanctified lives of His holy people. But that's for tomorrow, in the meanwhile, the demons are allowed to play. And what a play they make.


Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here

Here in this small Texan rural community they mostly run around asking for candy, many it seems in the safe space of 1st Baptist car park. A living parable of the world around us, perhaps. Here, let me leave you with something scary. Maybe you remember all that "joy."



Out Demons Out,

LSP

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Just Go To Mass

 


So, LSP, where do you to Mass in London, if you go at all, which we doubt you ask with that knowing smile on your face. Ah hah, not so fast, punters, I do go to Mass in London and here's where, the Brompton Oratory in Knightsbridge.

Why? Because it's most awesome, with remarkable music, think Tallis, Tye, Byrd etc, and there you have it, the music transports your soul to heaven, and the oriented Novus Ordo but in Latin liturgy (lections English) does the same. And all with efficiency, they don't fumble about and mess around.




I tell you, this Solemn High Concert Mass lasts exactly one hour and fifteen minutes, perfect, leaving you with plenty of time to catch a cab, aka fast mover, to St. James' Square and Sunday lunch at the Club. No bad thing.

So, if you want a dose of real religion and you're in London, if you want to feel like you've been to church, go to the Brompton Oratory, it won't disappoint. Or go to St. Peter's London Docks, but that's a different if similar post.

Your Pal,

LSP

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Texas is Awesome Liturgical Dance is Not

 



It's great to be back in Texas where there's no liturgical dance outside of Austin, just all this big sky threatening rain, yes please, and dusty roads. But maybe this angers you, maybe you want liturgical dance. Here, have a look:




Beautiful, isn't it. Not unlike a Clown Mass, on reflection. Check it out:




And they're wondering why the Church of England is dying, which it is. No wonder, the people in charge of the operation don't believe in the Faith they're paid to promote. Witness subsequent clownshow. Is there a solution? Always.

Years ago, I celebrated a wedding in rural England, just a kid, and some ne'er do wells crossed me afterwards in the churchyard, "We're from the old religion," they said, and I paused, "So you're Roman Catholics? Perhaps you like Chesterton?"





They did, curiously, and we got along just fine, despite their Fuhrer having flicked a dead rat at me over the grave of a county worthy. Regardless, solution?

Return, steadfast to the Faith, regardless of denom, and say NO to the godless NWO. I tell you kids, it's dark v. light right now. Rise to the challenge.

Your Pal,

LSP



Monday, October 28, 2024

Let's Rock 'n Roll

 


There we were, years ago in a flat in Bloomsbury, which is a part of London, and a music kid asked me to put on some music. I did, Mona, QSMS, rock on. Boy listened for a minute and asked, "So where's the bass, man?" So where's the bass. Resisting the heady temptation to punch him in the face, I turned up the juke box. Rock on.

Excelsior,

LSP

WAR

 



Just throwing it out there,

LSP

Who Are These Ciphers?

 


They don't even bother to campaign.


La Malinche

And why would they?




Because the result is fixed. But the question is, fixed towards whom. Maybe that's up for debate, wewait with bated breath, or not. Game of Thrones, anyone? As always...

Your Call,

LSP

Sunday, October 27, 2024

DeCalifornia

 



With apologies to LL,

LSP

A Sunday Sermon Against Satan

 



No, not from me, from Archbishop Vigano. Here it is:

 

The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. […]
Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four.
Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.

G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, 1905


Dear Faithful American Catholics,

I am addressing all of you, a few days before the Presidential Election that will call millions of American citizens to the polls.

Even in conditions of relative normality, the exercise of the vote is your moral duty, through which you cooperate in the first person in choosing the person who will lead the Nation for the next four years. But in this coming electoral round – just as in 2020 and indeed much more so – you are not simply called to choose between two candidates who happen to be on different political sides but who both nevertheless have the common good at heart in compliance with the Constitution and the Law. No; in this election you must choose between two radically opposed ways of conceiving the government of your Nation: you are called to choose between democracy and dictatorship, between freedom and slavery.

On one side we have candidate Donald J. Trump, who, despite serious problems in his positions – especially in the matter of abortion and assisted procreation – has as his objective the common good and the protection of the fundamental freedoms of citizens. In Donald Trump’s America, every Catholic can practice their Faith and educate their children in it without interference from the State.

On the other side we have a candidate and a party that promotes everything that directly opposes the Faith and Morals of the Catholic Church. In Kamala Harris’ America, Catholics – but also Protestants – are considered fundamentalists to be marginalized and eliminated, and their children are considered the property of the State, which arrogates to itself the right to lead them astray from an early age in both body and soul. Trump’s America can become great and prosperous again. Harris’ America is destined for invasion and for moral, social, and economic destruction: the most ferocious dictatorship.

Look at your country! Your cities have become dumps filled with derelicts and criminals, drug dealers and addicts, prostitutes and robbers. Your schools are dens of indoctrination and corruption from kindergarten onwards. In your courts, criminals are acquitted and innocents are imprisoned: new ideological crimes are prosecuted, while illegality is tolerated and encouraged. In your hospitals, multinational corporations rule, and you are their guinea pigs to be exterminated or made chronically ill so that you will be their perpetual clients. Farmers, ranchers, and fishermen are persecuted and forced to fail, while the land is grabbed by unscrupulous corporations who transform it into endless photovoltaic systems and wind turbines to power their data centers and server farms where they collect all your data, your movements, your purchases, and your political preferences. They have gone so far as to tamper with the climate by means of sophisticated geoengineering operations and devastating arson in order to make the global warming fraud credible and impose the green transition, the increase in the cost of energy, and electric cars and scooters. And all this is done based on evidence that consists of lies without any scientific proof, but which are propagated through the servile collaboration of the regime media, ever ready to label any dissenters as conspiracy theorists. But what until yesterday was dismissed as the result of conspiracy theories is now admitted by the government itself. They take away your sunlight; they poison you by seeding the clouds; they overwhelm your villages and your fields with deadly hurricanes; they kill your livestock and dry up your crops with induced droughts and devastating fires. They aim to control the entire food sector, to force you to eat only what they make available to you. This is what the Agenda 2030 calls for, which has been imposed without any vote by the United Nations and the World Economic Forum.

In these four disastrous years of the Biden-Harris administration, we have had a puppet in the White House and a corrupt and incompetent Vice President who has never stopped lying and deceiving voters about her past and her future. Power is managed by the criminal deep state – whose names and faces we now know – that is responsible for the destruction of your great Nation. And to ensure that the crisis is endless, new war scenarios are continually opening up, in conflicts that no one actually wants, except for those who make enormous profits from them, sacrificing human lives and compromising international stability.

You have seen what the Democrats, that is, the woke far Left, have been capable of in four years. Imagine what they will be able to do if, instead of Biden’s numerous stand-ins, his Vice President is elected – in the most scandalous and unimaginable fraud – with her entourage of LGBTQ+ Ministers, rigorously woke, sold out to China or the World Economic Forum, sponsored by George Soros or Bill Gates, manipulated by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. At that point, dear American Catholics, you will not only have to go to a different rally – as Kamala would like – in order to say “Christ is the Lord”, because saying that will be considered hate speech, and praying in front of an abortion clinic an act of terrorism. Do not think that these are remote hypotheses: wherever the woke Left takes power, it establishes the most vicious, anti-human, and anti-Christian dictatorship that humanity has ever known. And we know that every time the Left has come to power, it has never left through democratic means.

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris: we are not talking about two visions that are a bit different but still part of the normal political back-and-forth. No; we are talking about two diametrically opposed and irreconcilable worlds, in which Trump fights against the deep state and is committed to freeing America from its tentacled grip, while on the opposite side we have a corrupt and blackmailed candidate, an organic part of the deep state, who acts as a puppet in the hands of warmongers like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, of self-proclaimed “philanthropists” like the criminals George Soros and Klaus Schwab, or of characters like Jeffrey Epstein and Sean Combs. Their program is that of the Global Left, the World Economic Forum, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and ultimately the program of Vanguard, BlackRock, and StateStreet. Their agenda is dictated by the financial oligarchy that controls humanity to the detriment of the people: an elite that operates not only in the United States but also in Canada, Australia, Europe, and wherever politics is held hostage by their investment funds and their pseudo-humanitarian organizations dedicated to the obliteration of Western Civilization.

Behind these people – by now we should know this – are people devoted to evil, united by the satanic hatred against Our Lord Jesus Christ and those who believe in Him, mainly against the Catholic faithful. We want Christ to reign, and we proclaim it with pride: Christ is King! They want the Antichrist to reign, whose tyranny is made of chaos, war, disease, famine, and death. And the more emergencies and crises planned and created by the globalist elite increase, the more that elite has a pretext to impose new limitations, new restrictions of fundamental rights, and new social controls.

Joe Biden, the current “President,” is a servant of this subversive elite and widely blackmailable for the scandals and crimes committed by himself personally and also by his family, beginning with his son Hunter. His “Vice President,” Kamala Harris, is equally subservient to the same deep state. And the Democratic Party, to which they both belong, is the expression of the woke ideology that plagues all the parties of the global Left.

Candidate Donald J. Trump, while certainly taking some serious critical positions that a Catholic cannot agree with, represents for us, dear American faithful, in this specific historical moment, the only possible choice to counter the globalist coup that the woke Left is about to implement definitively, irreparably, and with incalculable damage for future generations.

Voting for Donald Trump means firmly distancing ourselves from an anti-Catholic, anti-Christian and anti-human vision of society. It means stopping those who want to create a hellish dystopia that is even worse than the one announced by George Orwell. And it also means – do not forget – giving him our vote of confidence, so that President Trump knows that the massive vote of Catholics and Christians that brought him back to the White House must become the premise for a more incisive commitment to the defense of life from conception to natural death, the traditional family, the right of parents to educate their children, and to the defense of the Christian Faith and the cultural identity of the Nation.

I repeat: the choice is between a conservative President, who is paying with his very life for his fight against the deep state, and an infernal monster who obeys Satan. For a Catholic, there can be no question: voting for Kamala Harris is morally inadmissible and constitutes a very grave sin. Nor is it morally possible to abstain, because in this war declaring oneself neutral means allying oneself with the enemy.

People around the world are beginning to understand the threat that looms over them and their children’s future, and you Americans have understood it too. But even if this time it will be more difficult for the deep state to repeat the fraud of 2020, you must not think that it will resign itself to defeat so easily. Let us therefore prepare to prevent possible attacks and civil war scenarios from being used to impose martial law and new restrictions, after the attempts on his life from which President Trump providentially escaped.

But let us not forget, dear Faithful, that human energies alone are powerless in the face of this infernal display of forces. We proclaim that Christ is King – this means that Our Lord must return to reign, and the first way to make Him reign is by obeying His holy Law and living in His Grace. Let Christ reign in your hearts, in your families, in your communities, and throughout the entire United States of America: this is the only way to peace, harmony, and prosperity for your Nation.

Think of how many of you Catholics there are in the United States! Vote without hesitation, and pray that Our Lord will enlighten American citizens in making their choice and grant victory to those who, at least, have no problem proclaiming that Christ is Lord.

May God bless you all, and may the Virgin of Guadalupe, she who is the Patroness of the United States and all the Americas, and Saint Michael the Archangel, protect you. 


+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop,
former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America


Make of this what you will, and note Vigano's been excommunicated by the Red Pope.

Cheers,

LSP 

Saturday, October 26, 2024

Up Up And Away

 


Perhaps you know the feeling, sometimes you have to get away because things get samey, and my solution was this. Fly to England with Ma LSP for a well needed break, which is exactly what we did. First stop, DFW Terminal D, next stop, Heathrow Terminal 3 followed by a fast train to Paddington.


Just Some Carousel

Take in the wonders of Victorian railway architecture then line up, in a weirdly long line, for a cab. Take that to the Farmers Club in Whitehall like a champ. Book into Farmers, most congenial, then set up in rooms overlooking the Thames and go from there.

"There", meant the NatLib, two doors down, and dinner in the club's monumental dining room. There you are, enjoying an autumnal menu under larger than life portraits of statesmen who shaped the world in their time. It's not hard to reflect on the scale and grandeur of the Empire in that setting, and by the same token, who are we now compared to them? Pygmies in the footsteps of giants.


Gordons is Awesome at Noon

Speaking of which, London's grown pretty gargantuan over the last 20 years or so, but has it grown better? Good question. There's certainly many more secular cathedrals of glass, concrete and steel rising out of the city's eastern skyline; St. Paul's is dwarfed in comparison, and I guess that's a sign of wealth. But are the people any richer?

Some are, obviously, no doubt about it, but lately London seems to lack the vibrancy of the mid '90s when you could feel and watch a tidal wave of wealth roll into the city, to say nothing of talent. Remember, ahem, Britpop? Still, the place is clearly running on multiple cylinders, to say nothing of hordes of Japanese and Korean tourists.


Ma LSP at Farmers


Regardless, the first week of the trip was all all about entertaining old friends, not least my Mother's, who are a step above, and then, after a weekend at the EIC (East India Club) and Mass at the Brompton Oratory, climbing aboard a train to idyllic Ludlow. This sits on the Welsh border and shouldn't be missed.

After several convivial days with SH and K, my brother drove in from Aberystwyth and off we went to the Welsh coast. It was good to be back in this rainy seaside resort and good to see my brother, who's a good man, but I only stayed a night, sadly. The next day I sped back to Town on a slow moving Transit for Wales train to meet old friends, setting up at an AirBnB in Soho on Frith Street.


The Jolly Old NatLib

Part of this may have involved a Techno Rickshaw around the storied streets of Soho, another part of it certainly involved a lot of Coach & Horses, French House and Bar Italia. One friend, we'd gone to dinner at the NatLib and immigrated to Soho, accused me of inverse Milton, "From Paradiso to Inferno, Padre!" Quite.

Then, Soho tomfoolery over, a sideways move to Bloomsbury and a pleasant little flat on Coptic Street overlooking the British Museum. Ma LSP joined me there for the last few days and we closed up with lunch at the Prix Fixe in Soho, followed by a glass or two at the French House and then, after a sensible rest, drinks and snacks at the Museum Tavern. And now?


Coptic Street

Back in the great state of Texas. It feels good. We may not have real bread, butchers, pubs, architecture to speak of, cobblers, butchers, fishmongers and clubs with imperial ceilings and portraits of Gladstone and statues of General Outram or Gordon. True enough, but we do have this, big skies, trucks, guns and NO NANNY STATE.


Rare LSP Tie Shot

So forgive the lack of comms, I've been busy. Stand by for further correspondence.

Your Old Pal,

LSP

Saturday, October 5, 2024

Nessie's Back

 



Do you remember the Loch Ness Monster? Sure you do, an historic cryptid if ever there was one. There it is, according to sightings for a solid 100 years, a sea serpent, perhaps a living dinosaur, in a loch, in Scotlamd.

Far out, I guess Nessie just paleolithic sea monster decided to beat its friends' extinction event by hanging out in the 230 meter depth of a Scottish loch, undisturbed. A sleeper agent from the Younger Dryas and beyond, sorta thing.




Ha, ha, how stupid, like the Anglican Church of Canada itself (ACOC) or its older brother, the dying Church of England (COE). But not so fast, punters. Unlike ACOC and the risibly rainbow COW Nessie shows signs of life. 

Seriously, some fisher persyns mapped out a sonar image of the beast. Like no fooling. What does this mean? At the very least that Team LSP has to foray into Scotland and get to the root of the matter. As in, see if there's a dinosaur in that loch or not.




In the meanwhile, our beloved rulers refuse to help Trump voting citizens in America despite spending billions on money laundered aid to the living monster that is Ukraine.

Cheers,

LSP