For Evelyn Waugh, redemption is found in the wasteland, not in society.

Why is that? In the novel, Brideshead Revisted (the most Catholic of novels), why is society not seen as the means of salvation except in the abstractness of society as found in the Mass?

When I look at the path of salvation of each character what stands out is that they are all by means of denial of the natural bonds of social life.

What are the Fairies?

Since the fairies are rational, it follows that they are also human because the specific difference of man as corporeal creature is rational. Or to put it simply, if it's rational, then it's likewise a man.

Perhaps the fairies only exist in our imagination as projections of various aspects of our nature. But what if they're also our cousins but without fallen nature who venture forth from Paradise? If Adam and Eve had children prior to the Fall, those children would have remained in Paradise.

Poor Pia de Solenni, at least Rapunzel knew she lived in a tower.

But why would anyone expect differently, she is after all - - - a Thomas Aquinas College graduate." So concluded my wife when I asked her to read Miss Pia's article in the National Catholic Register ‘Theology of Women in the Church’ Only Beginning to Be Revealed

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But let me back up to before my wife made her comment, and begin at the beginning.

The elitist Catholics are a closed circle.

Aristotle grounded all his arguments on observation, whereas the elitist Catholics give every appearance of avoiding dirtying their hands with the empirical world about us, preferring instead their rarefied disembodied delusions.

By elitist Catholics I mean the Theocons, or as they call themselves. "Whig Catholics"

Culturally authentic curvaceous altar-babes in bikinis

The problem with liberal Catholics is that they have no idea how to actually have fun.

And so as long as they insist on making the Mass 'relevant' by dressing down to be 'culturally authentic' so as to increase Mass attendance, why not look to the experts who know how to draw a crowd?

Hooters restaurants is the model they should follow because Hooter Girls are culturally authentic and decked out to draw a crowd, and needless to say highly entertaining.

The homosexual end game

The day is coming when it will be considered child abuse to not let your sons be molested by homosexuals. Because sexual molestation will be deemed necessary for good child development.

The end game for homosexuals is not only the right to molest children, but state power coercing parents to hand over their children to be molested.

Think I exaggerate? When it come to deviant sex the only limit is their imagination and their insatiable appetites.

No one is in hell for committing adultery.

Because adultery requires that a person first be married.

And since virtually no one is married as proved by the fact that virtually every marriage can be annulled, it then follows that even less have committed adultery, because not everyone who is married commits adultery.

And of those virtually non existent few who have committed adultery, even less have died in that state of sin, because not all who commit adultery die in that state.

And so, because marriage is the the most rare of all the sacraments where even holy orders occurs much more frequently as proven by annulments granted to virtually all who apply.

And because the grounds applied by marriage tribunals virtually precludes adultery since adultery is grounds for annulment, i.e. unable to form a bond, it then follows that No one, or virtually no one, is in hell for committing adultery.

Now some may say I'm simply being cynical, but truth be told I'm looking at the bright side of the annulment scandal because adultery will send a man to a deeper level of hell than will fornication.

Which of the ten commandments does artificial birth control violate?

And more importantly, how in clear, understandable, convincing language does artificial birth control violate it?

My solution to the shortage of Priests, and excess of Permanent Deacons

Tell all the deacons in the diocese to show up at the cathedral, ordain them as priests and then send them off to do their duty. Those who don't like it? Too bad, that water went under the bridge when they chose to be deacons.

Toxic Blogging

subtitled: [Mark Shea and other professional Catholics, toxic bloggers without excuse.]

There have always been some rather nasty bloggers out there who have a kneejerk caustic reaction to all things traditionalist. Where if the subject is traditionalists, the portrayal will be some absurd caricature (see at bottom of this page), never found at an actual traditionalist parish Mass.

Make newlyweds prove they are married, another solution to the annulment scandal

All marriages should immediately be subjected to the annulment process before the wedding bedding to determine if there is actually a valid marriage.

To be sure it's a bit inconvenient to put off the wedding trip and so forth. But since lots of dioceses now make a year wait mandatory, just have the wedding at say 9 months and spend the next three month determining if the marriage is actually valid.

What is distributism?

is a question commonly asked.

It's also unfortunately a question that distributist are unable to answer, or at the least they're unable to answer correctly, because if they could answer the question correctly, then they would in turn not be distributists.

So let me answer the question, because it does deserve a correct answer.

My reply to a post over at Front Porch Republic

(please note, I am much better at, and prefer classical style architecture. And whereas there are many architects who are better than me at the more modern styles, there are none that I know of who are better than me at the classical. A classical which is invariably post modern since no one is actually designing straight forward classical.

And during the short time I was in architecture school I too caught hell over my preference for the classical. A preference which was seen as stilted, when it was very much the opposite, I have always had the muse. My preference played a significant role in my conflict with my design teacher leading to his demanding I leave his class which in turn forced me to leave the school when the dean of students would not defend me, but instead suggested I transfer.)

I mention the above to so as to help eliminate any thought that my argument in defense of modern architecture is a defense of myself.

robert m peters writes: "Just down the road from me is a school, built in the 1960's, quite utilitarian, and I am sure, very practical with symmetry and balance, or tripartite separation, or rhythmic diminution. It is now abandoned and exudes no beauty."

On the other hand, the California missions were built using those same principles in an abstracted modern style, using utilitarian materials. But yet they are typically not abandoned, nor have I ever known of someone to describe them as not beautiful.

My Other solution to the annulment scandal

If a marriage is found to be null, i.e. a marriage is found to not exist, and there are also children, simply make the parents retake their marriage vows.

Or better yet, Simply make anyone applying for an annulment retake their marriage vows so that he or she is certain they are married.

And if the second time taking the vows doesn't work out any better than the first, make them do it again until they get it right.

Never trust a priest to help you solve your marriage problems

Because the only advice you are likely to receive is permission to cause irreparable harm to your children, i.e. receive permission to separate.

Children are severely harmed by separation but don't expect a priest to take that into account, because they virtually never will.

The solution to the annulment scandal :

There needs to be a class action lawsuit filed against the U.S. bishops and their marriage tribunals.

The visible Church in the US practices Catholic divorce, even going so far as to require Catholics to obtain an immoral no fault divorce as a required first step before even granting a hearing to a petitioner seeking an annulment.

It's a required first step that makes a fait accompli the destruction of every marriage a tribunal even looks at. It's a required first step that makes the visible Church in the U.S. no better than the immoral civil court system that treats marriage as unilaterally dissoluble.

"Divorce is immoral also because it intorduces disorder into the family and into society. This disorder brings grave harm to the deserted spouse, to children traumatized by the separation of their parents, and often torn between them and, because of its contagious effect which makes it truly a plague on society," but yet the U.S. marriage tribunals require a divorce as a required first step.

It's a required first step that in and of itself proves the visible Church in the U.S. is not in keeping with the letter or the spirit of canon law.

Because the visible Church in the U.S. refuses to act in accordance with the Catholic Faith there is only one viable solution left, the visible Church must be forced to act Catholic.

"The floor of hell is paved with the skulls of bishops", *

and of those who serve on their marriage tribunals because they are recklessly scandalizing our children, driving a wedge between our children and the Faith.

How many children will fall away from the Faith because of the destruction of their homes caused by marriage tribunals ignoring clear Catholic teaching that marriage is indissoluble?

Stressing the unitive aspect of marriage only makes the problem worse.

The entire movement inside the visible Church to stress the unitive aspect of marriage in hope of counteracting modern social ills is not only doomed to failure, it's making the problem worse.

When I read modern theological comments on marriage what is striking is the supernaturalization of the natural. Marriage is described as some kind of mystical bond of man and woman. When in reality marriage is an act of justice, it's a contract grounded in man's nature as corporeal living creature where all living creatures eat, grow and reproduce. Which is in turn what marriage is ordered toward, i.e. eating, growing and reproducing in society because man is by nature social.

Well that didn't take too much to get banned from The American Catholic

One post is all it took.

The American Catholic blog is nothing more than a bunch of dumb libs. who think they're conservative and think they're defenders of the Faith.

But at least they were smart enough to know that it was at them I was directing my comment, and not at D. N..

Libs. come in different flavors, so to speak, and The American Catholic blog flavor is an all too predictable one.

Reduce snail-mail service to once a week.

And if you want to receive the mail more often. Get a post office box.

The Post Office will no longer be delivering mail on Saturday. It's a good start, now they just need to finish it by taking off the rest of the week as well, sans one day per week.


Mailmen for the most part have become nothing more than couriers for commercial advertising or on occasion couriers for bill collectors such as the local electrical company or credit card company.

Better advice than Fr. Z.s on what to do about bad homilies :

Ignore them from the get go. And expect the priest to do his duty.

btw 'bad' is rather weak. Horrid, as in depressingly drawn out while saying nothing, is a more accurate description.

Is it alright for mothers to prepare horrid meals for their children? Of course Not. And if some mother does, do we do penance and fast in slim hope that she might figure it out that she's being negligent? Or should we perhaps take the situation seriously and charitably intervene because sometimes prayer is not sufficient?

The difference between negligent mothers and negligent priests is that priests all too commonly don't take their duty seriously. As more than evidenced by the annulment scandal where priests commonly give a stone to those with marriage difficulty when they've been asked for bread.

Hand to mouth survival / working 3 times as hard for a third of the money.

With the economy now gone to hell and life an extreme struggle trying to support a family, is there anything more annoying during these difficult times than the academia types who think of themselves as economic guiding lights when all they have to offer is the most inane and horrific advice possible?

Torture : What it is. . . . And. . . . What it is not.

Torture is excessive use of pain as an instrumental cause to coerce a man to act contrary to his appetite. The operable term is 'excessive', which is a variation of degree or a quality beyond a limit.

This is not an equivocal definition of the term 'torture', nor does the definition specifically separate itself from common use expressions which are an equivocation.

Torture is not knowable in the same manner as speeding in a car over the lawful limit is knowable. Nor is it knowable in the same manner as theft or adultery or similar are each knowable. Each of these is knowable with certitude because the rule for each is hard and fast. Where as torture is not knowable by a similar hard and fast rule.

Which is not in turn to say we don't have some idea of what torture is. Because if we could not have a universally understood idea of what torture is, I couldn't in turn signify it by the word torture and expect a reader to understand the sign in the same manner as I understand the sign.

Further, as with all else in nature there is a limit, and so while there is not a hard and fast rule, we can nevertheless with certitude still know torture when we see it when we see it at the extremes. For instance :

Do distributists realize how absurd they sound?

The following distributist video isn't only utopian or ideological. It's also plain old fashioned lunacy:

From the youtube video Are You a Distributist :

Distributism is the economic arrangement in which the means of production or capital and land are owned by individuals in the market much like capitalism.

However, there are restrictions in the market which disallow the ownership of the means of production that another person labors at.

This results in a highly distributed economy.

Something important to note that the word 'Distributism' is not talking about an action. It refers to the state of the land and capital in the market whether it is well distributed or it is concentrated.

Get it? It's 'disallowed, ("by the market"), to hire someone as an employee.

Such as the wine grower did in the parable of the vineyard where he hired workers by the hour.

So not only would a winegrower be disallowed from hiring labor by the hour

Will the Real Distributists Please Stand Up

From Distributist Review article Mondragon Revisited :

the Mondragon co-operatives offer an astonishingly successful alternative to the way we organise business and economies.

From an article on Mondragon :

At the end of 2009, Eroski was operating an extensive chain of almost 2,400 stores made up of 113 EROSKI hypermarkets, 1,063 EROSKI/center, Caprabo and EROSKI/city supermarkets, 224 branches of the EROSKI/viajes travel agency, 58 petrol stations, 40 Forum Sport stores, 289 IF perfume stores, 7 Abac leisure and culture outlets and 40 goods depots. In addition to this chain, there are 481 self-service franchise outlets. Moreover, in the south of France it has 4 hypermarkets, 16 supermarkets and 17 petrol stations and 4 perfume stores in Andorra.

__________

OK, I got it; Mondragon with it's extensive chain of 2,400 stores is a good Distributist paradigm business model.

But - -

The Mondragon paradigm doesn't square with other Distributist articles at The Distributist Review such as :

Cheering on the Coming Cataclysm

Does it annoy anyone else the way some Catholics are rather cheerful in their predictions of a coming cataclysm?

And that those who cheer it on most fervently are invariably libs. who want to remake the world into some kind of dystopia.

And that those same libs. are also invariably corporate, or institutional, drones who couldn't actually competently, or proficiently, do anything practical with their hands. And so when some cataclysm does come they will be the first to be winnowed out.

Yes, I know their cheering doesn't effect the outcome one way, or the other, but nevertheless they are cheering for an event which would, and perhaps shall, cause severe hardship and perhaps worse to my wife and children.

Wouldn't you like to poke them with a sharp stick, just because they are so damnable annoying?

When ever I read some advocacy for distributism

I’m invariably reminded of this passage in P.G. Wodehouse :

“Bingo,” I cried deeply moved, “you must act. You must assert yourself. You must put your foot down. You must take a strong stand. You must be master in the home.”

He looked at me a long strange look.

“You aren’t married, are you , Bertie?”

“You know I’m not.”

“ I should have guessed it anyway”

I would rather be ruled by the illiterate carpenters I've known

Than be ruled by the Catholic intellectual class who are infatuated with their notions of distributism.

Why? because in comparison to the Catholic intellectual class, those illiterate carpenters are humble and simple men with common sense who know what works and what doesn't at a practical level down on the street which is where it matters. And they've been stepped on and pushed around enough to know what benevolent government really does for them.

In comparison, the Catholic intellectual class is invariably and frighteningly clueless regarding anything practical.

They're completely full of themselves thinking they have not only answers, but should likewise be leaders guiding us to the promised land, when all they in reality do have to give us is dystopian insanity.

Distributive justice and the encyclicals are true guidelines to a holistic well functioning society, but they must be implemented according to common sense and human scale, which in turn means implemented using practical experience to moderate the universal principles.

Looking Backwards, learning from past mistakes.

Is Edward Bellamy's book, Looking Backward, a 21st century distributist manifesto? Because whenever I read the the writing of the New Distributists the dystopian Looking Backward is invariably what comes to mind.

Equality masquerading as solidarity, not subsidiarity, is the mark of the New Distributists. A solidarity similarly envisioned by Bellamy, that is only at odds with most distributist writers insofar as Bellamy envisioned a managerial state where the industrial class would be benevolently ruled by the managerial class, whereas in contrast most distributist writers gloss over the subject.

Distributists write only of democratic rule, but Bellamy's vision of a managerial class is in the final analysis likewise the distributist model because the intensely structured society distributists envision would likewise have to be ruled by a managerial class.

The movie "Summer of 42" is an adolescent boy’s fantasy

But if that fantasy occurred today it would be twisted into a story of sexual abuse.

I remember watching the movies The Summer of 42, The Secret of My Success, and The Graduate, among others, and not once did the thought of sexual abuse enter my mind. But getting lucky sure did.

Not as lucky as the same occurring with a friend's hot babe of an older sister, but pretty darn lucky nevertheless.

Occupy american distributism with foreign writers

I just did a search at the Distributist Review for Huey Long and for Fr. Charles E. Coughlin and received "No results".

And so just for the interest of it, I tried instead Chesterton or Belloc and recieved pages ad infinitum.

Why is that?

Obese carbon footprints

I recently read : “There is not a single state in the union in which less than twenty percent of adults are obese. O for fifty.”

Which got me thinking about my own State, which by the way is #50, as in the least fat of the bunch of fatties, and of another quote I read years back "Only in America are the poor fat".

Which certainly holds true here if daily exercise at the local park, and money spent on slick kayaks and expensive road bikes and similar fare are any indication.

On the carbon footprint scale it’s an inverse ratio, the less body fat the fatter the carbon footprint from conspicuous consumption.

I have never heard a homily against contraception at a novus ordo parish Sunday Mass

But I did in a marriage prep. class hear a deacon explain why contraception could be used.

It used to bug me that most novus ordo homilies were as incomprehensible as a Pope John Paul II encyclical, (and is there anything less comprehensible than Theology of the Body?), but perhaps we're better off for it. After all, the Faithful can't be scandalized by what they can't understand in the first place.

Catholic use of contraception is well known to be as close to 100% as it statistically can get so it's not as if the problem is hidden. When virtually every family at the novus ordo Sunday Mass only has 2 or, 3 children at most, it's a pretty sure sign contraception is being used.



Similarly to to my never having heard a homily against contraception at a novus ordo parish Sunday Mass :

Why does the world get it right, but Catholics can't?

The latest issue of First Things, (Jan. 2011), has an article Miraculous Box praising an inexcusable travesty masquerading as ecclesiastical architecture where my first thought when reading the article is : no one can actually experience the architecture in the manner the writer and architect describes, and further and more importantly, there is zilch cultural memory by which to know and understand the architecture as he describes it. The structure is freeform concrete virtually devoid of all signs Catholic, and the inside of the Church is even worse.

It is one thing for the socialist atheist Le Corbusier to design sickeningly vile architecture, it's quite another for a magazine published by Catholics to praise it.

Not that any of this is unusual, by any stretch of the imagination. It's almost as if Catholics are blind to seeing the signs of the Church.

The Annulment Scandal

I am completely certain I am married.

I am equally completely certain that if push came to shove the local visible Church would rule that I am not married.

Never mind arranged marriages and so forth were all seen as true valid marriages down through the ages. Marriages which no one questioned, just as I don't question mine because I trust God to have created a world sufficient for us to live in where that sufficiency would likewise include our capacity to actually contract marriage.

Executing Criminals

You know the story, the Church teaches capital punishment can be used, and then every ecclesiastic authority under the sun argues against its use in preference for life in prison..

But both of these given alternatives should be done away with, and instead men should be banished to some island.

We see the world by variations in shades of light

It is by shadows that we see the world. Which in turn is to see the world by contrasts of this from that. Contrasts which can be clearly defined, but which often are not. But what matters is that we do see the world about us with sufficient clarity to live in the world.

And sometimes that lack of clarity is desirable for the same reason that paintings are beautiful in part because they are abstract, because they don't have the precision of photographs. Paintings, like history, are not a blow by blow account of every known detail, but a picking and choosing of the important or pertinent. But more important paintings are beautiful or in turn ghastly depending on what the artist chooses to accentuate.

An artist can degrade or praise a women by how he portrays her. A praise nicely expressed in Paul Gauguin's Two Tahitian Women With Mango Blossoms because while the painting directs our eyes to the breasts Gauguin does so while treating the figure of the women with dignity and grace and loveliness according to her nature.

Mental reservation is deception. and some lies are not only good, but a duty

Ten or so years from now when the persecution begins

and it's your turn to stand in front of the incinerator door. And you are asked “Do you renounce your Faith” And you answer “Yes”

With the mental reservation that you are not renouncing your Catholic Faith but are instead renouncing your faith in the government of this accursed land. And they throw you into the incinerator anyway after your renunciation. Will you go to heaven, because up until that renunciation you were in a state of grace? Or will you go to hell?

Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder

Why is it that different cultures have a different sense of the beautiful, where the difference is somehow culturally informed.

A question I first wondered about when seeing the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy where the Aborigine gags at the sight of the winsome blond foreigner.

Hunting down and eating five years old children

Keep it Safe, Legal, but Rare.

Because for some leftists, some vices are just too tasty to resist.

I can understand how a Catholic would say that outlawing baby killing is not enough, because a serious right to lifer wants to outlaw baby killing for the simple reason of he doesn't want babies to be killed. And so, not only do we outlaw baby killing, but we also do everything we can to provide help for mothers in need to help make sure illegal baby killings likewise don’t occur.

A proof I came up with for the existence of God

I’ve never come across anywhere.

Which may simply be because it’s nonsense, but I don’t see any flaws in it. Do you?

As with all else, I prefer simplicity and immediate observation, and this proof is simple and immediate.

It’s grounded in two principles we observe to invariably occur when we have immediate knowledge of any given event.

Right to life movement is evil

A few years back the right to life movement started being attacked in Catholic blogs using the same arguments the secular feminists have been using since the early 80s? Such as we don't really care about women. And we don't even care about babies. We simply want to suppress women and so forth. In other words, we're just plain 'mean'.

About a year or so ago, and in the same manner as with the right to life movement, I started running across on Catholic blogs a rather constant flow of attacks against traditionalist Catholics. Where the arguments once again come down to we're just plain 'mean'.

And recently, beginning these past few weeks I've started to run across attacks on Catholic bloggers who discuss moral issues such as homosexuality and similar as being also just plain 'mean'.

A pattern perhaps? And if so, what is the bellwether leading it?

Marry a hot Catholic babe with a 2-year long marriage contract,

and receive a guaranteed annulment because of "lack of due discretion" when the contract runs out. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . And then, do it all over again with a different hot Catholic babe.
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Government issued temporary, (2-year long), marriage licenses are one more step down the slippery slope to pagan dystopia.

They also happen to be both a reasonable, as well as practical, civil law response to the Catholic marriage annulment scandal.