Article Archive
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The Vatican Space Program
The Assumption is not something invented by Pope Pius XII in 1950, the year when he infallibly declared it a dogma of the Catholic Church. Nor was he introducing some pious innovation to the core of the Catholic faith, indulging the excessive piety of Marian Catholics, or even—as C.G. Jung suggested—“restoring the feminine principle to the Godhead.” No, the pope was doing something much more important: He was beating the Russians into space. [Read More]
Malta: Knights, Wars & Wines
One of the most delightfully anachronistic institutions in the world is an order of military monks called the Knights of Malta. The Knights got named for Malta because that small, Mediterranean island was ruled for centuries by this distinctive religious order, the last group to carry on the spirit of the Crusades. When Jerusalem fell to Saladin’s Arab armies in 1187, most Christian armies declared victory and went home. The Hospitallers stuck around, conducting a kind of insurgency until 1291, when they fled to safety in Cyprus, and then to Rhodes—which they conquered in 1309, and governed until 1522. While they gave up dreams of reconquering Jerusalem, the Knights kept up a first-rate navy to suppress the Arab pirates who traded in white slaves. When Rhodes fell to the new Islamic superpower, the Ottomans, the Knights removed to Malta. [Read More]
The Real Bastille Day
The French Revolution was really a digestive eruption of all the basest instincts in the lowest elements of society, led by power-drunk ideologues of the radical Left. It was utterly unlike the American rebellion against the English colonial officials – which amounted to a regional secession, led by the responsible members of the upper middle class. And for that fact we should be forever grateful, as should other countries which emulated the American model of political reform, rather than the French, as Hannah Arendt and Wilhelm Röpke have written. Of course, apologists for the Revolution will point to the inequalities and injustices of the Ancien Regime as justification for the bloodbath. [Read More]
Sake and the Latin Mass
In the 1970s, as Pope Paul VI faced wholesale rebellion by progressives in the Church, he wielded his papal authority instead to persecute the small numbers of Catholics who resisted the most expansive readings of Vatican II. As a flag of resistance, these traditionalists also rejected the new, truncated liturgy which Paul VI had imposed, suppressing almost entirely the rites which the Church had used for well over 1,000 years. In 1970, with initial Vatican approval, French Archbishop Marcel Lefèbvre founded the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) to meet the needs of Catholics bewildered by postconciliar changes—most of which went far beyond what was authorized by the documents of the council. Indeed, so did the liturgy imposed by Paul VI, which bore little resemblance to the reforms called for in Sacrosanctum Concilium—a point recognized in several books by the present Pope Benedict XVI. [Read More]
Highballs and High Society
I would especially like to believe the theories of David Icke, a former British soccer player who “discovered” the fact that the world has been dominated, for the past 10,000 years, by a race of alien lizard-men who can take on human form. According to Icke, keeping up a human appearance is hard work, and if you stare at George Bush, or Queen Elizabeth, long enough, eventually you can get a glimpse of lizard. Or if you want a shortcut, Icke suggests, there’s a surefire way of seeing the lizard-men: Just drop a little LSD. That’s right, this wonder drug can pierce the veil of reptilian illusion . . . which is precisely why it’s illegal! [Read More]
Revolting Elites and Their Pet Amnesty
Here’s one aspect of the amnesty which no one is talking about: The moment each of these illegals receives his walking papers, he will be eligible for affirmative action preferences over every white male in America. Including veterans of the Iraq war. Instead of guarding the U.S. borders, our men are patrolling the frontier between Iraq and Syria, attempting to tamp down a civil war between two equally murderous sects of Islam. Meanwhile, bloodthirsty neocons like Joseph Lieberman are demanding that the U.S. launch a Pearl Harbor-style pre-emptive attack on a sovereign state, Iran, which poses no threat to us whatsoever. The pilots who (God willing) return from bombing Iranian cities into powder will return to find a country where lawbreakers who snuck into their homeland and used forged documents to work have more rights than veterans. [Read More]
The Wines of Provence and the Armies of Allah
What happened to turn wealthy sixth-century Gaul into the howling wasteland it would become just a hundred years later? It was the Islamic conquest of the Middle East and North Africa, which cut Europe off from the ancient centers of grain production in Egypt, and Asiatic trade in Syria and Persia. The new Islamic occupiers of these still mostly Christian regions cut off all trade with France, Italy, and any other region inhabited by infidels. This draconian economic boycott had devastating effects—helping within a century or two to virtually destroy urban civilization in Europe. As the post-Christian French—to the horror of the faithful remnant among them—complete the deconstruction of their Christian heritage, the heirs of the Moors and Saracens who once again populate Provence and other regions in prodigious, fertile numbers, meekly wait their turn to inherit the earth. If and when they do, I expect that the vast, green fields of grapes will once again be torn up and burned. So drink the stuff while you can. [Read More]
Pentecost: Because Fire is Cool
The Feast of Pentecost is one of the most important to Christians, for a number of reasons. First, it marks the birthday of the Church, the day when the Holy Spirit came down on the Apostles and Mary, and gave everyone the nerve they needed to preach the risen Christ to a hostile mob. Pentecost also reverses the story of the Tower of Babel—the Old Testament tale of a king so ambitious he wanted to reach heaven through technological means. God tweaked him by inventing that bane of American schoolchildren over the millennia: foreign languages. In what we might call multiculturalism’s founding moment, God scattered the king’s workforce into a squabble of hostile ethnic groups, who couldn’t communicate with each other. Then, at Pentecost, He reversed the process—giving the Apostles the gift enjoyed by Star Trek crewman ever since the very first episode: the ability to be understood by anyone, no matter his native language. [Read More]
The Saint Who Invented Therapy
St. Dymphna was buried in Gheel, where she was martyred, and a shrine was built in her honor. Several centuries later, a group of “madmen” who’d been driven from town to town happened upon the shrine—and were miraculously cured. Word of this cure spread quickly, in a world without Paxil or Lithium, and soon large numbers of mentally afflicted pilgrims began to descend on the town. Instead of locking them up, or burning them as “witches,” the Christian folk of the town admitted the pilgrims to their homes to await their cure. From this unlikely beginning came the West’s first humane facilities for treating the mentally ill. To this day, pilgrims and patients come to Gheel and are welcomed by the locals. To honor this saint and the heritage of her shrine, I suggest you turn your home into a little Gheel for a day, by throwing a party for your most insane friends and relatives. [Read More]
The Rothschilds, Opus One, and Opus Dei
If there’s one thing that makes people happier than finding a forgotten bottle in the cupboard or a six pack in the fridge, it’s finding out that world events are dominated by an evil conspiracy. It’s hard to explain why such a discovery proves so consoling, but it does: Some 35 million people shelled out cold, hard cash to buy The DaVinci Code—most of them Christians, eager to read a tale which portrayed their entire religion as a scam cooked up by a Roman emperor and perpetuated by a spectral order of murderous, albino monks. Clearly, they were not picking up this book because it depressed them. Such books give readers the free and easy feeling that they needn’t lift a finger to change the world—it’s all so futile anyway. (“What can you and I hope to do, against the likes of… Them? So let’s go rent Jackass again.”) Excerpted from The Bad Catholic's Guide to Wine, Whiskey and Song . [Read More]