We fly to Thy Protection

Storms ahead! Pray to Mary,
to protect the Church.

"We pray to Our Lady to protect us, and in times of spiritual turmoil the safest place is under Our Lady's mantle. She is the mother who takes care of the Church. And, in this age of martyrs, she is the protagonist, the protagonist of protection. She is the Mother. ... Let us say it with faith: 'The Church, Mother, is under your protection. Take care of the Church'!"

Pope Francis, on 15th April 2013.


Source: http://www.asianews.it/news-en/For-pope,-persecution-is-not-over,-there-are-more-martyrs-today-than-in-the-past-27662.html

X-treme times: the left is radicalising the right ...

Hands off my culture!

Yesterday anti gay-marriage protestors in Paris took a leaf out of the feminists' book, and whipped their shirts off for the day. The FEMEN have been getting a name for themselves recently, more often than not protesting against the Church. And so now the HOMMEN are on the rampage. Bare-chested and wearing colourful trousers they could pass for their own opponents in this politcal debate, except that they don't have the tanned, waxed and polished look one has come to associate with homosexuals. Apparently a few of them are homosexuals though; it's just that they don't believe that society should ditch the concept of one mummy and daddy make one baby.
But now the government has rushed the bill through the Senate, cut down parliamentary debate time, and will ensure no doubt that it becomes law before Christmas.

So what will these young men do now? They are being disenfranchised. They are the kind of young men I know very well: from conservative Catholic families, a hankering for the Ancien Régime, and a strong sense of national pride. Increasingly they are left without hope and without a voice, living in a country they no longer recognise as the one they were born in: for François Hollande, in his  New Year speech, the unique vocation of France and the key to her identity, is to engage in progressive social reform. Nothing to do with high culture, art, music, gothic cathedrals, haute cuisine, a sense of style and occasion ... no, it's all down to legislation now. That is the new French identity. It is an old debate between the two Frances: one for constant revolution, one for tradition.

Up until recently the two ideas of the nation had learned to live together, with a political swing from left to right every few years, just to keep the philosophical clock ticking. Most French people have always been traditionally-minded in all sorts of ways, and viewed politicans and the whole business of government with mistrust and some scorn. The real business of life was lived in families and communities just as it always had been, with attachment to tradition going hand in hand with organic change.

Political correctness, however, has come to mean that the views of the HOMMEN will soon have no droit de cité. They will have just have to shut up and be quiet, or radicalise. And there are as many of them around as there are disoriented, jobless Moslem boys in the inner cities ...

Inclusivity has long been a concern of the whole political class here, especially the left. Now they have screwed up big time. If they can manage to marginalise a whole generation of the best brought-up, best educated and most idealistic of their young people they are storing up trouble for the future.

Who knows what kind of meltdown will happen when there are more people on the margins than in the centre? It is likely to happen sooner than our rulers think.

And, just in case you thought these gentlemen were unthinking yobs ... they even quote Kipling :

Without faith, without truth, we cannot defeat the Powers of darkness

Interesting quote from Baroness Thatcher from Damian Thompson:

"Christianity is about more than doing good works. It is a deep faith which expresses itself in your relationship to God. It is a sanctity, and no politician is entitled to take that away from you or to have what I call corporate State activities which only look at interests as a whole.
    So, you’ve got this double thing which you must aim for in religion, to work to really know your faith and to work it out in everyday life. You can’t separate one from the other. Good works are not enough because it would be like trying to cut a flower from its root; the flower would soon die because there would be nothing to revive it." (Interview in the Catholic Herald.)

The first reading in her funeral service today, about defeating the powers of darkness only with God's help, was on the same theme.

The first hymn, "He who would be valiant be" reminded us that even the Iron Lady was, like all of us, a pilgrim. I did not always see eye to eye with her, but today I shed a tear for her, and will keep her soul in my prayers.

Beautiful music for her end-off. England at its best.

Refuse Antinous? It is going to be hard

Antinous, the Emperor Hadrian's
deified boyfriend. Hadrian's
subjects were forced to worship
him after the boy's death.

Our rulers in France accuse the opponents of gay marriage of not being 'straight' with their arguments. They are not putting on their cards on the table, the socialists say.
But that criticism cuts both ways. And the social reformers are hiding even more.

The transformation of birth certificates so as to include Parent A and Parent B, and the school textbooks that will follow on in order to promote the idea to children in primary schools, will have the effect of imposing a minority view about marriage and family on the majority. Schools will have to promote the excellence of the new arrangements, and little ones who say "but I have a mummy and a daddy" will be told to shut up.

It will no longer be possible for the child's mother and father to be publicly recognised as such. Acknowledging the fact of a mother and father will be become something banished to the private sphere. Discovering that new friends also come from a traditional family will be the kind of nice surprise one gets when one finds out they share the same religion or went to the same kind of school. But one never asks outright ... That would be rude. And soon, asking a guy if he ever had a mum and dad could soon even be illegal. References in schools (including children's stories) and public documents, to mothers and fathers will have to be modified so as to be freed from 'homophobia'. All of this is already underway ...

Then, the idea that one should be able to marry whomsoever one choses is a powerful one. But the problem is that once one accepts that there should be no limits on marriage, why not follow the argument through? If a man loves two women and they love him then perhaps one should not seem to fall into bigamophobia (and what about the Muslims, with all their wives?).

If it is all about sexual orientation then perhaps we need to be fair to bisexuals too; they are much more commonplace than homosexuals, and yet even more persecuted and marginalised by society; no marriage for them ... a successful businessman who wants to marry an energetic young man plus a warm, caring and elegant lady to be the mother of his children finds no comfort in the new social reforms ... but he no doubt will, if he can just hang on a few more years. Because once polygamy is opened up in order to be fair to Muslims, then bisexual marriage will have to come next in order to satisfy the sleeping giant of the bisexual minority (or will we discover that it's a majority?)

Promoting three-way bisexual marriage would even have the effect of solving the problem of where two women or two men will get the new baby from. No need for surrogate mothers or expensive medical treatment ...

It is all just a slippery slope into anarchy. And the custody battles in divorce cases will be so intracatable that we will in the end just have to leave the children at the mercy of the adults fighting over them, or doing worse to them ... what about the fact that the age of legally informed consent to sexual relations is dropping everywhere like a stone, and that judges are increasingly refusing to sentence couples for incest. It will not be long before the momentum gathers to legalise incestuous gay marriage (is it morally any worse, after all?) and perhaps even incestuous heterosexual marriage, and certainly the legal situation of adolescent children is going to become increasingly problematic; if 13 and 14-year-old children in countries such as Spain and Germany can legally have sexual relationships with an adult, then what happens if they campaign for the right to marry?

So, opposition to gay marriage is also opposition to an enormous and barely veiled agenda of social reform that is gaining enough momentum to keep Pandora's box open for decades to come, until such time as our families and relationships are in the biggest mess they have ever been in since Adam and Eve. Talking about this in public, and in my job as a schoolteacher, is going to get harder and harder.

Soon, I fear, we will all be worshipping the beautiful Antinous if we want to stay out of jail. Who dares stand up to the Emperor?

Desperate thoughts on Good Friday. But there is a lesson in that: our Lord's disciples felt, no doubt, that they had failed and been abandoned that day, only to discover that all that suffering and confusion was a prelude to the glory of the resurrection.

Pope Francis

We must not believe the Evil One when he tells us that there is nothing we can do in the face of violence, injustice and sin.

Pope Francis, Palm Sunday, on Twitter!