Church politics

Mass Migration: Slouching Toward Dissolution

Our betters tell us that mass migration is a moral imperative. “Love has no borders,” they croon. They use this facile sentimentality to bully us into assenting to the dissolution of shared culture and a collective identity. It is hard to muster courtesy toward the Better Sort who consciously conflate the word immigration with migration. The first is a legal process, in effect a contract between arrivals and the state. In current context, the second assents to illegal entry by the brute force of overwhelming numbers. Continue Reading
Lepanto Redux or The Idolatry of Devout Ideas?

Is the upcoming presidential election our Lepanto moment? Is it a watershed event as consequential to civilization as the Battle of Lepanto? It certainly looks that way. Unhappily, Christian civilization is less capable today of defeating the enemy than it was on October 7, 1571. Collective discernment dissolves in a daily acid bath of media exertions to synthesize a viable candidate from a calculating, Marxoid cipher who parlayed sexual favor to the 41st mayor of San Francisco into a lucrative public service job. Continue Reading
A Florida Initiative, Abortion & The Lesson of Venezuela

The specter of Venezuela looms over a complacent American electorate. Mary Jo Anderson, a notable Catholic journalist and public speaker, gave a talk to an organization of Republican women in central Florida’s Volusia County on August 8. Her topic was Florida’s Amendment 4, a.k.a. Right to Abortion Initiative, a hot-button issue for discussion that preceded the group’s business meeting. The agenda included an introduction to Faustina Guzman-Trump [no relation to Donald], a Venezuela-born candidate for the office of Republican Committeewoman in the county. Continue Reading
statue on display in cathedral, Linz, Austria

Decapitated statues of Mary are not uncommon in European nations culturally enriched by Muslim migration. So the July 1 beheading of the Virgin Mary in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception (a.k.a. Mariendom) in Linz, Austria, was a welcome detour from a political minefield. It shifted attention from Islam to a less threatening adversary: Catholic traditionalists. Let me explain. “Crowning,” a coarsely crafted sculpture of the Virgin Mary in labor, went on display at the cathedral as part of DonnaStage, a tangle of events celebrating the 100th anniversary of Mariendom’s consecration. Continue Reading
Sex Education, Then And Now

Sex education was simpler when I was a girl. There were only two sexes back then. And the word gender had not yet leaped from the declension of nouns to an identity. Sr. Edmund Marie, the biology teacher in the girls’ department of our parish high school, visited the grammar school every year. She spent a day talking to seventh graders (or was it sixth?) about the biology of plants, and brought with her a black portfolio of over-sized botanical posters. Continue Reading